Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

justice.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

731–740 of 889 posts

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#731

Post by steve_gh »

oneplane wrote: post #577
extropy wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The machine prints a paper ballot that is considered the actual vote. Any electronic copy is just a counting optimization. https://www.wired.com/2003/11/e-votes-must-leave-a-paper-tra...

That is how voting with electronics should be. It's great for entertainment/news etc to get early results but ultimately it doesn't matter if it takes a day or two with analog counting. Same day results really don't help with anything.

In the UK we count ballots manually. We have 90%+ of results overnight.

There is even a race between a few constituencies to be the first to officially declare a result. These guys are really well organised, and for a few days it is a huge piece of civic pride.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#732

Post by hef19898 »

l33t2328 wrote: post #659
saghm wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can't just make people up! Every vote is tied to a specific registration. We do same-day registration, but those votes are cast provisionally, with a paper log; there aren't many of them, and they can all be set aside and audited after-the-fact. > You certainly can't just make up a final tally. The numbers from the individual voting machines and the paper ballots have to match up; we had to stay an extra 2 hours…

What if all the citizens are bribed to vote for someone else? Really, all these systems rely on humans so they have inherent weaknesses.

So, democracy is not your thing?

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#733

Post by Vladimof »

tptacek wrote: post #350
Vladimof wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Chicagoland, every polling place has a team of 4-5 judges, and they all have to sign off on the final election result but what if they are all from the same party?

First, they can't be from the same party; they're deliberately mixed in Cook County. There's a Republican EJ (usually multiple) in every polling location. Second, the story we're talking about here is about a primary election; the whole contest took place within a single party. Third, I'm not sure why it would matter. OK, they're all Democrats. Now what? Even if all 4 EJs wanted to corrupt the results of an election,…

> Third, I'm not sure why it would matter. OK, they're all Democrats.

I don't know about you, but I used to change my party affiliation before the primary to be able to vote in the election I care the most about... (I'm not from that state though).

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#734

Post by mulmen »

JoBrad wrote: post #589
ipspam wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hit the nail on the head: "they just added ballots and records for registered voters they knew weren't going to show up." Which is exactly why charities and get out the vote campaigns shouldn't be given voter roles and voter statuses.

I don’t know if there is a legitimate reason that any private or even public-private partnership (like the Democratic and Republican parties in the US) should have that info.

Transparency.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#735

Post by ohgodplsno »

abeyer wrote: post #202
ohgodplsno wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuffing paper ballots is infinitely harder if your election system isn't entirely fucked. Multiple assessors, both from parties and individuals who just want to ensure that everything goes right, invalidation of the entire ballot box if any cheating is found post-votes, increase the amount of voting places so that scaling this up becomes impossible. Voting has been solved centuries ago. And voting machines will neve…

> invalidation of the entire ballot box if any cheating is found post-votes That seems to just introduce a new vulnerability where you could intentionally get caught cheating in precincts that leaned contrary to your beliefs to invalidate everyone there who voted legitimately.

No. Any attempts at cheating caught live just invalidate that bulletin (and said cheater is brought to the police). With a well organised setup (having a record of who already voted, having a transparent ballot box that is only open for a moment when your identity has been verified, multiple assessors watching for the extremely obvious "hey there's multiple envelopes that fell in there"), cheating is already extremely hard, for almost no gain. Maybe you can stuff two votes instead of one, but at what cost, potentially invalidating hundreds for your candidate ? And since voter counts are recorded and compared to bulletin counts, even a difference of one will start an inquiry and potentially invalidate.

If you multiply the voting places, where instead of having a single place which will tally over 10k votes, have 15 places that tally 700 votes each, you have now made both cheating much harder, and less worth it in the scenario you propose.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#736

Post by ohgodplsno »

rootusrootus wrote: post #543
ohgodplsno wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuffing paper ballots is infinitely harder if your election system isn't entirely fucked. Multiple assessors, both from parties and individuals who just want to ensure that everything goes right, invalidation of the entire ballot box if any cheating is found post-votes, increase the amount of voting places so that scaling this up becomes impossible. Voting has been solved centuries ago. And voting machines will neve…

> Voting has been solved centuries ago. Yes, but then we threw in a huge wrench when we decided that votes needed to be secret, too.

No. Voting has been secret also for centuries. Paper ballots allow secrecy of the vote _and_ verification of voters. Something that electronic ballots will never be able to do.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#737

Post by mulmen »

hef19898 wrote: post #418
hamburglar wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. You can’t make something a prerequisite to voting if every voter doesn’t have it. And the US is very much against the concept of a national ID. So you can’t have a national ID requirement . And as another commenter points out, it’s not that an ID requirement is racist, it’s that the motivations for it, knowing its impact, are racist.

Man, the US is such a strange place. It is also the only country I know of, top of my head, that doesn't have national ID requirements. No idea why this can be seen as bad thing.

Too much power in too few hands.

Compare the US to the EU.

The US is over 4.5x the population of Germany, the largest EU member. The entire EU is only about 25% more people than the US. California alone is larger than all but four of the EU member nations.

The US Federal Government is more like the EU itself rather than any member country. The states are more analogous to the countries in the EU.

So a US National ID is kind of like a EU Citizen ID.

What we have instead is an agreement between states and the federal government on ID guidelines. From that perspective it’s not so different.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#738

Post by ohgodplsno »

unethical_ban wrote: post #169
ohgodplsno wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuffing paper ballots is infinitely harder if your election system isn't entirely fucked. Multiple assessors, both from parties and individuals who just want to ensure that everything goes right, invalidation of the entire ballot box if any cheating is found post-votes, increase the amount of voting places so that scaling this up becomes impossible. Voting has been solved centuries ago. And voting machines will neve…

Other than speeding up voting calculations, reducing paper usage, enabling arbitrary language use at the booth, and other things. If electronic fraud is a concern, we should mitigate it, because encryption, identity, and date integrity are solved problems. Furthermore, spot auditing and paper receipts/copies are a thing, or could be. (Also, voting may be "solved" but voting systems and universal access to the ballot…

>Other than speeding up voting calculations

Hilarious to read that as the US presidential elections take over a week to tally results, when french elections have 90% of the results at 10PM on the same evening (most voting places close at 7PM)

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#739

Post by freefrog334433 »

david_p wrote: post #708
otikik wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It almost guarantees that the electorate won’t be consulted often, though. That’s something you can afford to do every 4 years, but not every 6 months.

I just checked, France has 70000 polling stations and 280000 volunteers for each election, so it’s rather 0.4% of the population. We just had presidential elections and are electing representatives for parlement next week, we had local elections in 2020, nation-wide elections are not that rare.

Similar to Australia. We have mandatory voting, with paid staff, most being hired just before elections, and from my experience working there, it is well organised, with plenty of redundancy, in case of challenges and recounts.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#740

Post by hef19898 »

freefrog334433 wrote: post #739
david_p wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just checked, France has 70000 polling stations and 280000 volunteers for each election, so it’s rather 0.4% of the population. We just had presidential elections and are electing representatives for parlement next week, we had local elections in 2020, nation-wide elections are not that rare.

Similar to Australia. We have mandatory voting, with paid staff, most being hired just before elections, and from my experience working there, it is well organised, with plenty of redundancy, in case of challenges and recounts.

I love the mandatory voting. Back the day I barely ever voted, that did change. Mainly because I saw political parties rise that I fundamentaly disagree with, meaning that the outcome all of a sudden actually did make a difference for me.

Having mandatory voting would mean that non votes don't screw up the results when one side manages to mobilize morw voters than others. And intentionally voting blank actually sends a pretty strong signal.

Post reply on HN