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Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

arstechnica.com

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Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#81

Post by jfengel »

recursivecaveat wrote: post #9
db1234 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding Indian voting machines, there is also randomization involved at various levels during distribution making it difficult to game the system but still I always wonder if there is any way to hack the system. I hope people in charge have a process to continuously evaluate the security procedures and improve it.

I never understood the desire to have any kind of machine at all. Paper ballots are a perfectly efficient and scalable system used for many large elections. Even if complicated machines are theoretically safe against malfeasance, keeping it simple increases public confidence.

Tell me you're under 24 years old without telling me you're under 24 years old.

The US 2000 election was a fiasco of the failures of paper ballots. Officials spent weeks scrutinizing ballots and to this day nobody thinks they got it correct to within the margin of error.

That's when electronic machines came in. They are not necessarily better, but nobody who lived through that nightmare thinks fondly of the clarity of paper ballots.

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#82

Post by ForHackernews »

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #69
liquidise wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CO resident here. CO mails paper ballots to everyone* about a month before election day. You can choose to vote in person, or mail in/drop off your paper ballot anytime prior to election night. My understanding is what while the ballots are paper, many (all?) are tabulated digitally. It certainly appears to be laid out in a way that benefits digital reading, and i believe that is what the machines in question are res…

[flagged]

Another example of "Everything looks suspicious when you don’t know how anything works."[0]

Mailed ballots are verified against voter registrations and signatures are checked against the signature on file. This woman with a bunch of ballots for former residents of her apartment would gain essentially nothing and open herself to serious criminal penalties if she tried to vote as anyone except herself.

[0] https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-electi...

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#83

Post by gruez »

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #74
nkrisc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

There's a pretty wide range of possibilities between "videos were all faked because this is the most secure election in history" and "let's not take the video at face value and await further verification because it's election season and there's plenty of bad actors trying to sow distrust in the election system by posting misleading/manipulated videos".

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#84

Post by kkielhofner »

laxmin wrote: post #6

The Indian Voting Machines are the answer. No operating system, no passwords, no connections, no bruteforcing anything, system on a chip, so widely distributed devices that hacking even a few of them is challenging, etc. The US voting machines are just waiting to be hacked, just a matter of when, not if.

> The US voting machines are just waiting to be hacked, just a matter of when, not if.

The US election system is very distributed and fragmented - there is virtually no standardization.

Even in the tightest margins for something like President you'd need to have seriously good data to figure out which random municipality voting system(s) you'd need to target to actually affect the outcome.

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#85

Post by CaliforniaKarl »

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #69
liquidise wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CO resident here. CO mails paper ballots to everyone* about a month before election day. You can choose to vote in person, or mail in/drop off your paper ballot anytime prior to election night. My understanding is what while the ballots are paper, many (all?) are tabulated digitally. It certainly appears to be laid out in a way that benefits digital reading, and i believe that is what the machines in question are res…

[flagged]

> You would think AI/ML could help with fraud detection.

I think that's a very big leap to make, that the ballots are going to where they're going because of fraud. Hanlon's razor applies.

> ballot box stuffing

Ballot-box stuffing happens when more ballots are cast than there are people who voted. This is difficult to do when voting by mail. Indeed, from the article:

> LeVan Hodson told KING 5, "Even if someone gets a second ballot (or more), whether under their name or someone else’s, we’ll only ever count one ballot per registered voter with their matching signature."

When you receive the envelope, you check the signature against what's on file. You also check records to see if the voter had voted elsewhere (such as at an early-voting location). You can check to see if the voter reported not receiving their mail-in ballot. You can do all these checks before opening the envelope. And once you do open the envelope, it's easy to see if multiple ballots had been included in the envelope.

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#86

Post by [deleted] »

ForHackernews wrote: post #82
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Another example of "Everything looks suspicious when you don’t know how anything works."[0] Mailed ballots are verified against voter registrations and signatures are checked against the signature on file. This woman with a bunch of ballots for former residents of her apartment would gain essentially nothing and open herself to serious criminal penalties if she tried to vote as anyone except herself. [0] https://www.…

[deleted]

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#87

Post by wannacboatmovie »

gruez wrote: post #83
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There's a pretty wide range of possibilities between "videos were all faked because this is the most secure election in history" and "let's not take the video at face value and await further verification because it's election season and there's plenty of bad actors trying to sow distrust in the election system by posting misleading/manipulated videos".

The implication of the videos was that this was malice (and that generates clicks) yet if you read between the lines, it's simply incompetency - uncalibrated touchscreens.

My point is local jurisdictions do not have the knowledge or resources to properly maintain or deal with electronic voting machines (of which there appears to be no national standard) and maintain integrity. If they can't remember to perform basic maintenance like calibrate the screens, what other steps are missed or ignored?

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#88

Post by [deleted] »

quercusa wrote: post #63
gruez wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I hear some people say "but we use paper ballots". Then why do you have a BIOS password? If it's all paper where does the computer fit in? All of this is honest curiosity, I'm not sure how the voting system works. Not sure about Colorado specifically, but in many jurisdictions voters mark paper ballots, which go into a machine to be tabulated, and are finally deposited into a box for safe keeping/future recounts.

You get to feed the ballot into the (literal) black box yourself, it beeps and tells you your vote has been recorded. What did it record? Who knows?

[deleted]

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#89

Post by ForHackernews »

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #74
nkrisc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Which do you suppose is more likely...

A) There was a voting machine that had a miscalibrated touchscreen that will be corrected before election day.

B) An evil democrat conspiracy is going to steal the election in Kentucky

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#90

Post by ForHackernews »

kkielhofner wrote: post #84
laxmin wrote: post #6

The Indian Voting Machines are the answer. No operating system, no passwords, no connections, no bruteforcing anything, system on a chip, so widely distributed devices that hacking even a few of them is challenging, etc. The US voting machines are just waiting to be hacked, just a matter of when, not if.

> The US voting machines are just waiting to be hacked, just a matter of when, not if. The US election system is very distributed and fragmented - there is virtually no standardization. Even in the tightest margins for something like President you'd need to have seriously good data to figure out which random municipality voting system(s) you'd need to target to actually affect the outcome.

Ironically America's fragmentary and incoherent electoral system makes it extremely hard to steal an election there.
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