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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

#151

Post by muglug »

anigbrowl wrote: post #68

Interestingly, a website set up to document voter fraud by Mike 'My Pillow' Lindell has collected hundreds of election law violations, many in Colorado. For some reason they are all dated for the future though. Might be a warning signal about not populating your database where the public can watch you doing it. https://archive.ph/smlSQ (capture of https://electionnexus.com from earlier today)

Same guy has been running a $14.88 promotion for a month (14/88 is a recognised US far-right symbol: https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/1488)

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

#152

Post by sgerenser »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #124
CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I believe there are people who want results sooner rather than later. The greater the delay, the more annoyed folks become. Recording votes in _both_ paper and electronic form allows for the auditability of paper and the speed of electronic calculations. (Side note: I also believe that hand-counting of ballots can be tedious, and humans performing tedious, repetitive tasks are prone to error. See [1].) [1…

Why should you compromise on security because you're impatient? Have the voter vote on paper; since it's only two candidates, this can be postcard-sized. Scan the postcards for the fast results, check and double check by hand (or visual if there's a picture taken by the scanner).

There were 22 different races to vote on in my ballot yesterday. Are you suggesting only hand count the presidential election then tally all the rest digitally?

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

#153

Post by nicoburns »

EGreg wrote: post #143
roenxi wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In traditional voting, there is a pretty decent chance you know the person who does the counting or can find someone in your community who can personally vouch for them. Living in my small town at one stage, I knew several of the tabulators personally and all of them by reputation. That is an extreme case, but even in a city these people are somewhat known quantities. With a voting machine that wasn't verified by a h…

Seriously? You are saying that you just trust some people not to manipulate the votes? Why not use a Merkle Tree or a Blockchain to verify that your vote was included in the total ? They were invented to remove trust in middlemen. Mutually distrusting parties can maintain the vote tallying. That’s how elections should be done.

In a hand count you might get the odd bad actor, but you're unlikely to get large scale systematic bias, which is much easier to introduce in a machine counting system.

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

#154

Post by guiambros »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #124
CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I believe there are people who want results sooner rather than later. The greater the delay, the more annoyed folks become. Recording votes in _both_ paper and electronic form allows for the auditability of paper and the speed of electronic calculations. (Side note: I also believe that hand-counting of ballots can be tedious, and humans performing tedious, repetitive tasks are prone to error. See [1].) [1…

Why should you compromise on security because you're impatient? Have the voter vote on paper; since it's only two candidates, this can be postcard-sized. Scan the postcards for the fast results, check and double check by hand (or visual if there's a picture taken by the scanner).

2 candidates for president, yes.

Plus US Senate, federal congressional district, state assembly, state Senate, 7 judges, and 6 paragraph-long ballot propositions.

Not only your postcard idea wouldn't work, manual counting 3 pages (!) of a giant ballot would get prone to errors and be expensive rather quickly.

I think the current electronic plus storing the paper ballot for future audit if needed offers the best of both worlds.

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

roenxi wrote: post #133
gruez wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What did it record? Who knows? How is it any different than traditional voting, where you drop your ballot into a black box and trust the poll workers would count it correctly? You can do random spot checks select boxes to make sure the machine is tabulating correctly. If they're all correct, you can be reasonably sure the others are correct as well, unless your adversary has incredible luck.

In traditional voting, there is a pretty decent chance you know the person who does the counting or can find someone in your community who can personally vouch for them. Living in my small town at one stage, I knew several of the tabulators personally and all of them by reputation. That is an extreme case, but even in a city these people are somewhat known quantities. With a voting machine that wasn't verified by a h…

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by echoangle »

EGreg wrote: post #143
roenxi wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In traditional voting, there is a pretty decent chance you know the person who does the counting or can find someone in your community who can personally vouch for them. Living in my small town at one stage, I knew several of the tabulators personally and all of them by reputation. That is an extreme case, but even in a city these people are somewhat known quantities. With a voting machine that wasn't verified by a h…

Seriously? You are saying that you just trust some people not to manipulate the votes? Why not use a Merkle Tree or a Blockchain to verify that your vote was included in the total ? They were invented to remove trust in middlemen. Mutually distrusting parties can maintain the vote tallying. That’s how elections should be done.

The advantage of just counting in public and having other people vouch is that it is easily understandable by everyone. If you use the blockchain, how many people can be convinced that the election was stolen with some techspeak? Do you think the average citizen understands enough cryptography to validate that the election was legit?

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

#157

Post by cwalv »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #134
CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, hand-counting causes more errors than electronic counting, except in very small communities. Ref.: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hand...

It's not so much about errors tbh - paper votes can be re-counted as often as needed. The fear is that voting machines are insecure, its input or results tampered with, and then you can't do a recount. Unless they generate a paper receipt as well that the voter has to confirm before the vote is counted.

The machine prints a paper record at the same time. Couldn't they just read off the paper record as easily as recounting paper ballots?

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

#158

Post by CaliforniaKarl »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #134
CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, hand-counting causes more errors than electronic counting, except in very small communities. Ref.: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hand...

It's not so much about errors tbh - paper votes can be re-counted as often as needed. The fear is that voting machines are insecure, its input or results tampered with, and then you can't do a recount. Unless they generate a paper receipt as well that the voter has to confirm before the vote is counted.

> Unless they generate a paper receipt as well that the voter has to confirm before the vote is counted.

Indeed! I've volunteered at polling places where this is done.

I think one reason polling places have gravitated towards the "use paper ballots for everything, which are then scanned" option is because you're likely going to have something like that anyway, for mail-in ballots. It does bring problems, but you still have the paper to fall back to.

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

#159

Post by c1ccccc1 »

mFixman wrote: post #26
stuaxo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ways of doing this using encryption so that the person will know what their own vote is in a way that others don't.

"Prove that you voted for Putin or you are out of a job".

Cryptographers are clever and have figured out a way to let you know your vote was counted without being able to prove it to a third party!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRTvoZ3Rho

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

#160

Post by oceanplexian »

Sparkle-san wrote: post #60
pessimizer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mail-in ballots are worst of all, and the people who advocate for their expansion will regret it when they see entire church memberships filling out their ballots together, checking each other to make sure they voted correctly, and shunning, expelling, or firing people who don't participate. There are currently many heads of household voting for their entire families, and even aside from mail-in ballots, there are pe…

It's been the method of voting in Oregon for 25 years and Colorado for 10 years, when does the regret start? The current states that have all mail voting are also some of the least religious states in the country, you'd think the religious states would be pushing for it given the scenario you laid out. Colorado also had the second highest voter turn out nationwide in 2020 which supports the claim that all mail voting…

Of course mailing ballots increases turnout. That wasn’t the question. The question was how do we determine if the votes are fraudulent, for example someone filling out a ballot for their elderly parents against their will.
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