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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

#171

Post by goodlinks »

sgerenser wrote: post #152
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is so strange to me.. not complaining or criticising, just thanking you for the insight.

I would expect one ballot paper per vote (based on rare occasion of doing two at once) to ensure the count is simple and accurate.

They make the ballots different colours to ensure you put them in the correct boxes iirc

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

#172

Post by BurningFrog »

herbstein wrote: post #131
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…

> I believe there are people who want results sooner rather than later In Denmark all ballots are hand-counted. It takes about 6 hours from polls close to every precinct reporting a preliminary result. Wanting it faster isn't really necessary, other than to feed the 24/7 news machine.

There are a LOT of elections in the US. Where I live we have ~30 different things to vote on this election.

So the incentive to automate things are bigger here.

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

#173

Post by saturn8601 »

tupolef wrote: post #13

The only way to get an honest electronic vote is by giving realtime visibility on who voted what and where publicly. Everything else is a scam. It would mean no secrecy of vote, but I think that secrecy of vote is for places that are new to democracy. It could be anonymised to a point a clever system of personal certificats, but the idea is that in a 100 people district, the citizens should be able to count themselve…

>The only way to get an honest electronic vote is by giving realtime visibility on who voted what and where publicly.

How about having the voter verify a printed copy of their electronic vote before the machine casts the ballot and then counting the paper ballots afterwards to verify the tally with the machine. Two way verification. Problem solved.

Since 2016, with the help of activists over the country, NJ and many otther states switched to electronic machines with paper records validated by the voter. Unfortunately the part about counting the paper ballots afterwards varies between states.

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

#174

Post by dragonwriter »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #168
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…

Couldn't a church just require congregants to send a picture of their ballot from inside a voting booth? Is there any basis in reality for this?

> Couldn’t a church just require congregants to send a picture of their ballot from inside a voting booth?

They could, though there are some problems with that:

(1) It is generally illegal to ask people to do that,

(2) Voters could “comply” with such a demand and simply mark a ballot the way the church wanted, take a picture, tell poll workers they had made an error marking their ballot and needed a replacement, have the ballot they photographed discarded, mark the replacement with their honest preferences, and cast that ballot.

Of course, (1) applies to the proposed scenario with mail-in ballots, and why large groups that aren’t already tightly-knit cults where they wouldn’t need to worry about defectors with secret ballots anyway would do it – it only takes on defector to get the whole group busted.

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

#175

Post by chrisco255 »

CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #97
rsync wrote: post #37

Paper ballots have very boring failure modes and need no explanation or technical support. When you see a system more complex than paper ballots, know that the additions are not there on your behalf .

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…

You can scan paper to make the count faster. The benefit of using paper is you can even use multiple scanners from different companies even.

Hand counts are actually not all that time-consuming for large groups. Voting districts are already broken down enough whete each polling station only has a few thousand ballots.

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

#176

Post by IncreasePosts »

ForHackernews wrote: post #90
kkielhofner wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Wouldn't you only need to target a handful of battleground districts/states? No point in trying to turn Vermont red or Wyoming blue.

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

#177

Post by BurningFrog »

pessimizer wrote: post #56
Sparkle-san wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colorado uses paper ballots. It's an all-mail voting state so every voter is mailed a paper ballot which is then dropped off or mailed back.

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…

This is addressed in serious voting systems.

In Sweden you can vote by mail, but it has to be done in a private booth on a post office. You have to show ID, of course.

That means everybody votes secretly, even when voting by mail.

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

#178

Post by chrisco255 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #172
herbstein wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe there are people who want results sooner rather than later In Denmark all ballots are hand-counted. It takes about 6 hours from polls close to every precinct reporting a preliminary result. Wanting it faster isn't really necessary, other than to feed the 24/7 news machine.

There are a LOT of elections in the US. Where I live we have ~30 different things to vote on this election. So the incentive to automate things are bigger here.

So does Denmark, why do you assume it's any different? Counting doesn't take that long when you split it across 10K voting districts, which is what the U.S. did for most of its existence. We want ACCURATE elections free from corruption and hacks. You can't undo a fucked up election.

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

#179

Post by rcxdude »

jfengel wrote: post #81
recursivecaveat wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

That was punch-card ballots, which are also crap. Most of Europe uses a piece of paper you mark with an 'X' in pen or pencil.

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

#180

Post by chrisco255 »

goodlinks wrote: post #171
sgerenser wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is so strange to me.. not complaining or criticising, just thanking you for the insight. I would expect one ballot paper per vote (based on rare occasion of doing two at once) to ensure the count is simple and accurate. They make the ballots different colours to ensure you put them in the correct boxes iirc

It wouldn't be a bad idea to break up federal, state and local elections into different ballots.
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