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Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

arstechnica.com

211–220 of 682 posts

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

#211
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 a serious voting system the paper ballots are saved and can be recounted by hand. I've worked in elections in Sweden, and all elections are recounted at least twice, by different people.

The issue in the US is compounded further as running elections is left up to not only the states, but the individual municipalities in those states and typically run at the county level.

Each with their own rules, whether or not ID verification is mandatory or literally illegal, style of voting (mail vs in-person), ballot design/UX, what languages the ballots are in (are ballots in Sweden in anything but Swedish?) and mutually incompatible equipment. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of ballot designs in use for the current election.

When viewing this at a macro level for electing the office of the President, it seems absolutely insane.

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

#212
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 a serious voting system the paper ballots are saved and can be recounted by hand. I've worked in elections in Sweden, and all elections are recounted at least twice, by different people.

This is true here in the US. The paper ballot scans and then goes into a lock-box for possible manual recount.

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

#213
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do when duplicate serial numbers start showing up? I'm assuming you won't know who was issued which serial number, and if it's truly randomized you wouldn't even know where they were sent.

Then you have clear proof of election fraud and the FBI, NSA, etc can get to work. Invalidate the election results and do a new one.

How would they "get to work"?

And your proposed resolution means someone could DoS an election by copying their ballot and submitting it.

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

#214

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…

US election results take more time that every other paper ballot country so this is a lie

The US tends to combine rather than separate local, state, and federal elections, as well as not having a parliamentary system at either state or federal level (resulting in separate but often simultaneous legislative and executive elections, and in some states judicial as well), as well as having bicameralism at the federal level and most states (resulting in additional simultaneous legislative elections), as well as having initiative, recall, and/or referenda as significant functions in many states, as well as having non-unitary executives with multiple independently elected executive officers in many states as well as having many of those same state issues applying at the county and municipal levels as well (and, often, for overlapping additional special jurisdictions.)

As a result, there are a whole lot of separate elections conducted on the same ballot in the US, more than is typical elsewhere. This increases the tabulation load.

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

#215

"In addition to the Department of State Employees and in coordination with county clerks, these employees will only enter badged areas in pairs to update the passwords for election equipment in counties and will be directly observed by local elections officials from the county clerk's office. This is a bit weird. Someone having a perfectly legitimate excuse to fiddle with voting machines, urgently, two days before el…

As Jeff Bezos said a few days ago: "Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first."

This is not an election where we can afford doubt.

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

#216

I think all US folks reading this should volunteer at their county's Registrar of Voters (or equivalent agency for their county). Spend one election working at a polling place, and another election working at the RoV HQ. See what it's like to go through the training, and what things are like on Election Day, and in the days leading up (for places that allow early voting, drop-off, etc.).

To what end? Local to me, an “trained” election volunteer was still questioning voter’s citizenship at the polls.

I’d say this was a fluke if the GOP hadn’t spent the last umpteen months pushing all this non-citizen voting nonsense.

https://wapo.st/3AsIvnf

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand your comment. Are you claiming that the video is fake? — if not, what’s your comment referring to with “accuracy”? — how is “authority” relevant at all, when discussing video of a malfunction?

Provably digitally altered fake videos of voter fraud were made and disseminated by Russia during the US 2020 election. Non-partisan institutions put a lot of energy in trying to debunk these operations which basically suit America's adversaries and, absent of critical thinking, many people become unwitting participants in their disinformation campaigns. By eating away at the trust of non-partisan institutions that a…

You're comparing apples and oranges in an attempt to distract from the topic by invoking the Russian disinformation trope.

The video is provably authentic, and it elicited an official response from the local government. End of story.

By your logic, if it appears on social media at all, it never happened.

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a serious voting system the paper ballots are saved and can be recounted by hand. I've worked in elections in Sweden, and all elections are recounted at least twice, by different people.

This is true here in the US. The paper ballot scans and then goes into a lock-box for possible manual recount.

Depends on the state. Colorado does do this, for what it’s worth.

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

#219

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…

I agree. All those Kamala ads about wives in the polling place defying their misogynistic husbands miss the fact that those controlling husbands would demand that their wives receive mail-in ballots, and then use intimidation and pressure to ensure the vote.

The fact that this is rarely discussed probably means that it rarely actually happens. Political beliefs between husbands and wives are usually quite correlated, I'd imagine.

The issue of maliciously voting for you elderly grandparent may happen, but is probably very very rare.

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

#220
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the site satire? There's basically no information of each "incident" aside from the state and a bunch of hashtags.

No it's his real site afaik. I'm guessing they put in some fake data for testing purposes but are not very competent. I'd hate to think that they were just making shit up.

Then you don't know anything about the election denier and liar that is Mike.
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