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

Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 682 posts

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

#261

Post by elmomle »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #259
alistairSH wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Virginia purged 1600 non-citizens from their voter rolls and a Chinese student actually voted in Michigan. Clearly requiring citizenship to register as a voter is not sufficient. Poll volunteers should be verifying citizenship.

One person voting who is not allowed is as bad (in terms of fidelity of the vote to legal voters' intentions) as one person being kept from voting who is allowed. There is copious evidence that these purges, and the atmosphere of fear they create, cause far more harm than they prevent.

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

#262

Post by willy_k »

anigbrowl wrote: post #161
gruez wrote: 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.

It seems more likely that this is just test data, based on the time being the exact same for all of the datapoints and there being a currently null column for “post url”, suggesting that these will all be sourced to a social media post which at least significantly increases the complexity of faking it, especially when there are bound to be plenty of posts claiming incidents.

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

#263

Post by arp242 »

EasyMark wrote: post #238
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 value of secrecy is for protecting wives, mothers, etc from violence and punishment. the same is also true in local elections in particular. You could be ostracized from public services in a heart beat if they knew your vote. I can think of a hundred other reasons why a secret ballot is better than a public ballot. A secret ballot is necessary for safety, courtesy, and well being of a society.

Also see: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/01/women-cancel...

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

#264

Post by sixothree »

alistairSH wrote: post #216
CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #120

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

I remember hearing polls workers saying "here comes another good republican". Next year they had monitors at the polls.

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

#265

Post by Dig1t »

muglug wrote: post #151
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 )

This is just a Q-anon level conspiracy theory.

The ADL has a database full of “hate symbols” that nobody uses or some random person on the internet used one time. It’s a joke and the ADL uses it to bully other groups and people into silence.

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

#266

Post by throw_that_away »

jeffmcjunkin wrote: post #104
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oregon should never be the gold standard for how to do anything, ever. Can they even pump their own gas yet?

Recently, yes :) https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/06/us/oregon-drivers-pump-own-fu...

Before that changed I LOVED turning the attendants away as I grabbed my Diesel hose and started pumping. I loved telling them when they didn't know.

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

#267

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> 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.

Firing people for not cooperating with something that is a crime under both federal and state law is a strategy that…doesn’t work very long for the criminals.

(Giving a large group of people who you don’t trust to vote your way that kind of criminal leverage over you in general is a pretty self-defeating strategy even without the intense incentives produced when you pile termination of employment on top of it.)

Also, near-universal mail-in voting isn’t some novel untested practice. Oregon has been doing it for more than two decades, Washington and Colorado for a decade, and even more states have adopted it between 2019 and 2022.

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

#268

Post by CaliforniaKarl »

arp242 wrote: post #258
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> paper votes can be re-counted as often as needed That's not exactly what happened in Florida 24 years ago. In principle I don't really disagree, but just saying the problems run rather deeper than just hand-counting vs. electronic voting. The one time a recount actually would have been useful it was stopped for highly legalistic reasons that are hard to explain to a normal person. Not only that, it's highly likely…

> That's not exactly what happened in Florida 24 years ago.

Which is one of the reasons why the Help America Vote Act[0] was passed two years later.

> The one time a recount actually would have been useful…

I understand things are stressful, but please avoid resorting to hyperbole. There are other times in American history when a recount has changed the result. For example, see the 2004 Washington State gubernatorial election[2].

> Not only that, with the full-on cult of Trump and the perceived victimhood of his supporters, I'm not really sure to what degree hand counts can always be trusted.

> tl;dr: it's all pretty fucked no matter what.

Be an observer.

Seriously: Be an observer. For example, Orange County (California) has their public notice[2] inviting "the public" (that's you!) to observe election operations. Tomorrow, assuming you're in a place that allows early voting, go to a polling place or vote center (or whatever they're called there) and observe. On (and after) Election Day, go to your county's registrar of voters (or whatever they are called where you are) and observe the tally. Learn how to call out when something is wrong, and learn how to "observe the observers" to call out if they say something is wrong (assuming you think their call is BS.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_America_Vote_Act

[1]: https://ocvote.gov/sites/default/files/elections/gen2024/Pub...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_...

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

#269

Post by sixothree »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #125
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…

> [...] 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. That's a felony isn't it?

And tax fraud too?

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

#270

Post by pstrateman »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #229
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?) an…

On the flip side; it makes it incredibly difficult to pull off wide scale fraud. Instead of having to compromise a single system, you are forced to compromise dozens or hundreds of systems run by people with opposing ideologies

Wide scale fraud isn't necessary when elections are decided by 10k votes.
Post reply on HN