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Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

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

#281

Post by Groxx »

jasomill wrote: post #248
Groxx wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(without making any claim about "block chains for voting are good/bad") Not really. Generally if you want to privately check something like this, you encrypt it for the recipient (government), and sign it with something that only you know. So the contents are hidden from everyone and nobody knows anyone's signature, but you can prove that your item is in the list, unmodified, and is therefore counted. And then the ch…

Assuming uncontrolled public access to the blockchain, couldn't this also be used to prove to others that you voted "correctly", facilitating vote buying schemes?

Particularly if you do not publicly disclose the cert you signed it with: I'd be willing to bet there's some way to make it so you can produce a signing cert that'll claim you filled in any data you wish.

E.g. have your signature data be a class of values based on vote possibilities, but have all produce the same final signature. You could produce anything for anyone that way. I'm not sure if that'd be "forward secrecy" or "deniable encryption" or what, but there are a variety of systems that do similar things.

I am not a cryptographer and I don't know any concrete implementations that would have all the properties I want, but pieces of pretty much all things you could reasonably want in a voting system do already exist. And pretty often they can be layered together. The bigger problems in practice seem to be "people won't trust it" (which is defensible), "some of the fancier crypto is too new and not thoroughly proven" (which is very true, e.g. zero-knowledge proofs), and "implementers so far have been stunningly incompetent" (undeniable).

(edit: or I guess more easily, just sign the data after encryption, and throw away your encryption key. then you can claim whatever you like - it's encrypted, they can't know, and you can still show that it wasn't changed)

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

#282

Post by lolinder »

PittleyDunkin wrote: post #227
jack_h wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bezos? What the hell would a tech/business guy have to say about elections and why would anyone listen? He has a newspaper to speak for him, why is he saying this stuff under his own name? Edit: i was out of the loop but apparently bezos decided to throw his chips out the window for little benefit to himself (or anyone). Just goes to show the wealthy are just as capable of being morons as the rest of us

There's a corollary to the fallacy of appeal to authority, which is that it's also a fallacy of rejecting an idea outright on the grounds it doesn't come from an authority. It's an insightful observation whether or not you like Bezos.

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

#283

Post by CaliforniaKarl »

akira2501 wrote: post #253
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.

> to figure out which random municipality voting system(s) you'd need to target to actually affect the outcome. As you said, no standardization, which means all precincts reports on wildly different time intervals, if you can interfere with just tallying during or after the fact, and you can get the information on other precincts before any other outlets, you could easily take advantage of this. It's essentially the…

> As you said, no standardization, which means all precincts reports on wildly different time intervals

There is standardization within all precincts of a county. And from my past experience as a poll worker, I can tell you why precinct reporting times can vary wildly within a county.

(Note things I say here are specific to the county where I worked.)

Anyone in line to vote by 8PM is allowed to vote. We (the other poll workers and I) could not start closing the polls until every voter had voted. If the local community did not trust vote-by-mail, then that polling place will likely see delays in closing due to lines.

One polling place often covered multiple precincts, so you'll see multiple precincts delayed simultaneously.

After that, boxes go from one queue to another, with multiple queues consolidating into one or two. So, a one-minute delay in dropping off your box to a collection point, may mean a two-hour delay in that box being processed.

> if you can interfere with just tallying

First off, that would require a remarkable amount of fraud. Second, that's why there are observers. It doesn't matter if it's 2AM on the Wednesday after election day: If tabulating is happening, you are allowed to observe.

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

#284

Post by wannacboatmovie »

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 )

Do you also believe Walmart is marketing chocolate cookies to hate groups or is the price an unfortunate coincidence when they do it?

https://www.walmart.com/ip/President-s-Choice-The-Decadent-C...

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

#285

Post by gotoeleven »

elmomle wrote: post #261
tastyfreeze wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe the best answer would be to just create a system where only people who are legally allowed to vote, and those that aren't allowed can't, and the provenance of any given ballot is very clear and secure.

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

#286

Post by _def »

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…

> The greater the delay, the more annoyed folks become.

Where's the problem with waiting? This is not some customer service to optimize for profit, there's no harm in waiting a bit.

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

#287

Post by kec »

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.

Denmark has a smaller population than New York City, America is a very large place.

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

#288

Post by gotoeleven »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #271
tastyfreeze wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Virginia also purged my sister-in-law from the voter rolls, a naturalized citizen. Let's just say, I am not amused.

Sounds like maybe it would be good to push for accurate voter rolls!

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

#289

Post by [deleted] »

pstrateman wrote: post #270
dghlsakjg wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#290

Post by anon291 »

Spivak wrote: post #254
anon291 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess for me personally I don't deny that Joe Biden won the contest as performed. I just question the contest themselves. After all, if made up my own election law and ran an election, and declared my candidate the winner, no one would listen to me, but that's what happened here, which we know based on scotus's interpretation of whether secretaries of state can change rules the way they did in Pennsylvania.

It might just be the neuro-spicy in me but Pennsylvania seems morally in the right here even when the courts ruled against them. The rules as set are really dumb and Pennsylvania was counting valid unambiguous ballots. The election as run was to me better than the one following the letter. How shitty would it be to have your vote thrown out because you didn't put it in the special double envelope that's for preservin…

I mean I guess it's a viewpoint on who ought to set the rules. I actually don't even disagree with you, and I'm a sworn Republican. However, the moral hazard and threat to democracy of bureaucrat and officials overriding legislative policy is something I dislike basically universally, especially for elections
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