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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

#371

Post by defrost »

zo1 wrote: post #369
javawizard wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds great. How do you do that?

Are we talking about "Voter ID"? If so, isn't that being constantly derailed by the democrats? Just like all the issues with illegals and the border wall, which they don't seem to want to fix and make it impossible.

> Just like all the issues with illegals and the border wall, which they don't seem to want to fix and make it impossible.

How do you reconcile that with:

Senate Republicans block border security bill as they campaign on border chaos ( May 24, 2024 )

    Nearly every GOP senator, along with six Democrats, voted to filibuster a bipartisan bill designed to crack down on migration and reduce border crossings.

    The vote caps a peculiar sequence of events after Senate Republican leaders insisted on a border security agreement last year and signed off on a compromise bill before they knifed it. Democrats, wary of their political vulnerability when it comes to migration, had acceded to a variety of GOP demands to raise the bar for asylum-seekers and tighten border controls.
~ multiple US news outlets.

FWiW I'm not American, and it seems pretty clear that US Republicans vastly overhype the risks associated with the southern border, campaign hard on fear mongering, and tank any efforts by the Democrats to address those problems.

Politically it's a common conservative tactic having been used in Australia, the UK, and elsewhere.

What's curious is how people seem to fall for this and just accept what they're fed w/out looking into details.

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

#372

Post by tsimionescu »

javawizard wrote: post #318
gotoeleven wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds great. How do you do that?

It's hard to build it, but some countries (like mine) have universal government-issued IDs, called identity cards. You get your ID card when you turn 14 (voting starts at 18), based on your birth certificate, or when you become a legal citizen through immigration. This ID card includes a photograph, and has to be changed every ~10 years (slightly more often at first, slightly less often as you age). Whenever the government wants to confirm your identity, you present this card, including elections. On election day, if your ID card is lost/stolen, you can get one at any police station within the same day (if both your ID card and your birth certificate are also lost, however, that is going to take far more time to get back and get a new ID, and you will not be able to vote - which is a problem, but it affects very few people, fortunately).

This whole system is easy to maintain if you've had it in place. However, it's very hard to emit ID cards for a whole population that hasn't had one before. I'm not suggesting this is an easy fix for the USA, even beyond the cultural issues that would arise if trying to do a federal ID for every citizen like this.

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

#373

Post by mulmen »

gotoeleven wrote: post #291
dragonwriter wrote: post #267

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

And what a diversity of election results those states have had since then!

Why would mail in voting create more diverse results? States that don’t mail ballots also haven’t had diverse results. These concepts are orthogonal. Mail in voting is intended to improve turnout, not diversify results.

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

#374

Post by bomewish »

Dalewyn wrote: post #314
floating-io wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my locale there is a header on the physical ballot that contains a bunch of barcodes, presumably to make your votes machine readable. It then prints the votes in text below. I absolutely hate that fact. I am a human, I cannot read barcodes without a computer. Therefore, I cannot tell if the important part of what was recorded is correct. Not sure if Colorado's are the same...

The value of absolute transparency is why nothing will beat paper ballots written and marked in plain English counted by hand with anyone and everyone who cares about election integrity watching the process.

Absolutely agree. Just seems soooo simple.

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

#375

Post by Kwpolska »

mateus1 wrote: post #201
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 .

It does not make sense to paint paper ballots as something that is inherently better.. Paper ballots have many potential vector attacks many of which are stupidly easy or even unintentional (e.g. hanging chads)

Hanging chads were caused by a dumb idea to make ballots automatically countable. The solution is to make ballots easier to hand-count, by having separate ballot papers for each position (or at least the most important ones) and counting them by hand.

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

#376

Post by tsimionescu »

wbl wrote: post #323
riffraff wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Italy has 60M people and paper ballots, results are out the next day. Population does not matter since polling stations can be scaled up proportionally. I've been in voting where we had a dozen ballots per person (referendums) so this would be more than the total paper ballots in the US, it works fine. Minor miscounts happen but nobody has ever seriously questioned the overall vote results.

Uh no. This election I had a president, two senators, a state senator, a state assembly, a county executive, city council, school board, prosecutor recall, and half a dozen ballot measures. It took four legal size paper surfaces.

Those could easily be prioritized. First count the federal elections, then the state elections, then the county elections. You get the presidential and congressional results within a day, the state election results within two-three days, and the more local ones within the week. Is anyone going to seriously complain that it took a week to find out who is on the school board?

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

#377

Post by mulmen »

BurningFrog wrote: post #177
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…

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.

Sweden doesn’t have the same racist history as the United States. In the US there’s a long history of making it very hard to get adequate photo ID or moving or closing polling locations in minority districts.

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

#378

Post by tsimionescu »

Sparkle-san wrote: post #198
oceanplexian wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Colorado does signature matching and ballot tracking. My signature has changed since I registered to vote here and I was notified in one election about it not matching and had to cure my ballot. If someone voted under my name, I would be notified of the processing of my ballot and could object to it. Ease of voting/security is still an important balance. I could easily create a 100% secure election and it would disen…

Signature matching is a notoriously weak verification, especially when the risk is within-family disenfranchisement. You almost certainly know your spouse's and parents' and children's signatures, you likely have signed in their name in various occasions before, so signing with their signature in a convincing enough way to fool a ballot counter who gets to spend probably ~10s at most on every mail-in ballot is extremely easy.

Not to mention, you can do the opposite: you can destroy your "wrong-minded" family member's ballots to prevent them from voting.

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

#379

Post by zo1 »

macintux wrote: post #199
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Invalidate the election results and do a new one. The chaos that would ensue from this is staggering.

Much better to just deny it till after the new government is in, then make a nothing-burger out of all the news that is reported "afterwards"? Meanwhile, 50% of your country is disenfranchised for X-years because it was "less chaos" to just accept the vote and move on.

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

#380

Post by tsimionescu »

mateus1 wrote: post #201
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 .

It does not make sense to paint paper ballots as something that is inherently better.. Paper ballots have many potential vector attacks many of which are stupidly easy or even unintentional (e.g. hanging chads)

Hanging chads, which are anyway still a problem introduced by machine-counting, not hand counting, are much less problematic than hacking a voting machine. There is no tie between your vote choice and the probability of a hanging chad, so this doesn't bias the election against any particular candidate. A hacked voting machine does have intentional bias.
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