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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

#421

Post by mr_mitm »

mattclarkdotnet wrote: post #357
sadeshmukh wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if you're willing to spend that much, and it'll be very expensive, then sure. It's just technophobia - machines are going to be more accurate than a human (who also can make a mistake!).

The disconnect is that in most of the world we only vote for one or two candidates on a ballot. In America you vote for everything from the president to the dog catcher on one ballot. While I think of it, the USA and UK should both stop holding votes on working days. That is nuts! Do what Australia does and vote on a Saturday and make it compulsory.

Are you sure? The last time I voted in Germany they gave me five ballots (EU, state, county, city, district), some with dozens of candidates - per party. I had dozens of votes to give.

Here is a similar example: https://www.volksfreund.de/imgs/scaled/28/1/8/3/7/5/7/5/0/5/...

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

#422

Post by [deleted] »

sethammons wrote: post #412
anon291 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am happy to say, I've never been on the side of a Cheney. Go me!

I find that unlikely. They are very publicly voting D this round. So that implies you are voting R, but that means you likely voted R with Bush. Did you vote against Bush but for Trump?

[deleted]

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

#423

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #358
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is important that the voting system have credibility for everyone - regardless of party. Has anyone done a ground up exercise of rethinking the process and the involved technologies from a cybersecurity standpoint? It would be great to offer voters verification of their votes while maintaining secrecy. But right now I feel like we are stuck, with one half the country having doubts about the process and the other h…

> Has anyone done a ground up exercise of rethinking the process and the involved technologies from a cybersecurity standpoint? Chesterton’s fence.

This feels a lot like the people who simply tell others to become a poll worker when they start asking hard questions about the system. I get the wisdom in this but it can also be a waste of time. In other (non electoral) situations, many big improvements can and have happened without needing to endlessly understand existing things.

In this case it is clear we don’t have verifiable elections - you don’t need to understand anything deeply to know this, since it is apparent with your own ballot. So instead let’s design for something better.

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

#424

Post by _heimdall »

mulmen wrote: post #352
bboygravity wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. If all the machine does is mark who you voted on paper than what is the point of the machine over a pencil? 2. If it does more (for example count your vote) then how did you know that it actually did that? Either way it smells extremely fishy to me.

It avoids dangling chads and improperly filled bubbles which were both used to steal the 2000 presidential election. I have never used such a machine but the UX could be a lot clearer than the analog filp-and-punch machines used in Florida in 2000. I don’t love software in the voting process but printing the choices is verifiable and reduces ambiguity in the voting process.

It seems like quite a stretch to say the 2000 election was stolen. There were definitely ballot issues, but Gore challenged it and ultimately decided of his own accord to concede.

He could have continued the challenge and drawn the process out, throwing in throwing in the towel to allow the process to end was his choice, it wasn't stolen.

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

#425

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

mikeyouse wrote: post #117
gruez wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For lack of standing or lack of ability to relieve yes. Courts aren't going to question a presidential election. ??? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore >That doesn't mean we can't look at the videos of observers being banned, the facts of now-declared-illegal extra-legislative policy changes, the timings of various ballot drops etc. My impression is that there were a bunch of "this seems sus" allegations, bu…

Yeah it’s just a polite retelling of the crazy Trump nonsense that was laughed out of court by every judge who looked at it and the rest is just misunderstandings from casual election observers who refuse to do one iota of research about how things work. The accusations are always vague as well since each time you zoom in on one it’s completely anodyne but you need the distance to keep up the specter of something nef…

> Yeah it’s just a polite retelling of the crazy Trump nonsense that was laughed out of court by every judge who looked at it and the rest is just misunderstandings from casual election observers who refuse to do one iota of research about how things work.

The majority of the cases relating to that election were dismissed for various technicalities, not on merit. As in the judges didn’t laugh them out of the court based on the ideas in those cases. Of course they may have also been rejected on merits but we won’t know.

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

#426

Post by _heimdall »

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.

At that point it doesn't matter whether the voting system is centralized or left up to localities. If the election comes down to a few thousand key votes in one or a few localities you are left with a very small number of election systems to keep a close eye on whether that's the central one or a few local ones.

Its also worth noting that just because the central government could run one standardized election process doesn't mean that the election is easier to secure. Ultimately polling places would still be local. Maybe it helps a bit if everyone uses the same system, but that's more about consistency than security.

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

#427

Post by ReptileMan »

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

And which is this mythical group of people that will be disenfranchised if the rule of showing photo id is implemented? How many US citizens don't have any form of valid id?

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

#428

Post by neverartful »

laxmin wrote: post #6

The Indian Voting Machines are the answer. No operating system, no passwords, no connections, no bruteforcing anything, system on a chip, so widely distributed devices that hacking even a few of them is challenging, etc. The US voting machines are just waiting to be hacked, just a matter of when, not if.

When I was a kid living in Louisiana (a state well-known for political shenanigans), they had big mechanical voting machines for elections. The machines were very large and heavy and were stored in warehouses. Probably not much fun for the workers who had to move them to/from storage to polling places (they did have wheels though).

Anyways, you would walk into it and throw a big mechanical lever that would close a privacy curtain behind you. Then you would have to manually turn an individual mechanical switch for each choice. When finished voting, you would throw the big mechanical lever back to the original position. Moving the lever back would cause all of your votes to be counted, reset all voting switches, and open the privacy curtains. There were mechanical counters for all possible voting options. Then, when the polls closed the votes would be read off the counters (and presumably verified by multiple individuals) and then reported to the whoever they reported the results to.

This was before the internet, but the same machines could (and should) be used in the internet age. There's nothing to hack into electronically as the voting machines contain no electronics (at least for communications, for sure).

The only big downside is that the machines have to be stored somewhere and they take up a sizable space. Also, they incur expenses to be moved from storage to polling places (and back).

Someone will bring up voters with disabilities, but there were voters with disabilities back then too. I'm sure there was a protocol for accommodating voter disabilities.

All in all, I think it's a sensible and pragmatic solution to thwart hacking and hopefully garner more confidence in voting integrity.

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

#429

Post by _heimdall »

btreecat wrote: post #333
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 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. Over the last 20 years there's no record of a non citizen voting in VA. As a poll worker myself, there's nothing we would check election day that was that wasn't already checked during regis…

This would be my expectation as well. Poll workers can verify that a person is registered to vote in this election, whether the registration was valid is an upstream problem.

If a state is allowing intelligible people to register to vote that's a much, much bigger issue and one that can't be solved by poll workers.

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

#430

Post by _heimdall »

briandear wrote: post #401
SubiculumCode wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So is she unable to vote? Virginia has same day registration, so it would seem like a non-issue for a citizen.

I have to assume same day registration would require documentation to (re) prove your citizenship. If you can't find your birth certificate or similar on that day it would be an issue that your previously valid registration was removed and you aren't able to go through the process again in one day.
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