Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak • Hacker News Board

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

#521

Post by Sparkle-san » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 4:30 PM UTC

adolph wrote: post #325

Sparkle-san wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The signature matching would be the first line of defense against that. They would also be notified of deaths by the department of health and the social security administration. Broadly speaking though, whenever potential cases of fraud of investigated, very few end up being substantiated and the fraud that is committed is caught up front. https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-voting-gov... https://www.rm…

> They would also be notified of deaths by the department of health and the social security administration. Is your claim that the social security administration sends a death notification to the deceased person's voter registrar? https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/stateagreements.html

That is what is stated by the Secretary of State in the PBS link above.

“we get information when Coloradans pass away from two spots… the Department of Public Health and Environment and also the Social Security Administration.”

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

#522

Post by Sparkle-san » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 4:33 PM UTC

BostonFern wrote: post #327

Sparkle-san wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The signature matching would be the first line of defense against that. They would also be notified of deaths by the department of health and the social security administration. Broadly speaking though, whenever potential cases of fraud of investigated, very few end up being substantiated and the fraud that is committed is caught up front. https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-voting-gov... https://www.rm…

That kind of argument is open to criticism of survivorship bias.

Sure maybe and it still never seems to be proven on a substantial level. The Heritage foundation has an agenda to prove voter fraud and even going by thei number, it appears to be a 1 in every million vote level event. Far more legal votes are stopped by existing laws than illegal votes.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio...

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

#523

Post by ethbr1 » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 4:35 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #516

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> getting the count absolutely correct isn’t necessarily as important vs more systemic biases History lesson: The 2004 Washington state governor's election was decided by a mere 129 votes, and only after multiple recounts and repeatedly "finding" boxes upon boxes of supposedly uncounted ballots in the weeks following election day kept altering the totals and overturned the original result. The election was extremely…

>and only after multiple recounts and repeatedly "finding" boxes upon boxes of supposedly uncounted ballots in the weeks following election day kept altering the totals and overturned the original result. The explanations given in the wikipedia article seem pretty plausible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_... I don't see how it's any different what happened in the 2020 election, where Tru…

> While I can see why it might seem superficially suspicious, such phenomena is inevitable if the pool of mail-in (or other forms of voting liable to get delayed/incorrectly rejected) ballots lean one side.

God help us that Pennsylvania mandates mail-in ballots can only start being counted on election day.

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

#524

Post by rightbyte » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 4:37 PM UTC

MichaelZuo wrote: post #493

rightbyte wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just seemed so absurd wanting American diplomats to be salty about the Vietnam War. Like, the Vietnam War . I don't even know where to begin.

Uhhh… you might need to work on your reading comprehension skills, or are you projecting something on to me? Why would I be ‘salty’ about anything anyone does in Hanoi? It seems clear that many people in Hanoi are benefitting enormously, which is pretty much a total positive, except for some possibility of inducing corruption elsewhere.

> In Hanoi, American officials, diplomats, and executives are rushing to wine and dine people who literally celebrate the defeat of ‘American force’ in public, on the record, every year.

I read that as that your are implying that the American diplomats should take the Vietnamese celebrating their independence as an insult versus the American diplomats.

This further implies that the American diplomats should be salty concerning the Vietnam War, to not lose face or something.

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

#525

Post by Sparkle-san » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 4:37 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #378

Sparkle-san wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 extrem…

I know my spouses signature and I definitely could not copy it for the life of me. I'm sure we could put it different safeguards and they would almost certainly disenfranchise orders of magnitude more legal votes than fraudulent ones given the scale on which we've proven voting fraud to happen.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio...

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

#526

Post by pluto_modadic » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 4:39 PM UTC

efitz wrote: post #506

Computers anywhere in the vote casting process introduce new, additional failure modes. These modes may be intentional (hacking) or unintentional (misconfiguring the paper size of the ballots). They may be mundane (power failure, out of ink) or esoteric (logic error). Even computerized counting has a nonzero error rate (so does human counting, but that can be challenged by human observers). Computers add cost for acq…

scanned paper ballots. simple, fast, auditable. humans are WAY more error prone than computers at counting.

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

#527

Post by Sparkle-san » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 4:41 PM UTC

Robin_Message wrote: post #484

sethammons wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now the abuser can just say "show me a picture of your ballot" since we all take our phones into the booth. And the abuser might stand in line and watch to see if you get a second ballot. And you could quickly use photo editing software to fake it, but the abuser might run analysis... Where is the line of accepted risk?

Photos of ballots are a criminal offence in the UK, which obviously is imperfect in an abusive relationship, but does help set a general norm that the vote is secret.

Abusive relationships are typically criminal in of themselves so not sure laws will help here.

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

#528

Post by pluto_modadic » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 4:42 PM UTC

iluvcommunism wrote: post #224

Paper ballets please. No passwords needed.

ah, found the person who:

1. didn't know how Colorado already does it 2. doesn't know how hard it is to get humans to count without errors 3. doesn't know how expensive having that many temp staff count ballots is.

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

#529

Post by mulmen » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 4:49 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #383

mulmen wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But honestly, I think the whole idea of being able to prove how you voted being dangerous is overblown. Well you’re wrong.

Okay. People wrong about not needing voter ID. Simple. They’re wrong.

People who want voter ID are wrong because they ignore the racist history of using voter ID requirements to disenfranchise voters and/or don’t understand how voter registration or ballot tracking work.

Voter ID is simply not something that will add security to the voting process but it will disenfranchise voters.

ID is already verified when registering and names are recorded when submitting ballots. Anyone seeking to cast ballots in the name of registered non-voters would need an army of individuals that won’t be recognized by poll workers and perfect knowledge of who is registered and not voting.

If a single registered voter name tries to cast two ballots that will trigger an investigation that will unravel the conspiracy. It doesn’t scale. It’s a problem made up by people who want to disenfranchise voters and is eaten up because it sounds “common sense”.

People who don’t think anonymity in voting is important lack imagination and historical knowledge. Fear of retaliation from the government, political fanatics, your family, or friends is perfectly rational and is why voting must be anonymous. This is an especially reasonable concern in an election where one of the candidates refers to voters as “the enemy within”. Consider voting for a Communist when Senator McCarthy was on his witch hunts. People are right to be scared of retaliation.

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

#530

Post by ethbr1 » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 4:50 PM UTC

pluto_modadic wrote: post #526

efitz wrote: post #506

Computers anywhere in the vote casting process introduce new, additional failure modes. These modes may be intentional (hacking) or unintentional (misconfiguring the paper size of the ballots). They may be mundane (power failure, out of ink) or esoteric (logic error). Even computerized counting has a nonzero error rate (so does human counting, but that can be challenged by human observers). Computers add cost for acq…

scanned paper ballots. simple, fast, auditable. humans are WAY more error prone than computers at counting.

Seriously. The amount of suspicion for computerized scanning and counting systems here is surprising.

I realize state of the art, modern, high-performance systems are incredibly complex... but that doesn't mean all systems have to be incredibly complex.

Simple computerized systems are incredibly accurate and reliable, easily moreso than humans.

And critically, it's feasible to perform attestation on electronic systems: something that's completely impossible with humans. You have no idea if Joe or Sally are randomly slipping in a few miscounts (or the people auditing them, or the people auditing them). If you're careful, you can be sure that only specific code is executing.

I'd be fascinated to get a breakdown of trust in computerized voting systems, from programming professionals, by programming speciality. I have a suspicion you'd get different answers from firmware/RT folks vs js front-end, to pick a couple of examples.