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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

#551

Post by breatheoften »

floating-io wrote: post #294
breatheoften wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I voted early in person in Colorado a few days ago. Use a machine to entry my votes. Votes were printed onto a piece of paper. I checked to make sure the marks on the paper matched what I entered into the machine and then dropped it into the ballot box (not a machine just a box that collected the ballots). It was pretty sane and didn't seem like there was a lot to worry over related to the electronic entry system. As…

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...

I didn't notice any barcodes -- it looked just like a ballot a human would fill out but with the bubbles filled in as part of the printing

Googling around I think colorado banned ballots with qr codes / non human readable machine encodings .. or at least banned use of them for tallies

https://securitytoday.com/Articles/2019/09/18/Colorado-Becom...

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

#552

Post by EGreg »

mulmen wrote: post #529
EGreg wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tons of other countries require voter ID. You could say they’re all just being racist or whatever. But that wasn’t my point.

My point was — when it comes to challenging things you agree with, you write long explanations with nuance.

But when it’s things you disagree with, you say they’re “simply wrong”. That’s what I was getting at.

You need to have a consistent standard for discussion, and clearly the latter approach isn’t very helpful or productive.

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

#553

Post by Sparkle-san »

vlovich123 wrote: post #536
secabeen wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to recognize that the US system involves many more races and questions on the ballot than in other (especially parliamentary) systems. Electronic-free counting in many states would significantly extend counting times; many voters have 20+ choices to make, and each of these choices would have to be counted and tracked, which introduces failure modes of their own. Counting by hand makes sense when each b…

I would suggest that the solution is less voting. Ballots are insanely complicated and there’s absolutely zero knowledge the average person has about whether any of the people are good candidates. So then they turn to their favorite voting guides which just shifts the power to unaccountable political groups instead of making the single representative you elect responsible for figuring it out. And there’s too many ele…

It's not just about candidates for positions. I live in Colorado which allows citizen ballot initiatives and it's allowed us to reject actions of the government the populace disagrees with or to enact change they refuse to. A few notable examples are rejecting the 1976 winter Olympics from being hosted in Denver and the legalization of medical and recreational marijuana. Our ballots tend to be large and all citizens are mailed out what is know as "the blue book" months before the election which is a comprehensive guide to all the non-candidate questions including pros/cons and financial breakdowns. Between this and all-mail voting, we had the second highest voter turnout in 2020 and an extremely political engaged and knowledgeable electorate. I definitely would not trade it for less say in the political process.

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

#554

Post by returningfory2 »

wtcactus wrote: post #459

I don’t know why this is so hard in America. All other developed countries make this work, what are Americans lacking? The system is just: - Keep a list of citizens allowed to vote - Print paper ballots with the names of the candidates - ask for a proper ID with photograph - collect the votes - count them by hand with the oversee of representatives of the candidates That’s it, that’s all there’s to it and we count 99…

Other posters have mentioned that there's historically been a lot of voter suppression in the US, which has led to a lot of people being against anything that would make voting harder ("ask for a proper ID with photograph").

However there is another more cynical thing going on, which is that in recent times the pro-voting-rights Democratic party has also benefited electorally from the increased turnout resulting from looser voting rules. This has made any changes to voter ID laws impossible to pass federally (where they are currently set).

This situation is changing now though because polling and the last election suggest that increased turnout currently benefits Republicans. Many commentators believe that within a year the Democratic party will actually be agnostic on voting ID laws, and already in this election you can see that "getting out the vote" is not much of a Democratic talking point.

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

#555

Post by AtlasBarfed »

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.

With encryption/hashing, maybe requiring some of that "process encrypted data without decrypting the data" fancy papers from a year or two ago that I never understood, can't we do some basic anti-fraud measures?

Sure, we use a computer to produce a paper ballot (computers DON'T count or keep counts). The voter has a voting id that is hashed/encrypted/processed in such a way that the number is verifiable as a valid ballot hash (maybe using some sort of public/private key pair) so hashes can't simply be randomly generated.

So the computer UI produces the ballot. The voter is told to check their ballot reflects what they wanted to vote for. The ballot is scanned with a scantron.

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

#556

Post by mulmen »

EGreg wrote: post #552
mulmen wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tons of other countries require voter ID. You could say they’re all just being racist or whatever. But that wasn’t my point. My point was — when it comes to challenging things you agree with, you write long explanations with nuance. But when it’s things you disagree with, you say they’re “simply wrong”. That’s what I was getting at. You need to have a consistent standard for discussion, and clearly the latter approac…

I’m not calling voter ID racist. I’m saying that in the United States it has an established history of being abused by racists to suppress minority votes. This is a verifiable fact. Look at the Voting Rights Act for proof.

> You need to have a consistent standard for discussion, and clearly the latter approach isn’t very helpful or productive.

And yet you just did what you accuse me of.

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

#557

Post by efitz »

vlovich123 wrote: post #536
secabeen wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to recognize that the US system involves many more races and questions on the ballot than in other (especially parliamentary) systems. Electronic-free counting in many states would significantly extend counting times; many voters have 20+ choices to make, and each of these choices would have to be counted and tracked, which introduces failure modes of their own. Counting by hand makes sense when each b…

I would suggest that the solution is less voting. Ballots are insanely complicated and there’s absolutely zero knowledge the average person has about whether any of the people are good candidates. So then they turn to their favorite voting guides which just shifts the power to unaccountable political groups instead of making the single representative you elect responsible for figuring it out. And there’s too many ele…

Or we could have more elections, with each focusing on a specific topic. The biggest advantages here are that you only have to vote in elections you care about and that the more we exercise a process the better we get at it. Of course the time burden on voters is greater.

Or we could invert a lot of the races. I am college educated but never involved in law, how can I reasonably pick a judge or DA? What I want is my representatives to choose one, and then have a very low threshold for a special election to fire (“recall”) the person if they do a bad job. And only need that because my representatives have shown that they won’t.

Any sort of non-in-person voting is a security nightmare. But I am very sympathetic to the people who want to make it easier. I think we should vote on a Saturday or Sunday instead of a weekday, we should make it a federal holiday in order to close as many businesses as possible, and I think that employers who stay open should be required to give paid time off to vote, that doesn’t count against vacation or sick leave.

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

#558

Post by blibble »

Sparkle-san wrote: post #544
blibble wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so then the attack becomes introducing enough error at critical counts such that it affects the result without being regarded as having been tampered with pretty easy if your company produced the machines

How would this defeat doing a statistical hand sampling of the ballots to verify the electronic counting is accurate?

what's the failure point? then you work inside that

I know a guy who did this for a job for a company that produced food

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_sign

his entire job was to allow the company to push up as close to that line as possible without going over when checked randomly

saving them tens of millions a year

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

#559

Post by rogerthis »

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…

Why not use the Brazilian system? It's been working for a long time

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

#560

Post by alistairSH »

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.

1600 alleged non-citizens. There were absolutely citizens on the list.

And purging them within 60 days of the election is illegal per federal statute.

Youngkin and the GOP are flat out wrong here. The courts have said as much so far. And yet here we are again having to explain all this to somebody who watches too much Fox News.

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