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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

#611

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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.

You said something that he found unclear (so did I). He asked for clarification. You refused to give it. And now you mock his reading comprehension? Since at least two of us couldn't be sure what you meant, maybe you should work on writing less cryptically.

Also, site guidelines call for charitable interpretation. When someone asks you to clarify, assume they need it clarified.

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

#612

Post by worstspotgain »

anon84873628 wrote: post #593
worstspotgain wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, and the math is the same. If out of 3 million voters, just 1000 double-check the printout, they will detect a 1/100 flip with probability 99.996%.

Of course it's important that enough people check their ballot and say, "hey this isn't what I meant" it triggers a formal audit. Not just letting those 1000 have a redo and chalk it up to human error.

Sure, but 1000 is just 1 in 3000 voters. In practice it's going to be way more than that, probably 2 or 3 in 10. Thats hundreds of thousands of voters, many of whom are going to be punctilious people. Of all the suggested fuckery methods, this would be caught the fastest IMO.

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

#613

Post by Dalewyn »

ethbr1 wrote: post #541
Dalewyn wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What? There is no way to demonstrate that what is executing is the source code unless you're compiling at execution time from a local vetted copy of the source code. Is the guy who vetted the source code vetted? Who vets the vetter? Is the compiler actually compiling the source code? Is the compiler compiling as generally expected? What about bugs in the compiler? Is the source code even what it claims (binary blobs…

The questions you're asking make it seem like (a) you're not thinking about this very hard, (b) you're trying to reach the answer you've already decided on, or (c) you're not familiar with high trust systems. Still, in the interest of a conversation, some brief answers. Please ask in detail about any you're interested in (but realize I'm going to balance the time I spend answering with the time you spend researching…

The point is that humans counting paper ballots by hand in the witness of anyone and everyone is and always will be more credible than any voting machine ever. You can certify the digital chain of trust as much as you want, it will not beat human hands counting paper ballots as anyone and everyone watches.

>you're not thinking about this very hard

Yes, because the commons will not think very hard about a complicated "solution" when a much simpler solution already exists.

>If you can't envision all the ways humans can fail,

Yes, humans fail. It's also not important. Any election worth its salt should be counting multiple times using a variety of counters and witnesses to demonstrate repeatability of the vote.

Again: Humans failing is not important.

What is important is the ability to verify immediately and simply how the vote is being tallied. Machines can and will fail (or more likely be corrupted) like humans, but we can immediately see when the human screws up whereas it's impossible to see when the machine screws up.

It's baffling I'm having to argue this to FOSS people of all peoples, you guys should know better than anyone else that vetting source code and binaries and hardware is a fool's errand for something as important as counting votes.

Nothing beats the brutal simplicity of hand counting paper ballots while everyone watches.

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

#614

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #578
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am going to take a guess as to what the GP was referring to: In 2020, Pennsylvania was one of the states that made many changes to how their elections work under the guise of the pandemic. But they changed their rules at the last minute once more in a way that may have altered Pennsylvania’s outcomes. Existing state law meant ballots had to be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day in order to be counted. The Democrati…

> there is a good chance it affected the outcome Of the state? Maybe. Of the election? No. Biden won 306 to 232 [1]. Pennsylvania only has 19 EVs. It wasn’t the tipping-point state. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_president...

I meant the state, although a sister comment to yours (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42032946) claims the affected number of ballots was too small (which doesn’t match my recollection but sharing it here for balance). Regardless - although I am open to the possibility of various issues or flaws in various states adding up to something more, I personally am confident Biden won the election, for what it’s worth. I do have my doubts about the overall process though - voting is just the very end step, but there are things that happen before that can skew election results (media bias, social media censorship, whatever).

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

#615

Post by LtWorf »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #550
vlovich123 wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find it interesting that all the countries that the US "helped" to democratize all end up with a parliamentary system instead of the US system. Unfortunately I suspect the US is just stuck with it.

I find it very funny that in star trek, the orwell, star wars; the governing body has always 2 aliens per race because you have that weird 2 people from every state… so naturally the whole multiverse must be governed by the same absurd system :D

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

#616

Post by roenxi »

sethammons wrote: post #388
roenxi wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First of all zero-knowledge proofs allow you to verify stuff without being able to prove it to others I doubt it, and I suspect if you try to point at a specific system to implement you will find that that none exist even in theory. I can verify I voted with zero knowledge, yes. But I can't verify who I voted for . So I can put candidate A into the machine, it switches to candidate B and we can all prove I voted in…

If everyone got a unique prime number and a running total vote product was available, I always thought this would be a neat solution. Still susceptible to the goon-with-a-wrench technique I think

That doesn't sound like it secures anything. I can't verify that my prime number is unique (I vote for A. There is already a vote for A at 3. The machine logs a vote for B at 5 and reports to me my number is 3). So it'd be a scheme where nothing can be proved to me that I didn't already know. I still have to trust all the same middlemen, and I don't gain any knowledge about the integrity of an election.

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

#617

Post by MichaelZuo »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #611
MichaelZuo wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You said something that he found unclear (so did I). He asked for clarification. You refused to give it. And now you mock his reading comprehension? Since at least two of us couldn't be sure what you meant, maybe you should work on writing less cryptically. Also, site guidelines call for charitable interpretation. When someone asks you to clarify, assume they need it clarified .

Why do you believe your opinion on this or that is more relevant than other passing readers? Is there some novel argument your preparing?

Since the comment in question doesn’t have a negative score currently and some time has elapsed, passing readers combined have already decided in a more credible way than a single individual can.

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

#618

Post by vel0city »

floating-io wrote: post #353
shawnz wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say they get rid of the barcodes and only show the human readable text. How does that prove any better or worse that the machine counted the vote the way it says it did on the slip? The presence of the barcodes doesn't do anything to reduce the trustworthiness of the system

It starts with being able to tell that the information was encoded correctly when I submitted it. Tell me this: what is the advantage of a barcode, over a scantron-esque system where I can see which item I chose because a dot is filled in? The scantron-esque system is still efficiently machine readable; we've had scantron since I was a kid. The difference is, I can verify with my own two eyes that the information is…

But how do you know what position 5 option 2 is set to the person you voted for on the tabulation machine for a bubble fill? It's not like the counting machine is OCR'ing the choice to figure it out. In the end the pattern of dots on a scantron to what the computer thinks the ballot was is just as illegible as a collection of bar codes. It's practically the same thing.

I'm fine with it so long as the choices are also printed in a human readable way at the bottom. If it was just a giant bar code or whatever I wouldn't like it.

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

#619

Post by vel0city »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #532
gruez wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It adds another layer of safety. Do we still have to be able to trust the rest of the system? Yup. But I cannot trust anything at all if I cannot even verify that my vote was submitted correctly in the first place. I don't disagree that it's strictly better, but the improvements in security are marginal. Any audits/recounts would be done by looking at the human readable part of the ballot, and would therefore be una…

With a scantron voting system every single voter becomes an auditor. That’s orders of magnitude more auditing than will ever be achieved by randomized barcode audits and it will catch far smaller discrepancies. Even if a machine made only one mistake ever, it would stand a chance of getting caught. Not so with barcodes. Seems a pretty substantial difference to me.

How are you auditing what the machine actually rendered from the constellation of dots you filled in for its actual count?

A collection of dots and a collection of bars are the same to me in terms of trusting the computer actually read it right.

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

#620

Post by vel0city »

anon84873628 wrote: post #590
floating-io wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not actually about how the ballot is interpreted by downstream hardware and software. That's a different issue. It's about the ability for the voter to determine that their own part of the process -- the recording of their own vote -- is done correctly in every respect. Each step of the system has to be verifiable as correct for the system to be trustworthy. As it stands right now, I cannot visually verify that…

>It's not actually about how the ballot is interpreted by downstream hardware and software. That's a different issue. To me, this seems like the only part worth worrying about, and any solution to it should satisfy your concerns as well. Every ballot should have a UUID that the voter takes with them (or make it a hash of their voter registration number or something). As soon as the ballot is processed, the results ar…

> Every ballot should have a UUID that the voter takes with them (or make it a hash of their voter registration number or something). As soon as the ballot is processed, the results are posted to a public place. Voters can then confirm their ballot was recorded accurately.

Opening the door for vote bribery or voter intimidation.

$1,000 for every tag proving you voted for my candidate.

If you don't prove you voted for my candidate, expect some retaliation!

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