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Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

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

#621
post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what problem that solves that crossing voters of a list doesn’t already solve. What about mail in and early voting?

I suppose it could help with duplicate voting since some places don't require ID to vote.

ID requirements do practically nothing about duplicate voting.

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

#622
post #133
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What did it record? Who knows? How is it any different than traditional voting, where you drop your ballot into a black box and trust the poll workers would count it correctly? You can do random spot checks select boxes to make sure the machine is tabulating correctly. If they're all correct, you can be reasonably sure the others are correct as well, unless your adversary has incredible luck.

In traditional voting, there is a pretty decent chance you know the person who does the counting or can find someone in your community who can personally vouch for them. Living in my small town at one stage, I knew several of the tabulators personally and all of them by reputation. That is an extreme case, but even in a city these people are somewhat known quantities. With a voting machine that wasn't verified by a h…

> In traditional voting, there is a pretty decent chance you know the person who does the counting or can find someone in your community who can personally vouch for them.

Voting in my area is managed by my county. There's 1.1M people in my county and it's not even the biggest in my state. I'm supposed to personally know all of the few hundred people working the election out of 1.1M spread across 2,200sq km?

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

#623
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the state. Colorado does do this, for what it’s worth.

I thought federal law required paper backups as of 2016-ish? No pure electronic voting today, IIRC.

It appears you're correct, albeit somewhat more recently (2021): https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/u-s-election-commissio...

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

#624
post #602
post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes I did it after you to mimic you and prove a point

Right, which is what I was doing to begin with. So I guess we’re both right.

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

#625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.cpr.org/2024/10/08/vg-2024-how-your-vote-gets-co... Colorado ballot envelopes already have a bar code - essentially your "serial number". I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because everyone who thinks there's widespread election fraud seems to not know anything about how elections work.

Oh hey looks like I found one of the ballots sent to everyone in the state and filled it out and sent it back in. It's literally that easy in Colorado.

It’s not that easy and knowledge of how it works is one search away. Here’s a source that explains the process: https://www.cpr.org/2022/10/17/colorado-elections-ballot-cou...

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

#626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ba…

Cases dismissed for “technicalities” means they were just dismissed… administering law is a technical process, and while I know what you’re attempting to convey with that phrasing, it’s still abundantly clear that there was no evidence at all of anything untoward or election-changing happening in 2020. So much so that several of trumps lawyers were sanctioned for filing such frivolous nonsense and others were sued for millions of dollars for their defamatory proclamations and conspiracy theories.

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

#627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In Australia, (I believe) you have to pick your top 5...for a bunch of different items you're voting for. Here's an example ballot https://www.ecsa.sa.gov.au/images/article/2018_LC_Above.png

I'm Australian, that screenshot is from the State election in South Australia, it is an example of how the Upper House ballot paper looks, it is similar in my state New South Wales.

The vertical columns (labelled as Group A to E in screenshot) divide up the political parties. The Greens will be one column, Labor Party another, Liberal Party another column and so on.

There are two horizontal rows separated by a thick line.

You can choose to either vote "above the line" or "below the line" but not both methods.

Above the line is used if you would like to vote based upon the wishes of a political party and below the line is used for "finer grained" voting for individual persons.

For example the Labor party might have 3 Candidates "Fred", "Mary" and "Bob" if I vote above the line I can put a 1 next to the Labor party and then the Labor party's wishes will determine how my vote is distributed.

Or if I Vote below the line I must number 12 different people in the order I want them to be chosen. So I could number Bob from Labor first, Peggy from the Greens second, then Fred from Labor third and so on and I exert exact control over how I want my preferences to be distributed.

edit: Our elections are staggered, The State parliament is elected on different day to the Federal Parliament, which is different to Local City Council elections.

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

#628
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The only way to get an honest electronic vote is by giving realtime visibility on who voted what and where publicly. How about having the voter verify a printed copy of their electronic vote before the machine casts the ballot and then counting the paper ballots afterwards to verify the tally with the machine. Two way verification. Problem solved. Since 2016, with the help of activists over the country, NJ and many…

I believe since 2002 all electronic voting machines must produce a paper receipt like that, due to the Help America Vote Act. I don't think most states hand-check every single ballot, but I'd be shocked if there are any that don't perform random audits where some sampling of the receipt are hand-checked.

As of 2024 there are still many states that are still using DRE: Direct Record Electronic: a voter records the vote digitally and any paper record, if available is printed after the fact.

[1]:https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...

I am not a fan of Optical scan either. In NY back in 2019 I was a volunteer for a local election that was super close and we discovered that the machines rejected a bunch of votes. We then had to challenge the election and do a manual hand count. For the votes rejected by the machine that were not fully legible we had to find the voter who cast the ballot. I recall some ballot were rejected for stupid reason like there was a mustard stain on the ballot(this is in NYC ha ha). In the end I think we lost by 60 votes or so.

A good system in my mind is what NJ has moved to (although it seems like they have not moved to this system statewide which is a shame): DRE with paper trail. Essentially, the voter votes, the machine prints a paper record and shows it to the voter so they can verify. Once they verify, the vote is cast and the paper is deposited into a sealed box.

Unfortunately they only go back and count the paper for close races but they should really do it for all races.

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

#629
post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 system…

> Simple computerized systems are incredibly accurate and reliable, easily moreso than humans. Such systems are better enough that businesses handling cash use them to count paper money. Next to voting, or perhaps ahead of it, people surely value reliable accuracy in their money. So why not ballots?

Because the current implementations for ballots don't feel up to snuff, and I at least don't trust profit-driven companies to make "simple computerized systems" that are auditable and whatnot. Get a good solution in place for many election cycles and then we can all be happy.

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

#630

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!

You can vote by mail in all 50 states, and both red and swing states have no-excuse absentee. Your point doesn't stand up to the reality of these systems.
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