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Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

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Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#471

Post by robomartin »

yandie wrote: post #190
robomartin wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Because you can’t make me sign my ballot? Because without my signature the ballot is void. I can also show up in person to cure my vote if you force me to sign it at home btw. It’s not impossible - I won’t deny it. But we haven’t had any substantial evidence despite the current administration trying to claim otherwise. If we are to roll back mail in ballot, let’s also make voter ID free and easy, and also make Electi…

> But we haven’t had any substantial evidence despite the current administration trying to claim otherwise.

Take politics out of it. My comments are not at all based on politics or ideology. It's purely a matter of process issues. It's like saying that short passwords are insecure.

With regards to your lack of evidence observation, this is actually one of the problems with mail-in voting. There is now way at all to know who filled out the ballot. None. It happens privately. If, on the other hand, voting is in person and with proper identification, there is no doubt.

So, lack of evidence is not evidence of a lack of manipulation at all.

I'll give you a personal example: As my father succumbed to dementia a couple of years before passing, my mother, who was also pretty old but still mentally functional, would fill out his ballot and have him sign it. I told her many times that she should never do that and that he, due to his dementia, had no business voting. She didn't want to hear it. Before someone says "you should have reported it!". First, you are an asshole. Second, I'd like to see you report your 94 year old mother with pancreatic cancer and your 96 year old father with dementia at the edge of death.

Now, if in-person paper voting was required he would not have been able to vote and the same may have been true of her towards the end.

I'd be willing to bet this kind of thing happens with some frequency in households. Another one is children who just turn 18 and the parents telling them how to vote. That's just as fraudulent and manipulated. Another friend of ours who isn't interested in being informed and hates politics tells his wife to just fill out the ballots any way she wants.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#472

Post by direwolf20 »

yonaguska wrote: post #462
direwolf20 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with that?

People were being unknowingly registered to vote, even if they weren't eligible to vote when they would get IDs. People move. They get sent ballots. Now you have tons of ballots that aren't really valid, but they're out there and usable. It makes illegal ballot harvesting a lot easier as well if there's no active step where the ballot must be requested. I have to request my ballot every election. it takes 5 minutes,…

Why couldn't a ballot harvester send a ballot request on your behalf?

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#475

Post by beej71 »

schmuckonwheels wrote: post #356
Tagbert wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live we vote by mail by filling in little bubbles with a pen. the counting is done by simple photoelectronic tabulators and there is a built-in, human readable record that can be checked by hand. It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect. i hate the idea of using internet voting. I also don’t trust the electronic voting booths where the whole action is virtual or the older me…

>Where I live we vote by mail by filling in little bubbles with a pen. >It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect. Vote-by-mail creates unnecessary opportunities for cheating, irregularities, and all sorts of foolishness. If you can fill in the bubbles, you could theoretically fill them in for other people. People living with parents suffering from dementia could fill out their ballo…

The thing is, right now we have very little evidence that there is any significant mail-in voting fraud.

But we do have a fair amount of evidence that there is suppression of in-person voting.

So neither of these systems is perfect, but we should go with the one that gives us the most accurate legitimate vote.

Someone else posted a list of ways that in-person voting would be more acceptable, e.g. having a large window to cast ballots. But instead, we see move the other way, trying to restrict the window in which we can cast ballots.

You put a free ID in the hands of every legitimate voter and give them enough time and opportunity to vote, and then I will consider in-person to be on par with mail-in.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#476

Post by seanmcdirmid »

closewith wrote: post #397
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for older republicans and military members in almost all states?

I'm not American, so I don't understand the older republican comment, but except in exceptionally adverse circumstances (astronauts on the ISS or submariners, etc) the military can provide ballot boxes to it's personnel.

They use mail in ballots. Older people who are seen as having trouble reaching the polls can also vote by mail in most states. American conservatives don't see these as problems because these mail-in votes are generally in their favor.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#477

Post by seanmcdirmid »

galago wrote: post #389
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Georgia made sure African Americans had crowded long line voting locations with no access to water. It wasn’t hard to figure out why they were doing that. The South is still pretty racist.

I observed this in New England while living in a city with evenly distributed population. The polling locations were more abundant in the wealthier side of the city. This may not have been straight racism; there was no way for me to determine why this was the case. Looking at a map of median income and polling locations made it pretty obvious to me at least that polling location choice was biased.

By New England I guess you just mean Boston and the Boston area right? I'm unaware of any other huge concentrations of African Americans in that region. Boston is well known for its racism, I actually had a friend from Boston when I was living in Vicksburg MS and they got along there much better than me.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#478

Post by charcircuit »

JanisErdmanis wrote: post #430
charcircuit wrote: post #262

>Voters should not be able to prove to anyone else how they voted – the technical term is “receipt-free” – otherwise an attacker could build an automated system of mass vote-buying via the internet. But receipt-free E2E-VIV systems are complicated and counterintuitive for people to use. This can easily solved be done via letting people forge receipts. Then anyone can forge a vote to give to someone offering to buy th…

> This can easily solved be done via letting people forge receipts. Then anyone can forge a vote to give to someone offering to buy them. This is the literal definition of receipt freeness. It’s hard to ensure that the receipt you receive to verify your vote had not already been forged by the malware.

Then that is a confusing definition since the voter literally had a receipt of their vote that they can verify.

If the receipt you get says you voted for someone you didn't, then that is a clear sign something went wrong.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#479

Post by godelski »

habinero wrote: post #414
somenameforme wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2020 a number of states were sending out mail-in ballots to every single registered voter, even if they didn't request it. Those states were CA, CO, DC, HI, NJ, NV, OR, UT, VT, and WA. [1] [1] - https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voti...

And that's completely fine , because each mail-in ballot is associated with one voter, and the system is designed to make fraud very obvious and difficult to scale. If thousands of people were told "you already voted" when they showed up, then that would be very very obvious. They also really do look at signatures and contact voters to cure ballots if they're unsure.

Not to mention that you can catch double voting across state lines. It's not common that people do this but it does happen and people are really looking for it.

Hell, the fact that so many people have been looking for massive voter fraud for about a decade now and haven't is pretty telling. People aren't good at keeping secrets and if it's being done at scale it would be uncovered or leaked. Accidents and stupid people happen, but that works both ways

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#480

Post by godelski »

usefulcat wrote: post #296
godelski wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the bigger concern is that mail in ballots lead to fake ballots being submitted. Though I've seen no convincing evidence of this happening at any meaningful scale and the arguments seem unconvincing since you don't get a ballot unless verified with a state ID and your ballot has a unique ID associated with your name, preventing a double spend. Personally, my concern is that with mail in ballots some nutjob th…

> I can take my time to actually look up all those random candidates' policies But you can already do that, regardless of mail in voting or not?

In the booth I've never had a voter guide and you're definitely discouraged from pulling out your phone.

Not to mention the peer pressure. What asshole is going to stand in the booth for hours voting? I got to get to work!

Sure, you can do all this at home but there's a clear convenience when having both in hand

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