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White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

reuters.com

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Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#31

Post by caseysoftware »

jfengel wrote: post #13
caseysoftware wrote: post #3

I'd love to hear the steelman - what's the argument in favor of using a proprietary electronic system? There have been legit complaints about closed sourced voting systems for ~20 years and DEFCON has done a "Voting Village" for ~10 years demonstrating numerous issues, some of which were not addressed by the next elections. Transparency doesn't appear better either. Is it speed to tally? Cost? Easier to screw with re…

You must have missed the 2000 election. We hung for weeks on the vagueness of paper ballots. Both sides filed motion after motion to exclude some batch of ballots or other. There was a huge number of extremely unlikely votes in a place with a badly designed paper ballot. The system right now is a security nightmare, a bad implementation of a bad idea. But anybody who lived through 2000 remembers that as even worse.

I paid close attention.. and agreed that that particular approach was broken.

My question was: what's the argument in favor of using a proprietary electronic system?

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#32

Post by atmavatar »

XorNot wrote: post #5
cryptoz wrote: post #2

[flagged]

The core of the problem is that you have to have mandatory voting. Sending someone a $30 fine because they didn't vote serves a very important function: it gets you an independent check that they were aware they didn't vote, or didn't turn up. It's one of the core superpowers of the Australian electoral system: you can be fined for not voting, but also just about _any_ excuse will get you out of the fine - the fee it…

I'm not opposed to making voting mandatory, but making election day a national holiday should come first.

While I'm aware many (most? all?) polling locations allow for early voting, the reality is that many people wait for election day, and the combined hassle of having to work that day and deal with sometimes multi-hour waits (due to Republicans repeatedly closing and limiting polling locations) inevitably leads to some not voting.

Of course that also ignores many of the other issues with our electoral system that convince many they shouldn't bother voting (e.g., the electoral collect and heavy gerrymandering disenfranchising large swaths of people), but those are a larger and more complicated set of issues to address.

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#33

Post by rayiner »

jmward01 wrote: post #8

The red haring is that voting is hacked or illegals are voting, etc etc etc. The -real- story is disenfranchising voters by making it hard for them or out-right steaming their votes in the courts. We don't have an election fraud issue in the us. We have an election legitimacy issue.

So do you only secure your computer networks after they’ve been hacked? We should have transparent, verifiable election infrastructure, like Taiwan: https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo.

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#34

Post by rayiner »

caseysoftware wrote: post #3

I'd love to hear the steelman - what's the argument in favor of using a proprietary electronic system? There have been legit complaints about closed sourced voting systems for ~20 years and DEFCON has done a "Voting Village" for ~10 years demonstrating numerous issues, some of which were not addressed by the next elections. Transparency doesn't appear better either. Is it speed to tally? Cost? Easier to screw with re…

It’s cheaper in the short term because these are COTS products. But that’s not a good reason. Voting security should be “zero trust.” We should count votes the same way the Taiwanese, without reliance on technology: https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo. Voting should be

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#35

Post by thin_carapace »

hallman76 wrote: post #28
cryptoz wrote: post #2

[flagged]

My brother in tech. If anyone wanted to prove voter fraud it's President Donald Trump. Trump's campaign filed 62 lawsuits. 61 were lost, dismissed, or dropped. The other was a technicality. IANAL. Get the vagueposting out of here.

[flagged]

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#36

Post by rayiner »

js2 wrote: post #27
jfengel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have missed the 2000 election. We hung for weeks on the vagueness of paper ballots. Both sides filed motion after motion to exclude some batch of ballots or other. There was a huge number of extremely unlikely votes in a place with a badly designed paper ballot. The system right now is a security nightmare, a bad implementation of a bad idea. But anybody who lived through 2000 remembers that as even worse.

> both sides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot Gore probably won that election. I can't help but wonder about an alternate history where he became president and there was no 9/11 due to smoother handoff between administrations.

WaPo did a recount many years later and found that Bush would have won with further counting. (EDIT: It was a CNN meta-analysis, not WaPo: https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-elect...)

Gore attempted stochastic cheating in that election. There were a large number of uncountable votes because of incompletely punched out cards. That wasn’t a problem because, statistically, the errors would be randomly distributed between the candidates. But Gore requested hand recounts in only a few counties he had clearly won. The mathematical effect of that was to bias the recount in favor of finding more Gore votes. For example, if the county had gone 60% Gore, then for every 10 votes countable by hand that couldn’t be counted by machine, 6 would be Gore votes. Stochastic cheating.

There were also lots of shenanigans where precincts were adding partial recount numbers (where some precincts had finished counting and some had not) to the totals. There is a reason that the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Gore’s recount plan was unconstitutional. (The 5-2 part was only about the remedy.)

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#37

Post by gcau »

XorNot wrote: post #5
cryptoz wrote: post #2

[flagged]

The core of the problem is that you have to have mandatory voting. Sending someone a $30 fine because they didn't vote serves a very important function: it gets you an independent check that they were aware they didn't vote, or didn't turn up. It's one of the core superpowers of the Australian electoral system: you can be fined for not voting, but also just about _any_ excuse will get you out of the fine - the fee it…

>just about _any_ excuse will get you out of the fine

Hilariously wrong, and if it were true it defeats the purpose of making it mandatory.

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#38

Post by 1shooner »

rayiner wrote: post #33
jmward01 wrote: post #8

The red haring is that voting is hacked or illegals are voting, etc etc etc. The -real- story is disenfranchising voters by making it hard for them or out-right steaming their votes in the courts. We don't have an election fraud issue in the us. We have an election legitimacy issue.

So do you only secure your computer networks after they’ve been hacked? We should have transparent, verifiable election infrastructure, like Taiwan: https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo .

https://web.cec.gov.tw/english/article/23550

>Taiwan has a comprehensive household registration system. The compilation of the voter list/electoral register is handled by the Household Registration Offices 20 days prior to the Election Day. Hence, citizens do not have to actively register to vote, with the exception of citizens residing overseas during the Presidential and Vice Presidential election.

I don't think the Trump administration would be interested in pursuing this degree of vote access.

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#39

Post by what »

rcpt wrote: post #4

Seems to be an exclusive article that's also paywall. Anyone know the story? Ensuring secure elections and auditing extensively seems like good practice. However the issue has become political and neither party is interested in that. The right claims fraud with no good evidence, in response the left has decided that our elections perfectly secure and to suggest otherwise gets you a sound "tsk tsk"

> the right claims fraud

So does the left every time Trump wins.

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#40

Post by what »

jordanscales wrote: post #7
rcpt wrote: post #4

Seems to be an exclusive article that's also paywall. Anyone know the story? Ensuring secure elections and auditing extensively seems like good practice. However the issue has become political and neither party is interested in that. The right claims fraud with no good evidence, in response the left has decided that our elections perfectly secure and to suggest otherwise gets you a sound "tsk tsk"

Pretty remarkable both-sidesism in this comment. One side _does not admit the results of the 2020 election_ and the other side says widespread voter fraud is not happening in the United States. Being a fence-setter on this one is intellectually lazy.

Did you memory hole 2016?
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