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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

#61

Post by afavour »

rayiner wrote: post #49
pclowes wrote: post #44

Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important. Unsubstantiated claims of election fraud should be punished severely. Politicians who baselessly erode confidence in elections without providing timely evidence should be ineligible for political office at least and potentially tried for treason.

Faith in elections is a two-way street. The election system must also be fully transparent, minimize the degree to which voters must trust election administrators, and keep records that would allow evidence of voter fraud to be detected. You can’t punish people for not providing evidence if you’ve designed an election system that fails to keep the information that would allow anomalies to be detected.

> The election system must also be fully transparent

It should not be fully transparent. I should not be able to look up who you voted for. That should be private information.

With that caveat in mind, to my eyes the election system we have is doing exactly what you’re saying it should do.

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#62

Post by dawatchusay »

pclowes wrote: post #44

Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important. Unsubstantiated claims of election fraud should be punished severely. Politicians who baselessly erode confidence in elections without providing timely evidence should be ineligible for political office at least and potentially tried for treason.

This and a comment under it start with the exact same sentence. “Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important.” There’s something wrong here and it makes me doubt HN

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#63

Post by afavour »

baggy_trough wrote: post #59
afavour wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’ve spent a little too long huffing right wing media glue. There are valid arguments against voter ID requirements. Primarily that not everyone has ID. Any push for voter ID should be paired with a comprehensive program to aid folks in registering for a valid ID. And yet it rarely is, because the aim of voter ID laws is to disenfranchise eligible voters, rather than clamp down on voter fraud. Voter fraud b…

[flagged]

So, like I said in my previous comment, any moves to require ID in order to vote should be paired with comprehensive programs to make sure ID is free and easily available to all eligible voters. You haven’t considered why it isn’t?

> recklessly casual

I say again: there's absolutely no evidence that fraudulent voting has come anywhere close to changing the outcome of an election. Or had any statistical relevance at all. And there are a lot of people looking for that evidence.

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#64

Post by rayiner »

tzs wrote: post #42
rayiner wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 random…

What about the butterfly ballots? The errors those likely caused would not be randomly distributed.

When I say “errors” I mean votes the punchcard machines couldn’t read due to the chad not being punched out all the way. Those were the ballots that were at issue in the litigation (“undercounts”).

The butterfly ballot would have resulted in votes for Buchanan or double votes (ones for Buchanan + Gore if the person tried to go back and correct). Gore never actually tried to get those counted in his favor. And how could you know?

But the whole recount thing is stupid. It’s designed by people who don’t understand statistics. Any counting is a statistical process that’s going to have some measurement error. The Florida vote was almost certainly within that margin of error. The correct outcome then would have been re-voting, not a recount.

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#65

Post by tzs »

wahern wrote: post #19
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.

Florida was using a punch-card system, thus the infamous hanging chads. Fill-in-the-bubble scantron systems are much faster and less error prone; not as fast as purely electronic voting, but you get a reliable paper trail that is more transparent and much easier to audit.

> Fill-in-the-bubble scantron systems are much faster and less error prone; not as fast as purely electronic voting, but you get a reliable paper trail that is more transparent and much easier to audit.

An even bigger advantage of scantrol systems is with two simple changes to how ballots are produced and marked you can greatly increase the security and audibility of them.

The two simple changes are:

1. When the ballots are printed you print some alphanumeric codes on them in an invisible ink, and

2. The voter fills in the bubble using a special marker provided at the polling place that turns the invisible code visible.

The scanning machines themselves do not require any modification. Voters vote the same was as before, and can ignore the code that becomes visible in the bubbles they fill in if they way.

By combining the clever chemistry used for the invisible ink and marker with some clever cryptography in how those codes are generated you can overlay and end-to-end auditable voting system on the scantron system. And end-to-end auditable voting system (also called and end-to-end voter verifiable system) has these properties:

• Individuals can verify that their ballot was included in the final count and they vote was attributed correctly.

• Any third party can verify that the ballots were counted correctly. The candidates, the parties, news organization, civil rights groups, and anyone else can check.

• Voters cannot prove to third parties who they voted for. This is called coercion-resistance.

Such a system was developed by several cryptographers, including David Chaum and Ron Rivest. It is called Scantegrity II [1] and has been used successfully in a few elections.

Here are links to a paper by its creators explaining it, in HTML [2] and PDF [3]. Here's a paper [4] showing that it is coercion-resistant.

With this system after the voting is done the election officials can publish all the codes that were revealed. A voter who wants to know if their vote was counted can check that list to see if the code that was revealed to them for that candidate is in the list.

The election officials can also publish some more information that along with the code list allows anybody to verify that the totals for each candidate were right without this revealing the mapping from codes to candidates.

With this we get all the pluses of paper system including hand recounts, plus fast machine counting that can be done with a simple single purpose machine that has no software that could be hacked, yet with the kind of end-to-end auditing that the electronic voting systems promise.

And it inexpensive to implement and operate. Around half of the districts in the US already are using the scantron machines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity

[2] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...

[3] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...

[4] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#66

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

verdverm wrote: post #15

What does HN know about https://www.voting.works/ ? (open source/hardware voting machine) Note, they are also trying to change the USPS rules regarding mail-in ballots, such that the USPS will not deliver ballots either direction unless the recipient is on a list they are allowed to make. Public comment is open until July 2 https://www.regulations.gov/document/USPS-2026-1289-0001

What does USPS assume for chain of custody for a ballot? Do they hand them directly to a person?

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#67

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

wahern wrote: post #22
jordanscales wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Conservatives in multiple states looked under every rock to find voter fraud in the 2020 election and largely came up empty handed. In Arizona they even forced a quasi-legal audit with their own citizens brigade, spending weeks pouring through records, then quietly admitted there was no systemic fraud. All the cumulative fraud uncovered nationwide, most of which was mistaken registration, discovered through existing…

I don’t get this.

Isn’t it weak, two point out that no one can find evidence after the fact, versus the proper alternative that no one can prove that they’re actually-secure before the fact?

Let’s just say that you were a bad guy and manipulating elections, wouldn’t you be bad at your job if someone could detect it after the fact? How many people would a conspiracy even take to pull of?

I don’t get the US system. The people mad at Trump and 2020 claims brush off all the ways the elections can’t be proven in favor that weeks or years afterwards no one can’t point to hard evidence.

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#68

Post by pinkmuffinere »

jpkw wrote: post #21
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.

Red Herring* - it's a fish, not a rabbit

You’re right, but that’s a distraction from the bigger misconception — it’s actually “Read Herring”. The idea is that the herring has already been documented (and “read” back), no longer deserving of additional discussion.

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#69

Post by morkalork »

dawatchusay wrote: post #62
pclowes wrote: post #44

Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important. Unsubstantiated claims of election fraud should be punished severely. Politicians who baselessly erode confidence in elections without providing timely evidence should be ineligible for political office at least and potentially tried for treason.

This and a comment under it start with the exact same sentence. “Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important.” There’s something wrong here and it makes me doubt HN

Don't worry, various governments around the world are working hard to ensure online communities can only be accessed with ID verification. Will that ease your doubt in the future?

Re: White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

#70

Post by collabs »

rayiner wrote: post #47
1shooner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Taiwan’s system is like voter ID on steroids. The key part of your quote is that voter lists are compiled by “Household Registration Offices.” In Taiwan, everyone has to register with a household registration office within 30 days of moving. You have to show up to the office in person with your national ID card, household certificate, and proof of address. So it’s actually more stringent than voting registration in t…

It is also worth noting that these mandatory registration schemes are free of cost or I guess free of cost at the point of service. I think if we require a voter ID / national ID card scheme, it has to be free of cost at the point of service as well. These services should be at least AT MINIMUM as ubiquitous as a post office and / or at least TWO full time locations with extended hours for every county / parish / etc.

The funding for this has to come from somewhere and it MUST be the federal government because my state / local government doesn't have money to even build a small sidewalk so it definitely does not have money for all this nonsense.

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