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CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

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Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#101

Post by koenigdavidmj »

ilyagr wrote: post #82
Someone1234 wrote: post #8

Eight states[0] still have electronic voting systems without paper backups. They're un-auditable. I'm not going to weigh in on the current politics of this situation, but US Election security is awful, now, and since at least 2000. I actually did my degree thesis on designing electronic voting systems (and built one), and ultimately concluded it was impossible to make them fully secure. The best you can do is paper b…

From the article: "Pennsylvania, Georgia and South Carolina are on course to replace all paperless voting machines by 2020, while Arkansas, Virginia and Delaware have already completed this process." We're lucky; they made it just in time. Imagine if this was a potential concern for Georgia or Pennsylvania right now. To save you a click, the 8 remaining states are Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kansas, Ind…

I’m in Kansas—we had a mark-and-scan thing this year. Maybe it’s not that way statewide?

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#102

Post by ttul »

magicsmoke wrote: post #55
garyrichardson wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canadian here. We still count ballots the old fashioned way and get our election results out the night of the election (typically). Presumably that scales linearly.. more voters means more ballot boxes and more officials counting and auditing. This seems like a solved problem to me. Why doesn't/wouldn't this work in the US? My guess is the complexity of your ballots -- we typically vote for one person and every coupl…

That and having Elections Canada run everything instead of each province rolling their own protocols.

Imagine that: a non-partisan agency, much as the police and fire services are also non-partisan.

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#103

Post by dashundchen »

whiteflame7000 wrote: post #74
bitwize wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can avoid the politics of the situation because when it comes to presidential candidates, when the R candidate wins, much will be made of how broken the system is, from vulnerabilities in voting machines to fatal flaws in the Constitution itself (viz., the Electoral College). When the D candidate wins, we are assured that election security is airtight, there's no evidence of significant irregulariti…

Every person who downvoted you knows this too. They are being willfully ignorant because they are too smart not to notice at least in the slightest the difference in treatment.

I don't think it's true. Democrats still don't like the electoral college even when they win. The real margin in this election would be over 5 million instead of the hundred of thousands if the EC didn't exist.

And in this case the Republican claims of misnformation and conspiracy have seemed so outlandish and baseless it's hard to take any of them seriously.

Like videos of ballots being burned, that turned out to be sample ballots printed from the internet.

Or the false rumor that ballots marked with sharpie were being disqualified in Arizona when their own election officials repeatedly cleared that claim.

Or the baseless claim that Republican observers were not present for the counting of ballots in Michigan or Pennsylvania - they were.

Or the willful misunderstanding of how ballots were being tallied and reported.

Or that mail in ballots fraudulently skewed Democratic after Trump spent months telling his supporters not to trust mail voting, then complaining when those mailin ballots were legally counted after November 3rd.

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#104

Post by dllthomas »

kube-system wrote: post #11
nmlnn wrote: post #5

TIL, electronic voting machines are CLOSED SOURCE (hardware and software) - that should be completely unacceptable in an open democracy. It makes me wonder how a statement like this can be proved. > There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised When it comes to something as important as elections the mantra should be: don't trust. verify.

I don’t see security flaws with closed source software that prints backup paper ballots. If anything, it’s better than an open source machine that doesn’t print a paper backup. Those paper backups can be even audited by the voter at the moment they vote. You’re not going to be dumping the source code from a voting machine that is in use.

> I don’t see security flaws with closed source software that prints backup paper ballots.

There's room for asymmetric errors in input, in the direction of a favored candidate. Still way better than the kinds that are electronic only, but not as good as paper-first.

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#105

Post by ttul »

garyrichardson wrote: post #95
bobthepanda wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, Canadians also have local and provincial elections and referenda, no?

Yup. But local, provincial and national elections are different events. Referendums are occasionally attached. Ballots are almost always one question for provincial and national.

And regardless, all elections are run by a non-partisan agency. Just like the health service, the police service, the fire service, and the garbage service.

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#106

Post by tylerhou »

shripadk wrote: post #57
idlewords wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than taking some Hacker News rando's blanket dismissal of the work of thousands of poll workers across the country.

10,000 votes were discarded by a Court in Pennsylvania [1]. At least someone in US is bothered about making sure the elections were held in a legit manner rather than some Hacker News rando's blanket dismissal of allegations of voter irregularities! [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/11/12/pennsyl...

These dismissed ballots weren’t even electronic; they were mail-in ballots that were cured during an extended deadline.

While I disagree with throwing out any vote, the ballots were thrown out because they didn’t comply with the law, not because a third party interfered or hacked the election system.

You can disagree with the law (and disagreeing in this case is reasonable!), but that doesn’t mean our elections are insecure.

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#107

Post by jungletime »

This can't be True, when 6000 votes where reversed in Michigan county from one of these machines. This is a fact. Not some made up BS. You either have a machine tallying the votes that works 100% of the time during the election. Otherwise, everyone can reasonably question the results from a machine that works 99% of the time.

6000 votes can't be going to the wrong candidates and the same time the election be "secure" in the mind of most reasonable people.

Here's the story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeEW1oeLaVE

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#108

Post by jimmygrapes »

ttul wrote: post #102
magicsmoke wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That and having Elections Canada run everything instead of each province rolling their own protocols.

Imagine that: a non-partisan agency, much as the police and fire services are also non-partisan.

It's always non-partisan until it becomes partisan somewhere along the line

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#109

Post by bluejekyll »

jcranmer wrote: post #69
pstrateman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every person legally allowed to vote should be able to vote. No votes should be cast by people not allowed to vote. Mail-in ballots are not secret ballots and that's dangerous. There's a reason a workplace cannot be unionized in the US without a true secret ballot.

Mail-in ballots are secret ballots. The way they work is that they have two envelopes: you put your ballot in the inner envelope, which has no indication of who is casting the ballot. All of that information is on the outer envelope. When processing the ballot, the information is checked on the outer envelope; once verified, the inner envelope is then handed to another station to be opened and fed into the counting m…

This doesn’t work the same way in every state. In my county of CA you only send back a single envelope with the ballots folded over. Instead there is a serial number you can tear off to validate that the ballot was counted.

So it’s not doubly secret in the way you describe: https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/vote-by-mail/pdf/guidance.p...

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#110

Post by jimmygrapes »

tylerhou wrote: post #100
anonymouse008 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s your thinking on the “request” process of mail-in ballots? To me, it’s wild to think all one needs to request a ballot is a name, address and ssn... and on top of all of that, you can get the ballot sent to a different address...

But to return the ballot, you need to match the signature with the one on file, which is very difficult to do at scale.

Unless signature matching is deemed unnecessary as in PA
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