Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#401

Post by jberryman » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:18 PM UTC

beatpanda wrote: post #193

This is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. If you're in the U.S. I highly reccomend being a poll worker in a contentious district in a swing state if you ever get the chance. I was in a suburb of Denver last election and saw all kinds of shenanigans, from people pulling fire alarms to clear out the polling places to people walking aaround with laptops "checking voter registration" (actually just lying to people to g…

The bigger story in VA is this one, I think:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/va-politics/fairfax-democrats-sue-over-polling-place-observers/2012/11/01/2fb64b20-2451-11e2-9313-3c7f59038d93_story.html

There was also a NYT article suggesting that fairfax co. could end up being this election's Florida. We'll see.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#402

Post by mietek » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:18 PM UTC

mcantelon wrote: post #329

m_myers wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hanlon's Razor would suggest a bug in the hardware or software as the more likely explanation. Unfortunately, when politics are involved, people default to assuming malice far more than they perhaps should.

These voting machines flaws were widely reported last election. They always favoured the Republican candidate. Here's court testimony of an developer who was asked to create one of these rigged systems: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVmsaDS_FwY

What happened to this court case? Why isn't there a huge outcry about this?

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#403

Post by mturmon » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:19 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #381

logjam wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly, allowing easier access to voting is evil. No, definitely we should make it harder for those least able to afford it....working class people... to take time off from work and stand in line to vote. /sarcasm

Polls are generally open 12 hours, plus there's early voting and absentee voting. "Working class" people have no less opportunity to vote than anyone else. Stop with the class-warfare nonsense.

Here's a polling place, which happens to be in a luxury hotel, that offers free valet parking and continental breakfast to anyone voting:

http://blog.luxehotels.com/2012/10/30/luxe-sunset-boulevard-...

Did I mention you need to be voting in Bel-Air to take advantage of this offer?

Yep, it's all pretty much the same everywhere. Let's drop that class-warfare nonsense.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#404

Post by btilly » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:19 PM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #355

btilly wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine for that machine. According to http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-to/computer-s... a quarter of the country in this election will use paperless machines. No paper trail at all. According to polls, the election will be decided by swing states that are expected to have margins of victory under 4%. If, hypothetically, the election is decided for Romney in states like Pennsylvania which polls indicated w…

According to http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-to/computer-s... . a quarter of the country in this election will use paperless machines. No paper trail at all. You aren't reading your source correctly.

From the source, And so electronic voting machines fell from favor. Just 25 percent of the country will use paperless systems this year—down from 40 percent in 2006.

I read that as a quarter of the country will be using paperless systems in this election. If that is wrong, please explain the correction.

Grabbing another source, http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9233058/Election_watc... lists specific states where paperless systems are likely to be a big issue. Two of them, Virginia and Pennsylvania, are significant swing states that currently lean towards Obama in polls. If both have an unexpected swing to Romney, his chances of legitimately winning enough other states to carry the election are significantly increased. (According to what I see on http://www.electoral-vote.com/ he'd need to carry North Carolina and Florida - both of which he's at least tied in, and then any other swing state.)

Hopefully unaccountable election machines won't prove to be the margin of victory in this election. However anyone who thinks it is impossible is either uninformed, or unwilling to consider the evidence.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#405

Post by danielweber » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:20 PM UTC

incongruity wrote: post #382

danielweber wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The machine in question does produce a paper trail (at least when deployed in my state). Computer systems are trying to bring forward all the hidden problems that aren't found until we have to fight about the result and put them right in front of the user. By design, they are going to show more errors, instead of hiding them from the voter. (I shouldn't need to say this, but I'm not saying computer voting systems are…

Computer systems can only produce a paper facsimile of the vote cast – and thus it must be checked, immediately, by the voter to verify that their intentions were recorded and reflected. Further, that paper record must itself be capable of being re-read/re-counted by different hardware easily so that the (invisible) tally of votes can be verified. In the end, you need to essentially produce a paper ballot but you bur…

Read the link in tokenadult's post about Minnesota. Paper is hardly easy to count when you get to the dolts who don't know how to mark a ballot. What does it mean when the guy marks a vote for every question but also writes "LIZARD PEOPLE" in every write-in ballot spot?

Lots of people really don't like the fact that the senator is chosen based on how 3 people sit down and decide what that means, or whether this chad was punched out "enough."

Computer touch-screen voting systems, like all other voting, have flaws, but one thing they don't have is any ambiguity how you count each ballot.

(There are, of course, other ways to handle this. For example, you could fill out a paper ballot and have it read by a test machine that is very conservative in what it accepts, and alerts you to errors. I'm sure this has trade-offs, too.)

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#406

Post by thomasz » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:20 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #378

blindhippo wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is the reason, there is a bigger problem in America then simple voter fraud...

Ever dealt with a union election? That's exactly the problem with non secret ballots. You vote against unionization and thugs show up at your house. Union activists are among the most violent people around.

Gosh. Ever dealt with a union election? That's exactly the problem with non secret ballots. You vote for unionization and libertarians show up at your house. Libertarians are among the most violent people around.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#407

Post by rmc » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:20 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #206

danielweber wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have said, this is exactly how you can start buying votes. Pull any book about cryptographic voting off the shelf and this is treated as a design flaw.

I think I missed the discussions in the thread; how is verifiability (is that a word?) a design flaw?

Consider some scenarios:

Jim is not a nice man and is very demanding and abusive and goes to vote. He wants his wife to vote for X, but he suspects that she will vote for Y. Today, she can vote for X or Y and tell her husband that she voted for Y. He has no way to prove her wrong. With receipts, he can tell her, on no uncertain terms, that she is to show him her receipt afterwards. If she doesn't produce a receipt showing she votes for X, he'll beat her. With receipts she does not have a free vote, without receipts she has a free vote.

I want to buy your vote, and will pay you €10 to vote for X. Today, you can vote for who ever you want, and tell me you voted for X and demand payment. I have no way to prove you wrong. Hence vote buying is hard to do, because you can't know if you're actually buying votes. With receipts, I can ask to see your receipt, and only pay out if you vote for X. With receipts, vote buying now becomes an actual thing that I can do.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#408

Post by jarek » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:20 PM UTC

yesbabyyes wrote: post #151

ars wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's quite the opposite: People get so worked up about these things because they don't tolerate it. If you never hear about these things in your own country that means that apparently no one there cares.

If OP comes from a democracy, I highly doubt they do things like: - Voter ID to discourage minorities, students, elderly [1] - "True the Vote", invoking a problem that doesn't exist [2] - Another article on "True the Vote" [3] - Blocking voting on the weekend before election [4] - You don't see lines like this in other developed countries. It's not that they're not reported on because "no one cares", they're not repo…

> You don't see lines like this in other developed countries. It's not that they're not reported on because "no one cares", they're not reported on because there aren't any lines.

Well, that's not strictly true. I recall waiting about half an hour on the election day for one of the elections I voted in in Ontario.

Several hours' wait during early voting seems a little bush league though.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#409

Post by danielrhodes » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:20 PM UTC

mrb wrote: post #243

danielrhodes wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. Countries scale up linearly just like websites do. How stupid of us to think otherwise.

If Canada and the US merged, would it be twice as hard to vote? Of course not. Voting is the most trivial govt activity to scale up! It is the equivalent of an embarrassingly parallel pb. The "300M citizens" excuse is even less valid in the context of presidential elections, because each state plans it independently from the others. So it is more like 52 tiny countries voting together!

It is parallel, but not all jobs are run on the same hardware/software and you can't re-run jobs which error out. In fact, some jobs don't error out but should be invalid and if discovered as such might cast doubt on the authenticity of other jobs, etc. etc. So it's really not as trivial as you make it out to be, and neither is anything else which involves coordinating 100M+ people doing a particular task.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#410

Post by rmc » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:21 PM UTC

baddox wrote: post #20

salman89 wrote: post #3

Voting machines need to be a lot better than this or not exist at all, but does anyone actually think that IF this machine was altering votes, it would alter it in this fashion with a UI element tied to the alteration? Seems more like a crappy touch screen.

> does anyone actually think that IF this machine was altering votes, it would alter it in this fashion with a UI element tied to the alteration I think you mean if the machine was intentionally designed to alter votes, it wouldn't do it in this fashion. The article doesn't even hint that this might be done on purpose.

The article doesn't even hint that this might be done on purpose.

Cause it won't be spun like that at all.