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.
>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.
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 results?
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.
I think just the fact that it was the first thing on offer that wasn't the thing they were already using.
There are better alternatives, and if legislatures were designed to come up with optimal solutions, we'd probably have use one of them. Instead we have inertia, because the Sainted Holy Founders thought inertia was good for a country, so they optimized legislative branches to be useless.
As a Floridian, I apologize for the 2000 election. But we have a much better system now. We have paper ballots that are scanned. We have an auditable fallback for untrustworthy machines. There is no reason other states cannot have the same.
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.
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.)
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
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
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.
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 processes, and didn't even favor a single party, never amounted to enough to even to turn even a single state.
All places, outside the American South in the United States don't have a problem, the American South however, is where it is a time honored tradition to make it hard to vote for some citizens.
And it has always been political and other things in the south.
Tell me you've never been to Idaho without telling me you've never been to Idaho, where a considerable portion of the population (especially around Moscow, Idaho) wants explicitly to repeal the 19th amendment (the one that gave women the right to vote).
Or Michigan, home of both Henry Ford (and his now-infamous Dearborn Independent, which still seems to resonate with most Michiganders that I've met) and Charles Lindbergh.
What you're describing is a rural areas problem, and the South, most of which has never really developed much urbanism (outside Atlanta and maybe Charlotte) has never had to "grow up", much like rural Michigan has never had to "grow up" and remains a hotbed of MAGA racism and plots to kidnap their governor, or the same way that much of Idaho has never had to "grow up" and is a common destination for Doug-Wilsonites and similar "trad" homesteaders. Drive an hour outside of Detroit or Lansing and ask the almost-universally-white rural folks what they think of Dearborn and they'll tell you all the same wild "sharia law" white-replacement conspiracy theories they've told me over and over again.
And of course, even Boston famously took rather poorly to the notion of desegregation – look up Boston's reaction to "forced bussing" (since the only way to racially-integrate Boston schools was to bring in black kids from outside Boston, since the redlining had been so severe there, and the city was covered in widespread protests).
"The report, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, concludes that voting machines could be further safeguarded by, for example, updating their software, the sources said. It does not say the vulnerabilities have led to votes flipping, but examines security gaps in how the machines are used during U.S. elections."
My take is that they couldn't find anything that amounted to the level of fraud Trump needs to justify the deaths, chaos, and loss of faith in the system he caused, so they'll keep delaying it until they either find something or find someone willing to just make something plausible sounding up.
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.
Red Herring* - it's a fish, not a rabbit
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 results?
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.
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?
I think just the fact that it was the first thing on offer that wasn't the thing they were already using.
There are better alternatives, and if legislatures were designed to come up with optimal solutions, we'd probably have use one of them. Instead we have inertia, because the Sainted Holy Founders thought inertia was good for a country, so they optimized legislative branches to be useless.
As a Floridian, I apologize for the 2000 election. But we have a much better system now. We have paper ballots that are scanned. We have an auditable fallback for untrustworthy machines. There is no reason other states cannot have the same.
> 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.
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.)
I’m not sure that what’s happening right now in California is any better.. even Nate Silver is crying foul and this point.
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
Is anyone aware of any viable, or close to viable open-source options exist? That also have capacity for something like a CA statewide election?
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
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?
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 processes, and didn't even favor a single party, never amounted to enough to even to turn even a single state.
All places, outside the American South in the United States don't have a problem, the American South however, is where it is a time honored tradition to make it hard to vote for some citizens.
And it has always been political and other things in the south.
The South does have this problem. But pretending it's /only/ the South does no favors to people who are disenfranchised elsewhere.
A quick google will show that it has been a nationwide problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
Tell me you've never been to Idaho without telling me you've never been to Idaho, where a considerable portion of the population (especially around Moscow, Idaho) wants explicitly to repeal the 19th amendment (the one that gave women the right to vote).
Or Michigan, home of both Henry Ford (and his now-infamous Dearborn Independent, which still seems to resonate with most Michiganders that I've met) and Charles Lindbergh.
What you're describing is a rural areas problem, and the South, most of which has never really developed much urbanism (outside Atlanta and maybe Charlotte) has never had to "grow up", much like rural Michigan has never had to "grow up" and remains a hotbed of MAGA racism and plots to kidnap their governor, or the same way that much of Idaho has never had to "grow up" and is a common destination for Doug-Wilsonites and similar "trad" homesteaders. Drive an hour outside of Detroit or Lansing and ask the almost-universally-white rural folks what they think of Dearborn and they'll tell you all the same wild "sharia law" white-replacement conspiracy theories they've told me over and over again.
And of course, even Boston famously took rather poorly to the notion of desegregation – look up Boston's reaction to "forced bussing" (since the only way to racially-integrate Boston schools was to bring in black kids from outside Boston, since the redlining had been so severe there, and the city was covered in widespread protests).
A local media channel running the same wire service report: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ktvu.com/news/report-white-...
> the right claims fraud
So does the left every time Trump wins.
Non-paywalled - https://archive.is/ki4vM
I think this paragraph summarizes it nicely.
"The report, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, concludes that voting machines could be further safeguarded by, for example, updating their software, the sources said. It does not say the vulnerabilities have led to votes flipping, but examines security gaps in how the machines are used during U.S. elections."
My take is that they couldn't find anything that amounted to the level of fraud Trump needs to justify the deaths, chaos, and loss of faith in the system he caused, so they'll keep delaying it until they either find something or find someone willing to just make something plausible sounding up.