7 ms·

In Pennsylvania, Claims of a Rigged Election May Be Impossible to Disprove

35 points by kushti 10y ago

akshayB 10y ago
I don't seem to understand how externally small voter fraud can change the election results. Is there a chance that voters fraud can happen, absolutely yes. Also votes can go both ways its not like only democrats can commit voters fraud, republican can also do that same thing. Overall this should net each other out or even reduce the effect of fraud.
- rfrank 10y ago
  > Also votes can go both ways its not like only democrats can commit voters fraud, republican can also do that same thing. Overall this should net each other out or even reduce the effect of fraud. The fact both can do it says nothing about whether or not their efforts to commit voter fraud would be equal. It makes no sense to assume number of fraudulent votes from either side would offset.
  - akshayB 10y ago
    You just look at the probably of all events that can happen not just one outcome. Also what we are talking about is extremely small fraction it is even hard to be considered as margin or error.
    - rfrank 10y ago
      In 2000 Florida was decided by about 600 votes. Small fractions matter in battleground states and counties.
      - akshayB 10y ago
        Winner takes it all has its own consequences and that's why irrelevant things are voters fraud is a big topic of discussion.
        akshayB 10y ago
        Electing a new official should be about policy and not about going crazy on things like this.
    - jerf 10y ago
      "You just look at the probably of all events that can happen not just one outcome." You're probably committing the Gaussian fallacy, which is to assume that all events are always drawn from a Gaussian distribution. Drawing a series of events from a Gaussian distribution centered around zero will tend to at least stick close to zero, sure, but there's no reason to assume that fraud distribution will be Gaussian. Especially in the face of hostile and intelligent entities who know you're making that assumption and will abuse you with it. Very little math or math intuition is structured for dealing with intelligent hostile exploitation. (Game theory, of course. And a lot of math involves assuming the worst of your counterexamples, but that doesn't really come from an intelligence with goals, even if we sometimes are tempted to think otherwise.)
- xname2 10y ago
  In some battleground states, a few thousand votes can change the result, so even small voter fraud can make a big difference.
  - akshayB 10y ago
    This is the precise problem with US election system its pointless to vote as Republican in California and as a Democrat in Texas. Winner takes it all has its own consequences and that's why irrelevant things are voters fraud is a big topic of discussion.
- chroem- 10y ago
  Can they both commit voter fraud? Yes. Are they both necessarily going to commit voter fraud? No. I don't agree with Trump's politics in the slightest, but if there's anything that can be gleaned from the Clinton leaks, it's that her campaign and the DNC at large is willing to play fast and loose to get her elected. There is undeniable documentation that they attempted to subvert the primary election (and succeeded), and it stands to reason that they may again attempt something else in the general election. While that doesn't mean that they'll hack into voting machines, it would be prudent to scrutinize the results.
- jerf 10y ago
  There isn't an a priori reason to assume all parties are going to commit offsetting amounts of fraud. Parties have differences between them (ideological, levels of control over the system, the individuals in charge at given locations, and so on) and it's not hard to imagine there would be correlations between those differences and ability and desire to commit fraud, especially considered on a per-location basis. (I'm keeping it generic here because this goes beyond US politics and is true for any democracy that has a party-like system.) Further, even if by some miracle all the fraudulent parties completely cancelled each other out, it would still have a corrosive effect on the ability of the population to trust the outcome of the voting. First of all, how exactly does one go about proving to the populace that all parties committed offsetting amounts of fraud, when all parties are obviously motivated to hide what they've done? And second, it is rational of the voting population to be concerned that even though by some miracle it cancelled this time, and by some miracle they've been satisfied about that fact, it doesn't mean that will happen next time. If fraud is permitted, it doesn't take much playing with the game theory to discover that fraud is almost inevitably cheaper and more effective than anything else, and over time, the incentives inevitably align to encourage fraud to completely crowd out real voting. And the recent chatter that corroding confidence in the voting system is bad is correct. Where that chatter goes wrong is in somehow thinking that is a primary goal, when in fact it must be built on the foundation of having a reasonably fair voting system in the first place. Having a fraudulent voting system but convincing the population it is valid is taking out debt with an catastrophic and random interest rate; it works until it without warning explosively doesn't work.
npiazza83 10y ago
Says the candidate who forgot to spend money on an analytics team... I'm specifically talking about this: http://www.insidesources.com/trump-campaign-relied-on-data-from-former-obama-analytics-firm/ http://www.insidesources.com/trump-campaign-relied-on-data-f... A large part of the job of an analytics outfit on a campaign is to provide data to the boiler room on election day which informs legal action taken by the campaign to contest potential fraud or intimidation.
- lambdasquirrel 10y ago
  Candidates "shouldn't" have to spend money on an analytics team, but it is surprisingly unprofessional for a national, presidential campaign. (edit) Don't know why parent is being downvoted. This is a legitimate concern.
  - npiazza83 10y ago
    How can you make the case that fraud happened without collecting any evidence? The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence...
pyrophane 10y ago
This, not in-person voter fraud, is the real threat to our democratic election process. Paper ballots have a couple of strong advantages: 1) The voter can confirm that their vote was recorded as they intended. 2) There is a paper trail that is difficult to falsify which can be used to confirm election counts. Sure, there are problems with a paper ballot system, such as the fact that ballots can be misplaced or destroyed, but we've given up a lot for "convenience," which shouldn't be the top priority when it comes to our voting process. If nothing else, our voting machines need to produce duplicate paper receipts, one for the voter and one retained within the voting machine so that electronic results can be verified. Edit: as has been pointed out in the replies there are good reasons not to give people a paper copy of their vote, so it would be preferable to only produce a single paper receipt that the voter can view but which is retained within the voting machine itself.
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  How would a county realistically go about verifying voter receipts? Have everyone bring theirs in to be counted by...someone? The entire system is based upon trust and not easily verifiable by a single voter working alone, so in any of the solutions I've seen, it's impossible to independently verify the results of any counts.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - pyrophane 10y ago
    That's why I said that two copies of the receipt should be generated, both viewable by the voter, with one of them being retained within the machine. The one given to the voter allows them to verify that their vote was cast correctly and gives them a piece of paper with I "vote ID" on it to show an election official if they notice a problem. The one that is retained would be collected by election officials and stored. This would allow someone else to go back later using a separate counting device to verify that the automatic count from the voting machines.
- refurb 10y ago
mtgx 10y ago
Why is the focus on "trying to disprove" the election is rigged? Just because Trump says it, that means it's not true? Or what's the logic behind this trend? The media's job should be to focus on proving whether the elections can be rigged or not - especially if there is suspicion that they could be rigged. It shouldn't be to try to disprove it by default. The angle they choose matters a lot. If anything, calls for in-depth election process audits should've come at least a decade ago. The U.S. isn't doing so hot in terms of election integrity (and no, Russians have nothing to do with it, either): https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/03/21/the-u-s-has-worst-elections-of-any-long-established-democracy-report-finds/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/03/21...
- georgehotelling 10y ago
  Well you can't prove a negative, you can only disprove a positive. In this case there was a (vague) assertion made, so you can try to disprove that.
AvenueIngres 10y ago
>Trump won't have trouble finding support for his claim of a "rigged" election Trump won't have trouble with getting away saying that this election is rigged because we know it is. Anyone with a bit of a CS background knows that electronic voting machines is a stupid idea, that was bound to be implemented by either corrupt or crappy consulting firms. They provide literally no value over conventional vote counting, this is a textbook case of "better is good's enemy". I personally don't feel comfortable casting my vote in a literal black box. And if you had any doubts the political parties that makes up this country are ethical here is a couple links you should check: [0] - Project Veritas: DNC execs and shadow consultants conspiring mass voter fraud logistics on tape - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDc8PVCvfKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDc8PVCvfKs [1] - Again. This same time the higher-up are caught on tape in pretty sketchy stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEQvsK5w-jY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEQvsK5w-jY - funny that the boss who fired the "black-ops" employees of [0] ended up on tape as well. [2] - John Podesta emails - ""US not a democracy" - https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/23756 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/23756 [3] - "Trump: WikiLeaks Shows How Clinton Campaign Rigged The Polls By Over-Sampling Democrats" - http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/10/24/trump_wikileaks_shows_how_clinton_campaign_rigged_the_polls_by_over-sampling_democrats.html http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/10/24/trump_wiki... [4] - See the attached document about oversampling polls: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/26551 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/26551 [5] - Found this court testimony of a software developer who allegedly worked on the voting machines used in state elections - I cannot vouch for the authenticity of this video, see for yourself if you find that credible or not - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVmsaDS_FwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVmsaDS_FwY edit: I have no problem with a rain fire of downvotes, but perhaps you can take a little time to oppose actual arguments.
- wnevets 10y ago
  hacker news is voting up a comment where its primary source is a video by James O'Keefe, what a sad day this is.
  - AvenueIngres 10y ago
    Actually, my comment is (well) below zero so you can have a nice day! You can perhaps make a little effort and judge the videos on its own merits rather than using its author as a red-herring to disqualify further discussion on the matter. In addition to that, if you took the time to read this (short) comment you would have noticed that those sources I am using are only there to further my point that political parties are unethical and that one party dominating demographics of the intellectual class mechanically sees its power of nuisance increase tremendously. The bigger idea here is that political parties are willing to do anything to advance their interests and it is a mistake to allow them to self-regulate when it comes to respecting the will of the people. They have no regards for this and the emails show how cynical they are about it.
grzm 10y ago
There's been a lot of research done on the voting process, in particular following the 2000 US presidential elections. There's a lot involved. Integrity in the voting process -- and belief in integrity of election results -- is fundamental to a functioning democracy. If this is an area you're interested in, one place you can start is via the "End-to-end auditable voting systems" page on Wikipedia. Lots of good links there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy... From my reading, a big hurdle right now is getting these systems -- the whole process, not just the tech -- tested in actual elections. Too late for 2016, but if we get enough money, support and education involved, this can move forward.
- grzm 10y ago
  Here's a link to slides from a talk Ronald Rivest gave back in March 2016 at ACM-IEEE: "Auditability and Verifiability of Elections" https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv16x.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv16x.pdf It covers a lot of what I'm sure is going to be discussed in this thread, including vote receipts, coercion, verifiability that your vote is counted. Edit to add: And heres a good talk by Ben Adida speaking at Google for a "Theory and Practice of Cryptography" TechTalk series entitled "Verifying Elections with Crytography" from 2007. Good stuff there, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s
ideonexus 10y ago
Two solutions for this to my mind. (1) Give voters a paper receipt like they get at an ATM. They can confirm their vote, leave the receipt, and the paper trail is there for anyone to recount. It would be extremely complicated to tamper with both the electronic and paper ballots and have the results come out the same. (2) Improve the science of exit polling. Right now exit polls suck due to sampling biases and the inability of independent firms to cover enough territory [1], but this kind of independent verification--if done expansively and competently--could provide an independent verification on the final vote tallies. If the tallies drastically differ from the exit polls, then an investigation is warranted. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/upshot/exit-polls-and-why-the-primary-was-not-stolen-from-bernie-sanders.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/upshot/exit-polls-and-why-...
- jelly 10y ago
  In the first case: why not just the paper?
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
The focus of this argument seems to center around people casting multiple votes, "dead" people voting, etc. The problem is that there's no vote-verifiable trail and serious security issues with electronic voting booths. There was even a video interview with Howard Dean where he shows how easy it is to dink around in the MS Access database on voting machine and change the votes [0]. This [1] paper from 2003 sums up some of the issues nicely: Voters can cast multiple votes without leaving any trace. Voters, as well as voting staff or others with access to the machine, can perform actions that normally require administrative privileges, including viewing partial results and terminating the election early. Furthermore, communications between voting terminals and the central server are not properly encrypted, allowing a malicious man in the middle to alter the content of the communications I have zero faith in Diebold voting machines (or machines like it). And I'm very skeptical that people with malicious intent haven't already attacked and plan to attack such electronic components. [0] http://www.bradblog.com/?p=2724 http://www.bradblog.com/?p=2724 [1] https://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/pub/hackavote2003tr.pdf https://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/pub/hackavote2003tr.pdf
grzm 10y ago
The fact that there's some lack of trust in the voting system -- regardless of whether there are issues with the system -- is a problem. We're smart, well-meaning people. We can spend time discussing whether or not there is a problem: that's beside the point. How can we strengthen the entire system in a fair way that ensures reasonable people trust that the election is fair? We might disagree on which areas need to be worked on. That's an indication that all of those areas need effort, because they all need to be trusted. It's not either/or. People have been working on this. And it tackles a lot problems people here find interesting: open systems, cryptography, application of tech in society, hardware, scaling to name a few. We can build on the work that's already been done together. It strengthens all of us.
canadian_voter 10y ago
For those of you who are unfamiliar with how voting works in other parts of the world, I'd like to describe the voting process in Canada. Registered voters (which is virtually everyone) receive a card in them mail telling them where to vote. They bring the card, along with proof of address and photo ID to their polling station on election day. Their ID is checked against a list by two poll clerks and the elector is given a ballot. They take the ballot behind a curtain and make a mark with a pencil beside their candidate of choice. They take the ballot to the ballot box, where an observer watches them place it inside. At the end of the night, the ballot box is opened by the two poll clerks, who are generally (but not necessarily) observed by several "scrutineers": one representative from each party. One of the poll clerks holds each ballot in turn, and announces who they believe the ballot was cast for. If everyone agrees, the ballot is counted. If it is disputed, a discussion takes place with reference to the printed rulebook. If there is still no agreement, it gets escalated. Once all of the ballots have been counted, the results are reported to the Deputy Returning Officer, who phones them in to Elections Canada. The ballots go back in the box and the box is sealed. It is delivered to Elections Canada and stored in case of a recount. Enough results are generally available nation-wide a little after midnight (polls close at 9 or so) for a winner to be declared and concessions speeches given, although the official results can take a little longer. The system seems to work. I don't see how electronic voting machines could do it cheaper, more securely or even very much faster. I understand an American election is more complicated and may require a more complex system, but truly I feel electronic voting machines are a false efficiency here. Source: Worked a few elections as a poll clerk. More details at http://www.elections.ca http://www.elections.ca

35 points by kushti 10y ago

I don't seem to understand how externally small voter fraud can change the election results. Is there a chance that voters fraud can happen, absolutely yes. Also votes can go both ways its not like only democrats can commit voters fraud, republican can also do that same thing. Overall this should net each other out or even reduce the effect of fraud.

rfrank 10y ago
> Also votes can go both ways its not like only democrats can commit voters fraud, republican can also do that same thing. Overall this should net each other out or even reduce the effect of fraud. The fact both can do it says nothing about whether or not their efforts to commit voter fraud would be equal. It makes no sense to assume number of fraudulent votes from either side would offset.
- akshayB 10y ago
  You just look at the probably of all events that can happen not just one outcome. Also what we are talking about is extremely small fraction it is even hard to be considered as margin or error.
  - rfrank 10y ago
    In 2000 Florida was decided by about 600 votes. Small fractions matter in battleground states and counties.
    - akshayB 10y ago
      Winner takes it all has its own consequences and that's why irrelevant things are voters fraud is a big topic of discussion.
      - akshayB 10y ago
        Electing a new official should be about policy and not about going crazy on things like this.
  - jerf 10y ago
    "You just look at the probably of all events that can happen not just one outcome." You're probably committing the Gaussian fallacy, which is to assume that all events are always drawn from a Gaussian distribution. Drawing a series of events from a Gaussian distribution centered around zero will tend to at least stick close to zero, sure, but there's no reason to assume that fraud distribution will be Gaussian. Especially in the face of hostile and intelligent entities who know you're making that assumption and will abuse you with it. Very little math or math intuition is structured for dealing with intelligent hostile exploitation. (Game theory, of course. And a lot of math involves assuming the worst of your counterexamples, but that doesn't really come from an intelligence with goals, even if we sometimes are tempted to think otherwise.)
xname2 10y ago
In some battleground states, a few thousand votes can change the result, so even small voter fraud can make a big difference.
- akshayB 10y ago
  This is the precise problem with US election system its pointless to vote as Republican in California and as a Democrat in Texas. Winner takes it all has its own consequences and that's why irrelevant things are voters fraud is a big topic of discussion.
chroem- 10y ago
Can they both commit voter fraud? Yes. Are they both necessarily going to commit voter fraud? No. I don't agree with Trump's politics in the slightest, but if there's anything that can be gleaned from the Clinton leaks, it's that her campaign and the DNC at large is willing to play fast and loose to get her elected. There is undeniable documentation that they attempted to subvert the primary election (and succeeded), and it stands to reason that they may again attempt something else in the general election. While that doesn't mean that they'll hack into voting machines, it would be prudent to scrutinize the results.
jerf 10y ago
There isn't an a priori reason to assume all parties are going to commit offsetting amounts of fraud. Parties have differences between them (ideological, levels of control over the system, the individuals in charge at given locations, and so on) and it's not hard to imagine there would be correlations between those differences and ability and desire to commit fraud, especially considered on a per-location basis. (I'm keeping it generic here because this goes beyond US politics and is true for any democracy that has a party-like system.) Further, even if by some miracle all the fraudulent parties completely cancelled each other out, it would still have a corrosive effect on the ability of the population to trust the outcome of the voting. First of all, how exactly does one go about proving to the populace that all parties committed offsetting amounts of fraud, when all parties are obviously motivated to hide what they've done? And second, it is rational of the voting population to be concerned that even though by some miracle it cancelled this time, and by some miracle they've been satisfied about that fact, it doesn't mean that will happen next time. If fraud is permitted, it doesn't take much playing with the game theory to discover that fraud is almost inevitably cheaper and more effective than anything else, and over time, the incentives inevitably align to encourage fraud to completely crowd out real voting. And the recent chatter that corroding confidence in the voting system is bad is correct. Where that chatter goes wrong is in somehow thinking that is a primary goal, when in fact it must be built on the foundation of having a reasonably fair voting system in the first place. Having a fraudulent voting system but convincing the population it is valid is taking out debt with an catastrophic and random interest rate; it works until it without warning explosively doesn't work.

npiazza83 10y ago

Says the candidate who forgot to spend money on an analytics team... I'm specifically talking about this: http://www.insidesources.com/trump-campaign-relied-on-data-from-former-obama-analytics-firm/ http://www.insidesources.com/trump-campaign-relied-on-data-f... A large part of the job of an analytics outfit on a campaign is to provide data to the boiler room on election day which informs legal action taken by the campaign to contest potential fraud or intimidation.

lambdasquirrel 10y ago
Candidates "shouldn't" have to spend money on an analytics team, but it is surprisingly unprofessional for a national, presidential campaign. (edit) Don't know why parent is being downvoted. This is a legitimate concern.
- npiazza83 10y ago
  How can you make the case that fraud happened without collecting any evidence? The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence...

pyrophane 10y ago

This, not in-person voter fraud, is the real threat to our democratic election process. Paper ballots have a couple of strong advantages: 1) The voter can confirm that their vote was recorded as they intended. 2) There is a paper trail that is difficult to falsify which can be used to confirm election counts. Sure, there are problems with a paper ballot system, such as the fact that ballots can be misplaced or destroyed, but we've given up a lot for "convenience," which shouldn't be the top priority when it comes to our voting process. If nothing else, our voting machines need to produce duplicate paper receipts, one for the voter and one retained within the voting machine so that electronic results can be verified. Edit: as has been pointed out in the replies there are good reasons not to give people a paper copy of their vote, so it would be preferable to only produce a single paper receipt that the voter can view but which is retained within the voting machine itself.

seanp2k2 10y ago
How would a county realistically go about verifying voter receipts? Have everyone bring theirs in to be counted by...someone? The entire system is based upon trust and not easily verifiable by a single voter working alone, so in any of the solutions I've seen, it's impossible to independently verify the results of any counts.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- pyrophane 10y ago
  That's why I said that two copies of the receipt should be generated, both viewable by the voter, with one of them being retained within the machine. The one given to the voter allows them to verify that their vote was cast correctly and gives them a piece of paper with I "vote ID" on it to show an election official if they notice a problem. The one that is retained would be collected by election officials and stored. This would allow someone else to go back later using a separate counting device to verify that the automatic count from the voting machines.
refurb 10y ago

mtgx 10y ago

Why is the focus on "trying to disprove" the election is rigged? Just because Trump says it, that means it's not true? Or what's the logic behind this trend? The media's job should be to focus on proving whether the elections can be rigged or not - especially if there is suspicion that they could be rigged. It shouldn't be to try to disprove it by default. The angle they choose matters a lot. If anything, calls for in-depth election process audits should've come at least a decade ago. The U.S. isn't doing so hot in terms of election integrity (and no, Russians have nothing to do with it, either): https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/03/21/the-u-s-has-worst-elections-of-any-long-established-democracy-report-finds/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/03/21...

georgehotelling 10y ago
Well you can't prove a negative, you can only disprove a positive. In this case there was a (vague) assertion made, so you can try to disprove that.

AvenueIngres 10y ago

>Trump won't have trouble finding support for his claim of a "rigged" election Trump won't have trouble with getting away saying that this election is rigged because we know it is. Anyone with a bit of a CS background knows that electronic voting machines is a stupid idea, that was bound to be implemented by either corrupt or crappy consulting firms. They provide literally no value over conventional vote counting, this is a textbook case of "better is good's enemy". I personally don't feel comfortable casting my vote in a literal black box. And if you had any doubts the political parties that makes up this country are ethical here is a couple links you should check: [0] - Project Veritas: DNC execs and shadow consultants conspiring mass voter fraud logistics on tape - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDc8PVCvfKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDc8PVCvfKs [1] - Again. This same time the higher-up are caught on tape in pretty sketchy stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEQvsK5w-jY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEQvsK5w-jY - funny that the boss who fired the "black-ops" employees of [0] ended up on tape as well. [2] - John Podesta emails - ""US not a democracy" - https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/23756 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/23756 [3] - "Trump: WikiLeaks Shows How Clinton Campaign Rigged The Polls By Over-Sampling Democrats" - http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/10/24/trump_wikileaks_shows_how_clinton_campaign_rigged_the_polls_by_over-sampling_democrats.html http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/10/24/trump_wiki... [4] - See the attached document about oversampling polls: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/26551 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/26551 [5] - Found this court testimony of a software developer who allegedly worked on the voting machines used in state elections - I cannot vouch for the authenticity of this video, see for yourself if you find that credible or not - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVmsaDS_FwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVmsaDS_FwY edit: I have no problem with a rain fire of downvotes, but perhaps you can take a little time to oppose actual arguments.

wnevets 10y ago
hacker news is voting up a comment where its primary source is a video by James O'Keefe, what a sad day this is.
- AvenueIngres 10y ago
  Actually, my comment is (well) below zero so you can have a nice day! You can perhaps make a little effort and judge the videos on its own merits rather than using its author as a red-herring to disqualify further discussion on the matter. In addition to that, if you took the time to read this (short) comment you would have noticed that those sources I am using are only there to further my point that political parties are unethical and that one party dominating demographics of the intellectual class mechanically sees its power of nuisance increase tremendously. The bigger idea here is that political parties are willing to do anything to advance their interests and it is a mistake to allow them to self-regulate when it comes to respecting the will of the people. They have no regards for this and the emails show how cynical they are about it.

grzm 10y ago

There's been a lot of research done on the voting process, in particular following the 2000 US presidential elections. There's a lot involved. Integrity in the voting process -- and belief in integrity of election results -- is fundamental to a functioning democracy. If this is an area you're interested in, one place you can start is via the "End-to-end auditable voting systems" page on Wikipedia. Lots of good links there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy... From my reading, a big hurdle right now is getting these systems -- the whole process, not just the tech -- tested in actual elections. Too late for 2016, but if we get enough money, support and education involved, this can move forward.

grzm 10y ago
Here's a link to slides from a talk Ronald Rivest gave back in March 2016 at ACM-IEEE: "Auditability and Verifiability of Elections" https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv16x.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv16x.pdf It covers a lot of what I'm sure is going to be discussed in this thread, including vote receipts, coercion, verifiability that your vote is counted. Edit to add: And heres a good talk by Ben Adida speaking at Google for a "Theory and Practice of Cryptography" TechTalk series entitled "Verifying Elections with Crytography" from 2007. Good stuff there, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s

ideonexus 10y ago

Two solutions for this to my mind. (1) Give voters a paper receipt like they get at an ATM. They can confirm their vote, leave the receipt, and the paper trail is there for anyone to recount. It would be extremely complicated to tamper with both the electronic and paper ballots and have the results come out the same. (2) Improve the science of exit polling. Right now exit polls suck due to sampling biases and the inability of independent firms to cover enough territory [1], but this kind of independent verification--if done expansively and competently--could provide an independent verification on the final vote tallies. If the tallies drastically differ from the exit polls, then an investigation is warranted. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/upshot/exit-polls-and-why-the-primary-was-not-stolen-from-bernie-sanders.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/upshot/exit-polls-and-why-...

jelly 10y ago
In the first case: why not just the paper?

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

The focus of this argument seems to center around people casting multiple votes, "dead" people voting, etc. The problem is that there's no vote-verifiable trail and serious security issues with electronic voting booths. There was even a video interview with Howard Dean where he shows how easy it is to dink around in the MS Access database on voting machine and change the votes [0]. This [1] paper from 2003 sums up some of the issues nicely: Voters can cast multiple votes without leaving any trace. Voters, as well as voting staff or others with access to the machine, can perform actions that normally require administrative privileges, including viewing partial results and terminating the election early. Furthermore, communications between voting terminals and the central server are not properly encrypted, allowing a malicious man in the middle to alter the content of the communications I have zero faith in Diebold voting machines (or machines like it). And I'm very skeptical that people with malicious intent haven't already attacked and plan to attack such electronic components. [0] http://www.bradblog.com/?p=2724 http://www.bradblog.com/?p=2724 [1] https://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/pub/hackavote2003tr.pdf https://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/pub/hackavote2003tr.pdf

grzm 10y ago

The fact that there's some lack of trust in the voting system -- regardless of whether there are issues with the system -- is a problem. We're smart, well-meaning people. We can spend time discussing whether or not there is a problem: that's beside the point. How can we strengthen the entire system in a fair way that ensures reasonable people trust that the election is fair? We might disagree on which areas need to be worked on. That's an indication that all of those areas need effort, because they all need to be trusted. It's not either/or. People have been working on this. And it tackles a lot problems people here find interesting: open systems, cryptography, application of tech in society, hardware, scaling to name a few. We can build on the work that's already been done together. It strengthens all of us.

canadian_voter 10y ago

For those of you who are unfamiliar with how voting works in other parts of the world, I'd like to describe the voting process in Canada. Registered voters (which is virtually everyone) receive a card in them mail telling them where to vote. They bring the card, along with proof of address and photo ID to their polling station on election day. Their ID is checked against a list by two poll clerks and the elector is given a ballot. They take the ballot behind a curtain and make a mark with a pencil beside their candidate of choice. They take the ballot to the ballot box, where an observer watches them place it inside. At the end of the night, the ballot box is opened by the two poll clerks, who are generally (but not necessarily) observed by several "scrutineers": one representative from each party. One of the poll clerks holds each ballot in turn, and announces who they believe the ballot was cast for. If everyone agrees, the ballot is counted. If it is disputed, a discussion takes place with reference to the printed rulebook. If there is still no agreement, it gets escalated. Once all of the ballots have been counted, the results are reported to the Deputy Returning Officer, who phones them in to Elections Canada. The ballots go back in the box and the box is sealed. It is delivered to Elections Canada and stored in case of a recount. Enough results are generally available nation-wide a little after midnight (polls close at 9 or so) for a winner to be declared and concessions speeches given, although the official results can take a little longer. The system seems to work. I don't see how electronic voting machines could do it cheaper, more securely or even very much faster. I understand an American election is more complicated and may require a more complex system, but truly I feel electronic voting machines are a false efficiency here. Source: Worked a few elections as a poll clerk. More details at http://www.elections.ca http://www.elections.ca