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Statistician calls for audit to address election hacking fears

161 points by jmcgough 10y ago

brink 10y ago
If he's legitimately trying to find the true winner objectively then I'm all for it. One thing that scares me is when people try to spread uncertainty and fear through the ruse of science and numbers with a bias.
peller 10y ago
Link to the mentioned petition: https://www.change.org/p/demand-an-audit-of-the-2016-presidential-election https://www.change.org/p/demand-an-audit-of-the-2016-preside...
- jonahrd 10y ago
  I'm in Quebec, so all of the Change.org controls appear to me in French. There is no option to change this unless I log in (never a problem on actual Canadian websites which typically have a language button in the corner) What a terrible design decision.
  - BuuQu9hu 10y ago
    The web really needs to remember that content negotiation is actually a thing.
  - wyck 10y ago
    There is a language switcher in the footer no login required.
    - vacri 10y ago
      You have to scroll past a lot of twitter trash to find it, though.
    - slededit 10y ago
      Still bad design. This is almost universally put in the top right.
      - mercer 10y ago
        I disagree. True, the first place I look is the top right. But the second place is the footer because I've come across a bunch of sites where this is the place to change language. It's common enough, I think, to be at the very least 'adequate' deesign.
merpnderp 10y ago
Nate Silver says "bad news when a finding can't survive a basic sanity check like this." https://mobile.twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/801222961541816321 https://mobile.twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/801222961541...
- rconti 10y ago
  Thanks for that link. I had been sort of hoping for reasons not to believe this, because it's sort of lose/lose (bad if our elections are being hacked, bad if a recount happens and 'magically' the president-elect changes, etc etc).
- serge2k 10y ago
  Does Nate Silver have any credibility left when it comes to adjusting numbers based on assumptions? Considering how drastically wrong they got things.
  - harryh 10y ago
    538 had a higher chance of Trump winning that basically any other poll based source pre election.
  - rusbus 10y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by that. 538 projected the election at 70/30, which gave Trump a much bigger chance than all other models. Moreover, the final outcome of an electoral college/popular vote split was a specific risk Nate Silver called out repeatedly.
  - einarvollset 10y ago
    How so? He had Trump winning probability at about 25%, he even explicitly highlighted: - If Trump wins, chances are he looses the popular vote - Likely polling errors are not independent across states
  - iainmerrick 10y ago
    Yes, his election prediction was the least wrong of all the high-profile public predictions.
whoopdedo 10y ago
The only "hacking" going on in the election was done when voting district boundaries were drawn. Gerrymandering is an endemic problem in the U.S. as most recently evidenced in Wisconsin[1]. And it's a more effective way to steal an election than any behind the scenes subterfuge involving individual ballots. [1] http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/307176-court-strikes-down-wisconsin-district-lines http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/307176-court-strikes-do...
- andrewpi 10y ago
  Those boundaries are fairly irrelevant to the presidential election process. I believe only Maine assigns electors based on who wins a particular district versus who wins the overall statewide race.
  - entee 10y ago
    Nebraska too I think, but yeah pretty rare.
  - baconner 10y ago
    That is true, but don't forget that those boundaries also come into play wrt polling place count and convenience. And that's been a clear attack vector this year in states like NC.
  - schoen 10y ago
    I was just curious whether there was any historical evidence that the state borders themselves were ever a result of gerrymandering. Then I remembered an exhibit over at the Oakland Museum of California about proposals for the borders of California at the time of its statehood, which included debates about the effects of including lots of Mormons to the east (or not). A discussion summarizing some of these debates, but with a slightly different emphasis, can be found in http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/row/landsurveys/Study_material/State_Boundaries/ca-nv-border-p1-2.pdf http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/row/landsurveys/Study_material/Stat... It might be possible to interpret some of the proposals for the shape of the California-Nevada border as reflecting a kind of gerrymandering or considerations of political strategy. Maybe that's historically true of other U.S. state boundaries? (But the states haven't generally redrawn their boundaries in response to demographic changes over time.)
paulddraper 10y ago
Not exactly on point, but in general I've seen concern for voting fraud rise, even from people who formerly said concerns were overblown and racist.
- baconner 10y ago
  Well yeah. It's not a contradiction or a change of mind really to be concerned about one form of voter fraud and not another based on its likelihood. Individual voter fraud just doesn't make much sense as a method to swing an election. Way too many chances to get caught. way too many co-conspirators Voter suppression though or electronic machine hacking have a lot more potential. And not coincidentally those individual voter fraud protections can have a bigger effect as voter suppression than the fraud they might prevent.
  - bendbro 10y ago
    What are some sources for voter ID laws suppressing the minority vote? I've always bought this at face value until recently. A cursory Google search worries me even more, since all it seems to bring forward is a load of rote media content, which really pings my propaganda radar.
    - baconner 10y ago
      Well let me first re-assert my point that it is not a _contradiction_ to be more concerned about one type of voter fraud than another and one doesn't necessarily need to have definitive proof in the form of a stack of scientific studies to form the opinion that suppression is a bigger issue than individual voter fraud. Still, more data is better and it's a heavily studied topic. So here's my basic logic by which I came to that conclusion plus a few articles & studies. Individual voter fraud (where an individual votes more than once, or as another person, etc) is pretty rare or at least very rarely convicted. I am confident saying that because there is a lot of political and media incentive to go find those cases yet the number of actual convictions for individuals committing voter fraud every election is very small compared to the voting population. This year I've only see two in the news despite it being a hot topic: * https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/29/trump-supporter-charged-with-voting-twice-in-iowa/?utm_term=.23c029b482d0 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/2... * http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/illinois/alton-election-judge-charged-for-allegedly-casting-ballot-for-dead/article_036d82d7-80c4-57d3-9aa4-2cf02958e3ce.html http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/illinois/alton-election-j... State governments have again and again set up task forces to try and root out this kind of fraud and come up with only a handful of cases. For example in 2008 Wisconsin had a voter id task force investigation looking specifically for voter fraud and came up with a total of 20 individuals. ( https://badgerherald.com/news/2011/02/01/doj-task-force-charg/#.U71R741dUq9 https://badgerherald.com/news/2011/02/01/doj-task-force-char... ). The voting population of WI that year was over 2,900,000. So even if WI only caught say 1 of 100 fraudsters that's only 2000 fraudulent votes. It's not _nothing_ and those people should absolutely be prosecuted but quite unlikely to swing the vote. A big effort to get lots of voters to do this would increase the number of co-conspirators and likely increase their chances of being caught. So overall at least what they've found is a very small effect, yet they still came back later and enacted strict Voter ID. Why? Voter ID, one of the most popular recent forms of law to combat this type of fraud, has a demonstrable effect at depressing voter turnout overall by as much as 2% ( http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/measuring-the-effects-of-voter-identification-laws/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/measurin... ) in some cases. There are some conflicting studies as is normal in science but that seems to be the growing consensus and I think it follows basic logic that it does suppress votes the question is just how much and for whom. Added barriers to vote are bound to stop some eligible voters from coming to the polls. Even rain depresses turnout and ID requirements are a bigger barrier IMO. When I first started to dig in a little more on this topic recently I was startled by the numbers of US Citizens who do not have any kind of government Photo ID and reading more started to sympathize with how difficult it could be to get the ID in the first place if you are impoverished, elderly, or just don't have your birth certificate for whatever reason. For example in Texas during the trial which struck down their recent very strict voter id law the court found that about "608,470 registered Texas voters lack the ID necessary to vote" ( https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/separating-fact-fiction-voter-id-statistics https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/separating-fact-fiction-v... ). And something that should surprise no-one it's correlated highly with poverty which is also correlated highly with being in certain ethnic minorities so the effect is likely to be more pronounced there. So IMO you take all of that and the back of napkin math says that even if that 2% depressed turnout is highballing it and it's more like .5% we're looking at a theoretical 14,500 less eligible votes in WI in 2008 with an added Voter ID law vs. my inflated estimate for 2000 in person voter fraud (when they found only 20). If our goal is to maximize eligible voter turnout which one is more damaging to the right to vote? Voter ID good intentions or not has a much worse effect. So essentially my assertion is that Voter ID is the medicine which hurts the patient more than helping presuming our goal is to maximize the number of legitimate votes in each election. All that and we've not even touched on other much more direct voter suppression efforts like this year how with some VRA restrictions out of the way many states dramatically cut back on polling places and early voting both of which have had adverse effects on minority populations https://www.thenation.com/article/there-are-868-fewer-places-to-vote-in-2016-because-the-supreme-court-gutted-the-voting-rights-act/ https://www.thenation.com/article/there-are-868-fewer-places... . Voters in NC were lined up for four hours to vote in some democratic leaning areas like Charlotte that lost polling places and no doubt some people will give up and walk in that situation. To top it all off there are many examples of Republicans alluding to or directly stating that Voter ID, enhanced Voter Registration checks, reduced polling places, reduced early voting, etc will help their odds of winning ( http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknowledge-leveraging-voter-id-laws-for-political-gain.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknow... ). What a shame, to have powerful players in a major political party that seem to not believe in democracy at all. ps. The Brennan Center for Justice keeps a running roundup of notable studies on the topic and several delve way more into the suppression of minority votes issue vs suppression of democratic votes. It's a good resource and while they do certainly have a viewpoint on the matter present them in a balanced manner in my opinion. https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/research-and-publications-voter-id https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/research-and-publicat...
bbatsell 10y ago
A completely independent group, led by Alex Halderman (who is 100% legit), has come to the same conclusion and is quietly demanding that voting machines in certain suspicious states be forensically audited: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/activists-urge-hillary-clinton-to-challenge-election-results.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/activists-urge-...
- thesagan 10y ago
  Who does the auditing? How is that verified to be not rigged if there are claims that the election was? Why are audits less corrupt than administering an election? Is it easier to add or subtract votes one way or the other in a recount or audit, etc.? Honestly, I don't know the answers. But I don't like any of this rhetoric. Lots of conflicting reporting going on, and lots of F.U.D.
  - themgt 10y ago
    Honestly, analysis of this type (breaking down vote patterns by machine/type and calling out the electronic vote winner) has been presented in previous elections and mainly treated as fringe conspiracy theory. I think it is incredibly dangerous the way this type of talk (which does not look very credible if you believe Nate Silver's analysis) is now being mainstreamed by Democrats, the very people who in the days leading up to the election were setting their hair on fire over the possibility Trump might not respect the result. I could not remotely imagine this type of thing being mainstreamed if it was Trump who had lost and whose supporters were claiming fraud with shoddy statistics.
    - vectorpush 10y ago
      While I agree with you that the democrats are wrong to be pushing this type of conspiracy stuff, I totally disagree that it wouldn't be "mainstreamed" if the tables were turned. Fox News is mainstream, Rush Limbaugh is mainstream; it's totally plausible to see this kind of nonsense being "mainstreamed" by the segments of the media that favor the narrative of the story.
  - 10y ago
tn13 10y ago
This is BS.
rusbus 10y ago
I'm not sure what to think about this. It seems like overturning the result at this point could be even more destabilizing than a Trump presidency. Though ironically unfounded, it will look to a Trump support like the election truly was rigged.
- Dagwoodie 10y ago
  Without California, Hillary loses the Popular vote as well. California 'single' handedly gave it to her. Some already think it was the Illegal-Alien vote that gave that to her in the first place.
  - lostcolony 10y ago
    I don't understand how that is relevant. She could have lost (to pick a blue state at random) Vermont and still held the popular vote. What you're saying is that by removing the most populous blue state, she'd lose the popular vote. How is that relevant? States are arbitrary boundaries; we could slice and dice California up into 55 states, giving each one an electoral vote. Now we could remove any one of those and she'd still maintain the popular vote. We're allowing an arbitrary division determine our president, rather than a somewhat less arbitrary "majority of voters". But all -that- aside, the parent comment was referencing the OP. Literally nothing was said about the popular vote; the OP is about possible voting irregularities in some of the swing states that might lead to Hillary also clinching the electoral college majority (and the parent comment was saying how they're not very happy with the prospect of a recount).
    - Dagwoodie 10y ago
      I was simply pointing out how unlikely it is to change anything at this point (Look at WI, MI, PA), and if there is a change it will likely result in civil disturbances if anything at all.
    - alphapapa 10y ago
      Do you think that there's anything to the idea of compartmentalization? For example, suppose people in one area were so homogeneous in circumstances and concerns that they were of universally the same political opinion. By pandering to that one area, a candidate could win a large number of votes. In contrast, to win votes all across the country, a candidate would need to have wider appeal, taking into account the concerns of the wider population. It seems like the electoral college helps compartmentalize the votes, preventing an "overflow" of opinion in certain areas from outweighing the wider population's combined opinion.
flashman 10y ago
Various people are trying to explain the Wisconsin result, in which Trump-voting counties were three times more likely to have electronic voting than Clinton-voting counties. I made this image to illustrate: http://i.imgur.com/AZNr2Hd.png http://i.imgur.com/AZNr2Hd.png It's probably entirely explicable by demographic factors, but the difference is stark and certainly prompts curiosity.
- entee 10y ago
  Was that the case in previous elections? I.e. in 2012?
- themgt 10y ago
  That's really not a good way to graph the data. If you're rigging an election (within a state) you win by total votes, not how many counties are won. Showing which counties tipped one way or the other by voting machine type is far more likely to reflect demographic factors.
  - flashman 10y ago
    It's a graph which explains why people are curious, not why the data looks that way, so it's fine. If you're rigging an election, you're going to rig electronic machines because it's easier than changing thousands of paper ballots. Therefore in a rigged election with a mix of paper and electronic voting, you would expect the electronic voting to favour the rigged candidate. Of course, on summary numbers this is indistinguishable from perfectly normal activity.
  - rubyfan 10y ago
    The insinuation is that the disparity in voting methods could reflect tampering (for Trump or Clinton, depending on your party affiliation). I think there is actually robust statistical approaches to detecting irregularities and to normalize for demographic differences, etc. If anyone has a credible source for such a study, I'd suggest replacing the original link, which offers no evidence, statistical or otherwise.
zw123456 10y ago
I was wondering when we would finally see this, when I first saw the numbers a couple of weeks ago what I saw was pretty obvious evidence. I think I an election of this magnitude it makes sense to have everything thoroughly audited.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  > hen I first saw the numbers a couple of weeks ago what I saw was pretty obvious evidence. I was surprised by the result as well. But curious what did you see as obvious evidence?
wallace_f 10y ago
Is there a practical method to make the voting process transparent to audit yet able to maintain individual privacy? Ideally the people should be able to audit the process.
- umanwizard 10y ago
  What's wrong with normal paper ballots?
  - wallace_f 10y ago
    Conceivably there could still be fraud in counting the ballots.
    - alphapapa 10y ago
      It's a lot harder to commit fraud when there's physical evidence that anyone can recount, and the counting is done in a public place observed by a variety of people, and the ballots cannot so easily be tampered with without leaving physical evidence. With computers, even if you bring in a certified, gold-master CD containing the software under armed guard, it's still a black box. There's no way to conclusively prove that the machine counts accurately and fairly. Tampering can be done without a trace. Compromise is always a concern. Paper is always the best choice. Who cares if it takes longer to count.
      - wallace_f 10y ago
        Ok, I was just asking a question. I haven't thought about it enough, but it does sound like paper is better than what we have at the moment. I don't disagree with you there. If there's a possible way the process can be audited by the public without sacrificing privacy, that should be implemented.
meowface 10y ago
Even though this is probably politically motivated, Trump supporters were calling for such things before the election, so most of them can't really complain.
pfarnsworth 10y ago
When will people realize that Change.org is absolutely and completely useless?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
slicktux 10y ago
If people are this paranoid now, while this country is a democratic republic, then just imagine how bad it will get when they have it their way and all of the U.S becomes a Democracy. . . http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ there is a reasons as to why our founding fathers made this country a Democratic Republic rather than a Democracy. . .
- colechristensen 10y ago
  Not quite what those words mean – a president elected with a national popular vote would still very much be a democratic republic. The "democratic" adjective adds weight to how representative government will be elected amongst the population, "democratic republic" doesn't imply something like a electoral college. And nobody is really advocating for a direct Athenian-style democracy in the US (I'm sure _someone_ is but that's not this) and removing the electoral college would make us quite a bit more like the rest of the free world.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - slicktux 10y ago
    Okay, what then is the purpose, or benefits, of our vote counting for president elections and when does it stop being a democratic republic and instead a democracy?
    - colechristensen 10y ago
      The benefits of a national popular election for president are getting rid of the silly game built up around winning the electoral college. People say that the electoral college means less populated states get a say ... but (for example) Trump came to my state of 5.5 million exactly once for a public event and didn't even leave the airport. A national popular vote would mean that Florida and Ohio don't get a disproportional advantage and also that winning the presidency doesn't require you to be good at playing the electoral college or district drawing game. It means that every vote counts a little bit more and that wherever a candidate goes they can make a difference for their final vote count. I'm not really sure that if (literally) Hitler won the electoral college vote that the electors would go against their district's election so we're left with deciding which game is better to play – the popular vote game or the electoral college game. I think the electoral vote game could reduce the divisiveness of elections and lead candidates to really find and fight for the middle of the political spectrum. Maybe some game theorists have real science behind the effects of the different strategies. It stops being a republic when most of the ruling decisions are put directly to the populace. Go to war with Canada? National popular vote. Legalize catnip? National popular vote. National budget? National Popular vote. Ratify a treaty? National popular vote. Vim or Emacs? Vim. Places like California with their multitude of referendums approach this but are still very far away from removing the republic moniker.
icomefromreddit 10y ago
/r/conspiratard
myf01d 10y ago
We live in a post-democracy world, the people should choose whatever the elites tell them to, or the outcome gets changed if it's the not the right answer (Brexit, Austria, Trump, Le Pen?).
- mch82 10y ago
  Who are the "elites" you're referencing?
rubyfan 10y ago
The fact that a statistician suggests an audit leads one to believe there is some evidence or statistical insight here. However there doesn't seem to be any evidence base, rather a good old "let's just check just in case some bad guys did something bad!" I will say it again, "hackers" are the boogie man and worse yet state actors offer any political group an easy way out of having to offer any evidence to cast doubt or dispersion against anything counter to their worldview or agenda.
- karmelapple 10y ago
  https://mobile.twitter.com/LatishaOrtiz54/status/800794295515000832 https://mobile.twitter.com/LatishaOrtiz54/status/80079429551... https://mobile.twitter.com/LatishaOrtiz54/status/800795235055910913 https://mobile.twitter.com/LatishaOrtiz54/status/80079523505... These were part of the Berkeley team's rationale for asking for investigation. I have not independently verified this claim yet.
  - rubyfan 10y ago
    While interesting and warrants a good second look, this isn't evidence of hacking (Russian or otherwise). To attribute or speculate that the Russians somehow hacked voting machines and caused this is a stretch too far.
- wu-ikkyu 10y ago
  >"hackers" are the boogie man While there is a great deal of misinformation and ignorance in the media regarding info sec, labeling hackers as "boogie men" is irresponsible because it implies the threat is not real.
  - rubyfan 10y ago
    That's the problem, it is a threat that is plausible but without statistical or forensic evidence it is F.U.D.
    - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
ChicagoBoy11 10y ago
About half a year ago a paper was posted here on HN about research which conclusively demonstrated vote manipulation in several provinces in Russia: https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.6059 https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.6059 The technique essentially uses the non-random distribution of round numbers in vote counts as indication that some sort of manipulation has taken place. At the very least, it would seem prudent (or perhaps a fun project for someone) to check if election returns in this past election pass this test.
mzw_mzw 10y ago
Weird. I distinctly recall that a few weeks ago refusing to accept the results of an election was treason. Lots of people saying that, including here on HN. What changed, I wonder?
- baconner 10y ago
  There's a bit of a difference between saying in advance that you won't accept the results "Unless I win" and asking for a recount with some evidence of potential irregularities in hand after the election is concluded. It wasn't wrong of Gore to push for a recount in 2000 within the bounds of the law so long as when that process was complete he conceded, asked his supporters to let it go, and let the country get back to business.
known 10y ago
https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/ https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/ is doing it
blondie9x 10y ago
Here is the change.org petition we can all sign to make a difference: https://www.change.org/p/demand-an-audit-of-the-2016-presidential-election https://www.change.org/p/demand-an-audit-of-the-2016-preside... Every vote should count correctly.
snowwrestler 10y ago
The challenge when considering a small anomaly is to explain how the hackers could have known in advance it would be sufficient to tip the election. Today, we know the vote totals, so we can look back and say "wow, it's a small effect, but it would have been enough to tip things the other way." But hackers working on Nov 8 would have had no idea how the vote was going in real time. No one does, especially in a state that uses paper ballots for some counties. The vote count only becomes apparent much later. So how would the hackers, who were obviously highly motivated to achieve their desired result, decide that a 7% tweak in a few counties would be enough to get what they wanted? When they wanted it so badly that they're willing to commit felonies to get it?
- xamuel 10y ago
  If we want to make these kind of audits part of the process, we need to put the statisticians in an isolated environment before the election. Tell them Candidate A won by X% in such-and-such counties, but don't tell them who A is. Any other way, it's kids crying about the rules after losing Monopoly.
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    I would much prefer to standardize on paper ballots, and then we would not have to mess around with statistical analysis and audits of software code. I think votes should be recorded in a way that any set of adults could easily check for themselves with minimal tools.
    - snowwrestler 10y ago
      Replying to myself to offer more info: https://medium.com/@jhalderm/want-to-know-if-the-election-was-hacked-look-at-the-ballots-c61a6113b0ba#.p4hzdojxx https://medium.com/@jhalderm/want-to-know-if-the-election-wa... Apparently WI does use paper ballots, but they are not checked at all unless a recount is called. Which is ridiculous.
- csydas 10y ago
  As a preface, I do not have enough information from the article to form a strong opinion on whether or not any misconduct or alteration occurred with the vote, so attempting to comment in a non-partisan fashion. But to respond to your post, I don't actually think that based on the premise of the article and the accusation that exceptional foresight is really necessary on the part of potential hackers/manipulators like you're suggesting. There is ample historical data for virtually every county in the United States as to which way the vote will go, and once the dataset is loaded, it would be pretty trivial to figure out which districts need someone to press on the scale a little in favor of one side or another. State-wide, certain states have swung back and forth from red to blue, but county to county, the changes are much more predictable. Combine this that you're looking at a handful of states and not nation wide, and it seems a bit more possible. I want to reiterate I'm not making an accusation, but assuming there was a mechanism that "hackers" could use to influence the results, the scope and foresight necessary is easily attainable in common datasets online, with historical data going back pretty far.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Hmm, why no call for audit in 2008 or 2012? Can the fact that a Democrat won have something to do with this?
- ejstronge 10y ago
  > Hmm, why no call for audit in 2008 or 2012? Can the fact that a Democrat won have something to do with this? It could also be due to the fact that a Democrat clearly won both the Electoral College and the popular vote by a wide margin.
- pbstark 10y ago
  The methods were tried in various contest from 2008 on, but not on the presidential election in 2008 or 2012 because we could not get all the local election officials in any state to do it. Believe me, I tried to get states to do it. This time, there might be the political will.
jaypaulynice 10y ago
I don't know much about the election machines, but is there any reason for them to be connected to the WWW? If they're not connected to the WWW, then only someone with physical access to the machines could hack them...right? What's the likelihood of that?
- brbsix 10y ago
  Presumably components of the hardware or software could be compromised somewhere upstream by nation-state actors like the CIA and NSA's TAO. It's not as if Iran's nuclear facilities were connected to the Internet and that didn't exactly keep their centrifuges safe.
  - jaypaulynice 10y ago
    Right...definitely possible, but this would have to be extremely well coordinated. Chances are each state/city has different machines/hardware/software, different order of candidates on the ballots, etc...so for a random hacker to hack the results would be only if the machines are connected to the internet...I'm hoping they're not!
- pbstark 10y ago
  Most voting machines are connected to the Internet or to a machine that has been connected to the Internet in some point in the lifecycle of an election. But even absent hacking, there are sometimes configuration errors (e.g., swapping candidates or contests) that don't get detected in pre-election testing, procedural or equipment failures that result in not scanning some ballots or scanning some more than once, etc.
shuri 10y ago
It would be good to get more transparency into the process. Basically, I'm thinking a giant anonymized excel sheet. I can generate my anonymous id and verify that I appear correctly. That's one part. The other parts are making sure only real people voted (harder) and that the counting was done correctly (easier).
RcouF1uZ4gsC 10y ago
These statisticians knew about these issues before hand. It would have been a lot more believable if they had talked about these audits before the election, when everybody and their brother was blasting Trump for saying that the election could be rigged. Talking about them afterward just makes them seem like they have an agenda.
- pbstark 10y ago
  We have been calling for audits for more than a decade. I've piloted these audits in about 20 counties, published the methods and results in peer-reviewed journals, worked with local and state election officials to make them logistically efficient and to draft laws, etc. But this is the first election in a decade in which there seems to be the political will to do what we should do after every election: double-check the paper to ensure that errors, bugs, misconfiguration, or outright hacking did not alter the outcome.
dmfdmf 10y ago
This is just the Dems casting doubt on the legitimacy of Trump's presidency because they can't believe it. The converse on the Reps side was casting doubt on the legitimacy of Obama via the birth certificate. The breathless articles in the MSM pointing out that Clinton got the majority vote are driven by the same psychological motives and just as irrelevant (i.e. the president isn't elected by popular vote). To be clear I am not saying that the Dems (nor the Reps) are intentionally casting doubt as a planned strategy but that that is the normal psychological reaction when something bad or impossible has happened to you it is normal to look for a "rational" explanation. Once the left gets through the 4 or 6 stages (whatever those are) of grief I am hopeful that they will be a fine opposition party to Trump's buffoonery and the nation will carry on.
- whybroke 10y ago
  On what grounds do you assume these statisticians are Democrats? If the fact that they want to do a statistical study is the sole proof of their political alignment and then any request to do an analysis by someone of that political asking is invalid, I would suggest there is a serious logical problem.
- AbrahamParangi 10y ago
  While I agree that Trump's election being illegitimate is a narrative many (on the left) want to hear, I disagree with your characterization of the popular vote as irrelevant. I think most Americans consider the electoral college a funny historical quirk and 'getting more votes' is the source of the mandate to rule. Except when popular vote splits happen in which case everyone remembers that we've got a bizarre system that very, very occasionally returns a different result than the popular vote. Although, who knows. Of the 5 popular/electoral splits that have ever happened, 2 happened in the past 16 years. Maybe shifting demographics will preserve republican electoral competitiveness even if their fraction of the total vote shrinks.
  - dmfdmf 10y ago
    It is irrelevant in two ways. First, the constitution stipulates election via the Electoral College, not the popular vote, so until that changes the point is moot. Second, if the EC was abolished before the election then BOTH campaigns would have run completely different strategies. The current tallies are not relevant to a direct popular vote outcome so its impossible to say under that scenario who would have won. Its pure speculation to assume Clinton would have won under different rules and thus irrelevant.
prostoalex 10y ago
Not completely out of the question as Russian forces did attempt a dry run of election disruption in Ukraine, as cheerfully boasted by pro-Russian rt.com here https://www.rt.com/news/161332-ukraine-president-election-virus/ https://www.rt.com/news/161332-ukraine-president-election-vi... There's not a lot of public information available on technicalities of voting, but would be interesting to dig deeper on who controls the voting machines, how are they checked for malware, who controls the links from the machines to the local severs, how's the data transferred between the local and regional electoral commissions, what's the feasibility of having a third party covertly inserting proxy servers into the process, etc.
boards2x 10y ago
Probably the least you can do before you let your country commit public suicide, and put in the White House a neo Nazi in make America great again clothing.
baytrailcat 10y ago
Reading these comments, I am having a serious Deja Vu. This exact discussion took place in Slashdot after 2004 re-election of Bush (a study pointing out anomalies came out then too).
awqrre 10y ago
Hopefully, if they do that, they don't only audit electronic votes, but also all paper ballots (make sure that all ballots are legit (ie: if someone didn't vote, someone else didn't cast a vote for them) and no ballots disappeared)

161 points by jmcgough 10y ago

brink 10y ago

If he's legitimately trying to find the true winner objectively then I'm all for it. One thing that scares me is when people try to spread uncertainty and fear through the ruse of science and numbers with a bias.

peller 10y ago

Link to the mentioned petition: https://www.change.org/p/demand-an-audit-of-the-2016-presidential-election https://www.change.org/p/demand-an-audit-of-the-2016-preside...

jonahrd 10y ago
I'm in Quebec, so all of the Change.org controls appear to me in French. There is no option to change this unless I log in (never a problem on actual Canadian websites which typically have a language button in the corner) What a terrible design decision.
- BuuQu9hu 10y ago
  The web really needs to remember that content negotiation is actually a thing.
- wyck 10y ago
  There is a language switcher in the footer no login required.
  - vacri 10y ago
    You have to scroll past a lot of twitter trash to find it, though.
  - slededit 10y ago
    Still bad design. This is almost universally put in the top right.
    - mercer 10y ago
      I disagree. True, the first place I look is the top right. But the second place is the footer because I've come across a bunch of sites where this is the place to change language. It's common enough, I think, to be at the very least 'adequate' deesign.

merpnderp 10y ago

Nate Silver says "bad news when a finding can't survive a basic sanity check like this." https://mobile.twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/801222961541816321 https://mobile.twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/801222961541...

rconti 10y ago
Thanks for that link. I had been sort of hoping for reasons not to believe this, because it's sort of lose/lose (bad if our elections are being hacked, bad if a recount happens and 'magically' the president-elect changes, etc etc).
serge2k 10y ago
Does Nate Silver have any credibility left when it comes to adjusting numbers based on assumptions? Considering how drastically wrong they got things.
- harryh 10y ago
  538 had a higher chance of Trump winning that basically any other poll based source pre election.
- rusbus 10y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by that. 538 projected the election at 70/30, which gave Trump a much bigger chance than all other models. Moreover, the final outcome of an electoral college/popular vote split was a specific risk Nate Silver called out repeatedly.
- einarvollset 10y ago
  How so? He had Trump winning probability at about 25%, he even explicitly highlighted: - If Trump wins, chances are he looses the popular vote - Likely polling errors are not independent across states
- iainmerrick 10y ago
  Yes, his election prediction was the least wrong of all the high-profile public predictions.

whoopdedo 10y ago

The only "hacking" going on in the election was done when voting district boundaries were drawn. Gerrymandering is an endemic problem in the U.S. as most recently evidenced in Wisconsin[1]. And it's a more effective way to steal an election than any behind the scenes subterfuge involving individual ballots. [1] http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/307176-court-strikes-down-wisconsin-district-lines http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/307176-court-strikes-do...

andrewpi 10y ago
Those boundaries are fairly irrelevant to the presidential election process. I believe only Maine assigns electors based on who wins a particular district versus who wins the overall statewide race.
- entee 10y ago
  Nebraska too I think, but yeah pretty rare.
- baconner 10y ago
  That is true, but don't forget that those boundaries also come into play wrt polling place count and convenience. And that's been a clear attack vector this year in states like NC.
- schoen 10y ago
  I was just curious whether there was any historical evidence that the state borders themselves were ever a result of gerrymandering. Then I remembered an exhibit over at the Oakland Museum of California about proposals for the borders of California at the time of its statehood, which included debates about the effects of including lots of Mormons to the east (or not). A discussion summarizing some of these debates, but with a slightly different emphasis, can be found in http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/row/landsurveys/Study_material/State_Boundaries/ca-nv-border-p1-2.pdf http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/row/landsurveys/Study_material/Stat... It might be possible to interpret some of the proposals for the shape of the California-Nevada border as reflecting a kind of gerrymandering or considerations of political strategy. Maybe that's historically true of other U.S. state boundaries? (But the states haven't generally redrawn their boundaries in response to demographic changes over time.)

paulddraper 10y ago

Not exactly on point, but in general I've seen concern for voting fraud rise, even from people who formerly said concerns were overblown and racist.

baconner 10y ago
Well yeah. It's not a contradiction or a change of mind really to be concerned about one form of voter fraud and not another based on its likelihood. Individual voter fraud just doesn't make much sense as a method to swing an election. Way too many chances to get caught. way too many co-conspirators Voter suppression though or electronic machine hacking have a lot more potential. And not coincidentally those individual voter fraud protections can have a bigger effect as voter suppression than the fraud they might prevent.
- bendbro 10y ago
  What are some sources for voter ID laws suppressing the minority vote? I've always bought this at face value until recently. A cursory Google search worries me even more, since all it seems to bring forward is a load of rote media content, which really pings my propaganda radar.
  - baconner 10y ago
    Well let me first re-assert my point that it is not a _contradiction_ to be more concerned about one type of voter fraud than another and one doesn't necessarily need to have definitive proof in the form of a stack of scientific studies to form the opinion that suppression is a bigger issue than individual voter fraud. Still, more data is better and it's a heavily studied topic. So here's my basic logic by which I came to that conclusion plus a few articles & studies. Individual voter fraud (where an individual votes more than once, or as another person, etc) is pretty rare or at least very rarely convicted. I am confident saying that because there is a lot of political and media incentive to go find those cases yet the number of actual convictions for individuals committing voter fraud every election is very small compared to the voting population. This year I've only see two in the news despite it being a hot topic: * https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/29/trump-supporter-charged-with-voting-twice-in-iowa/?utm_term=.23c029b482d0 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/2... * http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/illinois/alton-election-judge-charged-for-allegedly-casting-ballot-for-dead/article_036d82d7-80c4-57d3-9aa4-2cf02958e3ce.html http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/illinois/alton-election-j... State governments have again and again set up task forces to try and root out this kind of fraud and come up with only a handful of cases. For example in 2008 Wisconsin had a voter id task force investigation looking specifically for voter fraud and came up with a total of 20 individuals. ( https://badgerherald.com/news/2011/02/01/doj-task-force-charg/#.U71R741dUq9 https://badgerherald.com/news/2011/02/01/doj-task-force-char... ). The voting population of WI that year was over 2,900,000. So even if WI only caught say 1 of 100 fraudsters that's only 2000 fraudulent votes. It's not _nothing_ and those people should absolutely be prosecuted but quite unlikely to swing the vote. A big effort to get lots of voters to do this would increase the number of co-conspirators and likely increase their chances of being caught. So overall at least what they've found is a very small effect, yet they still came back later and enacted strict Voter ID. Why? Voter ID, one of the most popular recent forms of law to combat this type of fraud, has a demonstrable effect at depressing voter turnout overall by as much as 2% ( http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/measuring-the-effects-of-voter-identification-laws/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/measurin... ) in some cases. There are some conflicting studies as is normal in science but that seems to be the growing consensus and I think it follows basic logic that it does suppress votes the question is just how much and for whom. Added barriers to vote are bound to stop some eligible voters from coming to the polls. Even rain depresses turnout and ID requirements are a bigger barrier IMO. When I first started to dig in a little more on this topic recently I was startled by the numbers of US Citizens who do not have any kind of government Photo ID and reading more started to sympathize with how difficult it could be to get the ID in the first place if you are impoverished, elderly, or just don't have your birth certificate for whatever reason. For example in Texas during the trial which struck down their recent very strict voter id law the court found that about "608,470 registered Texas voters lack the ID necessary to vote" ( https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/separating-fact-fiction-voter-id-statistics https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/separating-fact-fiction-v... ). And something that should surprise no-one it's correlated highly with poverty which is also correlated highly with being in certain ethnic minorities so the effect is likely to be more pronounced there. So IMO you take all of that and the back of napkin math says that even if that 2% depressed turnout is highballing it and it's more like .5% we're looking at a theoretical 14,500 less eligible votes in WI in 2008 with an added Voter ID law vs. my inflated estimate for 2000 in person voter fraud (when they found only 20). If our goal is to maximize eligible voter turnout which one is more damaging to the right to vote? Voter ID good intentions or not has a much worse effect. So essentially my assertion is that Voter ID is the medicine which hurts the patient more than helping presuming our goal is to maximize the number of legitimate votes in each election. All that and we've not even touched on other much more direct voter suppression efforts like this year how with some VRA restrictions out of the way many states dramatically cut back on polling places and early voting both of which have had adverse effects on minority populations https://www.thenation.com/article/there-are-868-fewer-places-to-vote-in-2016-because-the-supreme-court-gutted-the-voting-rights-act/ https://www.thenation.com/article/there-are-868-fewer-places... . Voters in NC were lined up for four hours to vote in some democratic leaning areas like Charlotte that lost polling places and no doubt some people will give up and walk in that situation. To top it all off there are many examples of Republicans alluding to or directly stating that Voter ID, enhanced Voter Registration checks, reduced polling places, reduced early voting, etc will help their odds of winning ( http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknowledge-leveraging-voter-id-laws-for-political-gain.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknow... ). What a shame, to have powerful players in a major political party that seem to not believe in democracy at all. ps. The Brennan Center for Justice keeps a running roundup of notable studies on the topic and several delve way more into the suppression of minority votes issue vs suppression of democratic votes. It's a good resource and while they do certainly have a viewpoint on the matter present them in a balanced manner in my opinion. https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/research-and-publications-voter-id https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/research-and-publicat...

bbatsell 10y ago

A completely independent group, led by Alex Halderman (who is 100% legit), has come to the same conclusion and is quietly demanding that voting machines in certain suspicious states be forensically audited: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/activists-urge-hillary-clinton-to-challenge-election-results.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/activists-urge-...

thesagan 10y ago
Who does the auditing? How is that verified to be not rigged if there are claims that the election was? Why are audits less corrupt than administering an election? Is it easier to add or subtract votes one way or the other in a recount or audit, etc.? Honestly, I don't know the answers. But I don't like any of this rhetoric. Lots of conflicting reporting going on, and lots of F.U.D.
- themgt 10y ago
  Honestly, analysis of this type (breaking down vote patterns by machine/type and calling out the electronic vote winner) has been presented in previous elections and mainly treated as fringe conspiracy theory. I think it is incredibly dangerous the way this type of talk (which does not look very credible if you believe Nate Silver's analysis) is now being mainstreamed by Democrats, the very people who in the days leading up to the election were setting their hair on fire over the possibility Trump might not respect the result. I could not remotely imagine this type of thing being mainstreamed if it was Trump who had lost and whose supporters were claiming fraud with shoddy statistics.
  - vectorpush 10y ago
    While I agree with you that the democrats are wrong to be pushing this type of conspiracy stuff, I totally disagree that it wouldn't be "mainstreamed" if the tables were turned. Fox News is mainstream, Rush Limbaugh is mainstream; it's totally plausible to see this kind of nonsense being "mainstreamed" by the segments of the media that favor the narrative of the story.
- 10y ago

tn13 10y ago

This is BS.

rusbus 10y ago

I'm not sure what to think about this. It seems like overturning the result at this point could be even more destabilizing than a Trump presidency. Though ironically unfounded, it will look to a Trump support like the election truly was rigged.

Dagwoodie 10y ago
Without California, Hillary loses the Popular vote as well. California 'single' handedly gave it to her. Some already think it was the Illegal-Alien vote that gave that to her in the first place.
- lostcolony 10y ago
  I don't understand how that is relevant. She could have lost (to pick a blue state at random) Vermont and still held the popular vote. What you're saying is that by removing the most populous blue state, she'd lose the popular vote. How is that relevant? States are arbitrary boundaries; we could slice and dice California up into 55 states, giving each one an electoral vote. Now we could remove any one of those and she'd still maintain the popular vote. We're allowing an arbitrary division determine our president, rather than a somewhat less arbitrary "majority of voters". But all -that- aside, the parent comment was referencing the OP. Literally nothing was said about the popular vote; the OP is about possible voting irregularities in some of the swing states that might lead to Hillary also clinching the electoral college majority (and the parent comment was saying how they're not very happy with the prospect of a recount).
  - Dagwoodie 10y ago
    I was simply pointing out how unlikely it is to change anything at this point (Look at WI, MI, PA), and if there is a change it will likely result in civil disturbances if anything at all.
  - alphapapa 10y ago
    Do you think that there's anything to the idea of compartmentalization? For example, suppose people in one area were so homogeneous in circumstances and concerns that they were of universally the same political opinion. By pandering to that one area, a candidate could win a large number of votes. In contrast, to win votes all across the country, a candidate would need to have wider appeal, taking into account the concerns of the wider population. It seems like the electoral college helps compartmentalize the votes, preventing an "overflow" of opinion in certain areas from outweighing the wider population's combined opinion.

flashman 10y ago

Various people are trying to explain the Wisconsin result, in which Trump-voting counties were three times more likely to have electronic voting than Clinton-voting counties. I made this image to illustrate: http://i.imgur.com/AZNr2Hd.png http://i.imgur.com/AZNr2Hd.png It's probably entirely explicable by demographic factors, but the difference is stark and certainly prompts curiosity.

entee 10y ago
Was that the case in previous elections? I.e. in 2012?
themgt 10y ago
That's really not a good way to graph the data. If you're rigging an election (within a state) you win by total votes, not how many counties are won. Showing which counties tipped one way or the other by voting machine type is far more likely to reflect demographic factors.
- flashman 10y ago
  It's a graph which explains why people are curious, not why the data looks that way, so it's fine. If you're rigging an election, you're going to rig electronic machines because it's easier than changing thousands of paper ballots. Therefore in a rigged election with a mix of paper and electronic voting, you would expect the electronic voting to favour the rigged candidate. Of course, on summary numbers this is indistinguishable from perfectly normal activity.
- rubyfan 10y ago
  The insinuation is that the disparity in voting methods could reflect tampering (for Trump or Clinton, depending on your party affiliation). I think there is actually robust statistical approaches to detecting irregularities and to normalize for demographic differences, etc. If anyone has a credible source for such a study, I'd suggest replacing the original link, which offers no evidence, statistical or otherwise.

zw123456 10y ago

I was wondering when we would finally see this, when I first saw the numbers a couple of weeks ago what I saw was pretty obvious evidence. I think I an election of this magnitude it makes sense to have everything thoroughly audited.

rdtsc 10y ago
> hen I first saw the numbers a couple of weeks ago what I saw was pretty obvious evidence. I was surprised by the result as well. But curious what did you see as obvious evidence?

wallace_f 10y ago

Is there a practical method to make the voting process transparent to audit yet able to maintain individual privacy? Ideally the people should be able to audit the process.

umanwizard 10y ago
What's wrong with normal paper ballots?
- wallace_f 10y ago
  Conceivably there could still be fraud in counting the ballots.
  - alphapapa 10y ago
    It's a lot harder to commit fraud when there's physical evidence that anyone can recount, and the counting is done in a public place observed by a variety of people, and the ballots cannot so easily be tampered with without leaving physical evidence. With computers, even if you bring in a certified, gold-master CD containing the software under armed guard, it's still a black box. There's no way to conclusively prove that the machine counts accurately and fairly. Tampering can be done without a trace. Compromise is always a concern. Paper is always the best choice. Who cares if it takes longer to count.
    - wallace_f 10y ago
      Ok, I was just asking a question. I haven't thought about it enough, but it does sound like paper is better than what we have at the moment. I don't disagree with you there. If there's a possible way the process can be audited by the public without sacrificing privacy, that should be implemented.

meowface 10y ago

Even though this is probably politically motivated, Trump supporters were calling for such things before the election, so most of them can't really complain.

pfarnsworth 10y ago

When will people realize that Change.org is absolutely and completely useless?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

slicktux 10y ago

If people are this paranoid now, while this country is a democratic republic, then just imagine how bad it will get when they have it their way and all of the U.S becomes a Democracy. . . http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ there is a reasons as to why our founding fathers made this country a Democratic Republic rather than a Democracy. . .

colechristensen 10y ago
Not quite what those words mean – a president elected with a national popular vote would still very much be a democratic republic. The "democratic" adjective adds weight to how representative government will be elected amongst the population, "democratic republic" doesn't imply something like a electoral college. And nobody is really advocating for a direct Athenian-style democracy in the US (I'm sure _someone_ is but that's not this) and removing the electoral college would make us quite a bit more like the rest of the free world.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- slicktux 10y ago
  Okay, what then is the purpose, or benefits, of our vote counting for president elections and when does it stop being a democratic republic and instead a democracy?
  - colechristensen 10y ago
    The benefits of a national popular election for president are getting rid of the silly game built up around winning the electoral college. People say that the electoral college means less populated states get a say ... but (for example) Trump came to my state of 5.5 million exactly once for a public event and didn't even leave the airport. A national popular vote would mean that Florida and Ohio don't get a disproportional advantage and also that winning the presidency doesn't require you to be good at playing the electoral college or district drawing game. It means that every vote counts a little bit more and that wherever a candidate goes they can make a difference for their final vote count. I'm not really sure that if (literally) Hitler won the electoral college vote that the electors would go against their district's election so we're left with deciding which game is better to play – the popular vote game or the electoral college game. I think the electoral vote game could reduce the divisiveness of elections and lead candidates to really find and fight for the middle of the political spectrum. Maybe some game theorists have real science behind the effects of the different strategies. It stops being a republic when most of the ruling decisions are put directly to the populace. Go to war with Canada? National popular vote. Legalize catnip? National popular vote. National budget? National Popular vote. Ratify a treaty? National popular vote. Vim or Emacs? Vim. Places like California with their multitude of referendums approach this but are still very far away from removing the republic moniker.

icomefromreddit 10y ago

/r/conspiratard

myf01d 10y ago

We live in a post-democracy world, the people should choose whatever the elites tell them to, or the outcome gets changed if it's the not the right answer (Brexit, Austria, Trump, Le Pen?).

mch82 10y ago
Who are the "elites" you're referencing?

rubyfan 10y ago

The fact that a statistician suggests an audit leads one to believe there is some evidence or statistical insight here. However there doesn't seem to be any evidence base, rather a good old "let's just check just in case some bad guys did something bad!" I will say it again, "hackers" are the boogie man and worse yet state actors offer any political group an easy way out of having to offer any evidence to cast doubt or dispersion against anything counter to their worldview or agenda.

karmelapple 10y ago
https://mobile.twitter.com/LatishaOrtiz54/status/800794295515000832 https://mobile.twitter.com/LatishaOrtiz54/status/80079429551... https://mobile.twitter.com/LatishaOrtiz54/status/800795235055910913 https://mobile.twitter.com/LatishaOrtiz54/status/80079523505... These were part of the Berkeley team's rationale for asking for investigation. I have not independently verified this claim yet.
- rubyfan 10y ago
  While interesting and warrants a good second look, this isn't evidence of hacking (Russian or otherwise). To attribute or speculate that the Russians somehow hacked voting machines and caused this is a stretch too far.
wu-ikkyu 10y ago
>"hackers" are the boogie man While there is a great deal of misinformation and ignorance in the media regarding info sec, labeling hackers as "boogie men" is irresponsible because it implies the threat is not real.
- rubyfan 10y ago
  That's the problem, it is a threat that is plausible but without statistical or forensic evidence it is F.U.D.
  - wu-ikkyu 10y ago

ChicagoBoy11 10y ago

About half a year ago a paper was posted here on HN about research which conclusively demonstrated vote manipulation in several provinces in Russia: https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.6059 https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.6059 The technique essentially uses the non-random distribution of round numbers in vote counts as indication that some sort of manipulation has taken place. At the very least, it would seem prudent (or perhaps a fun project for someone) to check if election returns in this past election pass this test.

mzw_mzw 10y ago

Weird. I distinctly recall that a few weeks ago refusing to accept the results of an election was treason. Lots of people saying that, including here on HN. What changed, I wonder?

baconner 10y ago
There's a bit of a difference between saying in advance that you won't accept the results "Unless I win" and asking for a recount with some evidence of potential irregularities in hand after the election is concluded. It wasn't wrong of Gore to push for a recount in 2000 within the bounds of the law so long as when that process was complete he conceded, asked his supporters to let it go, and let the country get back to business.

known 10y ago

https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/ https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/ is doing it

blondie9x 10y ago

Here is the change.org petition we can all sign to make a difference: https://www.change.org/p/demand-an-audit-of-the-2016-presidential-election https://www.change.org/p/demand-an-audit-of-the-2016-preside... Every vote should count correctly.

snowwrestler 10y ago

The challenge when considering a small anomaly is to explain how the hackers could have known in advance it would be sufficient to tip the election. Today, we know the vote totals, so we can look back and say "wow, it's a small effect, but it would have been enough to tip things the other way." But hackers working on Nov 8 would have had no idea how the vote was going in real time. No one does, especially in a state that uses paper ballots for some counties. The vote count only becomes apparent much later. So how would the hackers, who were obviously highly motivated to achieve their desired result, decide that a 7% tweak in a few counties would be enough to get what they wanted? When they wanted it so badly that they're willing to commit felonies to get it?

xamuel 10y ago
If we want to make these kind of audits part of the process, we need to put the statisticians in an isolated environment before the election. Tell them Candidate A won by X% in such-and-such counties, but don't tell them who A is. Any other way, it's kids crying about the rules after losing Monopoly.
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  I would much prefer to standardize on paper ballots, and then we would not have to mess around with statistical analysis and audits of software code. I think votes should be recorded in a way that any set of adults could easily check for themselves with minimal tools.
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    Replying to myself to offer more info: https://medium.com/@jhalderm/want-to-know-if-the-election-was-hacked-look-at-the-ballots-c61a6113b0ba#.p4hzdojxx https://medium.com/@jhalderm/want-to-know-if-the-election-wa... Apparently WI does use paper ballots, but they are not checked at all unless a recount is called. Which is ridiculous.
csydas 10y ago
As a preface, I do not have enough information from the article to form a strong opinion on whether or not any misconduct or alteration occurred with the vote, so attempting to comment in a non-partisan fashion. But to respond to your post, I don't actually think that based on the premise of the article and the accusation that exceptional foresight is really necessary on the part of potential hackers/manipulators like you're suggesting. There is ample historical data for virtually every county in the United States as to which way the vote will go, and once the dataset is loaded, it would be pretty trivial to figure out which districts need someone to press on the scale a little in favor of one side or another. State-wide, certain states have swung back and forth from red to blue, but county to county, the changes are much more predictable. Combine this that you're looking at a handful of states and not nation wide, and it seems a bit more possible. I want to reiterate I'm not making an accusation, but assuming there was a mechanism that "hackers" could use to influence the results, the scope and foresight necessary is easily attainable in common datasets online, with historical data going back pretty far.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

Hmm, why no call for audit in 2008 or 2012? Can the fact that a Democrat won have something to do with this?

ejstronge 10y ago
> Hmm, why no call for audit in 2008 or 2012? Can the fact that a Democrat won have something to do with this? It could also be due to the fact that a Democrat clearly won both the Electoral College and the popular vote by a wide margin.
pbstark 10y ago
The methods were tried in various contest from 2008 on, but not on the presidential election in 2008 or 2012 because we could not get all the local election officials in any state to do it. Believe me, I tried to get states to do it. This time, there might be the political will.

jaypaulynice 10y ago

I don't know much about the election machines, but is there any reason for them to be connected to the WWW? If they're not connected to the WWW, then only someone with physical access to the machines could hack them...right? What's the likelihood of that?

brbsix 10y ago
Presumably components of the hardware or software could be compromised somewhere upstream by nation-state actors like the CIA and NSA's TAO. It's not as if Iran's nuclear facilities were connected to the Internet and that didn't exactly keep their centrifuges safe.
- jaypaulynice 10y ago
  Right...definitely possible, but this would have to be extremely well coordinated. Chances are each state/city has different machines/hardware/software, different order of candidates on the ballots, etc...so for a random hacker to hack the results would be only if the machines are connected to the internet...I'm hoping they're not!
pbstark 10y ago
Most voting machines are connected to the Internet or to a machine that has been connected to the Internet in some point in the lifecycle of an election. But even absent hacking, there are sometimes configuration errors (e.g., swapping candidates or contests) that don't get detected in pre-election testing, procedural or equipment failures that result in not scanning some ballots or scanning some more than once, etc.

shuri 10y ago

It would be good to get more transparency into the process. Basically, I'm thinking a giant anonymized excel sheet. I can generate my anonymous id and verify that I appear correctly. That's one part. The other parts are making sure only real people voted (harder) and that the counting was done correctly (easier).

RcouF1uZ4gsC 10y ago

These statisticians knew about these issues before hand. It would have been a lot more believable if they had talked about these audits before the election, when everybody and their brother was blasting Trump for saying that the election could be rigged. Talking about them afterward just makes them seem like they have an agenda.

pbstark 10y ago
We have been calling for audits for more than a decade. I've piloted these audits in about 20 counties, published the methods and results in peer-reviewed journals, worked with local and state election officials to make them logistically efficient and to draft laws, etc. But this is the first election in a decade in which there seems to be the political will to do what we should do after every election: double-check the paper to ensure that errors, bugs, misconfiguration, or outright hacking did not alter the outcome.

dmfdmf 10y ago

This is just the Dems casting doubt on the legitimacy of Trump's presidency because they can't believe it. The converse on the Reps side was casting doubt on the legitimacy of Obama via the birth certificate. The breathless articles in the MSM pointing out that Clinton got the majority vote are driven by the same psychological motives and just as irrelevant (i.e. the president isn't elected by popular vote). To be clear I am not saying that the Dems (nor the Reps) are intentionally casting doubt as a planned strategy but that that is the normal psychological reaction when something bad or impossible has happened to you it is normal to look for a "rational" explanation. Once the left gets through the 4 or 6 stages (whatever those are) of grief I am hopeful that they will be a fine opposition party to Trump's buffoonery and the nation will carry on.

whybroke 10y ago
On what grounds do you assume these statisticians are Democrats? If the fact that they want to do a statistical study is the sole proof of their political alignment and then any request to do an analysis by someone of that political asking is invalid, I would suggest there is a serious logical problem.
AbrahamParangi 10y ago
While I agree that Trump's election being illegitimate is a narrative many (on the left) want to hear, I disagree with your characterization of the popular vote as irrelevant. I think most Americans consider the electoral college a funny historical quirk and 'getting more votes' is the source of the mandate to rule. Except when popular vote splits happen in which case everyone remembers that we've got a bizarre system that very, very occasionally returns a different result than the popular vote. Although, who knows. Of the 5 popular/electoral splits that have ever happened, 2 happened in the past 16 years. Maybe shifting demographics will preserve republican electoral competitiveness even if their fraction of the total vote shrinks.
- dmfdmf 10y ago
  It is irrelevant in two ways. First, the constitution stipulates election via the Electoral College, not the popular vote, so until that changes the point is moot. Second, if the EC was abolished before the election then BOTH campaigns would have run completely different strategies. The current tallies are not relevant to a direct popular vote outcome so its impossible to say under that scenario who would have won. Its pure speculation to assume Clinton would have won under different rules and thus irrelevant.

prostoalex 10y ago

Not completely out of the question as Russian forces did attempt a dry run of election disruption in Ukraine, as cheerfully boasted by pro-Russian rt.com here https://www.rt.com/news/161332-ukraine-president-election-virus/ https://www.rt.com/news/161332-ukraine-president-election-vi... There's not a lot of public information available on technicalities of voting, but would be interesting to dig deeper on who controls the voting machines, how are they checked for malware, who controls the links from the machines to the local severs, how's the data transferred between the local and regional electoral commissions, what's the feasibility of having a third party covertly inserting proxy servers into the process, etc.

boards2x 10y ago

Probably the least you can do before you let your country commit public suicide, and put in the White House a neo Nazi in make America great again clothing.

baytrailcat 10y ago

Reading these comments, I am having a serious Deja Vu. This exact discussion took place in Slashdot after 2004 re-election of Bush (a study pointing out anomalies came out then too).

awqrre 10y ago

Hopefully, if they do that, they don't only audit electronic votes, but also all paper ballots (make sure that all ballots are legit (ie: if someone didn't vote, someone else didn't cast a vote for them) and no ballots disappeared)