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US election system reveals frightening vulnerabilities at almost every level

183 points by throwaway2048 8y ago

TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
Paper ballots are the superior method of voting. It makes it nigh impossible to cheat at a large scale and there's a paper trail verified by multiple adversarial parties. It's also way more reliable due to the sheer simplicity of the system. For a system as important as our elections we should take every precaution possible. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I don't even trust mail-in ballots. I'm perfectly content to fill out my ballot ahead of time and hand-deliver it on election day. I think it should also be a requirement to show a state or federal ID before you can cast your vote. I'm always floored when people try to defend voting without requiring any kind of identity verification. In Puerto Rico you're required to register ahead of time for a voter ID and you must present it in order to vote. If Puerto Rico, which is drastically poorer than all 50 states, can pull this off without it being considered a problem then I find it really hard to take seriously the claims of people saying it sets too high of a bar.
- unethical_ban 8y ago
  I respect the idea that paper is "unhackable" and that decentralized voting counts are less vulnerable to attack. I've been thinking alot about Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) and how to do an instant runoff with paper ballots at scale, notably for something like President. I suppose it's unlikely to occur, but in the instance of a national popular vote for president that results in a runoff, it is worth the extra time to go back through and count. After all, TV entertainment aside, there is no need to have results in same-day.
  - daphneokeefe 8y ago
    I am a pollworker in San Francisco, and I can tell you from personal experience with thousands of voters that Ranked-Choice Voting is widely misunderstood. The common refrain is: I only want to vote for this one candidate, and not for anyone else. In a hotly-contested election, they absolutely do not want to vote for the other guy as #2.
    - unethical_ban 8y ago
      An interesting take, thank you. I wonder which would be more complex to explain: That is is easier to just rank the candidates and each "non-primary" vote only counts in a runoff? Or Do "optional" voting, and explain that if their #1 candidate gets eliminated, their voice will no longer count?
    - ikfmpwdsoz 8y ago
      How hard is it to explain to people that their vote only goes to #2 if #1 is already out of the running?
      - daphneokeefe 8y ago
        Well, you only get an opportunity to explain something when they ask.
      - baddox 8y ago
        It’s a challenge when people have only ever been exposed to first-past-the-post voting systems their entire life. And besides, it’s really not fair to assume that voting systems are simple to understand. Just have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...
        unethical_ban 8y ago
        I don't know why you're downvoted, but as someone advocating for RCV, I think that the "instant runoff" method is about as easy as it can get, next to the FPTP we use today. I agree there are other methods that are better by the book than the IRV method, but are exercises in statistics and graph theory.
    - mikelward 8y ago
      Then make it optional preferential voting. You can number as many boxes as you want. It works that way in New South Wales. Apparently in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Malta, too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_preferential_voting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_preferential_voting
- kimmeld 8y ago
  Past history of voter ID is mostly intended to lower voter turnout especially among certain groups of people. Historically it's not really about detecting fraud. I find it hard to take people seriously who think it's really about fraud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_State...
- adjkant 8y ago
  > I think it should also be a requirement to show a state or federal ID before you can cast your vote. I'm always floored when people try to defend voting without requiring any kind of identity verification. In Puerto Rico you're required to register ahead of time for a voter ID and you must present it in order to vote. If Puerto Rico, which is drastically poorer than all 50 states, can pull this off without it being considered a problem then I find it really hard to take seriously the claims of people saying it sets too high of a bar. The problem is that the state and federal ID system is so fucked up that it disenfranchises voters. Until that system is fixed, you can't use it for voting. This issue then becomes a partisan one because voter fraud is so rare that it doesn't seem to need any additions, so strong pushes for voter ID laws (which almost never address the issue of the ID systems) are targeting those who are less likely to have ID, which tends to be concentrated with voting for one party. If anyone actually cared about voter ID laws for non-partisan reasons, it would go hand in hand with a national ID system.
  - stouset 8y ago
    The same proponents of stronger voter ID laws are also the same people who are incomprehensibly paranoid about the notion of a national ID system.
    - Mountain_Skies 8y ago
      Is that really so weird? All elections are essentially state elections. Even the presidency is really a state level election due to the way the electoral college works. There is no nationwide election so why would there need to be a nationwide ID system for voting? I'm in favor of requiring a photo id to vote but am well aware of the problems some have in obtaining such an id. That's the problem that needs to be corrected. It does need to be corrected first and we shouldn't just shrug our shoulders and go back to things the way they've been. Everyone should have easy access to a state endorsed identification card. It's an essential function of government and interaction with citizens. As such it should be funded by general taxation rather than a user fee. A state issued identification card is used for so much more than just authorization for driving a vehicle. Why is it in the hands of the DMV/DDS in most if not every state? Even the non-driver identification cards issued to those who don't drive are usually still issued by DMV/DDS. It's an odd system that wouldn't be designed as it is now if we were designing from scratch but we're use to it because that's how it evolved over time.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Sure, require ID; but it must be freely available and easily accessible, and states which end up with different ID takeup rates for different races should be prosecuted.
  - Muromec 8y ago
    Can you please explain for non-americans what's the actual problem with havinf ID in US? Is it like most people only have driver license and ones who don't have a car (because they are poor) don't need one or it's more complicated? Where I'm from everybody is required by law to have one from the age of 14 and gets it for free for the first time. You just can't have anything done without id and tax identification code, so voting is just another place to show it. It's not even about technologies - my is handwritten with photo being glued on it.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      Americans have a historical paranoia about the government tracking its citizens. I don't think it's entirely unjustifiable, but clearly, that ship has sailed a long time ago. At this point, the federal government already has so much information on the citizens, it could effectively implement a national ID scheme (and pretty much everyone will admit to that if you phrase the question right). So the remaining opposition is more symbolical than anything - accepting a national ID would be acquiescing to this state of affairs, while rejecting it allows to maintain the pretense that all the massive data-gathering operations (from IRS and Social Security, to DHS and NSA) are somehow fundamentally different. In practice, this just means extreme inefficiency whenever you have to deal with the government. I would dare say that citizens actually suffer a lot more from it than the government does (the government can always hire more bureaucrats to maintain and synchronize more databases).
      - burfog 8y ago
        Providing a secure national ID would do much more than just stop most kinds of voter fraud. It would stop identity theft. Stopping identity theft would reduce the cost of banking, including all kinds of credit, bringing consumer interest rates closer to non-consumer ones. Stopping identity theft would quickly cause the arrest of most fugitives, both immigration-related and otherwise. Stopping identity theft would reduce medical errors; today your treatment can be affected by an identity thief. (the doctors think you have drug-seeking behavior, a genetic condition, a disease, or issues with violence toward hospital staff... and this changes how they treat you)
- cmurf 8y ago
  There's essentially no one saying there should be no identity verification, just like there's no meaningful voter impersonation fraud. The complaint is the fairness of the burden to obtain acceptable ID, for voting. In Alabama, over a dozen driver's license office closures mean people in overwhelmingly black counties had a vastly high burden to obtain ID than people living in predominately white counties. There are all kinds of examples and variations on this theme. It's hardly any different than poll taxes, and literacy tests. They're just as blatantly racist as how photo ID rules are employed. Using your logic of Puerto Rico, since the vast majority of the U.S. went without photo ID's for voting for over 200 years with no statistically meaningful voter fraud problems, we don't need such laws today either. Meanwhile a recent case in Texas, a non-citizen with stolen photo ID had been illegally voting in elections, which means photo ID's do not assure there's no fraud. Anyway, people have a right to vote. It is not a privilege. And therefore the state cannot apply unreasonable burdens on people, which only serve to disenfranchise them from their right to vote.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    > Anyway, people have a right to vote. It is not a privilege. Actually, in US, it is a privilege. Look up the Constitution - the original one doesn't define any right to vote at all (which was a necessary component of the 3/5th Compromise); all it says is that the states must have a "republican form of government". And all subsequent amendments specify what can't be used as a basis to deny the right to vote. Aside from the ones that did so explicitly, there's also the catch-all Equal Protection Clause - but even that does not amount to a full-on acknowledgement that voting is a basic right of any American citizen. This is why the states can e.g. deny the right to vote to felons - some doing so for the rest of their lives, and without any ability to reinstate it. And why all challenges to voter suppression have to be coached in anti-discrimination language (i.e. that they deny the right to vote to some protected minority specifically, as opposed to a generic right to vote). It's a very unfortunate state of affairs, and we desperately need a constitutional amendment that instates the right to vote as one of the fundamental rights of a citizen.
    - cmurf 8y ago
      I disagree with your interpretation. This is a more compelling argument: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/09/voting-right-or-privilege/262511/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/09/voting-...
- SubiculumCode 8y ago
  I dont trust mail in ballots because of the potemtial for spousal intimidation and fraud.
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    Oregon has had 100% vote by mail for 20 years. I would think that if this was a major problem it would have shown up by now.
    - SubiculumCode 8y ago
      And how would you detect it?
- daphneokeefe 8y ago
  In order to have an impact on election results, wouldn't you need a very large number of people without ID's standing in line all day long, for hours, to vote multiple times at different precincts? And they would have to give a valid name of a registered voter who had not showed up yet, or the pollworkers would realize that the same person was trying to vote twice. Or you could only impersonate voters who voted by mail (thereby voting twice in the same name). Sure, you can come up with examples where a very small number of votes determined an election outcome. But for the vast majority of important contests -- and especially for state and federal level -- it does not seem feasible to round up enough thousands of people to cast enough fraudulent ballots to affect the election outcome.
- fabian2k 8y ago
  In Germany you get a letter with an invitation to vote automatically for every election. This is based on the general resident registry, and you're required to register when you move. To vote you simply have to bring that letter with you, and then you usually don't need to show any ID. The election officers can still ask you for it if there is any doubt about your identity. Just before you enter your ballot your name is checked against the voter registry and crossed out from it. Of course that still leaves a bit of fraud potential, but not really on any scale that would affect the election. You'd still need to forge the letter and know the personal details of a voter that won't vote themselves.
- matthewmacleod 8y ago
  I think it should also be a requirement to show a state or federal ID before you can cast your vote. I’d be interested to know why though. Is it a problem in the US? In the UK at least, no ID is required and there is virtually no voter fraud. Is it really the case that the cost (disenfranchising groups with lower rates of access to photographic ID) is worth it to solve an issue that might not even exist?
  - baddox 8y ago
    There is virtually no voter fraud (that would be solved by Id requirements) in the United States either. Every study I have seen shows on the order of dozens per year in the entire country, and many of those are probably accidental. And if you think about it, it’s pretty clear that in-person voter fraud is already difficult and risky enough in the US that it’s really not a scalable election manipulation strategy.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Paper ballots are the superior method of voting Based on first-hand experience, Al Gore disagrees.
  - taejo 8y ago
    Fine, then pen and paper ballots.
- femto 8y ago
  In Australia's case there is little need for presenting ID. An Australian polling booth has a copy of the electoral roll, with names and addresses (homeless people can enroll with name only). This roll is marked when you vote, and then the roll is analysed afterwards. Attempting to stuff the ballot box by impersonating someone will show up as duplicate marks on the roll. You won't get far with impersonating random people as voting is compulsory in most elections so duplicates will quickly happen. You could vote twice if guaranteed in advance that someone wasn't going to vote, but at best you will get only a small number of extra votes that way. The aim with an election isn't necessarily to outright prevent cheating, but to prevent undetected cheating. Hence why ID isn't so crucial (at least in Australia).
1024core 8y ago
Democrats have been complaining about this for decades, but what did they do when they got majorities in 2008? Absolutely nothing. Like a lot of other things, I feel like Democrats like to keep these issues around as a rallying cause, instead of fixing them. Edit: I'll just address some of the comments here. This is not "partisan sniping", and I write this as a former Obama volunteer and a lifelong Democrat. Second: the federal government can do something. Here's an idea: give a $100M grant to 5 major universities to develop an open-source (hardware and software) alternative to the current system, and make a FIPS standard out of it. Then, certify vendors who implement that standard. The states can then buy systems from those vendors.
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  Vox is just trying to delegitimize the election ahead of a potential loss. They did the same thing for the Supreme Court. Textbook fearmongering.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - code_duck 8y ago
    Is that your response to the gigantic list of legitimate concerns about our Swiss-cheese election system... it’s all a conspiracy by the media?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - narinek 8y ago
      If they win they won't complain but if they lose they'll say the election was hacked because of the machines. He's not delegitimising the concerns about the machines, which are evident. He's delegitimising the way journalists are bitching about it. (I don't follow the American election so I don't know who will win.)
theseadroid 8y ago
Isn't election systems the best candidate for open sourcing? So that anyone with technical knowledge can independently verify the security and correctness. I wish every piece of civilian software funded by gov is open sourced. And why shouldn't they be?
- gsich 8y ago
  Yes. But verifying the source code doesn't guarantee anything, as you don't know what is actually running on the machine.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    BINGO! Validating source code does nothing. Even setting aside the fact that firmware and hardware level exploits could be running in any given voting machine, what guarantee do we have that the code in the repository is the code actually running on the machine at the app layer? Or, if you're REALLY security minded like myself, what guarantee do we have that the compiler and build environment didn't slip something in? (I guess that borders more on "paranoid" than "security minded", but you get the idea.)
  - tomrod 8y ago
    Unless you specify open testing protocols that also test for cheating (like VW emissions). It shouldn't be this hard to vote and to trust a certified outcome. Regulators require businesses to run with specified parameters, why do elections get off the hook?
    - DennisP 8y ago
      It's not hard, if you use paper ballots and well-established protocols for securing elections. On the other hand, if you use electronic machines without paper backup, it's basically impossible.
      - gsich 8y ago
        Then why do electronic machines in the first place?
thewhitetulip 8y ago
I'm from India and every ejection since 1950s has been called rigged by the Opposition. The party which is in power now, has written a book on EVM tampering and the party which was in power for most of the time have rubbished EvM tampering. Now that roles have reversed, so have their claims. Coming to the point, isn't US using paperballots? All the papers in my nation say US holds elections via paperballots and not EVMs. And why the heck do EVMs exist? Who verifies if they are fine or not? We know very well abouhow elections are rigged in third world dictatorships. There needs to be a standard.
- jakelazaroff 8y ago
  > Coming to the point, isn't US using paperballots? Not everywhere, no: https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_state https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
- monocasa 8y ago
  > Coming to the point, isn't US using paperballots? All the papers in my nation say US holds elections via paperballots and not EVMs. It's different on a per state/municipality basis. Some are paper, some are EVM. We're trending towards EVM despite warnings from computer security researchers.
  - thewhitetulip 8y ago
    EVMs with a verifiable paper trail should help. We have VVPats in India where we get receipts after voting. Plus Election Commission does/can do a random audit on constituencies.
- mikeash 8y ago
  I don’t think I’ve seen a paper ballot since I voted absentee in 2004. Why do electronic machines exist? The charitable interpretation is that they were chosen in the aftermath of the disastrous 2000 election because they remove ambiguity and error. The less charitable interpretation is that they’re used because they’re easier to screw with. Who verifies them? Mostly the companies who make them.
m3kw9 8y ago
Every election is rigged according to the loser, or the non-incumbent
- m3kw9 8y ago
  Another point is that there is not just ballot rigging, there is other types of rigging going on at the social level too.
- monocasa 8y ago
  Trump started a voting security investigation, saying the voting system was rigged. He also won.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    He started that narrative because he wanted to be a Fox News pundit after losing the election, selling the idea of a rigged election to bask in the attention and fuel his Hillary bashing. Winning ruined that plan.
- mikeash 8y ago
  That’s not even remotely true. Election results in the US are almost always accepted by both sides. When Trump indicated that he would reject the result of the 2016 election if he lost, that was unprecedented.
jcrawfordor 8y ago
My county of over 600k people has a Bureau of Elections staff of five, and none of them are really technical people, they just do basic work on the machines and train the temp staff hired for elections. They rely on a contractor to handle just about every aspect of the technology, including the pollbook system, and that company is a larger operation but still the kind of operation where I've heard the elections staff getting on the phone with them to have them restart a service that had gone sluggish. Some amount of support is provided by the secretary of state, but the SoS elections office is also very small, and even the state's department of IT doesn't have a meaningful security department. I honestly think that the election system in the United States is simply too decentralized. Counties, even larger ones like mine, struggle to afford to hire a staff or retain contractors that have any kind of serious security expertise - or even expertise in reliable services. The federal elections commission was created to address some of these problems by providing centralized resources to states and counties, but it hasn't gone nearly far enough in my opinion. I have a had time imagining a way to make a serious improvement here without moving just about the entire platform for voting systems under the federal government.
- bo1024 8y ago
  I agree to some extent, but paper ballots seem to solve a lot of these expertise problems (in addition to all the security and reliability ones).
  - jcrawfordor 8y ago
    Counties cannot afford to hand-tally paper ballots for the same reasons they can't afford to hire security expertise.
- ISL 8y ago
  The decentralization of the United States is, in my opinion, a feature, not a bug. The upside inherent in fifty parallel and bespoke experiments in government is worth the extra complexity and cost. Ideas are tried out, and can bubble outward and upward if they work. Bad ideas directly impact only ~2% of the country. Furthermore, having state and local control over elections has a direct impact on legitimacy. I don't have to believe that someone in Washington DC is doing things right. Instead, I can interact directly with our state's secretary of state and our local county elections office. Decentralization with heterogeneous procedures makes election compromise a much greater logistical challenge for any nefarious actor. It is probably a lot easier to spend money on lobbying. Edit: Finally -- if you want your local/state elections infrastructure to have more resources, your voice and your vote are your tools.
mycall 8y ago
If the system is already so rigged and/or fragile, why don't we explore the blockchain world more? If people could get private/public keys into their hands, they could vote using these and no one can change it. They could vote at home or at poling places.
- mikeash 8y ago
  https://www.xkcd.com/2030/ https://www.xkcd.com/2030/ Why mess around with new technology when there are proven solutions that work? The problem with American voting systems isn’t a failure to embrace new technology, it’s a failure to spend a little more money to do things right, combined with people who don’t want a system that accurately gathers people’s votes.
- monocasa 8y ago
  Because voter coersion and vote buying attacks have historically been the largest attacks against the voting system. If you can prove your vote to yourself, you can prove your vote to someone else unless you get into complex zero knowledge proofs that the average voter can't understand (which opens it's can of worms).
  - int_19h 8y ago
    All it takes to prove a vote is a camera. Which practically everybody has in their pocket these days, even on the cheap $10 feature phones.
    - monocasa 8y ago
      OK, that isn't encoded into the voting system though.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  I work in the public sector of Scandinavia, where we’ve digitised voter registration to make queues more efficient but kept the actual voting part on paper. Overall there isn’t a reason to have voting machines, and if you do, they should really just print a piece of paper with your vote so that you can make sure it’s what you picked. You’ll sometimes hear finance and efficiency as a reason, but unless American licensing for government software/hardware is significantly different from every where else, it’ll always be cheaper to manually count the votes than to buy voting software/hardware. I mean, we digitised part of the process like I said, but we did it to make citizens wait less not because it was cheaper. It’s actually really expensive compared to doing manual voter registration, but we pay the money because no one likes queues. Blockchain isn’t really a suitable option. It could be, but in the real world it would never be truly decentralised because no government is ever going to trust that, and if it isn’t, it’s just as easy to change and manipulate as any other database structure. And you still wouldn’t know if the voting machine actually did what you told it to do. You can never vote from home in a democracy, because people might force you to vote a way you didn’t want to. I don’t really think groups would show up at your house to force you to do anything, but we frequently get husbands ask if they can vote for their wives, and if they could do that from home, no one would be there to stop them. I know we live in a time where we want to digitise everything, but the paper vote is probably the safest and most efficient way to run voting in a democracy.
whoisthemachine 8y ago
Where is our National Security Agency in all of this? Isn't their express goal the monitoring of foreign signals and the protection of US signals?
- mtgx 8y ago
  And didn't they promise the Cybersecurity Act of 2016 would help them - oh so much - in stopping these attacks and that it "was not another surveillance bill in disguise" ?
cletus 8y ago
At this point I'm really wondering what it will take before we accept the utter insanity that is electronic voting. Even if there isn't a major breach to the point where hostile actors (foreign or domestic) "steal" an election, the confidence in e-voting will inevitably be cast into doubt by the losing side at some point. Guaranteed. How do you audit or recount an anonymous electronic vote? How do you know if a vote cast is recorded as such? How do you know votes aren't wiped at some point? There are two basic options that work perfectly well: - Fill in a paper ballot with pen or pencil marking in spaces for the candidates you vote for. Have a machine verify your ballot. - Vote on a touch screen. Once done print out your ballot and put it in a box. In either case you use some kind of paper that isn't impossible to counterfeit (that's basically an impossibility) but it should be hard enough such that it's nontrivial. That's it. That's all you need to do. Sure local actors can "lose" ballots, ball stuf and so forth but this all has to be done on a pretty local level. You get rid of any potential vectors like a Russian or Chinese state agency changing the result from the other side of the planet because someone forgot to update OpenSSL on one Linux server or someone clicked on a phishing link on an innocuous looking email. Apparently we didn't learn our lessons from unreliable voting methods in 2000 (pregnant chad, anyone?) so I'm not super-hopeful.
ashleyn 8y ago
I was floored when I read the responses to malfunctioning equipment in Texas. "Voters are moving too quickly through the pages." That is a BUG! not user error in the slightest.
- wizzard 8y ago
  Right? "Voters need to wait until all the choices have populated before making a selection." Absolute BS. Software design 101.
- drb91 8y ago
  I wonder if this would count as fraud.
djohnston 8y ago
This goes back to the whole, “hacking the election” 2016 fiasco. Why are we talking about these potential flaws more than the glaring flaw that adversaries already exploited, that of a relatively dumb populous easily manipulated via social media? There’s already a 0 day we don’t know how to patch, our adversaries don’t need to invest in complex cyber attacks when they can achieve the same end via free broadcasting platforms.
stretchwithme 8y ago
It's a winner-take-all electoral system. I'm not getting my interests represented anyway. So not exactly sure why I should be upset about the accuracy with which I being denied that. Sure it's not good. But it is just an enhancement of a greater wrong. I find most people don't want to deal with that issue at all and would prefer to believe the current system, as it is supposed to work, is the best way to do things. It's a good system for those who are currently able to exploit it for their own gain. But that's always true everywhere.
perpetualcrayon 8y ago
I think it's probably still a little too far outside most peoples' comfort zone, but I think the future of voting will be 100% electronic with the capability of being instantly recallable. The voting system will allow me to see exactly how my vote was tallied after the fact. From what I have read this is not desirable for the fact that people will more easily be able to sell their vote because they can prove to their "buyer" how they voted. I think from a big-picture perspective this isn't a big deal. The reason is it would be extremely easy to create sting operations on both ends of this transaction: (a) create a sting to find and prosecute people willing to sell their vote, and (b) create a sting to find and prosecute people attempting to buy votes. I'd prefer to move to a voting system where I can account for my vote after I've voted and put in place enforcement via these types of sting operations to prevent the inevitability of people attempting to buy / sell votes more frequently.
- 3pt14159 8y ago
  No the primary problem isn't selling votes. The primary problem is fabricating votes or people trying to destabilize an election by claiming they voted for someone else. If even 100 people come out and said their votes were changed what do we do? Re-run the election? Just use paper ballots. This isn't that hard.
  - perpetualcrayon 8y ago
    The way I look at it fabrication would be impossible if done right. 1) precinct has record of every eligible voter 2) voter can (via encrypted means) retrieve their vote so it's still "private", but the voter can view it after they've voted. So as long as (a) the precinct confirms only eligible voter records are counted and (b) each voter can confirm their vote counted how they intended then I can't see how fabrication comes into play. Granted this assumes the systems in place to onboard new voters is solid, but even if it's not breaches should in theory expose the weaknesses and make it possible for us to iterate toward an even more perfect system. By not exposing the core data it's kind of like "security through obscurity". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
  - 8y ago
8bitsrule 8y ago
I'd guess that it has had frightening vulnerabilities since it started. Ideals are hard to live up to ... for many.

183 points by throwaway2048 8y ago

Paper ballots are the superior method of voting. It makes it nigh impossible to cheat at a large scale and there's a paper trail verified by multiple adversarial parties. It's also way more reliable due to the sheer simplicity of the system. For a system as important as our elections we should take every precaution possible. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I don't even trust mail-in ballots. I'm perfectly content to fill out my ballot ahead of time and hand-deliver it on election day. I think it should also be a requirement to show a state or federal ID before you can cast your vote. I'm always floored when people try to defend voting without requiring any kind of identity verification. In Puerto Rico you're required to register ahead of time for a voter ID and you must present it in order to vote. If Puerto Rico, which is drastically poorer than all 50 states, can pull this off without it being considered a problem then I find it really hard to take seriously the claims of people saying it sets too high of a bar.

unethical_ban 8y ago
I respect the idea that paper is "unhackable" and that decentralized voting counts are less vulnerable to attack. I've been thinking alot about Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) and how to do an instant runoff with paper ballots at scale, notably for something like President. I suppose it's unlikely to occur, but in the instance of a national popular vote for president that results in a runoff, it is worth the extra time to go back through and count. After all, TV entertainment aside, there is no need to have results in same-day.
- daphneokeefe 8y ago
  I am a pollworker in San Francisco, and I can tell you from personal experience with thousands of voters that Ranked-Choice Voting is widely misunderstood. The common refrain is: I only want to vote for this one candidate, and not for anyone else. In a hotly-contested election, they absolutely do not want to vote for the other guy as #2.
  - unethical_ban 8y ago
    An interesting take, thank you. I wonder which would be more complex to explain: That is is easier to just rank the candidates and each "non-primary" vote only counts in a runoff? Or Do "optional" voting, and explain that if their #1 candidate gets eliminated, their voice will no longer count?
  - ikfmpwdsoz 8y ago
    How hard is it to explain to people that their vote only goes to #2 if #1 is already out of the running?
    - daphneokeefe 8y ago
      Well, you only get an opportunity to explain something when they ask.
    - baddox 8y ago
      It’s a challenge when people have only ever been exposed to first-past-the-post voting systems their entire life. And besides, it’s really not fair to assume that voting systems are simple to understand. Just have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...
      - unethical_ban 8y ago
        I don't know why you're downvoted, but as someone advocating for RCV, I think that the "instant runoff" method is about as easy as it can get, next to the FPTP we use today. I agree there are other methods that are better by the book than the IRV method, but are exercises in statistics and graph theory.
  - mikelward 8y ago
    Then make it optional preferential voting. You can number as many boxes as you want. It works that way in New South Wales. Apparently in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Malta, too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_preferential_voting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_preferential_voting
kimmeld 8y ago
Past history of voter ID is mostly intended to lower voter turnout especially among certain groups of people. Historically it's not really about detecting fraud. I find it hard to take people seriously who think it's really about fraud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_State...
adjkant 8y ago
> I think it should also be a requirement to show a state or federal ID before you can cast your vote. I'm always floored when people try to defend voting without requiring any kind of identity verification. In Puerto Rico you're required to register ahead of time for a voter ID and you must present it in order to vote. If Puerto Rico, which is drastically poorer than all 50 states, can pull this off without it being considered a problem then I find it really hard to take seriously the claims of people saying it sets too high of a bar. The problem is that the state and federal ID system is so fucked up that it disenfranchises voters. Until that system is fixed, you can't use it for voting. This issue then becomes a partisan one because voter fraud is so rare that it doesn't seem to need any additions, so strong pushes for voter ID laws (which almost never address the issue of the ID systems) are targeting those who are less likely to have ID, which tends to be concentrated with voting for one party. If anyone actually cared about voter ID laws for non-partisan reasons, it would go hand in hand with a national ID system.
- stouset 8y ago
  The same proponents of stronger voter ID laws are also the same people who are incomprehensibly paranoid about the notion of a national ID system.
  - Mountain_Skies 8y ago
    Is that really so weird? All elections are essentially state elections. Even the presidency is really a state level election due to the way the electoral college works. There is no nationwide election so why would there need to be a nationwide ID system for voting? I'm in favor of requiring a photo id to vote but am well aware of the problems some have in obtaining such an id. That's the problem that needs to be corrected. It does need to be corrected first and we shouldn't just shrug our shoulders and go back to things the way they've been. Everyone should have easy access to a state endorsed identification card. It's an essential function of government and interaction with citizens. As such it should be funded by general taxation rather than a user fee. A state issued identification card is used for so much more than just authorization for driving a vehicle. Why is it in the hands of the DMV/DDS in most if not every state? Even the non-driver identification cards issued to those who don't drive are usually still issued by DMV/DDS. It's an odd system that wouldn't be designed as it is now if we were designing from scratch but we're use to it because that's how it evolved over time.
pjc50 8y ago
Sure, require ID; but it must be freely available and easily accessible, and states which end up with different ID takeup rates for different races should be prosecuted.
- Muromec 8y ago
  Can you please explain for non-americans what's the actual problem with havinf ID in US? Is it like most people only have driver license and ones who don't have a car (because they are poor) don't need one or it's more complicated? Where I'm from everybody is required by law to have one from the age of 14 and gets it for free for the first time. You just can't have anything done without id and tax identification code, so voting is just another place to show it. It's not even about technologies - my is handwritten with photo being glued on it.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Americans have a historical paranoia about the government tracking its citizens. I don't think it's entirely unjustifiable, but clearly, that ship has sailed a long time ago. At this point, the federal government already has so much information on the citizens, it could effectively implement a national ID scheme (and pretty much everyone will admit to that if you phrase the question right). So the remaining opposition is more symbolical than anything - accepting a national ID would be acquiescing to this state of affairs, while rejecting it allows to maintain the pretense that all the massive data-gathering operations (from IRS and Social Security, to DHS and NSA) are somehow fundamentally different. In practice, this just means extreme inefficiency whenever you have to deal with the government. I would dare say that citizens actually suffer a lot more from it than the government does (the government can always hire more bureaucrats to maintain and synchronize more databases).
    - burfog 8y ago
      Providing a secure national ID would do much more than just stop most kinds of voter fraud. It would stop identity theft. Stopping identity theft would reduce the cost of banking, including all kinds of credit, bringing consumer interest rates closer to non-consumer ones. Stopping identity theft would quickly cause the arrest of most fugitives, both immigration-related and otherwise. Stopping identity theft would reduce medical errors; today your treatment can be affected by an identity thief. (the doctors think you have drug-seeking behavior, a genetic condition, a disease, or issues with violence toward hospital staff... and this changes how they treat you)
cmurf 8y ago
There's essentially no one saying there should be no identity verification, just like there's no meaningful voter impersonation fraud. The complaint is the fairness of the burden to obtain acceptable ID, for voting. In Alabama, over a dozen driver's license office closures mean people in overwhelmingly black counties had a vastly high burden to obtain ID than people living in predominately white counties. There are all kinds of examples and variations on this theme. It's hardly any different than poll taxes, and literacy tests. They're just as blatantly racist as how photo ID rules are employed. Using your logic of Puerto Rico, since the vast majority of the U.S. went without photo ID's for voting for over 200 years with no statistically meaningful voter fraud problems, we don't need such laws today either. Meanwhile a recent case in Texas, a non-citizen with stolen photo ID had been illegally voting in elections, which means photo ID's do not assure there's no fraud. Anyway, people have a right to vote. It is not a privilege. And therefore the state cannot apply unreasonable burdens on people, which only serve to disenfranchise them from their right to vote.
- int_19h 8y ago
  > Anyway, people have a right to vote. It is not a privilege. Actually, in US, it is a privilege. Look up the Constitution - the original one doesn't define any right to vote at all (which was a necessary component of the 3/5th Compromise); all it says is that the states must have a "republican form of government". And all subsequent amendments specify what can't be used as a basis to deny the right to vote. Aside from the ones that did so explicitly, there's also the catch-all Equal Protection Clause - but even that does not amount to a full-on acknowledgement that voting is a basic right of any American citizen. This is why the states can e.g. deny the right to vote to felons - some doing so for the rest of their lives, and without any ability to reinstate it. And why all challenges to voter suppression have to be coached in anti-discrimination language (i.e. that they deny the right to vote to some protected minority specifically, as opposed to a generic right to vote). It's a very unfortunate state of affairs, and we desperately need a constitutional amendment that instates the right to vote as one of the fundamental rights of a citizen.
  - cmurf 8y ago
    I disagree with your interpretation. This is a more compelling argument: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/09/voting-right-or-privilege/262511/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/09/voting-...
SubiculumCode 8y ago
I dont trust mail in ballots because of the potemtial for spousal intimidation and fraud.
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  Oregon has had 100% vote by mail for 20 years. I would think that if this was a major problem it would have shown up by now.
  - SubiculumCode 8y ago
    And how would you detect it?
daphneokeefe 8y ago
In order to have an impact on election results, wouldn't you need a very large number of people without ID's standing in line all day long, for hours, to vote multiple times at different precincts? And they would have to give a valid name of a registered voter who had not showed up yet, or the pollworkers would realize that the same person was trying to vote twice. Or you could only impersonate voters who voted by mail (thereby voting twice in the same name). Sure, you can come up with examples where a very small number of votes determined an election outcome. But for the vast majority of important contests -- and especially for state and federal level -- it does not seem feasible to round up enough thousands of people to cast enough fraudulent ballots to affect the election outcome.
fabian2k 8y ago
In Germany you get a letter with an invitation to vote automatically for every election. This is based on the general resident registry, and you're required to register when you move. To vote you simply have to bring that letter with you, and then you usually don't need to show any ID. The election officers can still ask you for it if there is any doubt about your identity. Just before you enter your ballot your name is checked against the voter registry and crossed out from it. Of course that still leaves a bit of fraud potential, but not really on any scale that would affect the election. You'd still need to forge the letter and know the personal details of a voter that won't vote themselves.
matthewmacleod 8y ago
I think it should also be a requirement to show a state or federal ID before you can cast your vote. I’d be interested to know why though. Is it a problem in the US? In the UK at least, no ID is required and there is virtually no voter fraud. Is it really the case that the cost (disenfranchising groups with lower rates of access to photographic ID) is worth it to solve an issue that might not even exist?
- baddox 8y ago
  There is virtually no voter fraud (that would be solved by Id requirements) in the United States either. Every study I have seen shows on the order of dozens per year in the entire country, and many of those are probably accidental. And if you think about it, it’s pretty clear that in-person voter fraud is already difficult and risky enough in the US that it’s really not a scalable election manipulation strategy.
reaperducer 8y ago
Paper ballots are the superior method of voting Based on first-hand experience, Al Gore disagrees.
- taejo 8y ago
  Fine, then pen and paper ballots.
femto 8y ago
In Australia's case there is little need for presenting ID. An Australian polling booth has a copy of the electoral roll, with names and addresses (homeless people can enroll with name only). This roll is marked when you vote, and then the roll is analysed afterwards. Attempting to stuff the ballot box by impersonating someone will show up as duplicate marks on the roll. You won't get far with impersonating random people as voting is compulsory in most elections so duplicates will quickly happen. You could vote twice if guaranteed in advance that someone wasn't going to vote, but at best you will get only a small number of extra votes that way. The aim with an election isn't necessarily to outright prevent cheating, but to prevent undetected cheating. Hence why ID isn't so crucial (at least in Australia).

1024core 8y ago

Democrats have been complaining about this for decades, but what did they do when they got majorities in 2008? Absolutely nothing. Like a lot of other things, I feel like Democrats like to keep these issues around as a rallying cause, instead of fixing them. Edit: I'll just address some of the comments here. This is not "partisan sniping", and I write this as a former Obama volunteer and a lifelong Democrat. Second: the federal government can do something. Here's an idea: give a $100M grant to 5 major universities to develop an open-source (hardware and software) alternative to the current system, and make a FIPS standard out of it. Then, certify vendors who implement that standard. The states can then buy systems from those vendors.

creaghpatr 8y ago
Vox is just trying to delegitimize the election ahead of a potential loss. They did the same thing for the Supreme Court. Textbook fearmongering.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- code_duck 8y ago
  Is that your response to the gigantic list of legitimate concerns about our Swiss-cheese election system... it’s all a conspiracy by the media?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - narinek 8y ago
    If they win they won't complain but if they lose they'll say the election was hacked because of the machines. He's not delegitimising the concerns about the machines, which are evident. He's delegitimising the way journalists are bitching about it. (I don't follow the American election so I don't know who will win.)

theseadroid 8y ago

Isn't election systems the best candidate for open sourcing? So that anyone with technical knowledge can independently verify the security and correctness. I wish every piece of civilian software funded by gov is open sourced. And why shouldn't they be?

gsich 8y ago
Yes. But verifying the source code doesn't guarantee anything, as you don't know what is actually running on the machine.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  BINGO! Validating source code does nothing. Even setting aside the fact that firmware and hardware level exploits could be running in any given voting machine, what guarantee do we have that the code in the repository is the code actually running on the machine at the app layer? Or, if you're REALLY security minded like myself, what guarantee do we have that the compiler and build environment didn't slip something in? (I guess that borders more on "paranoid" than "security minded", but you get the idea.)
- tomrod 8y ago
  Unless you specify open testing protocols that also test for cheating (like VW emissions). It shouldn't be this hard to vote and to trust a certified outcome. Regulators require businesses to run with specified parameters, why do elections get off the hook?
  - DennisP 8y ago
    It's not hard, if you use paper ballots and well-established protocols for securing elections. On the other hand, if you use electronic machines without paper backup, it's basically impossible.
    - gsich 8y ago
      Then why do electronic machines in the first place?

thewhitetulip 8y ago

I'm from India and every ejection since 1950s has been called rigged by the Opposition. The party which is in power now, has written a book on EVM tampering and the party which was in power for most of the time have rubbished EvM tampering. Now that roles have reversed, so have their claims. Coming to the point, isn't US using paperballots? All the papers in my nation say US holds elections via paperballots and not EVMs. And why the heck do EVMs exist? Who verifies if they are fine or not? We know very well abouhow elections are rigged in third world dictatorships. There needs to be a standard.

jakelazaroff 8y ago
> Coming to the point, isn't US using paperballots? Not everywhere, no: https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_state https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
monocasa 8y ago
> Coming to the point, isn't US using paperballots? All the papers in my nation say US holds elections via paperballots and not EVMs. It's different on a per state/municipality basis. Some are paper, some are EVM. We're trending towards EVM despite warnings from computer security researchers.
- thewhitetulip 8y ago
  EVMs with a verifiable paper trail should help. We have VVPats in India where we get receipts after voting. Plus Election Commission does/can do a random audit on constituencies.
mikeash 8y ago
I don’t think I’ve seen a paper ballot since I voted absentee in 2004. Why do electronic machines exist? The charitable interpretation is that they were chosen in the aftermath of the disastrous 2000 election because they remove ambiguity and error. The less charitable interpretation is that they’re used because they’re easier to screw with. Who verifies them? Mostly the companies who make them.

m3kw9 8y ago

Every election is rigged according to the loser, or the non-incumbent

m3kw9 8y ago
Another point is that there is not just ballot rigging, there is other types of rigging going on at the social level too.
monocasa 8y ago
Trump started a voting security investigation, saying the voting system was rigged. He also won.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  He started that narrative because he wanted to be a Fox News pundit after losing the election, selling the idea of a rigged election to bask in the attention and fuel his Hillary bashing. Winning ruined that plan.
mikeash 8y ago
That’s not even remotely true. Election results in the US are almost always accepted by both sides. When Trump indicated that he would reject the result of the 2016 election if he lost, that was unprecedented.

jcrawfordor 8y ago

My county of over 600k people has a Bureau of Elections staff of five, and none of them are really technical people, they just do basic work on the machines and train the temp staff hired for elections. They rely on a contractor to handle just about every aspect of the technology, including the pollbook system, and that company is a larger operation but still the kind of operation where I've heard the elections staff getting on the phone with them to have them restart a service that had gone sluggish. Some amount of support is provided by the secretary of state, but the SoS elections office is also very small, and even the state's department of IT doesn't have a meaningful security department. I honestly think that the election system in the United States is simply too decentralized. Counties, even larger ones like mine, struggle to afford to hire a staff or retain contractors that have any kind of serious security expertise - or even expertise in reliable services. The federal elections commission was created to address some of these problems by providing centralized resources to states and counties, but it hasn't gone nearly far enough in my opinion. I have a had time imagining a way to make a serious improvement here without moving just about the entire platform for voting systems under the federal government.

bo1024 8y ago
I agree to some extent, but paper ballots seem to solve a lot of these expertise problems (in addition to all the security and reliability ones).
- jcrawfordor 8y ago
  Counties cannot afford to hand-tally paper ballots for the same reasons they can't afford to hire security expertise.
ISL 8y ago
The decentralization of the United States is, in my opinion, a feature, not a bug. The upside inherent in fifty parallel and bespoke experiments in government is worth the extra complexity and cost. Ideas are tried out, and can bubble outward and upward if they work. Bad ideas directly impact only ~2% of the country. Furthermore, having state and local control over elections has a direct impact on legitimacy. I don't have to believe that someone in Washington DC is doing things right. Instead, I can interact directly with our state's secretary of state and our local county elections office. Decentralization with heterogeneous procedures makes election compromise a much greater logistical challenge for any nefarious actor. It is probably a lot easier to spend money on lobbying. Edit: Finally -- if you want your local/state elections infrastructure to have more resources, your voice and your vote are your tools.

mycall 8y ago

If the system is already so rigged and/or fragile, why don't we explore the blockchain world more? If people could get private/public keys into their hands, they could vote using these and no one can change it. They could vote at home or at poling places.

mikeash 8y ago
https://www.xkcd.com/2030/ https://www.xkcd.com/2030/ Why mess around with new technology when there are proven solutions that work? The problem with American voting systems isn’t a failure to embrace new technology, it’s a failure to spend a little more money to do things right, combined with people who don’t want a system that accurately gathers people’s votes.
monocasa 8y ago
Because voter coersion and vote buying attacks have historically been the largest attacks against the voting system. If you can prove your vote to yourself, you can prove your vote to someone else unless you get into complex zero knowledge proofs that the average voter can't understand (which opens it's can of worms).
- int_19h 8y ago
  All it takes to prove a vote is a camera. Which practically everybody has in their pocket these days, even on the cheap $10 feature phones.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    OK, that isn't encoded into the voting system though.
eksemplar 8y ago
I work in the public sector of Scandinavia, where we’ve digitised voter registration to make queues more efficient but kept the actual voting part on paper. Overall there isn’t a reason to have voting machines, and if you do, they should really just print a piece of paper with your vote so that you can make sure it’s what you picked. You’ll sometimes hear finance and efficiency as a reason, but unless American licensing for government software/hardware is significantly different from every where else, it’ll always be cheaper to manually count the votes than to buy voting software/hardware. I mean, we digitised part of the process like I said, but we did it to make citizens wait less not because it was cheaper. It’s actually really expensive compared to doing manual voter registration, but we pay the money because no one likes queues. Blockchain isn’t really a suitable option. It could be, but in the real world it would never be truly decentralised because no government is ever going to trust that, and if it isn’t, it’s just as easy to change and manipulate as any other database structure. And you still wouldn’t know if the voting machine actually did what you told it to do. You can never vote from home in a democracy, because people might force you to vote a way you didn’t want to. I don’t really think groups would show up at your house to force you to do anything, but we frequently get husbands ask if they can vote for their wives, and if they could do that from home, no one would be there to stop them. I know we live in a time where we want to digitise everything, but the paper vote is probably the safest and most efficient way to run voting in a democracy.

whoisthemachine 8y ago

Where is our National Security Agency in all of this? Isn't their express goal the monitoring of foreign signals and the protection of US signals?

mtgx 8y ago
And didn't they promise the Cybersecurity Act of 2016 would help them - oh so much - in stopping these attacks and that it "was not another surveillance bill in disguise" ?

cletus 8y ago

At this point I'm really wondering what it will take before we accept the utter insanity that is electronic voting. Even if there isn't a major breach to the point where hostile actors (foreign or domestic) "steal" an election, the confidence in e-voting will inevitably be cast into doubt by the losing side at some point. Guaranteed. How do you audit or recount an anonymous electronic vote? How do you know if a vote cast is recorded as such? How do you know votes aren't wiped at some point? There are two basic options that work perfectly well: - Fill in a paper ballot with pen or pencil marking in spaces for the candidates you vote for. Have a machine verify your ballot. - Vote on a touch screen. Once done print out your ballot and put it in a box. In either case you use some kind of paper that isn't impossible to counterfeit (that's basically an impossibility) but it should be hard enough such that it's nontrivial. That's it. That's all you need to do. Sure local actors can "lose" ballots, ball stuf and so forth but this all has to be done on a pretty local level. You get rid of any potential vectors like a Russian or Chinese state agency changing the result from the other side of the planet because someone forgot to update OpenSSL on one Linux server or someone clicked on a phishing link on an innocuous looking email. Apparently we didn't learn our lessons from unreliable voting methods in 2000 (pregnant chad, anyone?) so I'm not super-hopeful.

ashleyn 8y ago

I was floored when I read the responses to malfunctioning equipment in Texas. "Voters are moving too quickly through the pages." That is a BUG! not user error in the slightest.

wizzard 8y ago
Right? "Voters need to wait until all the choices have populated before making a selection." Absolute BS. Software design 101.
drb91 8y ago
I wonder if this would count as fraud.

djohnston 8y ago

This goes back to the whole, “hacking the election” 2016 fiasco. Why are we talking about these potential flaws more than the glaring flaw that adversaries already exploited, that of a relatively dumb populous easily manipulated via social media? There’s already a 0 day we don’t know how to patch, our adversaries don’t need to invest in complex cyber attacks when they can achieve the same end via free broadcasting platforms.

stretchwithme 8y ago

It's a winner-take-all electoral system. I'm not getting my interests represented anyway. So not exactly sure why I should be upset about the accuracy with which I being denied that. Sure it's not good. But it is just an enhancement of a greater wrong. I find most people don't want to deal with that issue at all and would prefer to believe the current system, as it is supposed to work, is the best way to do things. It's a good system for those who are currently able to exploit it for their own gain. But that's always true everywhere.

perpetualcrayon 8y ago

I think it's probably still a little too far outside most peoples' comfort zone, but I think the future of voting will be 100% electronic with the capability of being instantly recallable. The voting system will allow me to see exactly how my vote was tallied after the fact. From what I have read this is not desirable for the fact that people will more easily be able to sell their vote because they can prove to their "buyer" how they voted. I think from a big-picture perspective this isn't a big deal. The reason is it would be extremely easy to create sting operations on both ends of this transaction: (a) create a sting to find and prosecute people willing to sell their vote, and (b) create a sting to find and prosecute people attempting to buy votes. I'd prefer to move to a voting system where I can account for my vote after I've voted and put in place enforcement via these types of sting operations to prevent the inevitability of people attempting to buy / sell votes more frequently.

3pt14159 8y ago
No the primary problem isn't selling votes. The primary problem is fabricating votes or people trying to destabilize an election by claiming they voted for someone else. If even 100 people come out and said their votes were changed what do we do? Re-run the election? Just use paper ballots. This isn't that hard.
- perpetualcrayon 8y ago
  The way I look at it fabrication would be impossible if done right. 1) precinct has record of every eligible voter 2) voter can (via encrypted means) retrieve their vote so it's still "private", but the voter can view it after they've voted. So as long as (a) the precinct confirms only eligible voter records are counted and (b) each voter can confirm their vote counted how they intended then I can't see how fabrication comes into play. Granted this assumes the systems in place to onboard new voters is solid, but even if it's not breaches should in theory expose the weaknesses and make it possible for us to iterate toward an even more perfect system. By not exposing the core data it's kind of like "security through obscurity". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
- 8y ago

8bitsrule 8y ago

I'd guess that it has had frightening vulnerabilities since it started. Ideals are hard to live up to ... for many.