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Georgia election server showed signs of tampering, expert says
- british_india 7y agoThe Republicans can only win by cheating.
- creaghpatr 7y ago*Security expert for the plaintiffs in the case
- peteradio 7y agoAnd the only one outside of the FBI with access to images of the server and the non-incriminating ability to comment.
- wobbly_bush 7y agoA question to Americans, is there nothing a common citizen can do about it? In India, in a similar situation anyone would be able to file a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) with High Court (highest court at state level) or Supreme Court (highest court at central/federal level). If any of the courts decided to take up the PIL, they could ask any investigative body, including law enforcement or ex-judges, for investigation.
- ianai 7y agoAFAIK, the aggrieved party would be the losing candidate. That candidate is typically a D who announces defeat hours after the vote. They don’t fight these court battles long term in an interest of public unity. Or, worse, don’t have the finances for the court battle. See the vote election lawsuits following the ‘16 vote in the states which flipped that election. That was the 3rd party candidate Jill Stein suing and running out of money.
- jasonlotito 7y agoCouldn't it also be a voter? I know that if my vote wasn't counted, or an election I voted in was hacked, it would be like me losing my right to vote. It removes my right to vote and have that vote count.
- ianai 7y agoShould be, but for some reason that escapes me, I remember that not being the case.
- ancarda 7y agoTry to make electronic voting illegal? Not sure how though - call your representative, raise awareness, that sort of thing
- stanferder 7y agoThat's a good question, and I'm ashamed to say I don't know whether it's possible or not. "Grassroots organizing", or bottom-up pressure on the government, is a thing in the US, but I don't know the mechanisms by which it acts, beyond getting people to sign petitions once in a while. I suspect most other people in the US don't know the mechanisms either.
- btilly 7y agoThe answer is probably not. I am aware of have been a number of attempts at lawsuits against such state rules over a period of decades, and they have generally not gone very far. You can hold out hope that there will some day be a ruling that changes this. But I am dubious. To quote my brother on the USA vs China, "China is a nation of crooks ruled by honest men, while the USA is a nation of honest men ruled by crooks. It remains to be seen which is worse." This is one of the examples that I would cite for the US version of that.
- thepete2 7y agoI'm really glad Germany's supreme court (BVerfG) banned electronic voting ([0]) with the common sense reasoning that elections have to be understood by everyone, not just computer experts. [0] https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2009/wahlcomputer-urteil-bverfg https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2009/wahlcomputer-urteil-bverf...
- na85 7y agoI wish Canada would adopt some of that common sense.
- smacktoward 7y agoAlas, common sense is an uncommon virtue.
- graeme 7y ago....we use paper ballots in Canada. What are you referring to?
- na85 7y agoWhen I last voted (most recent federal election), my ballot was fed through an electronic reader of some sort on its way into the ballot box, no doubt an electronic vote counter.
- graeme 7y agoHuh, interesting. I’m in Montreal and we dropped them into boxes through a slot, same as before. I wonder if you had a pilot? Afaik, elections canada runs things the same way all around the country.
- mtmail 7y agoSame press release in english: https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2009/wahlcomputer-urteil-bverfg https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2009/wahlcomputer-urteil-bverf...
- tvanantwerp 7y agoElectronic voting, in addition to security concerns, isn't even a user experience improvement. I remember working at a polling station as a teenager during the 2004 election. One elderly lady needed help understanding how the machines worked, so I showed her how you tapped the buttons on the screen. Well, this woman had lost a lot of fine motor control. After selecting her choice for president, she went to hit the Next button. Her hand shook so badly that she skipped about five screens worth of races. I asked her if she's like my help going back to choose candidates for all of the races she accidentally skipped. "No," she replied, "I got the important one." I'm thankful that this experience, and many others from working the polls, eroded my faith in the system early on in life.
- davinic 7y agoNot to mention the negative impact on parallelization! Hundreds of paper ballot station can easily be setup in a room, but setting up an additional voting machine requires a ton of other things (budgets, purchasing, techs, etc).
- donarb 7y agoPeople do that all the time. Unfortunately, the higher up the office holder, the less they can affect your day-to-day life. It's the local elections that are most important.
- bonyt 7y agoHere's the actual declaration from PACER, which has some interesting details: https://tmp.tonyb.xyz/lamb-decl-pacer.pdf https://tmp.tonyb.xyz/lamb-decl-pacer.pdf
- mzs 7y agoCould you please post this somewhere else too, site is blocked for me here.
- bonyt 7y agoThat's strange that my site is blocked, is it an overly broad rule, like "lol, if it's not .com or .gov, it's not a website that upstanding gentlemen go to"? Anyway, here's something: https://tonybox.net/tmp/lamb-decl-pacer.pdf https://tonybox.net/tmp/lamb-decl-pacer.pdf https://moveything.com/tmp/lamb-decl-pacer.pdf https://moveything.com/tmp/lamb-decl-pacer.pdf
- mzs 7y agoThank you very much, the message had no details, sorry, just that it was blocked. I assume overly broad rule not liking xyz domain.
- ulkesh 7y agoI have been voting in GA since 2008 and there hasn't been a paper trail since at least then. The voting systems they still use today were purchased and put into service in, I believe, 2002. There is literally no reason not to also have a paper trail. I have no hard data, and this is from 2017/2018, but it is very sketchy when the secretary of state, the office which oversees elections in GA, runs for governor, doesn't resign ahead of time, doesn't allow any investigations into the electronic voting systems, doesn't push forward any paper trail requirements, and subsequently wins the election for governor. Everything Kemp did and didn't do was suspect as it relates to elections. I have zero faith in GA election results. And until the State moves off of these electronic systems and/or installs a paper trail, and brings a sense of integrity back into the election system, I will continue to feel the elections in GA are without integrity and potentially illegitimate, no matter who wins in any given election. This is outside of any political affiliation. This is the core of our country not being properly governed and protected. EDIT>> After some research, it looks as if GA is getting a paper trail after a court order required the state to move off the previous electronic system. Now it looks like they're installing BMDs which can be verified by the voter prior to scanning to commit their vote. Of course, there are plenty of articles relating to how hackable BMDs are as well.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoThey’re a user experience improvement over things like butterfly ballots (where part of user experience is ability to understand who you’re casting a vote for.) Of course, the right solution would be paper ballots that aren’t stupid.
- reaperducer 7y agoOf course, the right solution would be paper ballots that aren’t stupid. Much like computer interfaces, it doesn't matter how much you dumb down the experience, there will always been dumber people. I know that sounds harsh, but part of my job is building web sites for low-education people. There's a ton of research into this problem, much of it very interesting, and some of it just downright amazing. For example, I follow a recommendation to use "Go" instead of "Search" for search submission buttons because more than one study has shown that a remarkable number of people with low education and poor computer skills will just click the Search button without typing anything in the search box because they believe the computer will actually read their mind and know what they want to search for. I shit you not. The next time you're looking at your logs and you see clicks on search buttons with no text entered in the search field, it may not be a bot. It may just be someone struggling to understand your web page.
- kingkawn 7y ago$1 says that hack originated from within the state of Georgia, perhaps routed through Russian servers and back, but domestic nonetheless
- fredgrott 7y agofor USA folks, you can in each state request a paper ballot. visit your State's voting details page at heir statename.gov site to find out how to request one.
- qntmfred 7y agoHighly recommend following election security writer Jenny Cohn for more on this topic. GA is a highly egregious recent example, but the entire industry is a mess and very few are paying attention. https://twitter.com/jennycohn1 https://twitter.com/jennycohn1
- mzs 7y agoAlso Kim Zetter, she's been reporting on this with a greater level of technical expertise and less activism for at least a dozen years. In fact she was the one that scooped this last night https://twitter.com/KimZetter/status/1046429196182941696 https://twitter.com/KimZetter/status/1046429196182941696
- bsanr2 7y agoIs there a term for the increased credulousness with which people sometimes seem to approach increasingly, obviously problematic topics? The more blatant the irregularities in this race, where a black woman had a serious chance of becoming governor, the less seriously everyone (including her opponent, who oversaw the election in his official capacity) took them. I mention race because it is clearly a likely central motivation for malfeasance in this case, an election for a state with a history of disenfranchisement of its large black population.
- mnm1 7y agoI think it's safe to assume that any election that's done with software has been hacked unless proven otherwise. Of course there was foul play. Election fraud is currently a huge issue with a ton of players competing to be the ones rigging elections. When a secure, proven technology like mailed paper ballots exists, I question anyone who pushes computer solutions and immediately suspect them of wanting to commit fraud or incredible stupidity and incompetence. After all, if someone suggested to replace armored cars carrying money with unarmored convertibles without a top, what other conclusion can one draw?
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoIsn't that all speculation? I'm not aware of any verified election fraud, in the US. It's like Halloween candy, which everybody knows isn't safe but there are never any verified cases of a problem.
- mnm1 7y ago> but there are never any verified cases of a problem Funny how that happens when the logs and other evidence that would verify problems happen to have been destroyed.
- rhcom2 7y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/mccrae-dowless-indictment.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/mccrae-dowless-indictm...
- btilly 7y agoIf you are not aware, then it is because you have not looked. https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
- Frondo 7y agoThe parent poster was referring to election fraud, not voter fraud. They're different. Voter fraud is when someone casts a vote they should not have, e.g. because they moved or they've cast multiple votes. Election fraud is when election officials tamper with the election. There are documented cases of both, but the Heritage website, documenting about 1,200 over a period of at least 20 years (I didn't check every state, but the earliest I saw was 2000) is an insignificant amount of voter fraud over 20 years and hundreds of millions of votes cast. Even if they underreported by a factor of 100, that's no threat to democracy.
- save_ferris 7y agoDeleted logs and a server wiped clean days after a lawsuit was filed by election integrity activists, that is terrifying. If we can’t agree on a bipartisan basis that this isn’t acceptable, what does that mean for our future?
- swiley 7y agoIsn't that tampering with evidence? Don't "normal people" get in trouble for similar things?
- ianai 7y agoYes. That’s exactly what this is.
- makomk 7y agoDefine "normal people". From what I remember of the emails that were obtained about this, the server was wiped as part of a post-compromise remediation plan by university IT security staff.
- pbourke 7y agoNormal people are those who are not wealthy or politically connected such that issues like this can be made to disappear.
- lanternslight 7y agoUs Secretary of State didn't, so I guess politicians play with a different time book
- pstuart 7y agoThe buttery males? Oh my, that was a national security disaster! /s Edit: actually, she did get in "trouble". That faux controversy helped sway the election against her.
- naiveprogrammer 7y agoThe benefit of extra speed in ballot count does not completely offset the risks of electronic voting. Not only the risks of massive tampering in electronic ballots and servers, but also the lack of clarity on how the process works under the hood for the median voter.
- mzs 7y agotwo source articles and thread by original journalist on this - Shellshock exploited (ha, remember that one?) and Drupalgeddon was left unpatched - this is clown-car stuff https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1218055746534817792.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1218055746534817792.html
- anticensor 7y agoBecause, electronic voting is still a bad idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
- dsr_ 7y agohttps://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/ [Summary to remind you: "Don't trust voting software and don't listen to anyone who tells you it's safe.]
- dependenttypes 7y agoIt is beyond me how naive implementations of electronic voting can be trusted so easily by individuals.
- davidw 7y agoOregon gets voting pretty right. Do it by mail, automatic registration, and of course it's all paper. There are some risks about not having the privacy of a voting booth, but in general it seems to work pretty well.
- jakeogh 7y agoMail is trivially lost from X zip.
- fsh 7y agoVoting by mail is not at all secure. For example, a post-office worker could easily skew the results by throwing away letters from a partisan district.
- asdff 7y agoPost offices are covered in security cameras. My branch has two by the stationary alone, ensuring every angle is monitored lest you steal a $0.10 mailer.
- donarb 7y agoBallots are mailed out 3 weeks before the election. If you didn't receive a ballot, you can ask for another. After you've mailed in your ballot, you can check online if it's been received. Again, if not, you can request another ballot. In addition, most neighborhoods have drop off boxes where you can deposit your ballot, untouched by postal authorities.
- fsh 7y agoThis completely misses the point. In a well-designed paper ballot election the ballot never leaves the polling station which can be monitored by anyone during the entire process. This is simply not possible if you vote by mail. In the end you have to trust that the person who picks up the letters doesn't mess with them.
- 7y ago
- lucas_membrane 7y agoThis story seems to now invalidate the line that we have been hearing for about 3 years now that says that no evidence of tampering with the 2016 national election has been found. Of course, they were careful to not say that evidence of no tampering had been found, or even that anyone behind the no-evidence assertion was sufficiently skilled to find and recognize tampering. If no one can vouch for the correctness of the Georgia results now, what evidence is there of no error in the national results; how many other states might have had similarly overlooked anomalies?