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My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania

382 points by catacombs 6y ago

nobodyandproud 6y ago
The police officer mishap was disturbing.
killion 6y ago
I like how he went into real detail. I had signed up to be a poll worker in Alameda County, California but they had more than enough volunteers so I didn't get a chance to get called up myself and see how things happen.
dang 6y ago
Url changed from https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/drewdevault.com/2020/11/10/2020-Election-worker.gmi https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/drewdevault.com/2020/11/10/202... (by author's request).
juanbyrge 6y ago
While reading this I got a sense that all of these anachronistic processes would not exist if voting would be moved online. So many of the contentious issues we see here (mail-in ballots arriving late, machines not printing receipts, etc..) would simply not exist. Online voting seems like such a simpler approach.
- ebg13 6y ago
  > Online voting seems like such a simpler approach. It is! Until you try to secure it. Then it isn't.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    And even if you do secure it, if Joe McCitizen can't understand it, it does you no good.
    - u801e 6y ago
      There are plenty of things that people do online without really understanding how it works, but they still do it. Online voting could be done securely over the network and could be authenticated with a certificate associated with one's voter registration that's anonymized in a way that doesn't reveal any information about the voter other than whether they have already voted. Also, it can be an option in addition to voting in person or by mail (like you can do now with taxes).
      - ebg13 6y ago
        > Online voting could be done securely over the network and could be authenticated with a certificate associated with one's voter registration that's anonymized in a way that doesn't reveal any information about the voter other than whether they have already voted. There's a lot of handwaving in this sentence about what can be done. We can't even secure computers when the fate of the entire world _doesn't_ depend on it. You think we can do a better job when control of a nuclear power with the world's largest economy rests in the balance? > like you can do now with taxes I'm not terribly worried about the consequences of someone filing my taxes for me.
        u801e 6y ago
        > We can't even secure computers when the fate of the entire world _doesn't_ depend on it. This is hyperbole at best. In most cases, international policy does not change all that much regardless of what major party member happens to be president of the US. > I'm not terribly worried about the consequences of someone filing my taxes for me. Unless you have taken the time to fine tune your payments such that you don't receive a refund or owe a significant tax payment, then someone else filing can effectively get your refund, or put information in there that can land you legal trouble or have you owe a significant payment when you actually do not. That said, we have been able to file taxes online for many years now. It would be nice if we could get with the times and do the same for voting.
        Shared404 6y ago
- marios 6y ago
  I worry about online voting not being transparent enough
- buzzert 6y ago
  It’s trading one set of problems for an entirely different (and far scarier, IMO) set of problems.
- pontus 6y ago
  I used to be in your camp, but ultimately I think the decentralization and heterogeneity of the election processes provides a non-trivial layer of "security by obfuscation". In other words, if we streamline the process too well, we'll find ourselves with a system with a handful of highly vulnerable points of failure. I would much prefer a seemingly archaic system that, at the cost of annoyances and delays, at least provides us with a reasonable sense of conviction that the results are accurate.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    Computers make it very easy to centrally modify/control information. Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes it's a terrible thing.
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      It's also unique in its specifics. Voting is an unusual data-management challenge as we want a paper-trail (we want to be able to verify the correctness of the count), and voter anonymity (it must be impossible to prove that a specific person voted a specific way). We can do this robustly and easily with paper-based voting. Electronic systems are often deeply flawed. Bruce Schneier's article on this: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_electi_1.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec...
  - ryanobjc 6y ago
    Don’t forget the worst of the delays this year we’re deliberately left in place by GOP legislatures. There was a massive shift to mail in voting yet no changes to how they’re processed. The pre-canvass part: opening mail in ballots, verifying them, preparing them for tabulation, can be securely done before the election. Most states with substantial mail in already do this. That means on Election Day, workers merely have to tabulate ballots which is a lot less work. But in PA specifically the legislature declined to allow pre-canvass before the election. When done right we have have reasonable speed and security.
  - brandmeyer 6y ago
    It also makes it much easier to directly observe which systems work better and which systems don't. Imagine for a moment that the entire country was using the exact same ballot process in 2000: The punch system that lead to so much ambiguity in FL. Its one thing to look at a system and say in the abstract "this could be much more reliable." Its another entirely to say "Look at states X, Y, and Z: Their process is actually much more reliable". I expect the same thing to happen after this election. Once things calm down, several states are going to improve their processes.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  If you think IoT is bad when it comes to security, imagine what will happen when IoT is applied to voting. Insecure and hackable voting machines were already a problem more than a decade ago, and they're still a problem today.
- burkaman 6y ago
  I agree with you, except that I saw all the "anachronistic processes" as meaningful and useful backup systems. Obviously online voting would be simpler for the voter, I don't think anyone would deny that, but you wouldn't get: 1. Your physical signature witnessed by a poll worker, and your identity and presence physically recorded in several different locations. 2. A physical paper ballot only accessible by poll workers. 3. A locally stored electronic ballot only accessible by poll workers. 4. Multiple physical receipts with your votes, distributed to many different physical locations only accessible to poll workers. 5. A trained poll worker available to help at the time and place that you vote. 6. An easy backup plan if something goes wrong. Online voting is optimized for the happy path, but handling all the edge cases where something could go wrong is extremely difficult to implement and difficult for voters to understand. With online voting you need to ensure the security of the voter's physical device, operating system, web browser, each link in their internet connection, and all of those for the voting servers as well. After implementing processes to secure all of that, you need to communicate the security in a way that an average voter can understand it. You also need to think about what to do when a voter needs help, or their computer crashes mid-vote, or their power goes out, or someone sends them the wrong link, etc. etc. etc. Current processes are a little more complicated up front, but processes for preventing and correcting errors are easy to implement and understand.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  The thing is, your grandma can watch a paper process, understand it, and verify that no shenanigans happened during the part that she was watching. But she can't do the same for online voting. She's not going to audit the software used. She's not going to verify network integrity, or authenticate packets. The manual processes are much better for transparency and verifiability. And we really badly need those qualities right now, when you have to be able to prove to the other side that the vote was legit, and be able to prove that every claim otherwise is false.
  - ryanobjc 6y ago
    Yes exactly this so much. I’ve done poll clerk and the security of the process depends on security seals and armed guards and all sorts of things that are easy to understand.
- g00gler 6y ago
  In Pennsylvania there was a web tool via the department of state to check if your mail in ballot was counted. I can picture several ways to do a hybrid (mail + online) election like getting a code in the mail, voting online, then being able to ensure your ballot was counted correctly by using your code. It seems to make a lot more sense than having states count for a week.
  - jpttsn 6y ago
    Randomizing would be even faster and easier, if you just want incorrect answers in record time. Voting has a short list of maybe four easily stated requirements. Online voting “solutions” tend to solve one or two, forget about the others, and try to compensate on user experience.
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      > Voting has a short list of maybe four easily stated requirements. Online voting “solutions” tend to solve one or two, forget about the others, and try to compensate on user experience. Right. In this case: > then being able to ensure your ballot was counted correctly by using your code This fails the voter anonymity requirement. There must not be a database associating each voter with which way they voted.
  - jeffbezos982134 6y ago
    I second that. People could still count for weeks afterwards to make sure everything comes out on the up and up.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > Online voting seems like such a simpler approach. It isn't. Bruce Schneier has written about how online voting is a terrible idea in general [0], and how real-world attempts at it are often woefully incompetent. [1][2] Voting should remain paper-based. [0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_electi_1.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec... [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/12/election_machin_2.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/12/election_mach... [2] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/02/voatz_internet_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/02/voatz_interne...
- pgrote 6y ago
  It could be. With voting I think the consideration is a barrier for voting. In many states you do not need to prove it to vote. Some states allow a normal vote and some states make them provisional. Still, no concrete identification is required when voting in most states. The voter is trusted to be who they say they are under possible penalty. This only applies to in person voting. Almost all states allowing mail in voting do not require notarization. With electronic voting you have a huge barrier in that not everyone has access to the means to vote electronically. You disenfranchise a pool of voters. https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state
- cm2187 6y ago
  Beyond hacking, there is a reason to do polls in person. It is also a protection against people being coerced or selling their vote. When they are at the polling station, no outside force can exert any influence as the vote is fully confidential.
- pkulak 6y ago
  Decentralized, paper elections are the entire strength of the American system. Rigging an election means dealing with 50 entirely independent processes and modifying/creating millions of physical pieces of paper. Off the top of my head I can think of half a dozen ways to steal a centralized, digital election.
- tehlike 6y ago
  Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    It's true that the software field is bad at what it does. When someone makes a truly secure piece of software, they get a PhD and repeatedly make the HN front-page. [0] It's not just a matter of writing code with no bugs, though. As I mentioned this another comment, [1] voting is unusual as we must be confident in the correctness of the count, and confident that it's not possible to prove whether a particular person voted a particular way. There's also a trust issue: with a digital system, a single corrupt official will likely be able to do far more damage to the vote than with a paper-based system. Even if the system is somehow structured to resist this, public trust might still be less than in a paper-based system. [0] https://ts.data61.csiro.au/projects/seL4/ https://ts.data61.csiro.au/projects/seL4/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25048971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25048971
    - tehlike 6y ago
      You are correct. It needs to be anonymous, untamperable, auditable. I recently had a discussion with a friend who asked me how to implement a write only audit log that will comply with some finra regulation. I asked him how tamper proof it needs to be, and mentioned his system admin could practically stop the log writer, do shady stuff, and start the log writer and there is nothing you can do about it. As long as someone has access to the system, things can go wrong. I am hoping zero knowledge proof systems will provide some guarantees here some day.
youcandoithuman 6y ago
I am glad that the author didn't force election authority to use plan9 from outer space.
- Shared404 6y ago
  Wow, imagine creating an account just to troll a guy who you have disagreements with. Get a life.
estebank 6y ago
As a non-citizen who had a chance to observe how the process works in California, I was struck by how little emphasis is put in the secrecy of the vote. The whole system looks reasonable except for how easy it can be for poll workers to know what you voted for. Beyond that, the system is clearly geared towards increasing participation and enfranchising as many people as possible (a good thing in a democratic system).
- Der_Einzige 6y ago
  They have an optional secret ballot in all the votes. So does oregon who was doing vote by mail before it was cool...
  - drilldrive 6y ago
    Oregon has one of the worst voter-registration online systems in the country however, a date of birth + residency will give access to party registration of the individual, alongside some other information I believe.
    - krallja 6y ago
      That’s true of most states.
    - Rebelgecko 6y ago
      IIRC Oregon is one of the states that sells a big CSV of every registered voters name, address, and party affiliation. So really all they're doing is competing with their own business Quick edit: It's $500 to get data for everyone in the state, but there might be an extra fee if you want to know when they voted
      - drilldrive 6y ago
        Holy cow, that is nuts. Like I could actually buy that myself if I wanted? USA really needs a privacy amendment to the constitution quite badly.
- 6y ago
dx87 6y ago
This part seems incorrect: > There are strict laws regulating police and poll workers while the polls are open. Police are not allowed within 100 feet of the polling location, unless they're actively voting or there on official business at the request of the election board. Additionally, anyone working at the polls in an official capacity is not allowed to wear any clothing with political messaging. One of the officers who showed up earlier in the day was wearing a hoodie with the American flag on it, and the US armed forces oath of enlistment printed in place of the white stripes. As they were leaving, I pulled the officer aside and asked him to remove the hoodie before making his next stop, politely explaining the law. The linked PDF of rules says that the following isn't allowed: > Wearing a t-shirt or button supporting a candidate, campaign, or political party (except voters in the act of voting) The American flag with the military oath of enlistment isn't any of those. I'd probably get upset as well if some poll worker tried to tell me I'm not allowed to wear the American flag on my clothes.
- mindslight 6y ago
  "The American flag with the military oath of enlistment" is not "the American flag", but rather an attempt to make some kind of statement. At best it's political support of the military, at worst it's a possible dog whistle.
  - Fellshard 6y ago
    A dog whistle for what? There's an awful lot of cagey presumption going on in every reiteration of this claim.
    - AGSYS 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_Keepers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_Keepers
      - Fellshard 6y ago
        That is not what the Thin Blue Line represents.
jniedrauer 6y ago
Seems to have been hugged to death. Anyone have an alternative link?
- ddevault 6y ago
  It's not hugged to death, my Gemini server is just kind of unstable and crashes a lot. I'm keeping an eye on it.
D13Fd 6y ago
This may be accurate for Philadelphia County -- I don't know -- but it is definitely not how voting worked in at least one other area of Pennsylvania. I'm not saying the person is lying, but they may be misinformed about the procedures applying across the entire state. (I'm also not saying anything is wrong with how it was done anywhere in PA.)
- ddevault 6y ago
  What were the differences?
  - moduspol 6y ago
    I voted in Allegheny County. We filled in bubbles on paper, and then at the end, put our ballots in what looked like a scantron machine. It had a screen with a simple confirmation message (something like "thank you for voting") that lit up after it scanned your ballot. I also wasn't asked my party affiliation.
    - ddevault 6y ago
      Wow, that's much different. I wonder if the machines are unique to Philly, then.
      - moduspol 6y ago
        If it helps, the machines described in OP sound similar to what we used here four years ago. I haven't voted in between though so I'm not sure when the switchover actually took place here.
        Frondo 6y ago
        Philadelphia County switched their machines to a new style in 2019.
        djsumdog 6y ago
eatonphil 6y ago
Cannot connect to the site! Source of post is here though. https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/drewdevault.com/tree/master/content/blog/2020-Election-worker.gmi https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/drewdevault.com/tree/master/cont...
- est31 6y ago
  Raw link which has line wrapping: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/drewdevault.com/blob/master/content/blog/2020-Election-worker.gmi https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/drewdevault.com/blob/master/cont...
- seba_dos1 6y ago
  The canonical URL is gemini://drewdevault.com/2020/11/10/2020-Election-worker.gmi
lc9er 6y ago
> The voter approaches their table, and gives their name and party affiliation. I’ve voted in PA for 20 years and have never once been asked my party affiliation. This is all in Philadelphia, so maybe other counties are different? This seems sketchy. Even more so than the cop, who likely didn’t expect anyone to challenge him.
- ddevault 6y ago
  Your party affiliation is a matter of public record, and you're not required to vote for your party. Not really a big deal IMO. Any attempt by the election workers to suppress your vote based on your answer would be trivially detected by a number of security checks.
  - koolba 6y ago
    You're dodging the allegation. It's not that it's not public information or that it must dictate the vote. It's that there's no reason for the poll worker to ask or know what you party registration is prior to sending to you machine A or machine B. At best it's a non-issue, at worst it's an opportunity to steer voters to a broken machine. Any comparison of total turnout v.s. historic turnout based upon political party could be done after the fact anyway.
    - ddevault 6y ago
      We let voters use any machine they wanted, or the first one which became available, with no special preference. But whatever, I don't write the laws. If it bugs you, you should reach out to the election board directly: 1-877-VOTESPA.
    - lc9er 6y ago
      I want to clarify that I don’t think drew is being dishonest here. I’ve never heard this requirement nor been asked my party affiliation in a general election. Primaries - yes.
    - f154hfds 6y ago
      Pennsylvania voter here - in 2018 they asked me for my party affiliation and then remarked (jokingly) on the fact that my affiliation was an extreme minority for the district. I was a bit put off by this. 2020 and a few districts over however, totally secret somehow. No idea what changed.
eznzt 6y ago
Thanks for taking the time to write this. It is interesting to someone who lives in a developed country.
tptacek 6y ago
This squares with my experience in Illinois after a couple of elections. * As a security/integrity issue, the ballots themselves are much less scary than the pollbooks, which are what we use to match voters against the voting rolls. * Everything's ultimately on paper; there are bar codes, which nobody loves, but they're auditable against the readable printed ballot. * Most of the security is physical/human; for us, each polling station (a location can have several precincts and thus several stations, each a giant rolling metal box) is sealed using numbered plastic seals before the polls open and after they're closed, and everything is recorded redundantly and signed off on by the poll workers. * A matching count at the close of polls is a big deal, a nightmare big deal; in Illinois, we can't just shrug off a missing ballot and say "nothing we can do about it"; in March, I had to stay 3 hours late while we resolved a similar issue (IIRC, a mis-recorded provisional). Most pollworkers in my experience are there for the money (I've never bothered cashing the check) and the threat that they won't get paid if they count doesn't match is extremely powerful. * The local police are not allowed to monitor polling places, and the municipality of the polling place is usually confused about that; in Cook County, it's the County Sheriff's Department that has authority over polling places. Our cops were very friendly and responsive. * The drama of every election is the the "string line" that defined the 100 foot "no electioneering" radius of the polling place; the entertainment you can count on each cycle is the candidate whose people religiously move their lawn signs inside the string line, and freak out when you remove them. It's an interesting system that derives a lot of resiliency from extreme complexity and maximal human touch points --- Illinois elections will never do something with 1 person when the same thing could be done with 2 --- which is sort of the opposite of how we reason about security online. It's simultaneously terrifying and reassuring.
- patio11 6y ago
  I remember as an election judge in IIRC 2000, while in high school, having to enforce the electioneering thing against someone in the facility. Some things never change. I also came away from it thinking "Oh goodness it is amazing democracy survives, but kinda cool that it survives in an extremely participatory matter." Edited: Would have been for the primary, not the general, so I was still in high school, and the youngest judge by 50 years or so for our polling place.
rleahy22 6y ago
article { line-height: 1.3; font-family: Serif; font-size: 18px; }
- shazar 6y ago
  I agree, it is heard to read. Used Firefox's Reader View.
m0zg 6y ago
Biden only gets lucky in PA a full day after that if you look at vote share per batch, well after in-person votes are counted, and the later you go, the luckier he gets. The pattern is the same in every swing state except Arizona, and in Virginia as well. If you plot out Edison data that has vote count updates, in "normal" states (both Biden and Trump dominant), things are chaotic initially (when in-person votes are counted) and then they settle to a certain GOP/DEM ratio, with a very slow drift towards GOP, presumably because rural votes take longer to show up. In the swing states you observe the same initial chaos, and the same slight initial drift towards GOP, but then Biden starts to get very lucky indeed, and his luck improves as time goes on. To be fair, this could just be artifact of how votes are counted, in which case I'd like to see what could lead to such a pattern _only_ in the swing states. Or this could be evidence of vote rigging by all means necessary. No matter which side you're on, this should be looked into.
- tgb 6y ago
  This was literally predicted ahead of time based off the known demographics of the regions and the time it would take to count the ballots in different counties and the expected differences between in-person and mail-in ballots. It's absolutely misinformation to pretend that this is suspicious and should be investigated. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-pennsylvanias-vote-count-could-change-after-election-night/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-pennsylvanias-vote-...
  - m0zg 6y ago
    Why is this not happening in non-swing states other than Virginia? And why does Biden's luck improve over time when _only_ mail in ballots are counted?
    - tgb 6y ago
      Mail ballots come from different counties with highly different demographics. You get massive Biden support in one city and massive Trump support in another rural county - it's not surprising at all. There's also differences in when the ballots arrived: some states could process ballots ahead of time so the late counted ones are only those that arrived late and may be more or less D/R leaning. And different states have different voter registration policies; that's why Arizona has had relatively good Trump performance on the later counts since there are a large number of Republican voters using vote-by-mail and there always have been in Arizona. There is boundless discussion of the specifics of this on twitter, etc. I don't think swing state/non-swing state is a useful categorization here. Just look at the where the ballots are coming from directly.
lurker345 6y ago
drewdevault sounds like a cuck
ElijahLynn 6y ago
504: Gateway Timeout (likely an HN caused DDoS)
tomohawk 6y ago
Another POV: https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/11/06/a-pro-bono-lawyer-for-trump-campaign-shares-what-he-saw-in-pennsylvania/ https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/11/06/a-pro-bono-lawyer-for...
- philjohn 6y ago
  And yet television pictures during the count refute pretty much everything this person is saying - there were poll watchers mere feet away from the people processing the ballots.
- macintux 6y ago
  It’s hard to trust allegations like “our switchboard was hacked”, especially coming from someone who starts out with saying the Dems always cheat. I’d much rather hear concrete allegations with evidence from someone who isn’t a lawyer for the losing party.
  - wavefunction 6y ago
    As well, this media outlet linked in the op is owned by The Heritage Foundation a far-right-wing "think tank". The other pieces of media on the site do not seem to be without a certain political bias.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  The Daily Signal is published by the highly partisan Heritage Foundation and this person's account does not appear to be substantiated by any other evidence. The person who witnessed the events he relayed may be a lawyer, but he is not an election lawyer and also not from PA, so his specific knowledge of their rules and regulations may be lacking. Assuming the person making these claims accurately relayed his observations, what he saw sounds just as likely to be workers setting up & testing the machines for proper functionality. Of course, there's a chance that's not the case, and something else was going on. But lacking evidence to the contrary, this account seems explainable by something other than election fraud.
oblib 6y ago
Looks like HN broke Drew's blog.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sam36 6y ago
I'm curious where everyone is getting their "news" at. For one, the "blue wave" of mail in ballots is a myth: https://i.imgur.com/LIX2cwQ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/LIX2cwQ.jpg Two: No one is really questioning the machines not "working right". It is clear that there is no validation with the mail in ballots. MIB's are some of the most rejected ballots there are, yet no one seems to have any stats on this, or the stats provided are very low. Then you factor in tons of twitter and facebook posts of women saying that they were sent two ballots, one for their maiden name and one for their current name, at both their current address and their old addresses. Never mind that it is state law in most of these places that a ballot has to be "solicited" and cannot just be mailed en mass via mail. Put another way, you can't just mail 5 million ballots out to just 1 million physical addresses. I would not be surprised if during a recount, 50% of these MIBs are rejected. Three: elections are quite predictable. There are 100's of counties that for the last 40 years have always predicted the outcome. If this county is blue, then blue is our president, etc. This seems to still be the case this time around, except for the states in question. People's Pundit Daily https://youtu.be/Em0R9DRSbIE https://youtu.be/Em0R9DRSbIE for the most part has been a really good source of information on behind the scene numbers and what "normal" elections typically should look like. I'd recommend it.
- weci2i 6y ago
  My parents in PA received a mail in ballot for my grandfather. He has been dead over 7 years. Not only is he dead, he never lived with my parents at their address. I keep checking the status of his mail in ballot online to ensure that he hasn’t voted.
stefantalpalaru 6y ago
> The voter approaches their table, and gives their name and party affiliation. Is this a joke? An electoral system in which votes are not secret is anything but democratic.
hellepardo 6y ago
Similar experience here in Georgia. It sounds like there is more to do on setup morning here, since we had to show up at 5am (and didn't have things really ready until 6:30 or so). There are so many seals to check and record; lots and lots and lots of paperwork. In Georgia, the ballots are printed from a terminal that the voter uses and then scanned, leaving both an electronic count and a paper trail (the ballot itself is ejected from the bottom of the scanner into a sealed ballot box). However, our scanners jammed 40 minutes into the day; after a couple hours, a technician managed to come to our precinct and opened the ballot box and revealed that a lackluster design in the ballot box caused the ballots coming out of the scanner to sometimes curl up and jam. Without any realistic solution, we just had to open the ballot box every time it jammed (supervised every time to ensure no monkey business) and push any stuck ballots out of the way of the scanner so that more could be scanned. Amusingly we had good success regularly giving the machine a good shove to dislodge any stuck ballots. We also had problems printing receipts---in our case, we only need to print 3 from each scanner, but we ran out of scanner receipt paper. Since another precinct called us during the day looking for extra receipt paper... it wasn't available. But, we dodged a bullet, since there was just enough paper to print 2 of the 3 receipts. (1 gets posted on the door of the polling place; 2 go to the county. We wrote an apology on the receipt and only sent 1 to the county. I verified on the Secretary of State website that the votes tabulated for our precinct matched what our receipts printed. Cool to be able to double-check like that!) I spent a while thinking about what a pollworker would need to do to illegally cast ballots. It would be a tall order indeed and would require cooperation and secrecy from everyone there, since the only way to cast a ballot is to scan it, and everyone can see the scanners at all times. I can't see it realistically happening in any precinct.
noobermin 6y ago
The story about the police is ridiculous and in line with everything activists complain about. Police are not supposed to "puff up" they're supposed to be the cool heads.
pugworthy 6y ago
A fascinating post and I'm thankful for the post. Interesting to learn the experiences first hand. That said, it's sad to see we're no better than any other forum that just turns into political bullshit arguments sooner or later.
ropable 6y ago
I'm as much of a technophile as any other HN reader, but I am continuously flummoxed that anyone makes use of the sort of electronic voting machines described in this article. This is mainly from the perspective that a lot of the redundancy and auditability of the system seemed to rely on a bunch of printers working perfectly. Paper ballots and a pencil/pen are still hugely more reliable and trustworthy, IMO.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In the UK, everything is done on paper - even if there was potential for fraud, scaling it across the whole nation would take years and huge amounts of money (and even more hush money)
  - smt88 6y ago
    We had a presidential election in 2000 that was stolen in public by the GOP, despite being on paper. They did it with a technicality. They're doing the same with signature matching (your signature on your ballot has to match a different signature that could be many years older). Paper is safe from people outside the system, but not from politicized courts that are able to ignore paper ballots for minor mistakes.
    - specialist 6y ago
      I liked how an election advocate buddy said it one time: "GWB doesn't lose his right to speech when he makes another gaff. Under no circumstances should a voter lose their right to vote for a mistake." It just slays me that we're still arguing about this.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      Keep in mind the whole hanging chad situation is also impossible because we just use pencils. But the legal aspect is troubling too
- carapace 6y ago
  I'm with you. To me electronic voting machines means you've given your democracy to the best hackers. "Hackerocracy"?
puranjay 6y ago
If, as Trump claims, Biden's victory is fraudulent, it would mean over 100k voted were falsely cast. If that happens to be true, it would put every single election on US soil into question. Pretty much undermines democracy altogether.
specialist 6y ago
Great writeup. I am very surprised that police officers transport the ballots. When I was a poll judge, we transported everything ourselves, in pairs. Sheriffs did do traffic control and such at central count, like at a sporting event.
PeterStuer 6y ago
The one thing I do not understand about the US voting protocol is how you can possibly be comfortable with the undeniable huge potential for coercion in the case of voting by mail in such a contested election where both sides see voting for the other candidate as not just wrong bur evil.
admax88q 6y ago
Doea anybody ever actually verify the machine receipts by counting the paper ballots? In Canada we just use paper ballots, it works great. The whole count is usually done the night of the election. I don't see the appeal of complicated voting machines in the US.
ffggvv 6y ago
none of this addresses: 1. all the dead people who voted 2. all the ballot harvesting and curing which can be heavily manipulated
radford-neal 6y ago
This account expresses the idea that voter fraud would be very difficult to carry out in Pennsylvania - at least with respect to in-person election day voting (it doesn't seem relevant to claims of fraud with mail-in voting). However, this link describes a guilty plea of someone convicted of doing just that: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edpa/pr/us-attorney-william-m-mcswain-announces-charges-and-guilty-plea-former-philadelphia?fbclid=IwAR01GMlz_570Tmd0h74JlxTxsSnooIeZ84f1RpuHqScYV5DiFwhGM1xvTf8 https://www.justice.gov/usao-edpa/pr/us-attorney-william-m-m... So it would be interesting to reconcile this. One possibility is that procedures vary across the state, as some other comments here might indicate. Another is that the system the author participated in isn't actually as immune to fraud as he thinks.
- nemothekid 6y ago
  I think it’s incredibly difficult to design a system what’s 100% immune to voter fraud. Despite it being difficult, I think voter fraud is still very hard to do on a systemic scale that would swing an election. Prior studies have only shown minor instances of voter fraud, I think something like 1000 documented instances of voter fraud amount 10s of millions of votes cast. With all the available information I have, I think it would be very difficult to fradulently product ballots on the order of 10s of thousands to actually swing an election. Secondly, I think if we did have a widespread voter fraud problem I think it would also call into question past elections as well.
- aw1621107 6y ago
  > One possibility is that procedures vary across the state, as some other comments here might indicate. Another is that the system the author participated in isn't actually as immune to fraud as he thinks. Some other possibilities might be that primary elections use a different process and/or undergo less scrutiny than general elections, or that procedures have changed since 2016. As you said, it'd be an interesting exercise to go through exactly what DeMuro did and figure out whether what happened then would or would not work now. Incidentally, it seems the author might have had to deal with a similar situation: > The other event came when a discrepancy developed between the number of votes recorded by the machine and the number of voters tallied in the books: one vote was recorded in the books that was not recorded by the machines. We ultimately concluded that someone had just walked out of the polling place after they were handed their ballot, never casting their vote on the machine. Other possibilities which we ultimately ruled out were election board error, or that the voter voted in the wrong division after receiving their ballot. The redundant records — the index card, the registration book, the list of voters — helped to narrow down the possible causes. In the end, there was nothing we could do about it. So there's an argument to be made that what DeMuro did (ringing up votes on the machine) could have been caught.
bumbledraven 6y ago
I was also a poll watcher in PA this year, and my conclusions were similar to OP's: The in-person voting process in PA seems largely OK. However, that doesn't mean the 2020 PA general elction was fine; significant irregularities have been reported in PA this year regarding the processing of mail-in ballots.

382 points by catacombs 6y ago

The police officer mishap was disturbing.

I like how he went into real detail. I had signed up to be a poll worker in Alameda County, California but they had more than enough volunteers so I didn't get a chance to get called up myself and see how things happen.

dang 6y ago

Url changed from https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/drewdevault.com/2020/11/10/2020-Election-worker.gmi https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/drewdevault.com/2020/11/10/202... (by author's request).

juanbyrge 6y ago

While reading this I got a sense that all of these anachronistic processes would not exist if voting would be moved online. So many of the contentious issues we see here (mail-in ballots arriving late, machines not printing receipts, etc..) would simply not exist. Online voting seems like such a simpler approach.

ebg13 6y ago
> Online voting seems like such a simpler approach. It is! Until you try to secure it. Then it isn't.
- Shared404 6y ago
  And even if you do secure it, if Joe McCitizen can't understand it, it does you no good.
  - u801e 6y ago
    There are plenty of things that people do online without really understanding how it works, but they still do it. Online voting could be done securely over the network and could be authenticated with a certificate associated with one's voter registration that's anonymized in a way that doesn't reveal any information about the voter other than whether they have already voted. Also, it can be an option in addition to voting in person or by mail (like you can do now with taxes).
    - ebg13 6y ago
      > Online voting could be done securely over the network and could be authenticated with a certificate associated with one's voter registration that's anonymized in a way that doesn't reveal any information about the voter other than whether they have already voted. There's a lot of handwaving in this sentence about what can be done. We can't even secure computers when the fate of the entire world _doesn't_ depend on it. You think we can do a better job when control of a nuclear power with the world's largest economy rests in the balance? > like you can do now with taxes I'm not terribly worried about the consequences of someone filing my taxes for me.
      - u801e 6y ago
        > We can't even secure computers when the fate of the entire world _doesn't_ depend on it. This is hyperbole at best. In most cases, international policy does not change all that much regardless of what major party member happens to be president of the US. > I'm not terribly worried about the consequences of someone filing my taxes for me. Unless you have taken the time to fine tune your payments such that you don't receive a refund or owe a significant tax payment, then someone else filing can effectively get your refund, or put information in there that can land you legal trouble or have you owe a significant payment when you actually do not. That said, we have been able to file taxes online for many years now. It would be nice if we could get with the times and do the same for voting.
        Shared404 6y ago
marios 6y ago
I worry about online voting not being transparent enough
buzzert 6y ago
It’s trading one set of problems for an entirely different (and far scarier, IMO) set of problems.
pontus 6y ago
I used to be in your camp, but ultimately I think the decentralization and heterogeneity of the election processes provides a non-trivial layer of "security by obfuscation". In other words, if we streamline the process too well, we'll find ourselves with a system with a handful of highly vulnerable points of failure. I would much prefer a seemingly archaic system that, at the cost of annoyances and delays, at least provides us with a reasonable sense of conviction that the results are accurate.
- brundolf 6y ago
  Computers make it very easy to centrally modify/control information. Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes it's a terrible thing.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    It's also unique in its specifics. Voting is an unusual data-management challenge as we want a paper-trail (we want to be able to verify the correctness of the count), and voter anonymity (it must be impossible to prove that a specific person voted a specific way). We can do this robustly and easily with paper-based voting. Electronic systems are often deeply flawed. Bruce Schneier's article on this: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_electi_1.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec...
- ryanobjc 6y ago
  Don’t forget the worst of the delays this year we’re deliberately left in place by GOP legislatures. There was a massive shift to mail in voting yet no changes to how they’re processed. The pre-canvass part: opening mail in ballots, verifying them, preparing them for tabulation, can be securely done before the election. Most states with substantial mail in already do this. That means on Election Day, workers merely have to tabulate ballots which is a lot less work. But in PA specifically the legislature declined to allow pre-canvass before the election. When done right we have have reasonable speed and security.
- brandmeyer 6y ago
  It also makes it much easier to directly observe which systems work better and which systems don't. Imagine for a moment that the entire country was using the exact same ballot process in 2000: The punch system that lead to so much ambiguity in FL. Its one thing to look at a system and say in the abstract "this could be much more reliable." Its another entirely to say "Look at states X, Y, and Z: Their process is actually much more reliable". I expect the same thing to happen after this election. Once things calm down, several states are going to improve their processes.
heavyset_go 6y ago
If you think IoT is bad when it comes to security, imagine what will happen when IoT is applied to voting. Insecure and hackable voting machines were already a problem more than a decade ago, and they're still a problem today.
burkaman 6y ago
I agree with you, except that I saw all the "anachronistic processes" as meaningful and useful backup systems. Obviously online voting would be simpler for the voter, I don't think anyone would deny that, but you wouldn't get: 1. Your physical signature witnessed by a poll worker, and your identity and presence physically recorded in several different locations. 2. A physical paper ballot only accessible by poll workers. 3. A locally stored electronic ballot only accessible by poll workers. 4. Multiple physical receipts with your votes, distributed to many different physical locations only accessible to poll workers. 5. A trained poll worker available to help at the time and place that you vote. 6. An easy backup plan if something goes wrong. Online voting is optimized for the happy path, but handling all the edge cases where something could go wrong is extremely difficult to implement and difficult for voters to understand. With online voting you need to ensure the security of the voter's physical device, operating system, web browser, each link in their internet connection, and all of those for the voting servers as well. After implementing processes to secure all of that, you need to communicate the security in a way that an average voter can understand it. You also need to think about what to do when a voter needs help, or their computer crashes mid-vote, or their power goes out, or someone sends them the wrong link, etc. etc. etc. Current processes are a little more complicated up front, but processes for preventing and correcting errors are easy to implement and understand.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
The thing is, your grandma can watch a paper process, understand it, and verify that no shenanigans happened during the part that she was watching. But she can't do the same for online voting. She's not going to audit the software used. She's not going to verify network integrity, or authenticate packets. The manual processes are much better for transparency and verifiability. And we really badly need those qualities right now, when you have to be able to prove to the other side that the vote was legit, and be able to prove that every claim otherwise is false.
- ryanobjc 6y ago
  Yes exactly this so much. I’ve done poll clerk and the security of the process depends on security seals and armed guards and all sorts of things that are easy to understand.
g00gler 6y ago
In Pennsylvania there was a web tool via the department of state to check if your mail in ballot was counted. I can picture several ways to do a hybrid (mail + online) election like getting a code in the mail, voting online, then being able to ensure your ballot was counted correctly by using your code. It seems to make a lot more sense than having states count for a week.
- jpttsn 6y ago
  Randomizing would be even faster and easier, if you just want incorrect answers in record time. Voting has a short list of maybe four easily stated requirements. Online voting “solutions” tend to solve one or two, forget about the others, and try to compensate on user experience.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    > Voting has a short list of maybe four easily stated requirements. Online voting “solutions” tend to solve one or two, forget about the others, and try to compensate on user experience. Right. In this case: > then being able to ensure your ballot was counted correctly by using your code This fails the voter anonymity requirement. There must not be a database associating each voter with which way they voted.
- jeffbezos982134 6y ago
  I second that. People could still count for weeks afterwards to make sure everything comes out on the up and up.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> Online voting seems like such a simpler approach. It isn't. Bruce Schneier has written about how online voting is a terrible idea in general [0], and how real-world attempts at it are often woefully incompetent. [1][2] Voting should remain paper-based. [0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_electi_1.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec... [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/12/election_machin_2.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/12/election_mach... [2] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/02/voatz_internet_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/02/voatz_interne...
pgrote 6y ago
It could be. With voting I think the consideration is a barrier for voting. In many states you do not need to prove it to vote. Some states allow a normal vote and some states make them provisional. Still, no concrete identification is required when voting in most states. The voter is trusted to be who they say they are under possible penalty. This only applies to in person voting. Almost all states allowing mail in voting do not require notarization. With electronic voting you have a huge barrier in that not everyone has access to the means to vote electronically. You disenfranchise a pool of voters. https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state
cm2187 6y ago
Beyond hacking, there is a reason to do polls in person. It is also a protection against people being coerced or selling their vote. When they are at the polling station, no outside force can exert any influence as the vote is fully confidential.
pkulak 6y ago
Decentralized, paper elections are the entire strength of the American system. Rigging an election means dealing with 50 entirely independent processes and modifying/creating millions of physical pieces of paper. Off the top of my head I can think of half a dozen ways to steal a centralized, digital election.
tehlike 6y ago
Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  It's true that the software field is bad at what it does. When someone makes a truly secure piece of software, they get a PhD and repeatedly make the HN front-page. [0] It's not just a matter of writing code with no bugs, though. As I mentioned this another comment, [1] voting is unusual as we must be confident in the correctness of the count, and confident that it's not possible to prove whether a particular person voted a particular way. There's also a trust issue: with a digital system, a single corrupt official will likely be able to do far more damage to the vote than with a paper-based system. Even if the system is somehow structured to resist this, public trust might still be less than in a paper-based system. [0] https://ts.data61.csiro.au/projects/seL4/ https://ts.data61.csiro.au/projects/seL4/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25048971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25048971
  - tehlike 6y ago
    You are correct. It needs to be anonymous, untamperable, auditable. I recently had a discussion with a friend who asked me how to implement a write only audit log that will comply with some finra regulation. I asked him how tamper proof it needs to be, and mentioned his system admin could practically stop the log writer, do shady stuff, and start the log writer and there is nothing you can do about it. As long as someone has access to the system, things can go wrong. I am hoping zero knowledge proof systems will provide some guarantees here some day.

youcandoithuman 6y ago

I am glad that the author didn't force election authority to use plan9 from outer space.

Shared404 6y ago
Wow, imagine creating an account just to troll a guy who you have disagreements with. Get a life.

estebank 6y ago

As a non-citizen who had a chance to observe how the process works in California, I was struck by how little emphasis is put in the secrecy of the vote. The whole system looks reasonable except for how easy it can be for poll workers to know what you voted for. Beyond that, the system is clearly geared towards increasing participation and enfranchising as many people as possible (a good thing in a democratic system).

Der_Einzige 6y ago
They have an optional secret ballot in all the votes. So does oregon who was doing vote by mail before it was cool...
- drilldrive 6y ago
  Oregon has one of the worst voter-registration online systems in the country however, a date of birth + residency will give access to party registration of the individual, alongside some other information I believe.
  - krallja 6y ago
    That’s true of most states.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    IIRC Oregon is one of the states that sells a big CSV of every registered voters name, address, and party affiliation. So really all they're doing is competing with their own business Quick edit: It's $500 to get data for everyone in the state, but there might be an extra fee if you want to know when they voted
    - drilldrive 6y ago
      Holy cow, that is nuts. Like I could actually buy that myself if I wanted? USA really needs a privacy amendment to the constitution quite badly.
6y ago

dx87 6y ago

This part seems incorrect: > There are strict laws regulating police and poll workers while the polls are open. Police are not allowed within 100 feet of the polling location, unless they're actively voting or there on official business at the request of the election board. Additionally, anyone working at the polls in an official capacity is not allowed to wear any clothing with political messaging. One of the officers who showed up earlier in the day was wearing a hoodie with the American flag on it, and the US armed forces oath of enlistment printed in place of the white stripes. As they were leaving, I pulled the officer aside and asked him to remove the hoodie before making his next stop, politely explaining the law. The linked PDF of rules says that the following isn't allowed: > Wearing a t-shirt or button supporting a candidate, campaign, or political party (except voters in the act of voting) The American flag with the military oath of enlistment isn't any of those. I'd probably get upset as well if some poll worker tried to tell me I'm not allowed to wear the American flag on my clothes.

mindslight 6y ago
"The American flag with the military oath of enlistment" is not "the American flag", but rather an attempt to make some kind of statement. At best it's political support of the military, at worst it's a possible dog whistle.
- Fellshard 6y ago
  A dog whistle for what? There's an awful lot of cagey presumption going on in every reiteration of this claim.
  - AGSYS 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_Keepers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_Keepers
    - Fellshard 6y ago
      That is not what the Thin Blue Line represents.

jniedrauer 6y ago

Seems to have been hugged to death. Anyone have an alternative link?

ddevault 6y ago
It's not hugged to death, my Gemini server is just kind of unstable and crashes a lot. I'm keeping an eye on it.

D13Fd 6y ago

This may be accurate for Philadelphia County -- I don't know -- but it is definitely not how voting worked in at least one other area of Pennsylvania. I'm not saying the person is lying, but they may be misinformed about the procedures applying across the entire state. (I'm also not saying anything is wrong with how it was done anywhere in PA.)

ddevault 6y ago
What were the differences?
- moduspol 6y ago
  I voted in Allegheny County. We filled in bubbles on paper, and then at the end, put our ballots in what looked like a scantron machine. It had a screen with a simple confirmation message (something like "thank you for voting") that lit up after it scanned your ballot. I also wasn't asked my party affiliation.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    Wow, that's much different. I wonder if the machines are unique to Philly, then.
    - moduspol 6y ago
      If it helps, the machines described in OP sound similar to what we used here four years ago. I haven't voted in between though so I'm not sure when the switchover actually took place here.
      - Frondo 6y ago
        Philadelphia County switched their machines to a new style in 2019.
        djsumdog 6y ago

eatonphil 6y ago

Cannot connect to the site! Source of post is here though. https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/drewdevault.com/tree/master/content/blog/2020-Election-worker.gmi https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/drewdevault.com/tree/master/cont...

est31 6y ago
Raw link which has line wrapping: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/drewdevault.com/blob/master/content/blog/2020-Election-worker.gmi https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/drewdevault.com/blob/master/cont...
seba_dos1 6y ago
The canonical URL is gemini://drewdevault.com/2020/11/10/2020-Election-worker.gmi

lc9er 6y ago

> The voter approaches their table, and gives their name and party affiliation. I’ve voted in PA for 20 years and have never once been asked my party affiliation. This is all in Philadelphia, so maybe other counties are different? This seems sketchy. Even more so than the cop, who likely didn’t expect anyone to challenge him.

ddevault 6y ago
Your party affiliation is a matter of public record, and you're not required to vote for your party. Not really a big deal IMO. Any attempt by the election workers to suppress your vote based on your answer would be trivially detected by a number of security checks.
- koolba 6y ago
  You're dodging the allegation. It's not that it's not public information or that it must dictate the vote. It's that there's no reason for the poll worker to ask or know what you party registration is prior to sending to you machine A or machine B. At best it's a non-issue, at worst it's an opportunity to steer voters to a broken machine. Any comparison of total turnout v.s. historic turnout based upon political party could be done after the fact anyway.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    We let voters use any machine they wanted, or the first one which became available, with no special preference. But whatever, I don't write the laws. If it bugs you, you should reach out to the election board directly: 1-877-VOTESPA.
  - lc9er 6y ago
    I want to clarify that I don’t think drew is being dishonest here. I’ve never heard this requirement nor been asked my party affiliation in a general election. Primaries - yes.
  - f154hfds 6y ago
    Pennsylvania voter here - in 2018 they asked me for my party affiliation and then remarked (jokingly) on the fact that my affiliation was an extreme minority for the district. I was a bit put off by this. 2020 and a few districts over however, totally secret somehow. No idea what changed.

eznzt 6y ago

Thanks for taking the time to write this. It is interesting to someone who lives in a developed country.

tptacek 6y ago

This squares with my experience in Illinois after a couple of elections. * As a security/integrity issue, the ballots themselves are much less scary than the pollbooks, which are what we use to match voters against the voting rolls. * Everything's ultimately on paper; there are bar codes, which nobody loves, but they're auditable against the readable printed ballot. * Most of the security is physical/human; for us, each polling station (a location can have several precincts and thus several stations, each a giant rolling metal box) is sealed using numbered plastic seals before the polls open and after they're closed, and everything is recorded redundantly and signed off on by the poll workers. * A matching count at the close of polls is a big deal, a nightmare big deal; in Illinois, we can't just shrug off a missing ballot and say "nothing we can do about it"; in March, I had to stay 3 hours late while we resolved a similar issue (IIRC, a mis-recorded provisional). Most pollworkers in my experience are there for the money (I've never bothered cashing the check) and the threat that they won't get paid if they count doesn't match is extremely powerful. * The local police are not allowed to monitor polling places, and the municipality of the polling place is usually confused about that; in Cook County, it's the County Sheriff's Department that has authority over polling places. Our cops were very friendly and responsive. * The drama of every election is the the "string line" that defined the 100 foot "no electioneering" radius of the polling place; the entertainment you can count on each cycle is the candidate whose people religiously move their lawn signs inside the string line, and freak out when you remove them. It's an interesting system that derives a lot of resiliency from extreme complexity and maximal human touch points --- Illinois elections will never do something with 1 person when the same thing could be done with 2 --- which is sort of the opposite of how we reason about security online. It's simultaneously terrifying and reassuring.

patio11 6y ago
I remember as an election judge in IIRC 2000, while in high school, having to enforce the electioneering thing against someone in the facility. Some things never change. I also came away from it thinking "Oh goodness it is amazing democracy survives, but kinda cool that it survives in an extremely participatory matter." Edited: Would have been for the primary, not the general, so I was still in high school, and the youngest judge by 50 years or so for our polling place.

rleahy22 6y ago

article { line-height: 1.3; font-family: Serif; font-size: 18px; }

shazar 6y ago
I agree, it is heard to read. Used Firefox's Reader View.

m0zg 6y ago

Biden only gets lucky in PA a full day after that if you look at vote share per batch, well after in-person votes are counted, and the later you go, the luckier he gets. The pattern is the same in every swing state except Arizona, and in Virginia as well. If you plot out Edison data that has vote count updates, in "normal" states (both Biden and Trump dominant), things are chaotic initially (when in-person votes are counted) and then they settle to a certain GOP/DEM ratio, with a very slow drift towards GOP, presumably because rural votes take longer to show up. In the swing states you observe the same initial chaos, and the same slight initial drift towards GOP, but then Biden starts to get very lucky indeed, and his luck improves as time goes on. To be fair, this could just be artifact of how votes are counted, in which case I'd like to see what could lead to such a pattern _only_ in the swing states. Or this could be evidence of vote rigging by all means necessary. No matter which side you're on, this should be looked into.

tgb 6y ago
This was literally predicted ahead of time based off the known demographics of the regions and the time it would take to count the ballots in different counties and the expected differences between in-person and mail-in ballots. It's absolutely misinformation to pretend that this is suspicious and should be investigated. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-pennsylvanias-vote-count-could-change-after-election-night/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-pennsylvanias-vote-...
- m0zg 6y ago
  Why is this not happening in non-swing states other than Virginia? And why does Biden's luck improve over time when _only_ mail in ballots are counted?
  - tgb 6y ago
    Mail ballots come from different counties with highly different demographics. You get massive Biden support in one city and massive Trump support in another rural county - it's not surprising at all. There's also differences in when the ballots arrived: some states could process ballots ahead of time so the late counted ones are only those that arrived late and may be more or less D/R leaning. And different states have different voter registration policies; that's why Arizona has had relatively good Trump performance on the later counts since there are a large number of Republican voters using vote-by-mail and there always have been in Arizona. There is boundless discussion of the specifics of this on twitter, etc. I don't think swing state/non-swing state is a useful categorization here. Just look at the where the ballots are coming from directly.

lurker345 6y ago

drewdevault sounds like a cuck

ElijahLynn 6y ago

504: Gateway Timeout (likely an HN caused DDoS)

tomohawk 6y ago

Another POV: https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/11/06/a-pro-bono-lawyer-for-trump-campaign-shares-what-he-saw-in-pennsylvania/ https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/11/06/a-pro-bono-lawyer-for...

philjohn 6y ago
And yet television pictures during the count refute pretty much everything this person is saying - there were poll watchers mere feet away from the people processing the ballots.
macintux 6y ago
It’s hard to trust allegations like “our switchboard was hacked”, especially coming from someone who starts out with saying the Dems always cheat. I’d much rather hear concrete allegations with evidence from someone who isn’t a lawyer for the losing party.
- wavefunction 6y ago
  As well, this media outlet linked in the op is owned by The Heritage Foundation a far-right-wing "think tank". The other pieces of media on the site do not seem to be without a certain political bias.
ineedasername 6y ago
The Daily Signal is published by the highly partisan Heritage Foundation and this person's account does not appear to be substantiated by any other evidence. The person who witnessed the events he relayed may be a lawyer, but he is not an election lawyer and also not from PA, so his specific knowledge of their rules and regulations may be lacking. Assuming the person making these claims accurately relayed his observations, what he saw sounds just as likely to be workers setting up & testing the machines for proper functionality. Of course, there's a chance that's not the case, and something else was going on. But lacking evidence to the contrary, this account seems explainable by something other than election fraud.

oblib 6y ago

Looks like HN broke Drew's blog.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sam36 6y ago

I'm curious where everyone is getting their "news" at. For one, the "blue wave" of mail in ballots is a myth: https://i.imgur.com/LIX2cwQ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/LIX2cwQ.jpg Two: No one is really questioning the machines not "working right". It is clear that there is no validation with the mail in ballots. MIB's are some of the most rejected ballots there are, yet no one seems to have any stats on this, or the stats provided are very low. Then you factor in tons of twitter and facebook posts of women saying that they were sent two ballots, one for their maiden name and one for their current name, at both their current address and their old addresses. Never mind that it is state law in most of these places that a ballot has to be "solicited" and cannot just be mailed en mass via mail. Put another way, you can't just mail 5 million ballots out to just 1 million physical addresses. I would not be surprised if during a recount, 50% of these MIBs are rejected. Three: elections are quite predictable. There are 100's of counties that for the last 40 years have always predicted the outcome. If this county is blue, then blue is our president, etc. This seems to still be the case this time around, except for the states in question. People's Pundit Daily https://youtu.be/Em0R9DRSbIE https://youtu.be/Em0R9DRSbIE for the most part has been a really good source of information on behind the scene numbers and what "normal" elections typically should look like. I'd recommend it.

weci2i 6y ago
My parents in PA received a mail in ballot for my grandfather. He has been dead over 7 years. Not only is he dead, he never lived with my parents at their address. I keep checking the status of his mail in ballot online to ensure that he hasn’t voted.

stefantalpalaru 6y ago

> The voter approaches their table, and gives their name and party affiliation. Is this a joke? An electoral system in which votes are not secret is anything but democratic.

hellepardo 6y ago

Similar experience here in Georgia. It sounds like there is more to do on setup morning here, since we had to show up at 5am (and didn't have things really ready until 6:30 or so). There are so many seals to check and record; lots and lots and lots of paperwork. In Georgia, the ballots are printed from a terminal that the voter uses and then scanned, leaving both an electronic count and a paper trail (the ballot itself is ejected from the bottom of the scanner into a sealed ballot box). However, our scanners jammed 40 minutes into the day; after a couple hours, a technician managed to come to our precinct and opened the ballot box and revealed that a lackluster design in the ballot box caused the ballots coming out of the scanner to sometimes curl up and jam. Without any realistic solution, we just had to open the ballot box every time it jammed (supervised every time to ensure no monkey business) and push any stuck ballots out of the way of the scanner so that more could be scanned. Amusingly we had good success regularly giving the machine a good shove to dislodge any stuck ballots. We also had problems printing receipts---in our case, we only need to print 3 from each scanner, but we ran out of scanner receipt paper. Since another precinct called us during the day looking for extra receipt paper... it wasn't available. But, we dodged a bullet, since there was just enough paper to print 2 of the 3 receipts. (1 gets posted on the door of the polling place; 2 go to the county. We wrote an apology on the receipt and only sent 1 to the county. I verified on the Secretary of State website that the votes tabulated for our precinct matched what our receipts printed. Cool to be able to double-check like that!) I spent a while thinking about what a pollworker would need to do to illegally cast ballots. It would be a tall order indeed and would require cooperation and secrecy from everyone there, since the only way to cast a ballot is to scan it, and everyone can see the scanners at all times. I can't see it realistically happening in any precinct.

noobermin 6y ago

The story about the police is ridiculous and in line with everything activists complain about. Police are not supposed to "puff up" they're supposed to be the cool heads.

pugworthy 6y ago

A fascinating post and I'm thankful for the post. Interesting to learn the experiences first hand. That said, it's sad to see we're no better than any other forum that just turns into political bullshit arguments sooner or later.

ropable 6y ago

I'm as much of a technophile as any other HN reader, but I am continuously flummoxed that anyone makes use of the sort of electronic voting machines described in this article. This is mainly from the perspective that a lot of the redundancy and auditability of the system seemed to rely on a bunch of printers working perfectly. Paper ballots and a pencil/pen are still hugely more reliable and trustworthy, IMO.

mhh__ 6y ago
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In the UK, everything is done on paper - even if there was potential for fraud, scaling it across the whole nation would take years and huge amounts of money (and even more hush money)
- smt88 6y ago
  We had a presidential election in 2000 that was stolen in public by the GOP, despite being on paper. They did it with a technicality. They're doing the same with signature matching (your signature on your ballot has to match a different signature that could be many years older). Paper is safe from people outside the system, but not from politicized courts that are able to ignore paper ballots for minor mistakes.
  - specialist 6y ago
    I liked how an election advocate buddy said it one time: "GWB doesn't lose his right to speech when he makes another gaff. Under no circumstances should a voter lose their right to vote for a mistake." It just slays me that we're still arguing about this.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    Keep in mind the whole hanging chad situation is also impossible because we just use pencils. But the legal aspect is troubling too
carapace 6y ago
I'm with you. To me electronic voting machines means you've given your democracy to the best hackers. "Hackerocracy"?

puranjay 6y ago

If, as Trump claims, Biden's victory is fraudulent, it would mean over 100k voted were falsely cast. If that happens to be true, it would put every single election on US soil into question. Pretty much undermines democracy altogether.

specialist 6y ago

Great writeup. I am very surprised that police officers transport the ballots. When I was a poll judge, we transported everything ourselves, in pairs. Sheriffs did do traffic control and such at central count, like at a sporting event.

PeterStuer 6y ago

The one thing I do not understand about the US voting protocol is how you can possibly be comfortable with the undeniable huge potential for coercion in the case of voting by mail in such a contested election where both sides see voting for the other candidate as not just wrong bur evil.

admax88q 6y ago

Doea anybody ever actually verify the machine receipts by counting the paper ballots? In Canada we just use paper ballots, it works great. The whole count is usually done the night of the election. I don't see the appeal of complicated voting machines in the US.

ffggvv 6y ago

none of this addresses: 1. all the dead people who voted 2. all the ballot harvesting and curing which can be heavily manipulated

radford-neal 6y ago

This account expresses the idea that voter fraud would be very difficult to carry out in Pennsylvania - at least with respect to in-person election day voting (it doesn't seem relevant to claims of fraud with mail-in voting). However, this link describes a guilty plea of someone convicted of doing just that: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edpa/pr/us-attorney-william-m-mcswain-announces-charges-and-guilty-plea-former-philadelphia?fbclid=IwAR01GMlz_570Tmd0h74JlxTxsSnooIeZ84f1RpuHqScYV5DiFwhGM1xvTf8 https://www.justice.gov/usao-edpa/pr/us-attorney-william-m-m... So it would be interesting to reconcile this. One possibility is that procedures vary across the state, as some other comments here might indicate. Another is that the system the author participated in isn't actually as immune to fraud as he thinks.

nemothekid 6y ago
I think it’s incredibly difficult to design a system what’s 100% immune to voter fraud. Despite it being difficult, I think voter fraud is still very hard to do on a systemic scale that would swing an election. Prior studies have only shown minor instances of voter fraud, I think something like 1000 documented instances of voter fraud amount 10s of millions of votes cast. With all the available information I have, I think it would be very difficult to fradulently product ballots on the order of 10s of thousands to actually swing an election. Secondly, I think if we did have a widespread voter fraud problem I think it would also call into question past elections as well.
aw1621107 6y ago
> One possibility is that procedures vary across the state, as some other comments here might indicate. Another is that the system the author participated in isn't actually as immune to fraud as he thinks. Some other possibilities might be that primary elections use a different process and/or undergo less scrutiny than general elections, or that procedures have changed since 2016. As you said, it'd be an interesting exercise to go through exactly what DeMuro did and figure out whether what happened then would or would not work now. Incidentally, it seems the author might have had to deal with a similar situation: > The other event came when a discrepancy developed between the number of votes recorded by the machine and the number of voters tallied in the books: one vote was recorded in the books that was not recorded by the machines. We ultimately concluded that someone had just walked out of the polling place after they were handed their ballot, never casting their vote on the machine. Other possibilities which we ultimately ruled out were election board error, or that the voter voted in the wrong division after receiving their ballot. The redundant records — the index card, the registration book, the list of voters — helped to narrow down the possible causes. In the end, there was nothing we could do about it. So there's an argument to be made that what DeMuro did (ringing up votes on the machine) could have been caught.

bumbledraven 6y ago

I was also a poll watcher in PA this year, and my conclusions were similar to OP's: The in-person voting process in PA seems largely OK. However, that doesn't mean the 2020 PA general elction was fine; significant irregularities have been reported in PA this year regarding the processing of mail-in ballots.