11 ms·

So what are the facts??

woofie11 6y ago
The facts are we have: * electronic voting machines * credible claims of foreign interference in elections * credible claims of organized state agent hacking of US digital infrastructure. * voting machines with designs and source code which are secret, and no way to know if they're working as advertised. We have cryptographic protocols for honest, verifiable, anonymous elections, which we don't bother implementing. It's all an honor system, in a government without much honor. We, quite frankly, have no way to know if votes are being counted correctly or honestly. As much as I disbelief Trump's claims of this election being rigged by democrats, the claims that we have excellent election security are false too. We have a huge chunk of the country openly lying about election results, and another half lying about election security. Two lies don't make a truth. If our current elections aren't being manipulated, you can bet future ones will be. It's easy for an organized state agent to do, and if it wasn't being done before, it will be now. And fixing this will be almost impossible post-Trump, because Democrats.
- AshamedCaptain 6y ago
  > We have cryptographic protocols for honest, verifiable, anonymous elections, which we don't bother implementing We do?
  - woofie11 6y ago
    Yeah. They've been around for decades. Applied Cryptography gives them (excellent book; highly entertaining, yet reasonably mathematical). The gist of it is that: - Everyone can verify who voted (so number of votes equals number of voters) - Everyone can verify their individual vote was correctly and uniquely counted - All votes are released under unique, anonymous identifiers, so anyone can recount all votes - However, no one can verify anyone else's vote individually It's pretty awesome! I've watched with gradual shock and horror as voting machines came out and seemed almost designed for riggable elections.
    - Ste_Evans 6y ago
      "and seemed almost designed for riggable elections" And yet all parties have passed up this oh-so-easy opportunity to rig an election, even Trump. Do you think they are not easily riggable, in fact, and you're just making stuff up?
    - Phrodo_00 6y ago
      I've seen this before. Do you remember the name of the algorithm? The question I've had with this is whether you can prove who you voted for. If you can, you can sell your vote and prove tongue buyer that you voted correctly. That's also my concern with mail in voting.
      - woofie11 6y ago
        It's complex. The scheme I saw in Applied Cryptography would in abstract permit vote selling, but not simple vote selling -- you'd need pretty complex security between the buyer and seller. If you're trying to buy my vote, and I'm trying to sell it, I could give you my unique anonymous number, and you could verify my votes. But I could also vote a different way, lie, and give you someone else's unique number, and you'd have no way to know. You could ask for a special ballot too, where, for example, I vote a particular pattern (yes/no/no/yes/yes/no), to encode things, ideally picking ones that aren't likely to come up in practice, or other complex schemes, but these generally have work-arounds. At the end of the day, though, it'd be cheaper and easier for you to require me to wear a pinhole camera to vote, do a mail-in, or otherwise. Plus, we had open voting for much of history, and it worked okay. If we went back to the risk of illegal vote selling versus the risk of wholesale election fraud, I'd take the former which seems like the lesser of two evils (and much easier to police too).
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      > Everyone can verify their individual vote was correctly and uniquely counted This violates the secrecy of the vote. I can threaten you to vote for someone then force you to prove you voted according to my orders.
      - 6y ago
  - Natanael_L 6y ago
    Yes and no. Techniques like Zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption and multiparty computation exists, but none of them are sufficient for elections. The security requirements are simply too complex, and we can't require that every voter manages a private keypair to issue their votes from an electronic device they can't audit. Paper voting is safer.
    - woofie11 6y ago
      The systems I know don't require voters to keep a private key pair.
      - Natanael_L 6y ago
        Then how else do you validate the identity of the voter? What do you gain if you can't prevent fraud by inserting fake votes?
        woofie11 6y ago
        * You have a list of people who voted. That's public. * You have a list of votes. That's public (and not correlated with the above) by anonymous tokens. * You have an anonymous token, which lets you verify your own vote. If the list of people who voted doesn't match up to real people, that's detectable. If I go into Massachusetts and find 10% of the people claimed to have voted don't exist, I can confirm fraud. If someone who didn't voted has there vote counted, that also confirms fraud. Anyone can count up and add up the votes. That's public too. And anyone can confirm their own vote was counted.
        Natanael_L 6y ago
        How are those tokens less complicated to use than a private keypair? How do you ensure that the votes are cast anonymously, without leaking metadata from timing, etc?
- welterde 6y ago
  > And fixing this will be almost impossible post-Trump, because Democrats. Why exactly should Democrats block any attempts at improving election security? The Democrats even introduced several election security bills the last couple years that all got blocked by the GOP..
  - woofie11 6y ago
    My experience is that the stance the Democrats take is the opposite of the stance the Republicans take, and vice-versa. If one party flips on an issue, the other almost immediately flops. At this point, the Republicans are mid-flop towards election security, while the Democrats have made statements which will be very hard to back out of, so I think we're seeing the fish flipping.... You can even see this in action, as every single one of these posts is trending toward negative infinite upvotes, where just a few months ago, they would have been trending towards upvotes. Even a mild pointer to a textbook on cryptography summarizing a cryptographic protocol is now at zero. I'll be delighted to be proven wrong, though. Democrats will control both chambers and the presidency. If I see crypto-secure voting, I'll be delighted. I just don't see it. At this point, Democrats are firmly in the voting-is-secure-nothing-to-see-here camp. I understand why given the unpleasantness in DC, but it is, as a point of fact, not secure. That doesn't mean it's been rigged, but it does mean we should fix it.
    - adamsea 6y ago
      > My experience is that the stance the Democrats take is the opposite of the stance the Republicans take, and vice-versa. If one party flips on an issue, the other almost immediately flops. I’m sorry but that is way too reductive. For one thing, there’s a bipartisan consensus (for better or worse) on a lot of foreign policy, which is a pretty huge area. And, your comment obscures the meaningful differences in ideology between the groups of people each party represents. And the different interests of those groups. The Democrats are far from perfect. But it’s not a “both sides equally bad” situation. Well, maybe it is when it comes to corporate money in politics. But even there you see bipartisan consensus on the fringes, I think, plus iirc the Republicans were basically all about Citizens United. But yeah money in politics is a big problem on both sides. To be fair, it’s been a big problem in all of politics throughout all recorded history. Which doesn’t mean we can’t (and haven’t) made some progress.
- simonh 6y ago
  Claims aren't evidence. Some of these "stolen" elections took place under Republican state administrations, supervised by Republican appointed election officials. WTF are these people doing if tens of thousands of votes are sneaking through the system and they can't find any evidence of it, and say themselves the election was fair? Trump did exactly the same thing in 2016, claiming massive vote fraud and that the election was being stolen from him. Not only did he provide no evidence, but his own Justice department and subsequent administration was unable to find any evidence. If he really though the electoral system was so badly flawed, he had control of the House and Senate to do something about it, so why no voting reforms? If he actually believed his claims why didn't do something about it? The truth is he didn't do anything because there's nothing to be done. He and his people know perfectly well the electoral system is fair, that's why they haven't bothered to reform it. There would be no point. In fact it would simply make them responsible for the voting system and thus unable to claim fraud anymore. Instead he's simply using claims of fraud as a tool to incite his supporters and avoid the ignominy of being a "loser". Something he has said many times he cannot tolerate. Both his words and his actions show very clearly this is a pre-meditated attempt to undermine democracy in America.
  - woofie11 6y ago
    Can you please point to where I contradict any of that? It's like telling your grandma to install security updates, and her coming back saying no one has broken into her computer so it must be secure (while gramps insists someone has). The simple fact of the matter is our elections are NOT secure, and making them secure would be cheap, and easy. We have absolutely no idea whether the vote counts in the US are authentic. That doesn't mean anyone stole this election. That certainly doesn't mean Democrats stole this election. But it does mean we should secure them. Of course, physical security is a cheap and easy step. The harder part is gaming our media. If attackers can help direct where voters vote with $$$, that's a cheap attack too. As a footnote, if I were an attacker, of any type, I wouldn't even bother with the November election. The easiest place to attack is primaries. Both 2020 and 2016, we had among the weakest candidates among the crop win. We're going from a con artist to a senile mildly corrupt lifetime politician of limited accomplishment. UPGRADE! I'll expect we'll move from major corruption to minor corruption, without an attempted coup. What I think we deserve, though, is a politician with intelligence, vision, and integrity. That requires fixing systems, rather than GOP pointing to DNC, and vice-versa.
- fignews 6y ago
  The Dominion machines have a paper trail. How do you hand wave that away?
  - woofie11 6y ago
    (1) My state doesn't use machines with a paper trail, so it's sort of irrelevant here. (2) Many of the machines with paper trails don't show the voter what's printed is the same as their vote (although I haven't looked at the models you refer to). If there's a printer paper trail that the voter can see, that's a big step forward.
  - wdkrnls 6y ago
    This paper seems relevant to that question: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3375755 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3375755
- oulu2006 6y ago
  When Georgia conducted a hand re-count of the ballots without using dominion machines and found it fairly consistent with the original tally (biden did drop 2000 votes but not because of count erros), doesn't that put to pasture claims about hacked voting machines flipping votes?
  - woofie11 6y ago
    Analogy: When I looked around my computer, I found no evidence of someone having broken in. Doesn't that lay to pasture claims of all these "security holes" "zero-days" and "hackers?" And aren't these "security updates" just paranoia? Whether or not something happened in Georgia this election -- and I don't particularly care whether something did -- the perfectly valid point is we have an insecure election system, and we should fix it.
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      Why is that evidence in any direction. “Computer security is hard” is just as much evidence that Biden actually won by 10% in Georgia as it is that Trump won.
      - woofie11 6y ago
        It's not evidence in any direction. It's perfectly possible votes were stolen from Biden, from Trump, or neither. We don't know. I wish we did. In this context, though, security is NOT hard. We've just made the decision not to do it. I see no excuse for why I shouldn't be able to see the source code and design of the voting machines in my state, or audit any part of the manufacturing or voting process. This should all be open and transparent. A not-for-profit should be able to spot audit a hundred random machines around the US: - Swipe a credit card to cover supervisor time - In a secure facility, confirm the source code and hardware are as advertised on local voting machines This just isn't rocket science. Judging from downvotes and comments on HN, building political consensus around that will be neigh-impossible post-Trump. Click on my post history. Most of my comments are in the +3 to +15 range. Virtually all my comments in this thread are either 1 (not voted on) or between 0 and -4 (having gone to -6). None are swinging Trump conspiracy theories; merely pointing out the obvious: we need robust, auditable, secure voting.
- wronginternet4 6y ago
  I don't understand this "electronic voting machines are bad" myth. I voted with one of these machines for the first time this election and all it did was... print out my choices on a ballot. It takes all of 15 seconds to look over your votes and make sure they're correct. Then I manually put the ballot in a privacy sleeve, walked over to the ballot box, and inserted my ballot. The machine was a mere convenience that kept me from needing to manually circle my choices with a pen. Not much opportunity for widespread voter fraud in my opinion. If the machines were switching votes so rampantly you'd think, of the millions of people who voted, more people would've raised concern at the polls when they noticed their vote for the president of the United States at the top of the printed ballot was switched. Am I missing something?
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    The ballots are counted by machine too right? I would not say that is a good idea but the hand recounts would have shown any fraud from those if there were any fraud.
    - woofie11 6y ago
      I'm not worried about machines which print ballots and leave a paper trail. That's not what they look like many places. You hit a button on the screen. Your pray your vote is counted correctly. There's no audit trail, no security, and no transparency.
      - syspec 6y ago
        > Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kansas, Indiana, Kentucky and New Jersey. States with electronic voting, which does not print out a paper receipt. But interestingly, no one is looking into these states for alleged fraud
    - Natanael_L 6y ago
      Yes they are, and several states followed up with manual hand counts. This includes Georgia (which performed 3 manual recounts!).

The facts are we have: * electronic voting machines * credible claims of foreign interference in elections * credible claims of organized state agent hacking of US digital infrastructure. * voting machines with designs and source code which are secret, and no way to know if they're working as advertised. We have cryptographic protocols for honest, verifiable, anonymous elections, which we don't bother implementing. It's all an honor system, in a government without much honor. We, quite frankly, have no way to know if votes are being counted correctly or honestly. As much as I disbelief Trump's claims of this election being rigged by democrats, the claims that we have excellent election security are false too. We have a huge chunk of the country openly lying about election results, and another half lying about election security. Two lies don't make a truth. If our current elections aren't being manipulated, you can bet future ones will be. It's easy for an organized state agent to do, and if it wasn't being done before, it will be now. And fixing this will be almost impossible post-Trump, because Democrats.

AshamedCaptain 6y ago
> We have cryptographic protocols for honest, verifiable, anonymous elections, which we don't bother implementing We do?
- woofie11 6y ago
  Yeah. They've been around for decades. Applied Cryptography gives them (excellent book; highly entertaining, yet reasonably mathematical). The gist of it is that: - Everyone can verify who voted (so number of votes equals number of voters) - Everyone can verify their individual vote was correctly and uniquely counted - All votes are released under unique, anonymous identifiers, so anyone can recount all votes - However, no one can verify anyone else's vote individually It's pretty awesome! I've watched with gradual shock and horror as voting machines came out and seemed almost designed for riggable elections.
  - Ste_Evans 6y ago
    "and seemed almost designed for riggable elections" And yet all parties have passed up this oh-so-easy opportunity to rig an election, even Trump. Do you think they are not easily riggable, in fact, and you're just making stuff up?
  - Phrodo_00 6y ago
    I've seen this before. Do you remember the name of the algorithm? The question I've had with this is whether you can prove who you voted for. If you can, you can sell your vote and prove tongue buyer that you voted correctly. That's also my concern with mail in voting.
    - woofie11 6y ago
      It's complex. The scheme I saw in Applied Cryptography would in abstract permit vote selling, but not simple vote selling -- you'd need pretty complex security between the buyer and seller. If you're trying to buy my vote, and I'm trying to sell it, I could give you my unique anonymous number, and you could verify my votes. But I could also vote a different way, lie, and give you someone else's unique number, and you'd have no way to know. You could ask for a special ballot too, where, for example, I vote a particular pattern (yes/no/no/yes/yes/no), to encode things, ideally picking ones that aren't likely to come up in practice, or other complex schemes, but these generally have work-arounds. At the end of the day, though, it'd be cheaper and easier for you to require me to wear a pinhole camera to vote, do a mail-in, or otherwise. Plus, we had open voting for much of history, and it worked okay. If we went back to the risk of illegal vote selling versus the risk of wholesale election fraud, I'd take the former which seems like the lesser of two evils (and much easier to police too).
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    > Everyone can verify their individual vote was correctly and uniquely counted This violates the secrecy of the vote. I can threaten you to vote for someone then force you to prove you voted according to my orders.
    - 6y ago
- Natanael_L 6y ago
  Yes and no. Techniques like Zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption and multiparty computation exists, but none of them are sufficient for elections. The security requirements are simply too complex, and we can't require that every voter manages a private keypair to issue their votes from an electronic device they can't audit. Paper voting is safer.
  - woofie11 6y ago
    The systems I know don't require voters to keep a private key pair.
    - Natanael_L 6y ago
      Then how else do you validate the identity of the voter? What do you gain if you can't prevent fraud by inserting fake votes?
      - woofie11 6y ago
        * You have a list of people who voted. That's public. * You have a list of votes. That's public (and not correlated with the above) by anonymous tokens. * You have an anonymous token, which lets you verify your own vote. If the list of people who voted doesn't match up to real people, that's detectable. If I go into Massachusetts and find 10% of the people claimed to have voted don't exist, I can confirm fraud. If someone who didn't voted has there vote counted, that also confirms fraud. Anyone can count up and add up the votes. That's public too. And anyone can confirm their own vote was counted.
        Natanael_L 6y ago
        How are those tokens less complicated to use than a private keypair? How do you ensure that the votes are cast anonymously, without leaking metadata from timing, etc?
welterde 6y ago
> And fixing this will be almost impossible post-Trump, because Democrats. Why exactly should Democrats block any attempts at improving election security? The Democrats even introduced several election security bills the last couple years that all got blocked by the GOP..
- woofie11 6y ago
  My experience is that the stance the Democrats take is the opposite of the stance the Republicans take, and vice-versa. If one party flips on an issue, the other almost immediately flops. At this point, the Republicans are mid-flop towards election security, while the Democrats have made statements which will be very hard to back out of, so I think we're seeing the fish flipping.... You can even see this in action, as every single one of these posts is trending toward negative infinite upvotes, where just a few months ago, they would have been trending towards upvotes. Even a mild pointer to a textbook on cryptography summarizing a cryptographic protocol is now at zero. I'll be delighted to be proven wrong, though. Democrats will control both chambers and the presidency. If I see crypto-secure voting, I'll be delighted. I just don't see it. At this point, Democrats are firmly in the voting-is-secure-nothing-to-see-here camp. I understand why given the unpleasantness in DC, but it is, as a point of fact, not secure. That doesn't mean it's been rigged, but it does mean we should fix it.
  - adamsea 6y ago
    > My experience is that the stance the Democrats take is the opposite of the stance the Republicans take, and vice-versa. If one party flips on an issue, the other almost immediately flops. I’m sorry but that is way too reductive. For one thing, there’s a bipartisan consensus (for better or worse) on a lot of foreign policy, which is a pretty huge area. And, your comment obscures the meaningful differences in ideology between the groups of people each party represents. And the different interests of those groups. The Democrats are far from perfect. But it’s not a “both sides equally bad” situation. Well, maybe it is when it comes to corporate money in politics. But even there you see bipartisan consensus on the fringes, I think, plus iirc the Republicans were basically all about Citizens United. But yeah money in politics is a big problem on both sides. To be fair, it’s been a big problem in all of politics throughout all recorded history. Which doesn’t mean we can’t (and haven’t) made some progress.
simonh 6y ago
Claims aren't evidence. Some of these "stolen" elections took place under Republican state administrations, supervised by Republican appointed election officials. WTF are these people doing if tens of thousands of votes are sneaking through the system and they can't find any evidence of it, and say themselves the election was fair? Trump did exactly the same thing in 2016, claiming massive vote fraud and that the election was being stolen from him. Not only did he provide no evidence, but his own Justice department and subsequent administration was unable to find any evidence. If he really though the electoral system was so badly flawed, he had control of the House and Senate to do something about it, so why no voting reforms? If he actually believed his claims why didn't do something about it? The truth is he didn't do anything because there's nothing to be done. He and his people know perfectly well the electoral system is fair, that's why they haven't bothered to reform it. There would be no point. In fact it would simply make them responsible for the voting system and thus unable to claim fraud anymore. Instead he's simply using claims of fraud as a tool to incite his supporters and avoid the ignominy of being a "loser". Something he has said many times he cannot tolerate. Both his words and his actions show very clearly this is a pre-meditated attempt to undermine democracy in America.
- woofie11 6y ago
  Can you please point to where I contradict any of that? It's like telling your grandma to install security updates, and her coming back saying no one has broken into her computer so it must be secure (while gramps insists someone has). The simple fact of the matter is our elections are NOT secure, and making them secure would be cheap, and easy. We have absolutely no idea whether the vote counts in the US are authentic. That doesn't mean anyone stole this election. That certainly doesn't mean Democrats stole this election. But it does mean we should secure them. Of course, physical security is a cheap and easy step. The harder part is gaming our media. If attackers can help direct where voters vote with $$$, that's a cheap attack too. As a footnote, if I were an attacker, of any type, I wouldn't even bother with the November election. The easiest place to attack is primaries. Both 2020 and 2016, we had among the weakest candidates among the crop win. We're going from a con artist to a senile mildly corrupt lifetime politician of limited accomplishment. UPGRADE! I'll expect we'll move from major corruption to minor corruption, without an attempted coup. What I think we deserve, though, is a politician with intelligence, vision, and integrity. That requires fixing systems, rather than GOP pointing to DNC, and vice-versa.
fignews 6y ago
The Dominion machines have a paper trail. How do you hand wave that away?
- woofie11 6y ago
  (1) My state doesn't use machines with a paper trail, so it's sort of irrelevant here. (2) Many of the machines with paper trails don't show the voter what's printed is the same as their vote (although I haven't looked at the models you refer to). If there's a printer paper trail that the voter can see, that's a big step forward.
- wdkrnls 6y ago
  This paper seems relevant to that question: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3375755 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3375755
oulu2006 6y ago
When Georgia conducted a hand re-count of the ballots without using dominion machines and found it fairly consistent with the original tally (biden did drop 2000 votes but not because of count erros), doesn't that put to pasture claims about hacked voting machines flipping votes?
- woofie11 6y ago
  Analogy: When I looked around my computer, I found no evidence of someone having broken in. Doesn't that lay to pasture claims of all these "security holes" "zero-days" and "hackers?" And aren't these "security updates" just paranoia? Whether or not something happened in Georgia this election -- and I don't particularly care whether something did -- the perfectly valid point is we have an insecure election system, and we should fix it.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    Why is that evidence in any direction. “Computer security is hard” is just as much evidence that Biden actually won by 10% in Georgia as it is that Trump won.
    - woofie11 6y ago
      It's not evidence in any direction. It's perfectly possible votes were stolen from Biden, from Trump, or neither. We don't know. I wish we did. In this context, though, security is NOT hard. We've just made the decision not to do it. I see no excuse for why I shouldn't be able to see the source code and design of the voting machines in my state, or audit any part of the manufacturing or voting process. This should all be open and transparent. A not-for-profit should be able to spot audit a hundred random machines around the US: - Swipe a credit card to cover supervisor time - In a secure facility, confirm the source code and hardware are as advertised on local voting machines This just isn't rocket science. Judging from downvotes and comments on HN, building political consensus around that will be neigh-impossible post-Trump. Click on my post history. Most of my comments are in the +3 to +15 range. Virtually all my comments in this thread are either 1 (not voted on) or between 0 and -4 (having gone to -6). None are swinging Trump conspiracy theories; merely pointing out the obvious: we need robust, auditable, secure voting.
wronginternet4 6y ago
I don't understand this "electronic voting machines are bad" myth. I voted with one of these machines for the first time this election and all it did was... print out my choices on a ballot. It takes all of 15 seconds to look over your votes and make sure they're correct. Then I manually put the ballot in a privacy sleeve, walked over to the ballot box, and inserted my ballot. The machine was a mere convenience that kept me from needing to manually circle my choices with a pen. Not much opportunity for widespread voter fraud in my opinion. If the machines were switching votes so rampantly you'd think, of the millions of people who voted, more people would've raised concern at the polls when they noticed their vote for the president of the United States at the top of the printed ballot was switched. Am I missing something?
- rightbyte 6y ago
  The ballots are counted by machine too right? I would not say that is a good idea but the hand recounts would have shown any fraud from those if there were any fraud.
  - woofie11 6y ago
    I'm not worried about machines which print ballots and leave a paper trail. That's not what they look like many places. You hit a button on the screen. Your pray your vote is counted correctly. There's no audit trail, no security, and no transparency.
    - syspec 6y ago
      > Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kansas, Indiana, Kentucky and New Jersey. States with electronic voting, which does not print out a paper receipt. But interestingly, no one is looking into these states for alleged fraud
  - Natanael_L 6y ago
    Yes they are, and several states followed up with manual hand counts. This includes Georgia (which performed 3 manual recounts!).