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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 200

by 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.
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      > In this context, though, security is NOT hard. It is. How many papers were been published in Oakland between 2000 and 2010 on election security? Lots. Clearly this is a problem interesting enough to capture the interest of computer security faculty. It isn't a toy problem. In addition to technical challenges (open sourcing isn't magic), there is a very complex organizational challenge due to the decentralized structure of elections in the US. But more importantly, making vague claims about hypothetical limitations of the existing systems while tens of millions of americans believe that actual literal fraud stole the election from Trump and are using that as motivation to invade the capitol building and disrupt the process of transitioning power between parties is tone-deaf to say the least.
      - woofie11 6y ago
        Proper security may be hard, but election security is at the level of someone running a 5-year-old Android phone which no longer receives security updates. Seriously. It's tone deaf to one side, but I'm pretty scared since the other side has, just as wrongheadedly, convinced itself these systems work. I'm not worried about 50,000 votes stolen due to doublevoting somewhere or a mailtruck of votes getting lost. If victory falls on the 50.1% mark versus the 49.9% mark, that's okay. I'm worried because we have a system which IS exploitable and which WILL be exploited, if it hasn't already been. Rigging US elections has incredible ROI for any foreign state actor, and simply isn't hard. For the record, I made equally tone deaf comments when 9/11 happened and when COVID19 was in its early days. Now, they're common sense to most people. I don't want to wait for Russia, China, or North Korea to pick our next president before we do something. Open source, transparency, and auditability won't solve the problem 100%, but they'll prevent most types of gross, blatant rigging. Cryptographic voting algorithms or paper trails will get us much of the rest of the way there. We don't need perfect security, but we need to be in a place where a single point of compromise can't break our democracy.
        UncleMeat 6y ago
        > Proper security may be hard, but election security is at the level of someone running a 5-year-old Android phone which no longer receives security updates. I'm serious. Go read the papers. You very obviously don't have a background in academic security. Because Oakland doesn't tend to accept stuff on trivial matters.
- yonaguska 6y ago
  For some reason I can't reply to your other comment about your downvotes, so I'll just reply here. We have reached an era of wrongthink- where even if you align slightly with the wrong side in your thinking, you are silenced. You are no longer allowed to agree with any portion of the wrong side, it must wholly be rejected.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    It's not wrongthink, it's consensus building in a world where humans are fuzzy association machines. We can loop back to election security when POTUS isn't trying to use it as an excuse for a coup.
meowface 6y ago
I think that poster isn't disagreeing but merely saying that that doesn't necessarily mean such a system couldn't be compromised in a future election. (Unless every single polling station with machines does a recount by hand for all elections from now on. But then it might put into question why we have the machines at all.) This is similar to the common argument about voter fraud. Of course there was almost certainly basically no fraud to speak of in this election, like usual. (And that's important to emphasize, especially right now.) But the way this overall topic tends to be approached in general is very odd, to me: There's a routinely used argument that concern about voter fraud is ridiculous because there's essentially been no significant incidence of it in modern history. This isn't unreasonable to bring up, but I think by itself is a very poor approach to risk assessment that's reminiscent of early COVID predictions/warnings/guidance and 2016 election odds from many of the same people. Especially when some foreign intelligence agencies appear to be getting increasingly brazen, and when considering that for most of the recorded history, voting was a lot less digitized. There was almost no incidence of jets being deliberately flown into buildings as a form of WMD, until some people pulled out all their cards and exploited a "0-day", doing as much damage as they could in a single effort before a "patch" could be deployed. And sometimes it's simply a matter of no one making a serious, motivated attempt to do something until one day someone finally does.
- enkid 6y ago
  The problem is that the countermeasures people want to put in place strip people of their ability to vote legitimately. For example, voter id laws are put into place to prevent voter fraud, that you admit isn't happening, but strip ten of thousands of people of the right to vote. [0] Similar to poll taxes and literacy requirements in the 19th century, this was said to have a better electorate, but it was selectively enforced so that it disproportionately affected black voters. That's why you have to be careful with this rhetoric. When someone is fixing a problem that doesn't actually exist, they could (likely?) have ulterior motives. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-we-know-about-voter-id-laws/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-we-know-about-vote...
  - meowface 6y ago

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.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    > In this context, though, security is NOT hard. It is. How many papers were been published in Oakland between 2000 and 2010 on election security? Lots. Clearly this is a problem interesting enough to capture the interest of computer security faculty. It isn't a toy problem. In addition to technical challenges (open sourcing isn't magic), there is a very complex organizational challenge due to the decentralized structure of elections in the US. But more importantly, making vague claims about hypothetical limitations of the existing systems while tens of millions of americans believe that actual literal fraud stole the election from Trump and are using that as motivation to invade the capitol building and disrupt the process of transitioning power between parties is tone-deaf to say the least.
    - woofie11 6y ago
      Proper security may be hard, but election security is at the level of someone running a 5-year-old Android phone which no longer receives security updates. Seriously. It's tone deaf to one side, but I'm pretty scared since the other side has, just as wrongheadedly, convinced itself these systems work. I'm not worried about 50,000 votes stolen due to doublevoting somewhere or a mailtruck of votes getting lost. If victory falls on the 50.1% mark versus the 49.9% mark, that's okay. I'm worried because we have a system which IS exploitable and which WILL be exploited, if it hasn't already been. Rigging US elections has incredible ROI for any foreign state actor, and simply isn't hard. For the record, I made equally tone deaf comments when 9/11 happened and when COVID19 was in its early days. Now, they're common sense to most people. I don't want to wait for Russia, China, or North Korea to pick our next president before we do something. Open source, transparency, and auditability won't solve the problem 100%, but they'll prevent most types of gross, blatant rigging. Cryptographic voting algorithms or paper trails will get us much of the rest of the way there. We don't need perfect security, but we need to be in a place where a single point of compromise can't break our democracy.
      - UncleMeat 6y ago
        > Proper security may be hard, but election security is at the level of someone running a 5-year-old Android phone which no longer receives security updates. I'm serious. Go read the papers. You very obviously don't have a background in academic security. Because Oakland doesn't tend to accept stuff on trivial matters.
yonaguska 6y ago
For some reason I can't reply to your other comment about your downvotes, so I'll just reply here. We have reached an era of wrongthink- where even if you align slightly with the wrong side in your thinking, you are silenced. You are no longer allowed to agree with any portion of the wrong side, it must wholly be rejected.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  It's not wrongthink, it's consensus building in a world where humans are fuzzy association machines. We can loop back to election security when POTUS isn't trying to use it as an excuse for a coup.

meowface 6y ago

I think that poster isn't disagreeing but merely saying that that doesn't necessarily mean such a system couldn't be compromised in a future election. (Unless every single polling station with machines does a recount by hand for all elections from now on. But then it might put into question why we have the machines at all.) This is similar to the common argument about voter fraud. Of course there was almost certainly basically no fraud to speak of in this election, like usual. (And that's important to emphasize, especially right now.) But the way this overall topic tends to be approached in general is very odd, to me: There's a routinely used argument that concern about voter fraud is ridiculous because there's essentially been no significant incidence of it in modern history. This isn't unreasonable to bring up, but I think by itself is a very poor approach to risk assessment that's reminiscent of early COVID predictions/warnings/guidance and 2016 election odds from many of the same people. Especially when some foreign intelligence agencies appear to be getting increasingly brazen, and when considering that for most of the recorded history, voting was a lot less digitized. There was almost no incidence of jets being deliberately flown into buildings as a form of WMD, until some people pulled out all their cards and exploited a "0-day", doing as much damage as they could in a single effort before a "patch" could be deployed. And sometimes it's simply a matter of no one making a serious, motivated attempt to do something until one day someone finally does.

enkid 6y ago
The problem is that the countermeasures people want to put in place strip people of their ability to vote legitimately. For example, voter id laws are put into place to prevent voter fraud, that you admit isn't happening, but strip ten of thousands of people of the right to vote. [0] Similar to poll taxes and literacy requirements in the 19th century, this was said to have a better electorate, but it was selectively enforced so that it disproportionately affected black voters. That's why you have to be careful with this rhetoric. When someone is fixing a problem that doesn't actually exist, they could (likely?) have ulterior motives. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-we-know-about-voter-id-laws/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-we-know-about-vote...
- meowface 6y ago