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I will elaborate on why I think it's relevant. The election infrastructure for much of the country has the security of swiss cheese. And this isn't some new th

I will elaborate on why I think it's relevant. The election infrastructure for much of the country has the security of swiss cheese. And this isn't some new thing created from whole cloth by Trump supporters; people have been raising concern about this for years. Back when Obama was up for election, there were news articles about how election machines could potentially be tampered with to steal the election from Obama. When it was Trump vs Hillary, some were concerned the election would be stolen from Hillary, and when Trump was elected, insinuations and outright accusations were levied that Trump stole the election through, amongst other things, election machine tampering. And then in this most recent election cycle, we have the "Kraken", et. al., which appears to have, in-part, motivated the Capitol riot. Regardless of what you think of the of the truth of the accusations, whether in this election cycle, prior ones, or future ones, the fact that the underlying (lack-of) security lends a plausibility to such accusations is a problem unto itself. If elections have or are tampered with by malicious agents, foreign or domestic, we do not have free and fair elections, and that's a Big Problem. If demagogues can easily stir up popular sentiment that the elections are not free and fair, that's also a Big Problem. It is the lack of election security that amplifies those problems into big ones. Sure, we can go after entities that try to tamper with elections, and we would do well educate ourselves to be able to spot demagoguery and misinformation. But we would also do quite well to go after underlying problems that make the aforementioned problems worse.

thefreeman 6y ago
That's why the CISA had a huge emphasis on paper backups in the election. You can't hack a physical printout which the voter verifies themself before scanning.
- ndiscussion 6y ago
  The QR code is scanned, not the text on the paper printout, as far as I understand
  - thefreeman 6y ago
    But the count can (and was in certain states) be verified with a hand recount of the paper ballots, which is not subject to digital interference.
TrispusAttucks 6y ago
Your right. It's complicated. The sad thing is, it doesn't matter. Simpler manufactured narratives will win in the future.
skissane 6y ago
The problem with electronic voting machines, is no matter how secure you make them, people find the narrative that they are insecure easily believable, regardless of whether the narrative is true or not in any particular case. If you stick entirely to paper-based voting, you don't have that problem. Of course low-tech means of fraud still exist (stuffing ballot boxes, etc), but there are low-tech means of presenting that – you allow each candidate/party to send poll observers to watch the counting process.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  Yep, I changed my view on electronic voting for this reason. Even if we create a perfect, provable, electronic voting system, a very small percentage of the public is going to be able to understand the proof and even fewer will be able to verify for themselves. Most people will have to rely on experts to tell them if it is secure or not. For voting, we need most people to be able to both understand why it is secure and be able to verify for themselves that it is. Paper ballots provide that, electronic voting doesn’t.
  - mjevans 6y ago
    Electronic fast counting on deposit for in-person voting? Sure, but I like mail in a lot better. I am OK with electronic printing of human legible votes; if you want to get fancy. (Fill the bubbles in fully)
  - hunter2_ 6y ago
    There's always the issue of not being able to verify for oneself. We tend to trust video, but what if it's video of something tainted (or a straight up deepfake)? If poll workers hand off ballots to separate counters, but publicly hired counters are diverted and provided with plausible decoys while poll workers actually hand off to secret actors who just capture and release video of the public counters... back to the Swiss cheese we go.
    - smichel17 6y ago
      This is extremely difficult to pull off at scale without being caught.
FDSGSG 6y ago
But how is a boring LPE related to election security?

thefreeman 6y ago

That's why the CISA had a huge emphasis on paper backups in the election. You can't hack a physical printout which the voter verifies themself before scanning.

ndiscussion 6y ago
The QR code is scanned, not the text on the paper printout, as far as I understand
- thefreeman 6y ago
  But the count can (and was in certain states) be verified with a hand recount of the paper ballots, which is not subject to digital interference.

TrispusAttucks 6y ago

Your right. It's complicated. The sad thing is, it doesn't matter. Simpler manufactured narratives will win in the future.

skissane 6y ago

The problem with electronic voting machines, is no matter how secure you make them, people find the narrative that they are insecure easily believable, regardless of whether the narrative is true or not in any particular case. If you stick entirely to paper-based voting, you don't have that problem. Of course low-tech means of fraud still exist (stuffing ballot boxes, etc), but there are low-tech means of presenting that – you allow each candidate/party to send poll observers to watch the counting process.

cortesoft 6y ago
Yep, I changed my view on electronic voting for this reason. Even if we create a perfect, provable, electronic voting system, a very small percentage of the public is going to be able to understand the proof and even fewer will be able to verify for themselves. Most people will have to rely on experts to tell them if it is secure or not. For voting, we need most people to be able to both understand why it is secure and be able to verify for themselves that it is. Paper ballots provide that, electronic voting doesn’t.
- mjevans 6y ago
  Electronic fast counting on deposit for in-person voting? Sure, but I like mail in a lot better. I am OK with electronic printing of human legible votes; if you want to get fancy. (Fill the bubbles in fully)
- hunter2_ 6y ago
  There's always the issue of not being able to verify for oneself. We tend to trust video, but what if it's video of something tainted (or a straight up deepfake)? If poll workers hand off ballots to separate counters, but publicly hired counters are diverted and provided with plausible decoys while poll workers actually hand off to secret actors who just capture and release video of the public counters... back to the Swiss cheese we go.
  - smichel17 6y ago
    This is extremely difficult to pull off at scale without being caught.

FDSGSG 6y ago

But how is a boring LPE related to election security?