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Video shows GOP fake elector giving 'unauthorized access' to voting equipment

• Proven 4y ago
• ParksNet 4y ago
  Why use voting machines at all? Just stick to pen and paper.
  • npc54321 4y ago
  • npc54321 4y ago
  • einherjae 4y ago
    Misled techno-optimism mostly. A lot easier to secure a pen and paper election, but also a bit slower to count.
    • postalrat 4y ago
      Here we have pen and paper and scanners. To vote you fill in the ballot with pen then stick it in the scanner on way out. As long as they aren't stuffing more ballots or modifying existing ones it should be easy to do a recount at any time.
      • dsr_ 4y ago
        Stuffing should be hard: you get checked off (name and address) when you receive your ballot, and again when you deposit your ballot. Vote totals need to match in both those places and the ballot box.
    • MichaelCollins 4y ago
      I think it's not just techno-optimism. Profit motivated media wants faster results to keep people excited on the edge of their seat, eyeballs glued to the advertisements.
    • mikepurvis 4y ago
      The best of both worlds is hand-marked paper ballots that are then counted by machine.
      • brendoelfrendo 4y ago
        There's no reason to need the "best of both worlds." People will doubt the validity of the electronic count anyway, you might as well skip that step and go straight to a hand count.
        • einherjae 4y ago
          The more counts the better, let a machine count first to give quick results, but use multiple machines and software solutions, kept fully airgaped. Then count by hand. A tiny horror story from the last Norwegian election was when some results were delayed due to problems with a scanner. The news story about that machine mentioned that the machine was connected to the internet (shudder), and ran Win XP (facepalm). The internet should only be used for reporting preliminary numbers, and the counting machines should not be talking directly to the net at all.
    • dsr_ 4y ago
      Massachusetts uses hand-marked printed paper forms that are fed into an optical-scanner, with the paper dropping into a lockbox for auditability. The paper is the vote, the scanner just allows you to count faster. If you're blind or otherwise need assistance marking your form, you can bring along a person of your choosing or you can ask for two officials to help you out. If you need accessibility and online voting, you're hosed: there's a system and it sucks. Overall, there's room for improvement but it's better than all of the electronic-first systems.
      • duxup 4y ago
        Minnesota uses the scanning ballots too. Very handy, ballots are tied to each machine for random validation and etc. I like that system, best of both worlds.
      • elliekelly 4y ago
        For anyone who might need to know: in the US you have an affirmative right under federal law to have someone of your choosing (although IIRC you may not choose your boss/employer) accompany you into the voting booth in order to assist you in casting your ballot. And assistance isn’t limited to people who are blind or have a disability that prevents them from being able to mark a ballot. If you struggle to read or if you struggle to understand how to fill out the ballot you have a right to get assistance.
    • soulofmischief 4y ago
      Anything less than an open source machine with a cryptographically secured, auditable trail from my vote to the final tally is 100% untrustworthy. There is no reason for an American citizen today to trust the security of pen and paper elections. There never was, but now we have digital tooling.
  • mburee 4y ago
    There's a small but significant advantage to some partys when using voting machines, just with touch screen being more likely to malfunction in humid/hot weather, which really is only an issue in poor districts lacking AC.
  • fabian2k 4y ago
    They are an entirely unnecessary risk. There are plenty of countries that manage to count elections a lot faster than the US while using only pen and paper. It provides a lot more transparency as observers can actually follow every single step of the entire process and verify everything. A voting machine is a big black box that you have to trust (unless they also have a paper trail, and you actually verify it).
    • retrac 4y ago
      > It provides a lot more transparency as observers can actually follow every single step of the entire process and verify everything. Simple folk physics gives everyone an understanding of the security of ballot boxes. There's thousands of ballot boxes, each in a different physically-secured location, with various personnel keeping track of them, many of them citizen volunteers and workers, as well as partisan observers. Everyone intuitively understands the security, as well as security flaws, of this system. All of that is lost with electronic voting. Even with complete confidence/faith in the system, it simply becomes a black box. Press button and the vote total is spit out. Only a few experts understand the system in a way that they could explain how that total was arrived at and why you should have confidence in it. And even fewer would be able to actually verify that the black box does what it says it does and that you should by confident in it. Otherwise it's just a box that spits out a number. And computers make up numbers all the time.
  • richieb 4y ago
    Machines are mostly used to count votes. Ballots are still on paper.
    • anecdotal1 4y ago
      Not every state has a paper trail for ballots. It should be required by law, but it's not.
    • pavon 4y ago
      That isn't universally true. Many counties in the US have used or still use touchscreen machines with no paper ballot.
  • elliekelly 4y ago
    You must be too young to remember the 2000 election. Butterfly ballots. Hanging chads. The threshold level of “filled” a Scantron circle must be to qualify as “a vote” vs merely an errant mark. When one side is determined to scrutinize a large-scale process until it falls apart the process will inevitably breakdown.
  • yardie 4y ago
    Not sure about your state but mine uses paper scantron with a scanner/lockbox. If there is a dispute/recount they verify the paper record against the digital record. The results at each poll site are ready 30-60 minutes after polls close. Rarely, if the results aren't ready by 9pm its usually because a long line at 7pm at that polling station.
  • lazyninja987 4y ago
  • r00fus 4y ago
    The HAVA [1] legislation was extremely misguided and IMHO designed to create an industry where none was needed to line even more rich pockets. Ostensibly it was done to support disabled (blind) folks to vote without anyone else seeing their ballot, but has introduced a massive potential for fraud (lack of paper ballots originally) and distrust (can you verify your vote?) in the process. MAGA just took that distrust and weaponized it. [1] https://www.eac.gov/about_the_eac/help_america_vote_act.aspx https://www.eac.gov/about_the_eac/help_america_vote_act.aspx
  • citilife 4y ago
    > Why use voting machines at all? IMO, for the same reason people are concerned about them... France handles elections via paper and pen and has everything counted within 24 hrs. Somehow the U.S. had trouble even doing it in a week last election.
    • cwmma 4y ago
      the reason it took a while was mainly absentee ballots
  • howinteresting 4y ago
    It is important to present results as quickly as possible to prevent the sorts of fuckery Trump did. So voting machines with a paper trail and risk-limiting audits (basically randomized audits—the closer the result is the bigger the sample) are ideal
  • jimbob45 4y ago
    There's one very clear answer as to why we still use electronic voting machines: money[0]. States have to fund their own elections and machines are cheap. When you're choosing between a funding shortfall for schools, firehouses, or elections, it's really no surprise that the elections don't come out the winner. [0] https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/election-costs-who-pays-and-with-which-funds.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/electi...
  • preinheimer 4y ago
    Some possible advantages of voting machines: - They can provide different accessibility assistance than pen and paper, allowing people to vote on their own. Multi-language support should be easy. - They can provide UI improvements over paper. Consider situations where the voter needs to select up to 3 candidates out of a list of 12. Or a long ballot with lots of distinct questions. - Hopefully less lead time for updates to the ballot if someone drops out of the race, is replaced, etc. The past few times I've voted (Canada) it's been pencil on paper, stuck into a machine that confirmed it could read the ballot, then I left. When it's been a longer ballot for municipal election it's actually felt like a bit of a test. We are voting for: city councillor, mayor, regional representatives, multiple school board trustees from one of two different school boards (but not both).
    • asdff 4y ago
      OTOH you can get a paper ballot in any language an electronic ballot is served, and the UI is the same "fill in the bubble by the name" only its a virtual bubble you tap to fill. Disability wise it seems worse. You need to have access to some way to get to the polling site, the polling site has to be accessible itself for you, you need to be able to read the screen well and have a good finger to touch the buttons. Meanwhile if you are very disabled, you get a paper ballot mailed to you wherever you live, and your nurse/friend/pastor/whoever can help you fill out the ballot and sign off as having helped you fill it out.
  • themitigating 4y ago
    People got upset that they were still counting at night or the count changed the next day. How would this help?
• standardUser 4y ago
  We're going to hit a breaking point soon on faith in elections. We have poll workers refusing to work due to threats to their safety. We have an increasing number of candidates and elected officials who believe the last election was stolen in positions to override actual election results. We have an increasing number of people who want to "police" the polls (this one troubles me the most). And of course there's been a huge increase in restrictive and oftentimes convoluted voting laws that are going to confuse the hell out of people and result in many votes not being cast or counted. We already have the majority of one party believing the last election as stolen despite a comprehensive lack of evidence. It won't take too many more people until a clear majority simply stop believing any election results are valid.
  • 46756e 4y ago
    The stolen election thing is very dumb, but people forget the same argument was made in 2016 with Russia “hacking the election” with no evidence found.
    • runnerup 4y ago
      And the same argument was made over the 2000 elections against Diebold in Ohio and Florida. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy
      • ajross 4y ago
        Not by major thought leaders or elected representatives. That was a popular conspiracy theory among the too-connected internet left. The problem in the modern world is that you have elected republicans and talking heads on FOX News saying the same thing to millions of believing partisans.
      • ceejayoz 4y ago
        That doesn't allege that hacking happened; it alleges (and demonstrates) that voting machines at the time were really shittily secured.
    • 4y ago
• binarymax 4y ago
  So, trying to keep this technical and not political (this is HN after all)... Assuming these machines that were handled are decommissioned, is there a risk to future elections that use the same model of machine? I imagine there's significant security through obscurity. Do all models of this machine need to be decommissioned? We're taught that physical access to a machine should deem it compromised. But voters handle machines behind curtains every election. Does 4 hours unfettered access make things worse for the whole model?
  • airza 4y ago
    Based on the ~2 days i spent hacking on them at defcon a few years ago, all of the current models should be taken out back and shot.
  • bogwog 4y ago
    At my voting location in the last presidential election, we were given paper ballots to fill out (at tables with privacy dividers), and then we handed those to a poll worker who immediately fed it into the machine right in front of you (and everyone else). I think that's a good low-tech way to have security, since random people never directly interact with the machine. The only outside input is the paper ballot, and it shouldn't be hard to write scanning software that's perfectly secure from malicious ballots. The only remaining issue then is making sure the machine isn't tampered with before/after the events. You don't even need to trust the poll worker that feeds the ballot into the machine, since they're standing in plain view of everyone at all times, and under surveillance (I assume).
    • tarakat 4y ago
      At my (non-US) voting location, we put marked ballots into big plastic boxes. After the polls closed, the ballots were counted by volunteers, and the counting was supervised by other people to make sure it was done correctly. Nobody had to worry about the boxes being tampered with, or about "unauthorized" people gaining access to them before or after the election, because they're just boxes. If your election can be trusted only if only "authorized" people interact with voting equipment, then it can't be trusted at all. Obscurity has no place in elections.
• wnevets 4y ago
  At this point I have become convinced every accusation is an admission
  • ARandomerDude 4y ago
    By that line of reasoning you are making an admission. You probably want to nuance your stance.
    • wnevets 4y ago
      I haven't made an accusation in that comment.
• citilife 4y ago
  • favorited 4y ago
    There absolutely are fake electors, because some of the "alternate slate" sent by states' GOP were neither the preselected Democrat nor Republican electors, but completely different people.
    • citilife 4y ago
      You can cast a ballot as an elector. If the state certifies it it's fine. Again there's no such think as a "fake" elector.
      • hairofadog 4y ago
        "We would just be sending in 'fake' electoral votes to Pence so that 'someone' in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the 'fake' votes should be counted," Jack Wilenchik, a Phoenix-based lawyer who helped organize the pro-Trump electors in Arizona, wrote in a Dec. 8, 2020, email to Boris Epshteyn, a strategic adviser for the Trump campaign. In a follow-up email, Mr. Wilenchik wrote that "'alternative' votes is probably a better term than 'fake' votes," adding a smiley face emoji." [1] [^1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/us/politics/trump-fake-electors-emails.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/us/politics/trump-fake-el...
      • selimthegrim 4y ago
        The VP is entitled to reject if there is a gross mistake by the state in the covering material/certificates about number of electors, etc, even a clerical error. He can accept if he is satisfied the clerical error will be remedied. So you are dead wrong that "if the state certifies it's fine"
    • sathomasga 4y ago
      Definitely! In my home state of Georgia, the slate of electors pledged to Donald Trump and Mike Pence on the 2020 presidential election was: Joseph Brennan, Ken Carroll, Vikki Consiglio, Carolyn Fisher, Patrick Gartland, Gloria Godwin, David Hanna, Mark Hennessy, Susan Holmes, John Isakson, Cathleen Latham, Daryl Moody, C. J. Pearson, David Shafer, Shawn Still, and C. B. Yadav. The individuals who signed the fake electoral certificate did not include John Isakson, Patrick Gartland. C. J. Pearson, or Susan Holmes. Instead, the signers included Burt Jones, John Downey, Brad Carver, and Mark Amick. Those four individuals, at least, were fake.
• pnemonic 4y ago
• jxramos 4y ago
  I'm curious about how feasible it would be to two competing counting systems put side to side in each election such that the bulk of the agreements on a given ballot could be ignored and allow manual focus upon those ballots that are discrepant between the two systems.
  • themitigating 4y ago
    what if one side benefits when less votes are counted?
    • jxramos 4y ago
      I would think that would show up with a summary discrepancy of the count of the ballots. First you’d match overall ballot counts and drill into the specific ballots when disagreement is found. It should be a straightforward merge operation on the ballot ID where null values reveal a missing datapoint for a given row in the ballot.
• hollywood_court 4y ago
  • asdff 4y ago
• kristopolous 4y ago
  Question for the internet: Have vote tallies ever been intentionally run adversarially, as in you have partisans count votes and then they have to agree on the final tally?
  • ceejayoz 4y ago
    That's essentially the current setup; both parties send election observers to precincts, who can challenge ballots. https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/challenging-someone-elses-voter-eligibility-shouldnt-be-so-easy-but-it-is/ https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/challenging-someone... > In May, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported that a man challenged the voter eligibility of 13,000 voters in Forsyth County, Georgia. To reiterate: a single individual questioned the right to vote for around 8% of the registered voters in the county.
• wyldfire 4y ago
  Signed bootloaders, machines that print ballots which can be independently reviewed. Maybe even unannounced audits by manufacturer or federal election officials would be useful (if there were some election mechanics standards that existed, I suppose). We should be able to make it so that even if the equipment is not monitored minute-by-minute we can still be confident Former Travis county clerk Dana DeBeauvoir teamed up w UT profs [1] to make voting more secure. let's roll out some standards across the country. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/dana-debeauvoir-texas-county-clerk-voting-tech-revolution/ https://www.wired.com/story/dana-debeauvoir-texas-county-cle...
  • themitigating 4y ago
    Why do we need to make elections more secure? Has there been any serious issues since the countries founding?
    • NoGravitas 4y ago
      Not really, no, but this is about increasing confidence, not about dealing with threats that are actually likely.
      • themitigating 4y ago
        So if I made an accusation of rape against another person with no evidence the police should watch that person more to increase the feeling of safety of the community? What you are proposing legitimizes traitors and liars
      • themitigating 4y ago
        The confidence was lost due to lies by right wing media and republicans.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• duxup 4y ago
  The correlation of "accuses other people of cheating" and "engaged in activity that looks like trying / preparing to cheat" is a bit too high in the GOP for my taste. I find some of the "ideas" that the GOP might push somewhat appealing, but more often than not I find them distasteful as people and more often than not in reality betraying the ideas they claim to want to uphold. Free markets, any sense of libertarianism ... all of it seems to actually be the opposite and a guise for "get mine", or "impose my religion", pick winners, and so on.
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    Reaganism is dead. Trumpism is the party now. It's an attractive ideology to the people is pretends to look after, and our elections are set up to empower the crazies in primaries.
• tamaharbor 4y ago
  There is fraud in every aspect of life. Tax fraud, welfare fraud, credit card fraud, covid fraud, government grant fraud, charity fraud, bank fraud, etc etc etc… Yet every election is beyond reproach? I call bullshit.
• ncmncm 4y ago
  Buried Lede: comparing sworn deposition to video evidence, "Latham said that she went to her job as a high school teacher and stopped by the election office briefly that afternoon. But the video image shows her arriving at 11:37 a.m. while time stamps on other images show her there throughout much of the day. She also said she didn’t see specific people and saw others only briefly, but the video images show otherwise." There are efforts in Georgia to establish paper ballots to make electronic tampering impossible. They could still stuff ballot boxes, but that takes physical work. The first step in election fraud is always to accuse the other side of it. But real paper ballots are a thing anybody honest and competent supports.