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VotingWorks is doing so much good between their risk limiting audit software, their voting machines that use many off the shelf parts to lower cost/maintenance,

VotingWorks is doing so much good between their risk limiting audit software, their voting machines that use many off the shelf parts to lower cost/maintenance, and of course the open source nature opening up the potential for a competitive market without rip and replace. Since the article didn’t mention the RLA stuff it is here: https://www.voting.works/risk-limiting-audits https://www.voting.works/risk-limiting-audits A favorite part of watching their journey has been their case study videos which were produced after they ran their first elections in small Mississippi jurisdictions: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvehCClJUfizMrg5vyBKpqUVuDBQQA8kL https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvehCClJUfizMrg5vyBKpqUVu... For those in San Francisco they are doing a pilot this year: https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/2022_01_25%20PRESS%20RELEASE_BOS%20APPROVES%20OPEN%20SOURCE%20VOTING%20PILOT.pdf https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/2022_01_25%20PRESS%20R... disclosure: I am a donor to VotingWorks and previously a member of the SF Open Source Voting Technical Advisory Commission.

sieabahlpark 4y ago
Why would I trust anything with "off the shelf" parts (China) and elections in California? You've listed two pieces that are not truly in favor of legitimate or honest elections.
- hedora 4y ago
  Talking about how these machines are open source is misleading. They (like many, many other voting machines already in use) are designed to let you run an election without actually trusting the software on the machines. From the risk limiting auditing link above: > How Does a RLA Work? > A risk-limiting audit examines a random sample of paper ballots, comparing them to the machine count to ensure that the winner actually won. > The number of votes needed to manually count depends on the margin of victory. The closer the margin, the more votes we manually count. The RLA confirms that, if a full hand-tally were performed, it would give the same outcome. Put another way, the malicious voting machine plays a game: It makes the first move by lying about the tally and incorrectly claiming that candidate X wins. If the machine claims X won by a large margin, then a small randomized recount exposes its lie. If the machine claims X won by a small margin, then a full recount is performed. Crucially, with high probability (it can be set arbitrarily high), the faulty voting machines get caught the first time they attempt this, and then are thrown away. There are some voting machines in use in the US that do not keep paper trails. There's widespread evidence of systematic fraud with those machines in swing districts, going back to a least 2004. (Old paperless mechanical machines had the same problem.)
  - trelane 4y ago
    > There's widespread evidence of systematic fraud with those machines in swing districts, going back to a least 2004. Uhh, citation please?
    - cudgy 4y ago
      Given that countless companies, websites, social media networks, governmental organizations, hospitals, school systems, and individuals including consumer credit companies are hacked every year, do you really need more evidence that an electronic voting machine could be compromised?
      - toofy 4y ago
        generally we need to see evidence, yes. particularly with the claim of “widespread” and “systemic abuse” casually tossed in. do we doubt machines have been hacked? of course not, you’re on hackernews, we all attended defcon voting machine village, but yes, “widespread” and “systemic abuse” needs to be backed up with something more than, “it happened to joe and jim two streets over so obviously it happened to jill next door.”
      - llbeansandrice 4y ago
        Yes. What kind of bullshit question is that? The claim is “widespread evidence of fraud”. I’d like to see any of the widespread evidence and not hand wavey back tracking to “could be compromised”.
        cudgy 4y ago
        It doesn’t have to be widespread in order to have a widespread impact. Some national elections are extremely close and essentially decided in one county of a single swing state. Most local elections are by definition “local” and close local elections can be decided by the votes from a single voting precinct. Requiring the evidence to be widespread in order to acknowledge the risk is real and impactful is shortsighted and “hand wavy”.
  - 4y ago
- philips 4y ago
  I have been involved in elections in both Oregon and California and the hardware from the incumbent vendors is mostly regular off the shelf general purpose computer hardware which as we know isnt always produced fully domestically. The difference is that the voting machine incumbents wrap their hardware and software in unfair licenses with single source provisions so municipalities end up paying a huge markup over retail to get “certified gear”. In San Francisco one of the voting machines I managed as a poll manager in 2018 was a early pentium machine with a BIOS and floppy. These machines were never designed to be remotely attested let alone tamper evident like modern Chromebooks. Anyways, the VotingWorks systems are all based on paper ballots so hand counts and risk limiting audits are options if the hardware is found to be untrustworthy.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  The nice thing is that all the votes with this system are on paper ballots. The paper ballots can then be verified against the machine counts. It does not stop people from stuffing ballot boxes, but it does stop people from fudging the machine count too much.
systemvoltage 4y ago
Would this speed up counting process? One party continues to prepare people with "Please be patience" The other party continues to sow doubt in the election integrity with "We can't even count ballots like Brazil, Japan and Australia" on the same day. Why don't we solve this problem? Seems like it sows more division and doubts, whether legitimate or not and threatens democracy. Why don't we also ask voters for IDs like many other nations? We need to work for solutions, not gas lighting each other and make progress. Solution here should be that we have a common understanding of 1 person = 1 ballot = 1 ID. MIB should have a postmark date 4 days prior to election day, not on election day like in California. Elections need to run like clockwork and with precision. Give no excuses to anyone sowing doubts.
- philips 4y ago
  Oregon has been state wide mail in voting only for decades and they allow post mark date of election day. I honestly think we all need to reset expectations that voting day means we get the result. It puts too much pressure on speed over accuracy. I want election workers to focus in getting it right and to feel they have the space to do that if they have hardware failures or other issues. As part of my work on the SF Open Source Voting Technical Advisory Commission I learned a bit about how all the media companies scrape various non standard tabulation formats from all municipalities big and small all over the country. And I was simply frightened. As citizens we have enabled media companies to “call” elections via these scrapers and statistical methods instead of waiting for certified results from the municipalities. It is error prone and calling it wrong because a parser had a bug or because a random government web server was hacked seems like a silly unnecessary risk.
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    Doesn't matter. Argument you're presenting is fine for a small number of people who live in Oregon but someone living in Nebraska has no idea what the hell is going on. We need a standardized process that doesn't take 7 days to count ballots. That's ridiculous regardless of the historical significance. Again, we're not engaging in solutions, but presenting excuses (your point is reasonable to people who live in Oregon, but still some people will always complain). The idea is to stop all complaining. Other nations seems to do just fine and better than us. Shameful.

sieabahlpark 4y ago

Why would I trust anything with "off the shelf" parts (China) and elections in California? You've listed two pieces that are not truly in favor of legitimate or honest elections.

hedora 4y ago
Talking about how these machines are open source is misleading. They (like many, many other voting machines already in use) are designed to let you run an election without actually trusting the software on the machines. From the risk limiting auditing link above: > How Does a RLA Work? > A risk-limiting audit examines a random sample of paper ballots, comparing them to the machine count to ensure that the winner actually won. > The number of votes needed to manually count depends on the margin of victory. The closer the margin, the more votes we manually count. The RLA confirms that, if a full hand-tally were performed, it would give the same outcome. Put another way, the malicious voting machine plays a game: It makes the first move by lying about the tally and incorrectly claiming that candidate X wins. If the machine claims X won by a large margin, then a small randomized recount exposes its lie. If the machine claims X won by a small margin, then a full recount is performed. Crucially, with high probability (it can be set arbitrarily high), the faulty voting machines get caught the first time they attempt this, and then are thrown away. There are some voting machines in use in the US that do not keep paper trails. There's widespread evidence of systematic fraud with those machines in swing districts, going back to a least 2004. (Old paperless mechanical machines had the same problem.)
- trelane 4y ago
  > There's widespread evidence of systematic fraud with those machines in swing districts, going back to a least 2004. Uhh, citation please?
  - cudgy 4y ago
    Given that countless companies, websites, social media networks, governmental organizations, hospitals, school systems, and individuals including consumer credit companies are hacked every year, do you really need more evidence that an electronic voting machine could be compromised?
    - toofy 4y ago
      generally we need to see evidence, yes. particularly with the claim of “widespread” and “systemic abuse” casually tossed in. do we doubt machines have been hacked? of course not, you’re on hackernews, we all attended defcon voting machine village, but yes, “widespread” and “systemic abuse” needs to be backed up with something more than, “it happened to joe and jim two streets over so obviously it happened to jill next door.”
    - llbeansandrice 4y ago
      Yes. What kind of bullshit question is that? The claim is “widespread evidence of fraud”. I’d like to see any of the widespread evidence and not hand wavey back tracking to “could be compromised”.
      - cudgy 4y ago
        It doesn’t have to be widespread in order to have a widespread impact. Some national elections are extremely close and essentially decided in one county of a single swing state. Most local elections are by definition “local” and close local elections can be decided by the votes from a single voting precinct. Requiring the evidence to be widespread in order to acknowledge the risk is real and impactful is shortsighted and “hand wavy”.
- 4y ago
philips 4y ago
I have been involved in elections in both Oregon and California and the hardware from the incumbent vendors is mostly regular off the shelf general purpose computer hardware which as we know isnt always produced fully domestically. The difference is that the voting machine incumbents wrap their hardware and software in unfair licenses with single source provisions so municipalities end up paying a huge markup over retail to get “certified gear”. In San Francisco one of the voting machines I managed as a poll manager in 2018 was a early pentium machine with a BIOS and floppy. These machines were never designed to be remotely attested let alone tamper evident like modern Chromebooks. Anyways, the VotingWorks systems are all based on paper ballots so hand counts and risk limiting audits are options if the hardware is found to be untrustworthy.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
The nice thing is that all the votes with this system are on paper ballots. The paper ballots can then be verified against the machine counts. It does not stop people from stuffing ballot boxes, but it does stop people from fudging the machine count too much.

systemvoltage 4y ago

Would this speed up counting process? One party continues to prepare people with "Please be patience" The other party continues to sow doubt in the election integrity with "We can't even count ballots like Brazil, Japan and Australia" on the same day. Why don't we solve this problem? Seems like it sows more division and doubts, whether legitimate or not and threatens democracy. Why don't we also ask voters for IDs like many other nations? We need to work for solutions, not gas lighting each other and make progress. Solution here should be that we have a common understanding of 1 person = 1 ballot = 1 ID. MIB should have a postmark date 4 days prior to election day, not on election day like in California. Elections need to run like clockwork and with precision. Give no excuses to anyone sowing doubts.

philips 4y ago
Oregon has been state wide mail in voting only for decades and they allow post mark date of election day. I honestly think we all need to reset expectations that voting day means we get the result. It puts too much pressure on speed over accuracy. I want election workers to focus in getting it right and to feel they have the space to do that if they have hardware failures or other issues. As part of my work on the SF Open Source Voting Technical Advisory Commission I learned a bit about how all the media companies scrape various non standard tabulation formats from all municipalities big and small all over the country. And I was simply frightened. As citizens we have enabled media companies to “call” elections via these scrapers and statistical methods instead of waiting for certified results from the municipalities. It is error prone and calling it wrong because a parser had a bug or because a random government web server was hacked seems like a silly unnecessary risk.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  Doesn't matter. Argument you're presenting is fine for a small number of people who live in Oregon but someone living in Nebraska has no idea what the hell is going on. We need a standardized process that doesn't take 7 days to count ballots. That's ridiculous regardless of the historical significance. Again, we're not engaging in solutions, but presenting excuses (your point is reasonable to people who live in Oregon, but still some people will always complain). The idea is to stop all complaining. Other nations seems to do just fine and better than us. Shameful.