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I think the real reason is that the political donation system operates on trust that the donors are who they say they are just like the voting system in most st

I think the real reason is that the political donation system operates on trust that the donors are who they say they are just like the voting system in most states just trusts that you are who you claim to be when you show up to vote (i.e. no requirement to show ID) and the mail-in voting system trusts that the voter filled out their ballot in secret without any coercion or intimidation. The entire US election system is comically insecure and the thing that's surprising is how rare evidence of large scale fraud is. This is probably because it is much easier (and legal!) for rich people to just funnel money into super PACs, buy their own media outlet and/or use political activist "non-profit charities" as tax dodges and jobs programs for their kids. Why make illegal donations to politicians or outright steal an election when you can just spend an unlimited amount of money on propaganda to brainwash people into supporting your agenda that is completely contrary to their own interests, the interests of their friends and family and their interests of their community? Why would you break the law when you could accomplish the exact same goal legally and get out of paying your fair share of taxes at the same time?

monetus 4y ago
An extortion racket for voting is only going to work in a small locality I think, it wouldn't scale to a large scale conspiracy without getting out. That guy in the Carolinas who tried it a few years ago was turned in by his family iirc.
- ChickenNugger 4y ago
  Here's Tom Scott's second video explaining why electronic voting is a terrible idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs Electronic voting machines and companies that manufacture them should both be illegal. Yet their use is widespread in America. The primary reason they're a bad idea is they make widespread election fraud easy. There is no good faith reason to use them.
  - slg 4y ago
    > The primary reason they're a bad idea is they make widespread election fraud easy. They make fraud easier. They do not make it easy. Lots of election data is public and analyzed by all sorts of people. Any big jump in turnout or shifts in the voting pattern of specific communities will be noticed and investigated even if it is just by hobbyist and journalists. Therefore the fraud would need to be incredibly widespread and only change the results subtly. Since elections are run at the local and state levels, at least in the US, it would need to be a huge operation in order to make enough small changes to accumulate to a result changing level of fraud.
    - somenameforme 4y ago
      The 2020 presidential election was decided by as few as 45,050 votes with no more than 20,565 votes in any given state. The 2016 election was decided by 77,000. [1] Targeted manipulation, done well, would not be detectable given how close elections tend to run. It's also noteworthy that if one has the technical capacity to change a vote, then you'd only need to edit half those numbers. Changing a vote from A to a vote for B is a net effect of +2 since A loses 1 and B gains 1. [1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/18/how-2020-election-was-closer-than-2016/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/18/how-2020-...
      - slg 4y ago
        It is true that it is a lot easier to get away with fraud if you can time travel. You can't just look at the numbers needed to change an election after the fact because whoever committed the fraud wouldn't have perfect knowledge on how much fraud to commit. The votes also can't just be dumped into a single machine, voting center, precinct, or even county because that shift in behavior would be noticed. Therefore this malicious actor would need to be able to add hundreds of thousands of votes state wide across several states in order to change things. Each state will have its own equipment and procedures and those can even vary within states. Once again, this would need to be a very widespread fraud that likely requires dozens of different attack vectors all executed in coordination. It is possible, but very difficult to pull off successfully.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  Yet this is the only argument people have against something like digital voting with anonymized-open results. When voting you select, or are assigned, a secret random key. That key is tied to your ballot which is then published. You can verify your vote was counted, and counted accurately. Observers can verify that exactly the number of people who vote were counted, and it can all be done near instantly and completely openly/transparently. It creates a system of electronic voting that's even more secure than paper trail audited traditional elections since there's no possibility of ballot stuffing, no possibility of changing votes, no possibility of discarding votes. The only argument against it is that you being able to verify your vote was counted accurately means you could also let somebody else verify how you voted. But the conspiracies where this could be a factor would be too small to matter, or near immediately end up getting busted. Even more so if you add a large 'finders fee' to anybody who exposes such a conspiracy.
  - tzs 4y ago
    You can do all that (except in a way that allows you to verify your vote was counted without being able to prove it to others) without a digital electronic voting system. All you need is the ordinary "fill in the bubbles" optical scan system with two changes: 1. Special ink is used to print the ballots, 2. A special marker is used to mark them. See "Scantegrity II: End-to-End Verifiability for Optical Scan Election Systems using Invisible Ink Confirmation Codes" [1] (in HTML [2]) and "Proving Coercion-Resistance of Scantegrity II" [3]. [1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/chaum/chaum.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c... [2] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/chaum/chaum_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c... [3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf
    - somenameforme 4y ago
      The problem with electoral systems is that one of the key threat actors you need to protect against from are the people running the election. And so any sort of a "special" requirement goes out the window, because it's not really special when you have arbitrary access to it. This is why public/transparent systems can be so powerful. They are literally impossible to cheat, even if a bad actor has complete unmoderated read/write access to every single system.
hulitu 4y ago
> I think the real reason is that the political donation system operates on trust If what you say is only remote true, then every member of US political system is utterly corrupt. CIA can give money to politicians and say it's from Google or TikTok or EU.
- jfengel 4y ago
  They can't. 1. Corporations aren't allowed to donate to politicians at all. 2. Foreign entities aren't allowed to donate, either. Donations "from a corporation" are really donations from employees of the corporation. That is commonly misrepresented in news reports. You're required to cite your employer so that it can be spotted if the employer is filtering corporate donations through individual employees -- as was the case here. American Corporations can create political action committees that are allowed drastically limited political donations. More importantly they can spend unlimited money on "issues" as long as they're not directly coordinating with a political campaign -- a fig leaf that can be less than a single atom thick at times.
  - deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
    “American corporations” is also less than an atom thick, as there are many fewer requirements than citizenship, for instance. There is no requirement for an American company to be owned by an American.
trelane 4y ago
> The entire US election system is comically insecure and the thing that's surprising is how rare evidence of large scale fraud is. The question that bothers me most is this: how would we know? What safeguards do we have, and how do we detect when they're overcome? Especially as a regular citizen. The one instance I'm familiar with when some safeguards were actually red teamed was a huge success--for the red team. https://www.wsj.com/articles/voter-fraud-a-myth-thats-not-what-new-york-investigators-found-1485994200 https://www.wsj.com/articles/voter-fraud-a-myth-thats-not-wh...
- colpabar 4y ago
  > what safeguards to we have We have the government and mainstream media and big tech all telling us that it's totally impossible for anything like this to happen and penalizing us for talking about it.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    It's not that it's impossible, but that it's just not cost-effective, and even if it does happen, it's not happening at a scale that would affect even a statewide election let alone a national election. Why go through all the effort (and risk) to modify Joe Smith's vote from Team A to Team B when Team B can just buy advertisements, write newspaper op-eds, spam social media, saturate the news cycle, take over talk shows, and otherwise propaganda thousands of Joe Smiths across the whole region into voluntarily voting for Team B?
    - elecush 4y ago
      We need evidence of security or evidence of insecurity. No evidence is not conclusive either way, that's the problem.
  - 8ytecoder 4y ago
    Bullshit. You’ll know when your election is routinely rigged and there’s rampant fraud. Been there and it’s difficult to hide even if you don’t have an independent media. Doesn’t mean I agree with the election system in the US. You need both real and perceived trust in the election system. You also need very high participation. Both are essential. You can’t just keep throwing hurdles and then let only those who’re willing to pass the test to vote. You need more booths - way more - if you want to get rid of mail-in ballots so people can walk to their center and not stand in line for long hours. You have to go issue voter id cards door to door, if you want to enforce id restrictions. You can’t just do one and not the other. That’s just exclusionary. Similarly, if you want faster results you need electronic voting but you also need paper trails for validation. The way results stay unknown and media organisations “call” the elections is absurd. You need official results to come out in under a few hours after all elections are closed. It’s just not right to announce Florida while California is still voting - that’s undue influencing IMHO. The US can fix it all. I do admire how it all seem to mostly work in spite of all these issues.
ryandrake 4y ago
> Why make illegal donations to politicians or outright steal an election when you can just spend an unlimited amount of money on propaganda to brainwash people into supporting your agenda Exactly. Election fraud and vote manipulation at the ballot box makes no sense. It's cheaper, much easier, more reliable, more scalable, less risky, and perfectly legal to just use propaganda and media saturation to control/influence voter behavior.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Well, there's always the possibility that you don't want to spend an unlimited amount of money. Hence the illegal donations by SBF.

monetus 4y ago

An extortion racket for voting is only going to work in a small locality I think, it wouldn't scale to a large scale conspiracy without getting out. That guy in the Carolinas who tried it a few years ago was turned in by his family iirc.

ChickenNugger 4y ago
Here's Tom Scott's second video explaining why electronic voting is a terrible idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs Electronic voting machines and companies that manufacture them should both be illegal. Yet their use is widespread in America. The primary reason they're a bad idea is they make widespread election fraud easy. There is no good faith reason to use them.
- slg 4y ago
  > The primary reason they're a bad idea is they make widespread election fraud easy. They make fraud easier. They do not make it easy. Lots of election data is public and analyzed by all sorts of people. Any big jump in turnout or shifts in the voting pattern of specific communities will be noticed and investigated even if it is just by hobbyist and journalists. Therefore the fraud would need to be incredibly widespread and only change the results subtly. Since elections are run at the local and state levels, at least in the US, it would need to be a huge operation in order to make enough small changes to accumulate to a result changing level of fraud.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    The 2020 presidential election was decided by as few as 45,050 votes with no more than 20,565 votes in any given state. The 2016 election was decided by 77,000. [1] Targeted manipulation, done well, would not be detectable given how close elections tend to run. It's also noteworthy that if one has the technical capacity to change a vote, then you'd only need to edit half those numbers. Changing a vote from A to a vote for B is a net effect of +2 since A loses 1 and B gains 1. [1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/18/how-2020-election-was-closer-than-2016/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/18/how-2020-...
    - slg 4y ago
      It is true that it is a lot easier to get away with fraud if you can time travel. You can't just look at the numbers needed to change an election after the fact because whoever committed the fraud wouldn't have perfect knowledge on how much fraud to commit. The votes also can't just be dumped into a single machine, voting center, precinct, or even county because that shift in behavior would be noticed. Therefore this malicious actor would need to be able to add hundreds of thousands of votes state wide across several states in order to change things. Each state will have its own equipment and procedures and those can even vary within states. Once again, this would need to be a very widespread fraud that likely requires dozens of different attack vectors all executed in coordination. It is possible, but very difficult to pull off successfully.
somenameforme 4y ago
Yet this is the only argument people have against something like digital voting with anonymized-open results. When voting you select, or are assigned, a secret random key. That key is tied to your ballot which is then published. You can verify your vote was counted, and counted accurately. Observers can verify that exactly the number of people who vote were counted, and it can all be done near instantly and completely openly/transparently. It creates a system of electronic voting that's even more secure than paper trail audited traditional elections since there's no possibility of ballot stuffing, no possibility of changing votes, no possibility of discarding votes. The only argument against it is that you being able to verify your vote was counted accurately means you could also let somebody else verify how you voted. But the conspiracies where this could be a factor would be too small to matter, or near immediately end up getting busted. Even more so if you add a large 'finders fee' to anybody who exposes such a conspiracy.
- tzs 4y ago
  You can do all that (except in a way that allows you to verify your vote was counted without being able to prove it to others) without a digital electronic voting system. All you need is the ordinary "fill in the bubbles" optical scan system with two changes: 1. Special ink is used to print the ballots, 2. A special marker is used to mark them. See "Scantegrity II: End-to-End Verifiability for Optical Scan Election Systems using Invisible Ink Confirmation Codes" [1] (in HTML [2]) and "Proving Coercion-Resistance of Scantegrity II" [3]. [1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/chaum/chaum.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c... [2] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/chaum/chaum_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c... [3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    The problem with electoral systems is that one of the key threat actors you need to protect against from are the people running the election. And so any sort of a "special" requirement goes out the window, because it's not really special when you have arbitrary access to it. This is why public/transparent systems can be so powerful. They are literally impossible to cheat, even if a bad actor has complete unmoderated read/write access to every single system.

hulitu 4y ago

> I think the real reason is that the political donation system operates on trust If what you say is only remote true, then every member of US political system is utterly corrupt. CIA can give money to politicians and say it's from Google or TikTok or EU.

jfengel 4y ago
They can't. 1. Corporations aren't allowed to donate to politicians at all. 2. Foreign entities aren't allowed to donate, either. Donations "from a corporation" are really donations from employees of the corporation. That is commonly misrepresented in news reports. You're required to cite your employer so that it can be spotted if the employer is filtering corporate donations through individual employees -- as was the case here. American Corporations can create political action committees that are allowed drastically limited political donations. More importantly they can spend unlimited money on "issues" as long as they're not directly coordinating with a political campaign -- a fig leaf that can be less than a single atom thick at times.
- deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
  “American corporations” is also less than an atom thick, as there are many fewer requirements than citizenship, for instance. There is no requirement for an American company to be owned by an American.

trelane 4y ago

> The entire US election system is comically insecure and the thing that's surprising is how rare evidence of large scale fraud is. The question that bothers me most is this: how would we know? What safeguards do we have, and how do we detect when they're overcome? Especially as a regular citizen. The one instance I'm familiar with when some safeguards were actually red teamed was a huge success--for the red team. https://www.wsj.com/articles/voter-fraud-a-myth-thats-not-what-new-york-investigators-found-1485994200 https://www.wsj.com/articles/voter-fraud-a-myth-thats-not-wh...

colpabar 4y ago
> what safeguards to we have We have the government and mainstream media and big tech all telling us that it's totally impossible for anything like this to happen and penalizing us for talking about it.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  It's not that it's impossible, but that it's just not cost-effective, and even if it does happen, it's not happening at a scale that would affect even a statewide election let alone a national election. Why go through all the effort (and risk) to modify Joe Smith's vote from Team A to Team B when Team B can just buy advertisements, write newspaper op-eds, spam social media, saturate the news cycle, take over talk shows, and otherwise propaganda thousands of Joe Smiths across the whole region into voluntarily voting for Team B?
  - elecush 4y ago
    We need evidence of security or evidence of insecurity. No evidence is not conclusive either way, that's the problem.
- 8ytecoder 4y ago
  Bullshit. You’ll know when your election is routinely rigged and there’s rampant fraud. Been there and it’s difficult to hide even if you don’t have an independent media. Doesn’t mean I agree with the election system in the US. You need both real and perceived trust in the election system. You also need very high participation. Both are essential. You can’t just keep throwing hurdles and then let only those who’re willing to pass the test to vote. You need more booths - way more - if you want to get rid of mail-in ballots so people can walk to their center and not stand in line for long hours. You have to go issue voter id cards door to door, if you want to enforce id restrictions. You can’t just do one and not the other. That’s just exclusionary. Similarly, if you want faster results you need electronic voting but you also need paper trails for validation. The way results stay unknown and media organisations “call” the elections is absurd. You need official results to come out in under a few hours after all elections are closed. It’s just not right to announce Florida while California is still voting - that’s undue influencing IMHO. The US can fix it all. I do admire how it all seem to mostly work in spite of all these issues.

ryandrake 4y ago

> Why make illegal donations to politicians or outright steal an election when you can just spend an unlimited amount of money on propaganda to brainwash people into supporting your agenda Exactly. Election fraud and vote manipulation at the ballot box makes no sense. It's cheaper, much easier, more reliable, more scalable, less risky, and perfectly legal to just use propaganda and media saturation to control/influence voter behavior.

DennisP 4y ago
Well, there's always the possibility that you don't want to spend an unlimited amount of money. Hence the illegal donations by SBF.