8 ms·

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 i

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
        It's not like the results all just come instantly. They come incrementally, and over unacceptably long periods of time. All you'd need to do is to look at which of the handful of competitive states you need to give yourself a little boost. And the tech side's even easier. For instance those 3 states, making up the 45,050 vote margin from 2020, all had districts using the exact same hardware/software: Dominion.
        slg 4y ago
        >our elections are unacceptably slow That is funny considering the primary benefit of electronic voting machines is speeding up the gathering of results. I'm not sure how you expect us to manually count 150 million ballots quicker without using any hackable electronics. Otherwise, you are still falling into the same trap. You say we can just use "insider knowledge" to know where to commit the fraud, but that requires both insiders and the ability to actually execute the fraud in all those potentially close places. We are back to needing a widespread conspiracy that operates in several states and can attack in a variety of different ways.
        ChickenNugger 4y ago
  - DennisP 4y ago
    But I'm glad we've mostly moved away from paperless voting machines. If you don't have that backup, you can be as suspicious as you want but there's nothing you can do about it. And it's not like an attack is infeasible. According to a professor who specializes in this, testifying to Congress: > “We’ve created attacks that can spread from machine to machine like a computer virus and silently change election outcomes." https://alumni.umich.edu/michigan-alum/hacking-the-vote/ https://alumni.umich.edu/michigan-alum/hacking-the-vote/
    - slg 4y ago
      100%, voting machines should at the very least spit out a paper copy that the voter can verify and can be manually recounted if there are any questions about the electronic total. Once we meet that baseline, I don't think it makes sense to worry too much about the voting machines. Our election process is much more vulnerable to manipulation through some of the other means mentioned in this thread.
- bandyaboot 4y ago
  I don’t believe that widespread voting fraud is a real problem. Is that not a good faith reason to be ok with electronic voting machines?
  - ChickenNugger 4y ago
    Voting fraud is generally a statistically insignificant issue. It's election fraud that is the issue. More here: https://www.findlaw.com/voting/how-u-s--elections-work/what-is-electoral-and-voter-fraud-.html https://www.findlaw.com/voting/how-u-s--elections-work/what-...
    - bandyaboot 4y ago
      So say you are right and that you’ve convinced me that I should be against electronic voting machines, my prior opinion on the matter was still formed in good faith, no? edit: on a side note, that website’s description of electoral fraud is pretty sloppy. In their bullet points of what constitutes electoral fraud they include ballot harvesting. Their description of ballot harvesting is not illegal everywhere.
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.

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
      It's not like the results all just come instantly. They come incrementally, and over unacceptably long periods of time. All you'd need to do is to look at which of the handful of competitive states you need to give yourself a little boost. And the tech side's even easier. For instance those 3 states, making up the 45,050 vote margin from 2020, all had districts using the exact same hardware/software: Dominion.
      - slg 4y ago
        >our elections are unacceptably slow That is funny considering the primary benefit of electronic voting machines is speeding up the gathering of results. I'm not sure how you expect us to manually count 150 million ballots quicker without using any hackable electronics. Otherwise, you are still falling into the same trap. You say we can just use "insider knowledge" to know where to commit the fraud, but that requires both insiders and the ability to actually execute the fraud in all those potentially close places. We are back to needing a widespread conspiracy that operates in several states and can attack in a variety of different ways.
        ChickenNugger 4y ago
- DennisP 4y ago
  But I'm glad we've mostly moved away from paperless voting machines. If you don't have that backup, you can be as suspicious as you want but there's nothing you can do about it. And it's not like an attack is infeasible. According to a professor who specializes in this, testifying to Congress: > “We’ve created attacks that can spread from machine to machine like a computer virus and silently change election outcomes." https://alumni.umich.edu/michigan-alum/hacking-the-vote/ https://alumni.umich.edu/michigan-alum/hacking-the-vote/
  - slg 4y ago
    100%, voting machines should at the very least spit out a paper copy that the voter can verify and can be manually recounted if there are any questions about the electronic total. Once we meet that baseline, I don't think it makes sense to worry too much about the voting machines. Our election process is much more vulnerable to manipulation through some of the other means mentioned in this thread.
bandyaboot 4y ago
I don’t believe that widespread voting fraud is a real problem. Is that not a good faith reason to be ok with electronic voting machines?
- ChickenNugger 4y ago
  Voting fraud is generally a statistically insignificant issue. It's election fraud that is the issue. More here: https://www.findlaw.com/voting/how-u-s--elections-work/what-is-electoral-and-voter-fraud-.html https://www.findlaw.com/voting/how-u-s--elections-work/what-...
  - bandyaboot 4y ago
    So say you are right and that you’ve convinced me that I should be against electronic voting machines, my prior opinion on the matter was still formed in good faith, no? edit: on a side note, that website’s description of electoral fraud is pretty sloppy. In their bullet points of what constitutes electoral fraud they include ballot harvesting. Their description of ballot harvesting is not illegal everywhere.

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.