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This whole affair is an incredibly frustrating example of why society is breaking down. There are legitimate concerns with both security and reliability with th

This whole affair is an incredibly frustrating example of why society is breaking down. There are legitimate concerns with both security and reliability with these voting machines... But no, Fox had to fold it into their culture war fight and took things too far. Now, Dominion is vindicated and I'm happy to bet good dollars to donuts that any legitimate criticism or questions raised about the fidelity of their machines will be countered with culture-war ad hominem attack

Retric 3y ago
This lawsuit wasn’t about criticism it was about blatant lies. Dominion Voting Systems doesn’t give a flying fuck about the culture wars, but they do care if people stop buying their products. Fox on the other hand very much cares about the culture wars, and is as shown here perfectly willing to lie.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
stonogo 3y ago
The people who are qualified to have technical opinions on these machines are still qualified to have technical opinions on these machines. Academics and other security researchers are still pursuing these issues. All this will do is make it less likely random internet opinion-havers will be amplified by grifters, which is an outcome I have no problem with.
- flavius29663 3y ago
  But that matters very little. What matters is people at large not wanting these machines anymore, until then, we will keep having them.
  - nebula8804 3y ago
    The good news is that these efforts to audit and improve the voting systems started many years ago. As a result of all the efforts by researchers, many states have scrapped their old systems and changed to newer paper + electronic based systems. For example, NJ used to have machines that were proven to have attack vectors. They were discarded in favor of a system that records electronically but also prints out your selection on paper and then drops it in a sealed box after you verify what is printed on the paper is what you intended to vote. If the election is close then a review of the paper ballots is performed. Is it perfect? No, but it is better than having no paper record at all as it at least gives the option of a manual recount is someone were to challenge the results (or if the count is close enough, a recount triggers without a challenge). The challenge now is to ensure all 50 states are on board with using machines with no known exploits. Unfortunately some states are lagging behind greatly (can you guess which ones?)
    - flavius29663 3y ago
      > For example, NJ used to have machines that were proven to have attack vectors. Why use machines at all? In my opinion any action that does not remove the machines altogether is not good enough. Machines are hack-able, humans are much harder to "hack", especially if you have both parties' representatives in the room at all times.
      - nebula8804 3y ago
        The electorate demands same day instant results. You'll have to change the mindset of the electorate for that one. Having both electronic + a statistical analysis of paper ballots or counting ballots slowly after the election as a final verification is the best approach.
        flavius29663 3y ago
        You can have very fast results by getting more poll workers. It's not that big of a deal, as people willing to work the polls scale with the number of voters. Nobody really wants "instant" results, if you get 90% of the count the night of the vote, that will be good enough. I come from Romania, and we only count by hand, and by 10PM you usually know the results with pretty high confidence. Romania only has 10 mil votes, but as I said, it scales very well.
        nebula8804 3y ago
        >You can have very fast results by getting more poll workers. It's not that big of a deal, as people willing to work the polls scale with the number of voters. Thats a lot of overhead and costs that is not going to fly with voters. > I come from Romania Well that explains it. You do not fully understand the "election night frenzy" that occurs every four years in the US.
        flavius29663 3y ago
        > Well that explains it. You do not fully understand the "election night frenzy" that occurs every four years in the US. I actually understand it, it's very similar for us. Why would you immediately assume it's different? In the UK it's different, it's incredibly quiet and somber. And I just told you that we finish counting earlier than many if not most US states anyway. Recounts happen but are limited to individual poll stations, because of all the party representatives they have very few chances of changing anything. It's really not that much overhead, the US has 900k people operating the polling stations on the voting day (https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/document_library/files/EAVSDeepDive_pollworkers_pollingplaces_nov17.pdf https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/document_library/fil...). That means 10 workers need to handle 1600 votes. It's really not that much, you can manually count those in a couple of hours once the polls are closed. Also, you can tap into volunteers from both parties. I really don't understand the US: you have half the country saying that the 2000 elections were decided by malfunctioning counting machines in Florida. Now in 2020 you have the other half distrusting machines for fear of tampering, and you still rely on machines? why? This is the norm in Europe, poll stations count their own votes and they get tallied up centrally. e.g. Germany https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/politics/election-in-germany-counting-and-checking-the-votes-cast https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/politics/election-in-ger... or UK https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-britain-counts-its-votes-41265 https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-britain-counts-its...
rocket_surgeron 3y ago
Society is not breaking down.
- andrewinardeer 3y ago
  Yet.
dabluecaboose 3y ago
I don't know about "society is breaking down" but as someone with pre-existing trepidation over computerized voting, I agree that it's going to be really frustrating to try to take that position anymore without being labeled some MAGA nutjob.
greenhearth 3y ago
Last time I used one it worked fine. The hysteria about them was started by a guy who got his ass handed to him in a presidential election and didn't feel too good about it.
- kentm 3y ago
  Concerns about electronic voting machines go back decades. Not sure how old you are, but there was a lot of hand wringing in the day when an executive of one such company promised to “deliver the election” to George W Bush.
  - greenhearth 3y ago
    And yet the Americans managed to conduct elections just fine, without any politicized hysterics about fraud. That is until the last one, when this fiction was pushed by the president himself in a shameful defeat, to activate the likes of you.
    - passwordoops 3y ago
      To be clear, not defending one "side" or the other, just pulling a thread on the "without any politicized hysterics" line. Not sure how old you are, but look up "hanging Chad". Gore didn't come out and say the 2000 election was stolen, but that was definitely part of the Zeitgeist on the left, and it did get pretty hysterical. Not to the level of 2020, but it was a level you only read about in history books Also, don't forget 2016 where Russian infiltration was the only acceptable explanation for why Trump won and not that half the population genuinely hated what the Democrats had to offer and were desperate for anyone different than the status quo in the aftermath of the uneven GFC recovery. There were definitely political hysterics then. Only difference between 2016 and 2020 was that the losing candidate didn't openly push the theory as forcefully in the aftermath of defeat. Luckily Obama won both his terms handily, otherwise similar controversies in 2008 and 2012 would have been likely.
    - kentm 3y ago
      I didn't vote for Trump and know the election wasn't stolen, so no, not "the likes of [me]".
tsunamifury 3y ago
Capitalism is revealing itself as the Moloch problem. We are feeding our babies to it and praying for rain. It's just now we are seeing the consequences more clearly.
lallysingh 3y ago
When was society not breaking down? We didn't start the fire. It's been burning since world's been turning.
devin 3y ago
I see you're getting downvoted, but wanted to chime in and say I agree generally with what you're saying RE: legitimate concerns about the security and reliability of voting machines. During all of this election denial I've been sitting around thinking to myself every now and again: Wait, haven't we been trying to talk about how the software in these machines should be open for public review? Weren't we concerned about the political biases of these company's owners? It worries me that now if you say something like "well, actually, I'm concerned about election integrity" a lot of people will think you're going full culture war.
bryananderson 3y ago
It is fine and good to be skeptical of pure computer-based voting, but what's maddening about the Dominion (manufactured) controversy is that those reasonable concerns do not apply here. Let me explain. In 2020 I worked at a polling place that used the same machines (not in Georgia). Each voter receives a printout with a human-readable list of their selections, along with a QR code. This printout is turned in, and the QR codes are scanned to tally the votes. In the event of any concerns with the computer tally, a recount can be done of the human-readable printouts. This is what was done in Georgia (for procedural reasons this was technically a "hand audit of 100% of the votes", which can be done at the SecState's discretion, not a "recount" which can only be triggered by certain requirements, but it is actually the same thing). The Dominion machines are good precisely because, unlike past digital voting machines, they create a human-readable paper trail that is legible to both the voter and to (re)counters, just like it was before computer voting terminals. Voting machines that do not create such a paper trail should be illegal, and anyone who proposes blockchain as a solution should receive a lifetime ban from making any democracy-critical policy decisions.
- LawTalkingGuy 3y ago
  > Each voter receives a printout with a human-readable list of their selections, along with a QR code. This is not an acceptable design. Not only should the voter be marking their ballot by hand not doing so through a machine whose UI may have bugs, but any scanner must scan the human-readable marks, not some machine-readable marks because the voter can't check that both sets of marks match. > The Dominion machines are good precisely because, unlike past digital voting machines, they create a human-readable paper trail that is legible to both the voter and to (re)counters, just like it was before computer voting terminals. Intentionally obfuscated paper trails. The problem is that none of this is required. Paper works. Paper + optical vote-checkers works. Nothing beyond that works, or is needed. > anyone who proposes blockchain as a solution should receive a lifetime ban from making any democracy-critical policy decisions. Lol, total agreement. But ... why does that not extend to people who make black-box machines that have a ton of chances to change the vote?
  - bryananderson 3y ago

Retric 3y ago

This lawsuit wasn’t about criticism it was about blatant lies. Dominion Voting Systems doesn’t give a flying fuck about the culture wars, but they do care if people stop buying their products. Fox on the other hand very much cares about the culture wars, and is as shown here perfectly willing to lie.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

stonogo 3y ago

The people who are qualified to have technical opinions on these machines are still qualified to have technical opinions on these machines. Academics and other security researchers are still pursuing these issues. All this will do is make it less likely random internet opinion-havers will be amplified by grifters, which is an outcome I have no problem with.

flavius29663 3y ago
But that matters very little. What matters is people at large not wanting these machines anymore, until then, we will keep having them.
- nebula8804 3y ago
  The good news is that these efforts to audit and improve the voting systems started many years ago. As a result of all the efforts by researchers, many states have scrapped their old systems and changed to newer paper + electronic based systems. For example, NJ used to have machines that were proven to have attack vectors. They were discarded in favor of a system that records electronically but also prints out your selection on paper and then drops it in a sealed box after you verify what is printed on the paper is what you intended to vote. If the election is close then a review of the paper ballots is performed. Is it perfect? No, but it is better than having no paper record at all as it at least gives the option of a manual recount is someone were to challenge the results (or if the count is close enough, a recount triggers without a challenge). The challenge now is to ensure all 50 states are on board with using machines with no known exploits. Unfortunately some states are lagging behind greatly (can you guess which ones?)
  - flavius29663 3y ago
    > For example, NJ used to have machines that were proven to have attack vectors. Why use machines at all? In my opinion any action that does not remove the machines altogether is not good enough. Machines are hack-able, humans are much harder to "hack", especially if you have both parties' representatives in the room at all times.
    - nebula8804 3y ago
      The electorate demands same day instant results. You'll have to change the mindset of the electorate for that one. Having both electronic + a statistical analysis of paper ballots or counting ballots slowly after the election as a final verification is the best approach.
      - flavius29663 3y ago
        You can have very fast results by getting more poll workers. It's not that big of a deal, as people willing to work the polls scale with the number of voters. Nobody really wants "instant" results, if you get 90% of the count the night of the vote, that will be good enough. I come from Romania, and we only count by hand, and by 10PM you usually know the results with pretty high confidence. Romania only has 10 mil votes, but as I said, it scales very well.
        nebula8804 3y ago
        >You can have very fast results by getting more poll workers. It's not that big of a deal, as people willing to work the polls scale with the number of voters. Thats a lot of overhead and costs that is not going to fly with voters. > I come from Romania Well that explains it. You do not fully understand the "election night frenzy" that occurs every four years in the US.
        flavius29663 3y ago
        > Well that explains it. You do not fully understand the "election night frenzy" that occurs every four years in the US. I actually understand it, it's very similar for us. Why would you immediately assume it's different? In the UK it's different, it's incredibly quiet and somber. And I just told you that we finish counting earlier than many if not most US states anyway. Recounts happen but are limited to individual poll stations, because of all the party representatives they have very few chances of changing anything. It's really not that much overhead, the US has 900k people operating the polling stations on the voting day (https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/document_library/files/EAVSDeepDive_pollworkers_pollingplaces_nov17.pdf https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/document_library/fil...). That means 10 workers need to handle 1600 votes. It's really not that much, you can manually count those in a couple of hours once the polls are closed. Also, you can tap into volunteers from both parties. I really don't understand the US: you have half the country saying that the 2000 elections were decided by malfunctioning counting machines in Florida. Now in 2020 you have the other half distrusting machines for fear of tampering, and you still rely on machines? why? This is the norm in Europe, poll stations count their own votes and they get tallied up centrally. e.g. Germany https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/politics/election-in-germany-counting-and-checking-the-votes-cast https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/politics/election-in-ger... or UK https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-britain-counts-its-votes-41265 https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-britain-counts-its...

rocket_surgeron 3y ago

Society is not breaking down.

andrewinardeer 3y ago
Yet.

dabluecaboose 3y ago

I don't know about "society is breaking down" but as someone with pre-existing trepidation over computerized voting, I agree that it's going to be really frustrating to try to take that position anymore without being labeled some MAGA nutjob.

greenhearth 3y ago

Last time I used one it worked fine. The hysteria about them was started by a guy who got his ass handed to him in a presidential election and didn't feel too good about it.

kentm 3y ago
Concerns about electronic voting machines go back decades. Not sure how old you are, but there was a lot of hand wringing in the day when an executive of one such company promised to “deliver the election” to George W Bush.
- greenhearth 3y ago
  And yet the Americans managed to conduct elections just fine, without any politicized hysterics about fraud. That is until the last one, when this fiction was pushed by the president himself in a shameful defeat, to activate the likes of you.
  - passwordoops 3y ago
    To be clear, not defending one "side" or the other, just pulling a thread on the "without any politicized hysterics" line. Not sure how old you are, but look up "hanging Chad". Gore didn't come out and say the 2000 election was stolen, but that was definitely part of the Zeitgeist on the left, and it did get pretty hysterical. Not to the level of 2020, but it was a level you only read about in history books Also, don't forget 2016 where Russian infiltration was the only acceptable explanation for why Trump won and not that half the population genuinely hated what the Democrats had to offer and were desperate for anyone different than the status quo in the aftermath of the uneven GFC recovery. There were definitely political hysterics then. Only difference between 2016 and 2020 was that the losing candidate didn't openly push the theory as forcefully in the aftermath of defeat. Luckily Obama won both his terms handily, otherwise similar controversies in 2008 and 2012 would have been likely.
  - kentm 3y ago
    I didn't vote for Trump and know the election wasn't stolen, so no, not "the likes of [me]".

tsunamifury 3y ago

Capitalism is revealing itself as the Moloch problem. We are feeding our babies to it and praying for rain. It's just now we are seeing the consequences more clearly.

lallysingh 3y ago

When was society not breaking down? We didn't start the fire. It's been burning since world's been turning.

devin 3y ago

I see you're getting downvoted, but wanted to chime in and say I agree generally with what you're saying RE: legitimate concerns about the security and reliability of voting machines. During all of this election denial I've been sitting around thinking to myself every now and again: Wait, haven't we been trying to talk about how the software in these machines should be open for public review? Weren't we concerned about the political biases of these company's owners? It worries me that now if you say something like "well, actually, I'm concerned about election integrity" a lot of people will think you're going full culture war.

bryananderson 3y ago

It is fine and good to be skeptical of pure computer-based voting, but what's maddening about the Dominion (manufactured) controversy is that those reasonable concerns do not apply here. Let me explain. In 2020 I worked at a polling place that used the same machines (not in Georgia). Each voter receives a printout with a human-readable list of their selections, along with a QR code. This printout is turned in, and the QR codes are scanned to tally the votes. In the event of any concerns with the computer tally, a recount can be done of the human-readable printouts. This is what was done in Georgia (for procedural reasons this was technically a "hand audit of 100% of the votes", which can be done at the SecState's discretion, not a "recount" which can only be triggered by certain requirements, but it is actually the same thing). The Dominion machines are good precisely because, unlike past digital voting machines, they create a human-readable paper trail that is legible to both the voter and to (re)counters, just like it was before computer voting terminals. Voting machines that do not create such a paper trail should be illegal, and anyone who proposes blockchain as a solution should receive a lifetime ban from making any democracy-critical policy decisions.

LawTalkingGuy 3y ago
> Each voter receives a printout with a human-readable list of their selections, along with a QR code. This is not an acceptable design. Not only should the voter be marking their ballot by hand not doing so through a machine whose UI may have bugs, but any scanner must scan the human-readable marks, not some machine-readable marks because the voter can't check that both sets of marks match. > The Dominion machines are good precisely because, unlike past digital voting machines, they create a human-readable paper trail that is legible to both the voter and to (re)counters, just like it was before computer voting terminals. Intentionally obfuscated paper trails. The problem is that none of this is required. Paper works. Paper + optical vote-checkers works. Nothing beyond that works, or is needed. > anyone who proposes blockchain as a solution should receive a lifetime ban from making any democracy-critical policy decisions. Lol, total agreement. But ... why does that not extend to people who make black-box machines that have a ton of chances to change the vote?
- bryananderson 3y ago