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The biggest security vulnerability of voting machines are that a single person can count thousands of votes. And that is by design. Election security is a conf

The biggest security vulnerability of voting machines are that a single person can count thousands of votes. And that is by design. Election security is a confusing business. It is, by design, the only thing you should not trust your government with, because your trust in the government comes from the election process. If you trust your government with the election, that's a circular trust problem and it's abused to the maximal extent possible. Which is why voting machines can't be secure, ever. Nothing the government does can truly convince the lay person it can trust a government provided voting machine, because in the security settings of election, the government is the adversary. It is actually the only time you should consider the government as an adversary and malicious - because that is when you verify and force it to be good. It matters less to win the election than to know that the government is accountable to the majority. I prefer the opposite political side to win in an accountable and trustworthy way (such as that I know their interest align with the majority of the population) than to have my side win and then answer to no one.

greggsy 3y ago
This is an extremely pessimistic view, but it’s evidently played out in the US, which (usually) espouses democratic principles, so it’s probably justified in some regard. In Australia, I believe that the officials and processes are highly trusted by the general public (or at least by those who participate in it). This (anecdotal) perception of trust has been earned through various means: a famous ad campaign in the 80’s featured John Farnham’s “You’re the voice” promoted an individual’s agency and participation, and a fairly hilarious Twitter account provided much needed outreach to a wider audience. There’s a somewhat impish yet popular pundit named Anthony Greene who has earned a reputation for delivering enthusiastic and entertaining analyses and observations during each election. The volunteers and temps who run and scrutinise elections are also just regular folk, and the commission exercise transparency and due diligence where necessary. They’re also independent of the government in so far as they do not implement policies like other departments: they merely activate the electoral procedures, once they have been triggered by an act of parliament. The thought of a sitting government or their agents affecting the outcome of an election is really only plausible in the context of branch stacking, or engineering the timing to suit their strategic interests. Murdoch media is viewed as a significant threat to democracy. The view that ‘all government elections are run by the government so they can’t be trusted’ is bordering on conspiracy theory logic. In many jurisdictions, they are executed by good people working for agencies that operate at arm’s length, with effective measures to prevent, deter and avoid misdeeds.
- machina_ex_deus 3y ago
  The structure of the election process itself, is what determines whether it is a plausible conspiracy or probably impossible. In an election where each vote is counted by hand, it's indeed quite hard and implausible for the government to conspire to rig it. If, however, the government presented you with a process which had very few points of failure - a single person counting tens of thousands of votes using machines, or mail ballots where all the workers never needed to see the voter, and rely on government supplied information to validate the person exists - these do not require huge conspiracy but only a select few. It is indeed bordering on conspiracy theory, and the border is exactly on proper process. Another way to "measure" the security of an election process, is instead of looking at votes gap, look at how many people are needed to conspire to change the results. If your answer is very few, for example, a hacker with access to voting machine, the worker which counted thousands of votes, or the voting machine manufacturer, or the dude with the mail ballots database, it is a possible conspiracy, because it is possible that very few people aren't honest. A properly designed election process really does require an implausible conspiracy to rig. An improperly designed election, is almost like a backdoor, and the conspiracy theory defense no longer works. By the way, there's another side to the coin: in a properly designed election, fraud claims simply do not happen, because it would take hundreds of individual and independent claims of fraud, to be able to claim that the results should be different. Because the most simple solution, hand counting, works, if the government fails to give you proper verification, it is already the government's fault. This is also the explanation that should be given in any functioning democracy. You shouldn't need PR campaign or media to establish trust in elections. Well designed democratic elections, by design, the losing side as a verifier can tell they were fair by the protocol itself. The losing side can try to see how many parts of the process they don't trust, and almost always in normally decentralized election, they could discount those parts and the results would barely change. If your government fails this verification, skips the rational explanation and instead gives you cliche media campaign, and uses an inherently bad process, that's the part where you should already stop and distrust it. At that point, the government already broke through all the security boundaries of the election process, and it's impossible to know that they didn't exploit it.
  - 3y ago
beached_whale 3y ago
the issue i see from outside the us is how complicated they have made their election ballots. Our provincial and federal ballots are write a single X in circle beside the name of the politician one is voting for. the walking over with it covered to cast it. the automation, if at all, is a vote tabulation machine. but the ballots are able to be recounted too. The US seems to have 101 issues on theirs too and that make’s manual tabulation tedious. also, there doesnt seem to be anyone fixing line ups. when i lived in Toronto, i walked in, voted, walked out. anything more than a total of 15min is considered very long to wait. there are polling stations in every neighbourhood.
specialist 3y ago
Please, at the very least, recommend solutions. For instance: election administration should use the Australian Ballot system (private voting, public counting), ballots cast at polls sites, ballots tabulated onsite the moment the polls close. Election workers composed of members from all parties (and independents), who must jointly certify the tabulation and chain of custody. And so forth. As a hot take, your pessimistic comment is not constructive, and only serves to further undermine confidence in our democracy. Source: Am a recovering election integrity activist. I spent a decade of my life on this issue. It's so utterly exhausting to rehash, from scratch, this topic every four years.

greggsy 3y ago

This is an extremely pessimistic view, but it’s evidently played out in the US, which (usually) espouses democratic principles, so it’s probably justified in some regard. In Australia, I believe that the officials and processes are highly trusted by the general public (or at least by those who participate in it). This (anecdotal) perception of trust has been earned through various means: a famous ad campaign in the 80’s featured John Farnham’s “You’re the voice” promoted an individual’s agency and participation, and a fairly hilarious Twitter account provided much needed outreach to a wider audience. There’s a somewhat impish yet popular pundit named Anthony Greene who has earned a reputation for delivering enthusiastic and entertaining analyses and observations during each election. The volunteers and temps who run and scrutinise elections are also just regular folk, and the commission exercise transparency and due diligence where necessary. They’re also independent of the government in so far as they do not implement policies like other departments: they merely activate the electoral procedures, once they have been triggered by an act of parliament. The thought of a sitting government or their agents affecting the outcome of an election is really only plausible in the context of branch stacking, or engineering the timing to suit their strategic interests. Murdoch media is viewed as a significant threat to democracy. The view that ‘all government elections are run by the government so they can’t be trusted’ is bordering on conspiracy theory logic. In many jurisdictions, they are executed by good people working for agencies that operate at arm’s length, with effective measures to prevent, deter and avoid misdeeds.

machina_ex_deus 3y ago
The structure of the election process itself, is what determines whether it is a plausible conspiracy or probably impossible. In an election where each vote is counted by hand, it's indeed quite hard and implausible for the government to conspire to rig it. If, however, the government presented you with a process which had very few points of failure - a single person counting tens of thousands of votes using machines, or mail ballots where all the workers never needed to see the voter, and rely on government supplied information to validate the person exists - these do not require huge conspiracy but only a select few. It is indeed bordering on conspiracy theory, and the border is exactly on proper process. Another way to "measure" the security of an election process, is instead of looking at votes gap, look at how many people are needed to conspire to change the results. If your answer is very few, for example, a hacker with access to voting machine, the worker which counted thousands of votes, or the voting machine manufacturer, or the dude with the mail ballots database, it is a possible conspiracy, because it is possible that very few people aren't honest. A properly designed election process really does require an implausible conspiracy to rig. An improperly designed election, is almost like a backdoor, and the conspiracy theory defense no longer works. By the way, there's another side to the coin: in a properly designed election, fraud claims simply do not happen, because it would take hundreds of individual and independent claims of fraud, to be able to claim that the results should be different. Because the most simple solution, hand counting, works, if the government fails to give you proper verification, it is already the government's fault. This is also the explanation that should be given in any functioning democracy. You shouldn't need PR campaign or media to establish trust in elections. Well designed democratic elections, by design, the losing side as a verifier can tell they were fair by the protocol itself. The losing side can try to see how many parts of the process they don't trust, and almost always in normally decentralized election, they could discount those parts and the results would barely change. If your government fails this verification, skips the rational explanation and instead gives you cliche media campaign, and uses an inherently bad process, that's the part where you should already stop and distrust it. At that point, the government already broke through all the security boundaries of the election process, and it's impossible to know that they didn't exploit it.
- 3y ago

beached_whale 3y ago

the issue i see from outside the us is how complicated they have made their election ballots. Our provincial and federal ballots are write a single X in circle beside the name of the politician one is voting for. the walking over with it covered to cast it. the automation, if at all, is a vote tabulation machine. but the ballots are able to be recounted too. The US seems to have 101 issues on theirs too and that make’s manual tabulation tedious. also, there doesnt seem to be anyone fixing line ups. when i lived in Toronto, i walked in, voted, walked out. anything more than a total of 15min is considered very long to wait. there are polling stations in every neighbourhood.

specialist 3y ago

Please, at the very least, recommend solutions. For instance: election administration should use the Australian Ballot system (private voting, public counting), ballots cast at polls sites, ballots tabulated onsite the moment the polls close. Election workers composed of members from all parties (and independents), who must jointly certify the tabulation and chain of custody. And so forth. As a hot take, your pessimistic comment is not constructive, and only serves to further undermine confidence in our democracy. Source: Am a recovering election integrity activist. I spent a decade of my life on this issue. It's so utterly exhausting to rehash, from scratch, this topic every four years.