Statistician calls for audit to address election hacking fears | Hacker News Reader

Statistician calls for audit to address election hacking fears

news.berkeley.edu

161 pointsjmcgough157 comments

Nate Silver says "bad news when a finding can't survive a basic sanity check like this."

https://mobile.twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/801222961541...

Thanks for that link. I had been sort of hoping for reasons not to believe this, because it's sort of lose/lose (bad if our elections are being hacked, bad if a recount happens and 'magically' the president-elect changes, etc etc).

Does Nate Silver have any credibility left when it comes to adjusting numbers based on assumptions?

Considering how drastically wrong they got things.

538 had a higher chance of Trump winning that basically any other poll based source pre election.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. 538 projected the election at 70/30, which gave Trump a much bigger chance than all other models. Moreover, the final outcome of an electoral college/popular vote split was a specific risk Nate Silver called out repeatedly.

How so? He had Trump winning probability at about 25%, he even explicitly highlighted:

- If Trump wins, chances are he looses the popular vote - Likely polling errors are not independent across states

Yes, his election prediction was the least wrong of all the high-profile public predictions.

He's always been very open about the models they use (though not the parameters of the secret sauce) as well as the errors they've made, which says a lot to me. And while they were off, I do think they've been earnest in figuring out what the limitations of their model were: as they did during the campaign as well. They've also been very clear in pointing out the difficulty in making predictions of singular events. Others may pay lip service to this, or say nothing all.

You could also read this as him being weasels from the get go. From what I've seen, that's not warranted in his case.

A last point I always have to remind myself of: human psychology just doesn't do stats well. That's why we have these tools. Kinda like quantum physics or relativity. We are smart enough to figure out the math, but the results—or our interpretations of them— don't always jive with our intuitions.

He was the least wrong of the mainstream pundits and was under attack for suggesting that Trump was "one normal polling error" from winning.

Also, he actually did predict both the Cubs and Trump back on May 10th, albeit as a joke:

https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/730251094614528000

One day I will comprehend how Nate Silver has managed to be, in one election cycle, vilified for both being TOO bullish on Trump's chances, and then just as equally vilified for not saying Trump would outright win.

It's the same way that Progressive Liberals call Obama a fascist, but Conservatives call him a socialist. It obviously can't be both, yet both sides strenuously believe it.

In American parlance, the Nazis were socialist ("it's even in the name"), so fascists and socialists can cohabitate in the same party.

Fascism isn't really "far right" in the same way socialism and communism are "far left". Fascists believe in a mix of typically far-right and typically far-left ideas. You need more than one dimension (probably at least three or four) to fit fascism into the political spectrum.

So if one of your axes is "economic protectionism", another is "level of state intervention in the economy" and a third is "nationalism", and fascism is pegged to the max on all of those, it's not too unreasonable to call it "national" (because of the first and third axes) and "socialist" (because of the second).

It is almost as if all combinations of political and economic systems can't be mapped to a one dimensional spectrum...

Yeah but maintaining America's rigid dichotomy ensures we never progress outside entrenched corporate interests.

As they say, if both sides all of the sudden hate you, you must be doing something right.

The argument would be that he was hedging his bets so either way he could say "oh I predicted the clinton win" vs "Oh well, I gave trump a good chance".

Anyway, the problem was the actual companies conducting polls.

Between the World Series and the presidential election, I'd say he has been demoted to Nate Plastic.

What did he get wrong with the election? As others have pointed out, he gave Clinton a 70% chance of winning. The fact that Trump won was not unrealistic in the slightest (30% chance).

Can we not have this /r/The_Donald crap here please?

I'm not a Trump supporter or a Redditor...

Do you have ANY idea how probability works? If you are going to roll a 6 sided die, and you ask me, "What is the probability that I will roll something besides a 6?" I will tell you that you have about an 83% chance of rolling a 6. If you roll, and you get a 6, it doesn't mean I was WRONG on the probability. It just means your roll fell into that 17% chance of getting a 6.

You can't take the result of one election and decide if Nate Silver is right or wrong in his probability. Instead, you have to take his many predictions and see how accurate they are; do his 90% predictions come true 90% of the time, do his 80% predictions come true 80% of the time, etc.

You can't take one time where he said Hillary had a 70% chance of winning, and say he was wrong because she lost.

But if you look at the hundreds of polls that all had Hillary winning by a wide margin, you can realize that there is a major problem with them.

Thanks for the link. One question I'd pose to Nate is how multicollinear were the paper factor and the additional predictors? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicollinearity

Estimates can be unstable if multicollinearity is too high, say if only richer more educated districts use a certain type if voting machine.

This is why we need statistically inclined journalists. The problem is that this makes journalism even more expensive.

A completely independent group, led by Alex Halderman (who is 100% legit), has come to the same conclusion and is quietly demanding that voting machines in certain suspicious states be forensically audited:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/activists-urge-...

Who does the auditing? How is that verified to be not rigged if there are claims that the election was? Why are audits less corrupt than administering an election? Is it easier to add or subtract votes one way or the other in a recount or audit, etc.? Honestly, I don't know the answers.

But I don't like any of this rhetoric. Lots of conflicting reporting going on, and lots of F.U.D.

Honestly, analysis of this type (breaking down vote patterns by machine/type and calling out the electronic vote winner) has been presented in previous elections and mainly treated as fringe conspiracy theory.

I think it is incredibly dangerous the way this type of talk (which does not look very credible if you believe Nate Silver's analysis) is now being mainstreamed by Democrats, the very people who in the days leading up to the election were setting their hair on fire over the possibility Trump might not respect the result.

I could not remotely imagine this type of thing being mainstreamed if it was Trump who had lost and whose supporters were claiming fraud with shoddy statistics.

While I agree with you that the democrats are wrong to be pushing this type of conspiracy stuff, I totally disagree that it wouldn't be "mainstreamed" if the tables were turned. Fox News is mainstream, Rush Limbaugh is mainstream; it's totally plausible to see this kind of nonsense being "mainstreamed" by the segments of the media that favor the narrative of the story.

There are procedures for auditing counties can have, paper ballots have barcodes which must be unique or fit a pattern. If voting machines have printed receipts (the only sane way to do electronic voting afaik) the printed receipts can also be tallied and must be unique. If there is no paper trail, you can still check the voting machines and databases for any tampering with a forensics/security team in case the manufacturer is a complete idiot who hasn't provided enough security.

Given the amount of hacking that has gone on during the election, to influence the election, it is worth investigating at some level for a sanity check. The kind of targeting required though would mean the Russians had to have the best polls out there. Targeting few counties in WI, MI, and PA, (and OH, FL, AZ) enough to tip it to Trump in a electoral college big-way? Doesn't seem too plausible, but I'm no spy.

> Given the amount of hacking that has gone on during the election, to influence the election, it is worth investigating at some level for a sanity check

Vaguely gesturing at "the amount of hacking" is kinda suspiciously nonspecific given that it was campaign email accounts that were hacked, and in very primitive fashion -- wasn't it a phishing email that the DNC fell for?

The fact that someone can successfully carry out a phishing attempt against a not-particularly-technically-savvy target is hardly evidence that they can just l33tly h4xx0r into any other target you could name, any more than a car break-in is evidence that a bank was robbed in another city.

At the risk of 100 down votes - considering the theory that "Clinton outperformed where paper ballots were used" - isn't there an alternate hypothesis that extra paper ballots could have been submitted by her supporters, as a lower-tech kind of fraud?

I get that this is a tech site, and we like to think that everything is the result of smart hackers (even the Trump election! because some Russian hacker could be the only explanation), but there are low tech options here as well.

The Project Veritas videos, whatever you may think of them, had high level operatives openly discussing tactics they use to affect elections. A few extra paper ballots seems like something a motivated person with access to a photocopier could accomplish.

As a prior, I would consider submitting lots of extra paper ballots to be much weaker than manipulating electronic voting. (To be clear, I think the prior on both is fairly weak.)

Project Veritas is not a credible source.

Edit: It seems like HN has gotten a lot more Trump and conservative since the election. I should hope that reiterating that submitting thousands of paper ballots of a lot more complicated than hacking into a computer system is obvious.

Or there could simply be another variable.

For example, maybe rural counties are more likely to use paper ballots than urban counties. (Or any other variable: income, race, geography.)

But wouldn't highly urban counties be more likely to vote for Clinton?

Urban counties in Wisconsin use paper; rural use electronic: https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#year/2016/state/55 (Dane County, Milwaukee County, and Brown County have the three biggest cities and use paper)

Easy as printing $100 bills.

It would be very difficult to introduce enough extra paper ballots to make a difference, because the chain of possession is audited in real time by a lot of people, many of whom don't know each other ahead of time and have no incentive to collude on a felony.

Perhaps you'll prove me wrong in a follow-up comment, but in my experience folks who think about paper vote fraud like what you describe, usually have little to no experience at actual polling places aside from popping in briefly to vote.

In contrast, you could have 20 people looking at an e-voting machine, and none of them could tell whether it's working correctly. It's a black box, literally in many cases.

You guys all pointed out the much stronger correlation during the primaries, right? Because it seems pretty hard to believe that such intense institutional collusion for Clinton could lead to widespread hacking for Trump... in fact... it's not believable.

> At the risk of 100 down votes

Max you get is 5.

The problem with most conspiracy theories is the number of Confederates it requires to keep a secret. Subtly tilting the scale with paper ballots across the nation requires many more Confederates than hacking across a network. This makes hacking the more likely scenario, all other things being equal.

Alex Halderman is not 100% legit, he's an activist pushing an agenda, HIS agenda, now aligned with his beliefs and political preferences.

The challenge when considering a small anomaly is to explain how the hackers could have known in advance it would be sufficient to tip the election.

Today, we know the vote totals, so we can look back and say "wow, it's a small effect, but it would have been enough to tip things the other way."

But hackers working on Nov 8 would have had no idea how the vote was going in real time. No one does, especially in a state that uses paper ballots for some counties. The vote count only becomes apparent much later.

So how would the hackers, who were obviously highly motivated to achieve their desired result, decide that a 7% tweak in a few counties would be enough to get what they wanted? When they wanted it so badly that they're willing to commit felonies to get it?

If we want to make these kind of audits part of the process, we need to put the statisticians in an isolated environment before the election. Tell them Candidate A won by X% in such-and-such counties, but don't tell them who A is.

Any other way, it's kids crying about the rules after losing Monopoly.

I would much prefer to standardize on paper ballots, and then we would not have to mess around with statistical analysis and audits of software code.

I think votes should be recorded in a way that any set of adults could easily check for themselves with minimal tools.

Replying to myself to offer more info:

https://medium.com/@jhalderm/want-to-know-if-the-election-wa...

Apparently WI does use paper ballots, but they are not checked at all unless a recount is called. Which is ridiculous.

As a preface, I do not have enough information from the article to form a strong opinion on whether or not any misconduct or alteration occurred with the vote, so attempting to comment in a non-partisan fashion.

But to respond to your post, I don't actually think that based on the premise of the article and the accusation that exceptional foresight is really necessary on the part of potential hackers/manipulators like you're suggesting. There is ample historical data for virtually every county in the United States as to which way the vote will go, and once the dataset is loaded, it would be pretty trivial to figure out which districts need someone to press on the scale a little in favor of one side or another. State-wide, certain states have swung back and forth from red to blue, but county to county, the changes are much more predictable. Combine this that you're looking at a handful of states and not nation wide, and it seems a bit more possible.

I want to reiterate I'm not making an accusation, but assuming there was a mechanism that "hackers" could use to influence the results, the scope and foresight necessary is easily attainable in common datasets online, with historical data going back pretty far.

You are imagining Russian hackers who have a better idea of county-by-county voting patterns in rural Wisconsin than expert American pollsters and statisticians who have been doing this for decades. This theory is not even remotely credible.

> So how would the hackers, who were obviously highly motivated to achieve their desired result, decide that a 7% tweak in a few counties would be enough to get what they wanted?

Hypothetically, let's say that you're a foreign state and you want to work together with candidate A to pull off a win. You might:

1. Utilize your existing intelligence and hacking resources to expose one or more secrets about candidate B to take advantage of their secretive nature and undermine what would seemingly be their greatest strength, their experience, by leaking info about mishandling classified information.

2. Manipulate* the public in the weeks prior to the election when the undecided are making up their minds by having the FBI director indicate that they had found "more" emails they would have to go through about candidate B that could be a smoking gun of mishandling classified information. Then afterwards have the director state that the emails were the same ones they had already analyzed, such that this would seem more legitimate.

I would think in such a situation, you could reasonably ensure you have a close lead, even with two unfavorable candidates.

In such as case, possibly a 7% tweak could be enough, because you've already done much more than 7% via other measures. Maybe you don't even need to do anything more.

* - I wouldn't have thought that a late game stunt by the FBI director would have been that big of a factor, but anecdotally know of some that were planning to vote for Hillary, but changed their minds and voted for Trump in the end because Hillary came off as too shady.

The point here is not that this is what actually happened, but that this could happen. Foreign states can influence elections in a lot of ways.

And, I think we should have statisticians get involved in trying to restore faith in democracy via giving more credence to the election. It's a good exercise.

It's wrong to assume the hackers intended to tip the election. That's simply too impossible a challenge, and any hackers would know that.

But if they could manipulate the results in some areas, and make it obvious they were manipulated, then the whole thing becomes suspect.

The fact that a statistician suggests an audit leads one to believe there is some evidence or statistical insight here. However there doesn't seem to be any evidence base, rather a good old "let's just check just in case some bad guys did something bad!"

I will say it again, "hackers" are the boogie man and worse yet state actors offer any political group an easy way out of having to offer any evidence to cast doubt or dispersion against anything counter to their worldview or agenda.

https://mobile.twitter.com/LatishaOrtiz54/status/80079429551...

https://mobile.twitter.com/LatishaOrtiz54/status/80079523505...

These were part of the Berkeley team's rationale for asking for investigation.

I have not independently verified this claim yet.

While interesting and warrants a good second look, this isn't evidence of hacking (Russian or otherwise). To attribute or speculate that the Russians somehow hacked voting machines and caused this is a stretch too far.

>"hackers" are the boogie man

While there is a great deal of misinformation and ignorance in the media regarding info sec, labeling hackers as "boogie men" is irresponsible because it implies the threat is not real.

That's the problem, it is a threat that is plausible but without statistical or forensic evidence it is F.U.D.

F.U.D. is the impetus for info sec audits/analyses. An audit is where the desired forensic evidence would come from.

The only "hacking" going on in the election was done when voting district boundaries were drawn. Gerrymandering is an endemic problem in the U.S. as most recently evidenced in Wisconsin[1]. And it's a more effective way to steal an election than any behind the scenes subterfuge involving individual ballots.

[1] http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/307176-court-strikes-do...

Those boundaries are fairly irrelevant to the presidential election process. I believe only Maine assigns electors based on who wins a particular district versus who wins the overall statewide race.

Nebraska too I think, but yeah pretty rare.

That is true, but don't forget that those boundaries also come into play wrt polling place count and convenience. And that's been a clear attack vector this year in states like NC.

I was just curious whether there was any historical evidence that the state borders themselves were ever a result of gerrymandering. Then I remembered an exhibit over at the Oakland Museum of California about proposals for the borders of California at the time of its statehood, which included debates about the effects of including lots of Mormons to the east (or not). A discussion summarizing some of these debates, but with a slightly different emphasis, can be found in

http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/row/landsurveys/Study_material/Stat...

It might be possible to interpret some of the proposals for the shape of the California-Nevada border as reflecting a kind of gerrymandering or considerations of political strategy. Maybe that's historically true of other U.S. state boundaries? (But the states haven't generally redrawn their boundaries in response to demographic changes over time.)

In business when someone wants to talk details, it means they want to f@@@ you.

I have no background in this area, but saw an interesting allusion to your idea the other day[1]

    Republicans in Congress passed the 1862 Homestead Act, offering free land to settlers who would move to territories 
    that would eventually become states — creating more Senate seats and Electoral College votes for a Republican Party 
    eager to keep government control away from Southern Democrats. They even managed to divide the Dakota Territory into 
    two states, worth twice the political power.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/upshot/as-american-as-appl...

Gerrymandering does nothing about presidential elections, which is what this is talking about.

The bigger problem is voter suppression through things like ID laws, eliminating early voting, and eliminating or moving polling places.

Instead of complaining about ID laws which help protect legitimate voters (and prevents their votes from being suppressed), how about we complain instead about why nothing is being done to make it easier to get ID's?

Yeah, it's weird how it's a national scandal that people have to present ID to vote, but not to drive a car, rent an apartment, open a bank account, buy cold medicine, get federal assistance, enter a courthouse...

The scandal is because certain states have repeatedly tried to pass laws that are totally for preventing voter fraud but just happen to disproportionately target minority voters.

Meanwhile the evidence says that voter fraud isn't really a problem.

and having to present ID to get cold medicine is fucked up.

Even india requires an id to vote.

> Instead of complaining about ID laws which help protect legitimate voters (and prevents their votes from being suppressed)

Protect them from nothing, while effectively disenfranchising others.

I can't tell if you are being subtle or not. But, if those are the bigger problems, they are directly influenced by gerrymandering, no?

Gerrymandering is probably the single most important issue in our democracy.

It makes the House unrepresentative: democrats routinely win a higher percentage of the total vote cast for the House than their representation by number of seats (in 2014 republicans won 52% of the vote but controlled 57% of seats, couldn't find a number for this election season sadly). Effectively, democrats aren't democratically represented in the House.

It contributes to extremism: in 2014 only 16 of 247 republicans in the house won by less than 10 percentage points. In that scenario, the only real election is the primary, where you're competing against someone of your own party. Typically only the most committed (usually the least moderate) voters come out in primaries, so you're more likely to lose to someone more extreme than to someone more moderate. As a result we get people that are completely unwilling to compromise, and government grinds to a halt.

We can't have good government without two (or more, but never gonna happen in the US) reasonably functional parties that are willing to compromise to get stuff done. Partisan gerrymandering massively impedes that objective by reducing effective representation and increasing extremism.

This guy also seems to think it's pretty important: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/10/17/...

Unless the attacker is a foreign state, who can't gerrymander but can bring Stuxnet level of hacking resources.

As a remote foreigner, I'd much rather find out that Putin got Trump elected than US voters did. The latter saddens me so much.

The second is cleaning voter rolls on the allegation of fraud.

>The only "hacking" going on in the election was done when voting district boundaries were drawn.

While gerrymandering is a indeed an effective way of "hacking" democracy, claiming it is the only hacking going on is unwise and is the antithesis of infosec.

"There are two types of enterprises in the world, those who know they've been hacked, and those that don't."

If he's legitimately trying to find the true winner objectively then I'm all for it.

One thing that scares me is when people try to spread uncertainty and fear through the ruse of science and numbers with a bias.

This is just the Dems casting doubt on the legitimacy of Trump's presidency because they can't believe it. The converse on the Reps side was casting doubt on the legitimacy of Obama via the birth certificate. The breathless articles in the MSM pointing out that Clinton got the majority vote are driven by the same psychological motives and just as irrelevant (i.e. the president isn't elected by popular vote).

To be clear I am not saying that the Dems (nor the Reps) are intentionally casting doubt as a planned strategy but that that is the normal psychological reaction when something bad or impossible has happened to you it is normal to look for a "rational" explanation. Once the left gets through the 4 or 6 stages (whatever those are) of grief I am hopeful that they will be a fine opposition party to Trump's buffoonery and the nation will carry on.

On what grounds do you assume these statisticians are Democrats?

If the fact that they want to do a statistical study is the sole proof of their political alignment and then any request to do an analysis by someone of that political asking is invalid, I would suggest there is a serious logical problem.

While I agree that Trump's election being illegitimate is a narrative many (on the left) want to hear, I disagree with your characterization of the popular vote as irrelevant.

I think most Americans consider the electoral college a funny historical quirk and 'getting more votes' is the source of the mandate to rule. Except when popular vote splits happen in which case everyone remembers that we've got a bizarre system that very, very occasionally returns a different result than the popular vote.

Although, who knows. Of the 5 popular/electoral splits that have ever happened, 2 happened in the past 16 years. Maybe shifting demographics will preserve republican electoral competitiveness even if their fraction of the total vote shrinks.

It is irrelevant in two ways. First, the constitution stipulates election via the Electoral College, not the popular vote, so until that changes the point is moot. Second, if the EC was abolished before the election then BOTH campaigns would have run completely different strategies. The current tallies are not relevant to a direct popular vote outcome so its impossible to say under that scenario who would have won. Its pure speculation to assume Clinton would have won under different rules and thus irrelevant.

The electoral college favors rural states and rural areas vote Republican. And elections hereafter will tend to be close owing to campaign strategizing and optimized campaign financing. And even then, politicians are only interested in swing states. So now the popular vote has lost in half of all 21st century elections and will continue to do so fairly often and will always be in one direction.

So the question is do we want customs that arbitrarily advantages one party for no clear reason.

I say customs and not actual laws because electors are only bound to vote the party line by a small fine and tradition not by the letter of the law. In the same way the letter of the law does not require a president to divest his assets, only ethics and tradition.

But even so, I imagine there will be an astounding number of highly creative justifications for the ludicrous electoral college remaining exactly as it is.

If people are this paranoid now, while this country is a democratic republic, then just imagine how bad it will get when they have it their way and all of the U.S becomes a Democracy. . .

http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ there is a reasons as to why our founding fathers made this country a Democratic Republic rather than a Democracy. . .

Not quite what those words mean – a president elected with a national popular vote would still very much be a democratic republic. The "democratic" adjective adds weight to how representative government will be elected amongst the population, "democratic republic" doesn't imply something like a electoral college.

And nobody is really advocating for a direct Athenian-style democracy in the US (I'm sure _someone_ is but that's not this) and removing the electoral college would make us quite a bit more like the rest of the free world.

Okay, what then is the purpose, or benefits, of our vote counting for president elections and when does it stop being a democratic republic and instead a democracy?

The benefits of a national popular election for president are getting rid of the silly game built up around winning the electoral college. People say that the electoral college means less populated states get a say ... but (for example) Trump came to my state of 5.5 million exactly once for a public event and didn't even leave the airport.

A national popular vote would mean that Florida and Ohio don't get a disproportional advantage and also that winning the presidency doesn't require you to be good at playing the electoral college or district drawing game. It means that every vote counts a little bit more and that wherever a candidate goes they can make a difference for their final vote count.

I'm not really sure that if (literally) Hitler won the electoral college vote that the electors would go against their district's election so we're left with deciding which game is better to play – the popular vote game or the electoral college game.

I think the electoral vote game could reduce the divisiveness of elections and lead candidates to really find and fight for the middle of the political spectrum. Maybe some game theorists have real science behind the effects of the different strategies.

It stops being a republic when most of the ruling decisions are put directly to the populace. Go to war with Canada? National popular vote. Legalize catnip? National popular vote. National budget? National Popular vote. Ratify a treaty? National popular vote. Vim or Emacs? Vim.

Places like California with their multitude of referendums approach this but are still very far away from removing the republic moniker.

Well, we are on a realm of speculation and subjectivity; but I beg to differ; the majority of people (at least the ones that I talk to) do not even acknowledge that their vote does not count and instead believe that it is a democracy; that is why people go out to vote. I really have nothing other to say than this: I think it would be better if people were educated about our constitutional system; and it would send a stronger message if NO ONE voted for president; then they can worry about the change they want all within their states! This whole, vote for this president because he/she is the lesser evil is what is destroying this country. . .

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages & countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. The disorders & miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security & repose in the absolute power of an Individual: and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.” (Washington 1976)

Personally I think we should ditch BOTH the electoral college and fist-past-the-post elections.

If there are several candidates from each party (including independent and third party candidates) and voting is done using one of the many ranking systems that allows you to do more than vote against a candidate, we could be in a much better situation.

Yes, and it all makes sense in this state of current affairs, but unfortunately (in my opinion) it is not that easy; by sticking to that mindset we once again get into the problems we have today; say we do it as you propose, and we have a great president running for office and he has all these proposals like free college, environmental energy subsidies, and whatever else you may think of; even though I agree with them, it would still be pointless for me to vote for him because I'm a constitutionalist (libertarian) and all those programs would be unconstitutional, just like the NSA spying; hence for consistency (thanks to the constitution) I disagree with everything you are saying, but I agree if I step into the paradox we call our state of current affairs; My views may make me sound like a fundamentalist, and in essence I am, but think about it; It should not matter who the president is and neither should our vote for president. You seem to understand how our different branches of government work hence you should know that the states are where the real, genuine, constitutional changes should take place; not within the Federal Branch (do not confuse powers with rights); it is all about checks and balances; you cannot have a federal government that taxes for social programs and then disagree when it taxes for programs that kill innocents, spy on the people, or bail out corporations. . .hence consistency and the argument that voting for president should not matter; because you must keep in mind that social norms influence individual behaviors and perceptions. . .and the democratic norm only forms what George Washington warned us about in the previous quote I referenced. . . this is not only pragmatism, it is mindsets.

Also, I do know that "a president elected with a national popular vote would still very much be a democratic republic" because that is how our system is set up, at it's core; but then it becomes paradoxical because the national popular vote got the president elected, therefore, the mentality (of the ignorant) would also be that this country is a democracy. My point is, people should acknowledge that our popular vote has never gotten a president elected and for a good reason; we do not need a demagogue in the Federal Branch appealing to the emotions of people, separating the masses, and creating a them and us mentality; we have state rights for that reasong (10th amendment) and we have article 1 Section 8 for limiting the federal government. Hence, when I say limit the federal government most have this negative stereotype that I do not believe in progressive change when in fact I do; I just do not ask for it from the president, I ask for it within my state; like In California. . .

These statisticians knew about these issues before hand. It would have been a lot more believable if they had talked about these audits before the election, when everybody and their brother was blasting Trump for saying that the election could be rigged. Talking about them afterward just makes them seem like they have an agenda.

We have been calling for audits for more than a decade. I've piloted these audits in about 20 counties, published the methods and results in peer-reviewed journals, worked with local and state election officials to make them logistically efficient and to draft laws, etc. But this is the first election in a decade in which there seems to be the political will to do what we should do after every election: double-check the paper to ensure that errors, bugs, misconfiguration, or outright hacking did not alter the outcome.

I'm not sure what to think about this. It seems like overturning the result at this point could be even more destabilizing than a Trump presidency. Though ironically unfounded, it will look to a Trump support like the election truly was rigged.

Without California, Hillary loses the Popular vote as well. California 'single' handedly gave it to her. Some already think it was the Illegal-Alien vote that gave that to her in the first place.

I don't understand how that is relevant.

She could have lost (to pick a blue state at random) Vermont and still held the popular vote. What you're saying is that by removing the most populous blue state, she'd lose the popular vote. How is that relevant? States are arbitrary boundaries; we could slice and dice California up into 55 states, giving each one an electoral vote. Now we could remove any one of those and she'd still maintain the popular vote. We're allowing an arbitrary division determine our president, rather than a somewhat less arbitrary "majority of voters".

But all -that- aside, the parent comment was referencing the OP. Literally nothing was said about the popular vote; the OP is about possible voting irregularities in some of the swing states that might lead to Hillary also clinching the electoral college majority (and the parent comment was saying how they're not very happy with the prospect of a recount).

I was simply pointing out how unlikely it is to change anything at this point (Look at WI, MI, PA), and if there is a change it will likely result in civil disturbances if anything at all.

Do you think that there's anything to the idea of compartmentalization? For example, suppose people in one area were so homogeneous in circumstances and concerns that they were of universally the same political opinion. By pandering to that one area, a candidate could win a large number of votes. In contrast, to win votes all across the country, a candidate would need to have wider appeal, taking into account the concerns of the wider population.

It seems like the electoral college helps compartmentalize the votes, preventing an "overflow" of opinion in certain areas from outweighing the wider population's combined opinion.

Without Texas, Trump lost the Popular vote by even more. With neither, Hillary still wins the popular vote. If we remove arbitrary chunks of the vote, it can go different ways! This is insightful!

Of course, the winner of the popular vote is meaningless anyway, because that's not how the election works.

Somewhat agreed. There is a difference between "has no procedural effect" and "meaningless" - it does speak to popular opinion slightly more forcefully than other polls.

Not really. In a counterfactual world where the winner of the national popular vote became President, the candidates would have campaigned differently. So it's impossible to say what the alternate result would have been.

I'm not sure what that counterfactual has to do with anything here. It would be relevant if I were saying "clearly we should ignore the electoral college and hand the election to Hillary." I'm not. I'm saying Trump has a bit less of a mandate, losing the popular vote by a small margin, than he would have had if he'd won the popular vote by a small margin, and much less than if he'd won the popular vote by a huge margin. Yes, the numbers would have been different if popular vote had been the chief objective, but... so what?

Not just without California, but even without Los Angeles County:

    | Popular vote totals:                          |          |
    | Clinton                                       | 60900953 |
    | Trump                                         | 60328203 |
    |-----------------------------------------------+----------|
    | Los Angeles County votes:                     |          |
    | Clinton                                       |  1654626 |
    | Trump                                         |   542591 |
    |-----------------------------------------------+----------|
    | California votes:                             |          |
    | Clinton                                       |  5931283 |
    | Trump                                         |  3184721 |
    |-----------------------------------------------+----------|
    | Popular vote totals minus Los Angeles County: |          |
    | Clinton                                       | 59246327 |
    | Trump                                         | 59785612 |
    |-----------------------------------------------+----------|
    | Popular vote totals minus California:         |          |
    | Clinton                                       | 54969670 |
    | Trump                                         | 57143482 |

Go ahead, downvote facts. :/

In addition to the bizarre idea of excluding parts of the vote... Your post was not factual; the numbers are grossly out of date. The current numbers for the popular vote are about 64.2M vs 62.2M, and the count is not actually yet finished.

When will people realize that Change.org is absolutely and completely useless?

Not completely out of the question as Russian forces did attempt a dry run of election disruption in Ukraine, as cheerfully boasted by pro-Russian rt.com here https://www.rt.com/news/161332-ukraine-president-election-vi...

There's not a lot of public information available on technicalities of voting, but would be interesting to dig deeper on who controls the voting machines, how are they checked for malware, who controls the links from the machines to the local severs, how's the data transferred between the local and regional electoral commissions, what's the feasibility of having a third party covertly inserting proxy servers into the process, etc.

Even though this is probably politically motivated, Trump supporters were calling for such things before the election, so most of them can't really complain.

Link to the mentioned petition:

https://www.change.org/p/demand-an-audit-of-the-2016-preside...

I'm in Quebec, so all of the Change.org controls appear to me in French. There is no option to change this unless I log in (never a problem on actual Canadian websites which typically have a language button in the corner)

What a terrible design decision.

The web really needs to remember that content negotiation is actually a thing.

There is a language switcher in the footer no login required.

You have to scroll past a lot of twitter trash to find it, though.

Still bad design. This is almost universally put in the top right.

I disagree. True, the first place I look is the top right. But the second place is the footer because I've come across a bunch of sites where this is the place to change language.

It's common enough, I think, to be at the very least 'adequate' deesign.

Various people are trying to explain the Wisconsin result, in which Trump-voting counties were three times more likely to have electronic voting than Clinton-voting counties. I made this image to illustrate: http://i.imgur.com/AZNr2Hd.png

It's probably entirely explicable by demographic factors, but the difference is stark and certainly prompts curiosity.

Was that the case in previous elections? I.e. in 2012?

That's really not a good way to graph the data. If you're rigging an election (within a state) you win by total votes, not how many counties are won. Showing which counties tipped one way or the other by voting machine type is far more likely to reflect demographic factors.

It's a graph which explains why people are curious, not why the data looks that way, so it's fine.

If you're rigging an election, you're going to rig electronic machines because it's easier than changing thousands of paper ballots. Therefore in a rigged election with a mix of paper and electronic voting, you would expect the electronic voting to favour the rigged candidate. Of course, on summary numbers this is indistinguishable from perfectly normal activity.

The insinuation is that the disparity in voting methods could reflect tampering (for Trump or Clinton, depending on your party affiliation).

I think there is actually robust statistical approaches to detecting irregularities and to normalize for demographic differences, etc.

If anyone has a credible source for such a study, I'd suggest replacing the original link, which offers no evidence, statistical or otherwise.

Not exactly on point, but in general I've seen concern for voting fraud rise, even from people who formerly said concerns were overblown and racist.

Well yeah. It's not a contradiction or a change of mind really to be concerned about one form of voter fraud and not another based on its likelihood. Individual voter fraud just doesn't make much sense as a method to swing an election. Way too many chances to get caught. way too many co-conspirators Voter suppression though or electronic machine hacking have a lot more potential. And not coincidentally those individual voter fraud protections can have a bigger effect as voter suppression than the fraud they might prevent.

What are some sources for voter ID laws suppressing the minority vote? I've always bought this at face value until recently.

A cursory Google search worries me even more, since all it seems to bring forward is a load of rote media content, which really pings my propaganda radar.

Well let me first re-assert my point that it is not a _contradiction_ to be more concerned about one type of voter fraud than another and one doesn't necessarily need to have definitive proof in the form of a stack of scientific studies to form the opinion that suppression is a bigger issue than individual voter fraud. Still, more data is better and it's a heavily studied topic. So here's my basic logic by which I came to that conclusion plus a few articles & studies.

Individual voter fraud (where an individual votes more than once, or as another person, etc) is pretty rare or at least very rarely convicted. I am confident saying that because there is a lot of political and media incentive to go find those cases yet the number of actual convictions for individuals committing voter fraud every election is very small compared to the voting population. This year I've only see two in the news despite it being a hot topic:

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/2... * http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/illinois/alton-election-j...

State governments have again and again set up task forces to try and root out this kind of fraud and come up with only a handful of cases. For example in 2008 Wisconsin had a voter id task force investigation looking specifically for voter fraud and came up with a total of 20 individuals. ( https://badgerherald.com/news/2011/02/01/doj-task-force-char... ). The voting population of WI that year was over 2,900,000. So even if WI only caught say 1 of 100 fraudsters that's only 2000 fraudulent votes. It's not _nothing_ and those people should absolutely be prosecuted but quite unlikely to swing the vote. A big effort to get lots of voters to do this would increase the number of co-conspirators and likely increase their chances of being caught. So overall at least what they've found is a very small effect, yet they still came back later and enacted strict Voter ID. Why?

Voter ID, one of the most popular recent forms of law to combat this type of fraud, has a demonstrable effect at depressing voter turnout overall by as much as 2% ( http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/measurin... ) in some cases. There are some conflicting studies as is normal in science but that seems to be the growing consensus and I think it follows basic logic that it does suppress votes the question is just how much and for whom. Added barriers to vote are bound to stop some eligible voters from coming to the polls. Even rain depresses turnout and ID requirements are a bigger barrier IMO.

When I first started to dig in a little more on this topic recently I was startled by the numbers of US Citizens who do not have any kind of government Photo ID and reading more started to sympathize with how difficult it could be to get the ID in the first place if you are impoverished, elderly, or just don't have your birth certificate for whatever reason. For example in Texas during the trial which struck down their recent very strict voter id law the court found that about "608,470 registered Texas voters lack the ID necessary to vote" ( https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/separating-fact-fiction-v... ). And something that should surprise no-one it's correlated highly with poverty which is also correlated highly with being in certain ethnic minorities so the effect is likely to be more pronounced there.

So IMO you take all of that and the back of napkin math says that even if that 2% depressed turnout is highballing it and it's more like .5% we're looking at a theoretical 14,500 less eligible votes in WI in 2008 with an added Voter ID law vs. my inflated estimate for 2000 in person voter fraud (when they found only 20). If our goal is to maximize eligible voter turnout which one is more damaging to the right to vote? Voter ID good intentions or not has a much worse effect. So essentially my assertion is that Voter ID is the medicine which hurts the patient more than helping presuming our goal is to maximize the number of legitimate votes in each election.

All that and we've not even touched on other much more direct voter suppression efforts like this year how with some VRA restrictions out of the way many states dramatically cut back on polling places and early voting both of which have had adverse effects on minority populations https://www.thenation.com/article/there-are-868-fewer-places... . Voters in NC were lined up for four hours to vote in some democratic leaning areas like Charlotte that lost polling places and no doubt some people will give up and walk in that situation. To top it all off there are many examples of Republicans alluding to or directly stating that Voter ID, enhanced Voter Registration checks, reduced polling places, reduced early voting, etc will help their odds of winning ( http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknow... ). What a shame, to have powerful players in a major political party that seem to not believe in democracy at all.

ps. The Brennan Center for Justice keeps a running roundup of notable studies on the topic and several delve way more into the suppression of minority votes issue vs suppression of democratic votes. It's a good resource and while they do certainly have a viewpoint on the matter present them in a balanced manner in my opinion.

https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/research-and-publicat...

Voting fraud doesn't seem to be actually happening. Voter suppression on the other hand does.

[citation needed]

Not a primary source, but happened to be at hand: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/11/election_secu...

> To be very clear, this is not about voter fraud. The risks of ineligible people voting, or people voting twice, have been repeatedly shown to be virtually nonexistent, and "solutions" to this problem are largely voter-suppression measures.

So one sentence blandly asserting that voter suppression is happening in the middle of an essay on an unrelated topic? Okay.

By someone who pays a lot of attention to security matters, and who is trusted by a lot of people here. I recognize (and called out) that it's not nearly as good a source as might be available, but like I said I happened to have it at hand, and it's certainly better than nothing.

Bold claim. I'd love to read the source material.

Voter suppression does not mean people at polling stations with guns threatening people (though that does occasionally happen). Voter suppression includes lessening the number of voting precincts to depress minority turnout and create longer lines. Purging voter rolls illegally. Voter ID laws that target the poor. Reducing the number of days where early voting takes place.

I don't think these are particularly bold things to claim are happening.

We agree that actively reducing voting stations in ways that disproportionately impact the poor is problematic.

But it's hard for me to believe that voter ID laws inherently target the poor more so than ID laws governing the sale of alcohol and/or tobacco (or cough syrup or spray paint or guns or...). I find it relatively obscene that I'll get carded at the bar but cast my vote for President by giving a volunteer my name.

I don't know for certain that fraud is happening (or at least that it's happening in sufficient numbers), but I find it disingenuous to propose _that it can't be happening_.

What is the appropriate trade off between potential for fraud and disenfranchisement is an interesting question. One I wish both sides were willing to talk about without rancor.

Honest question: How do you interpret the undercover video of Scott Foval as not indicative of election fraud? He explicitly confesses to violating federal election law.

Is he not actually Scott Foval?

Is he lying to the person he's talking to?

Or are you saying that, while he is telling the truth and has committed those acts, they didn't amount to enough to make a difference? If so, how do you know that, based on what he said? Why do you think they would spend time and money on those things, and risk prosecution, if they didn't think it could make a difference? Why do you think that there aren't people like him doing the same thing in other places?

Looking at the video of him, it is clear that election fraud is happening. The question is to what extent.

Besides, it's common knowledge that votes have been cast for dead people in places like Chicago and Philadelphia for decades. So I don't understand how you can say that election fraud isn't happening with a straight face.

O'Keefe is widely known for editing videos to create false narratives (see: the ACORN debacle). I don't really trust anything he puts out at this point.

> Besides, it's common knowledge that votes have been cast for dead people in places like Chicago and Philadelphia for decades. So I don't understand how you can say that election fraud isn't happening with a straight face.

Not true. It is true that people have casted absentee/early ballots and then died. It's also true that people with the same name as someone who has died has voted. When these examples come up they typically fall into those categories.

Hmm, why no call for audit in 2008 or 2012? Can the fact that a Democrat won have something to do with this?

> Hmm, why no call for audit in 2008 or 2012? Can the fact that a Democrat won have something to do with this?

It could also be due to the fact that a Democrat clearly won both the Electoral College and the popular vote by a wide margin.

The methods were tried in various contest from 2008 on, but not on the presidential election in 2008 or 2012 because we could not get all the local election officials in any state to do it. Believe me, I tried to get states to do it. This time, there might be the political will.

I don't know much about the election machines, but is there any reason for them to be connected to the WWW? If they're not connected to the WWW, then only someone with physical access to the machines could hack them...right? What's the likelihood of that?

Presumably components of the hardware or software could be compromised somewhere upstream by nation-state actors like the CIA and NSA's TAO. It's not as if Iran's nuclear facilities were connected to the Internet and that didn't exactly keep their centrifuges safe.

Right...definitely possible, but this would have to be extremely well coordinated. Chances are each state/city has different machines/hardware/software, different order of candidates on the ballots, etc...so for a random hacker to hack the results would be only if the machines are connected to the internet...I'm hoping they're not!

Most voting machines are connected to the Internet or to a machine that has been connected to the Internet in some point in the lifecycle of an election. But even absent hacking, there are sometimes configuration errors (e.g., swapping candidates or contests) that don't get detected in pre-election testing, procedural or equipment failures that result in not scanning some ballots or scanning some more than once, etc.

About half a year ago a paper was posted here on HN about research which conclusively demonstrated vote manipulation in several provinces in Russia: https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.6059 The technique essentially uses the non-random distribution of round numbers in vote counts as indication that some sort of manipulation has taken place.

At the very least, it would seem prudent (or perhaps a fun project for someone) to check if election returns in this past election pass this test.

Weird. I distinctly recall that a few weeks ago refusing to accept the results of an election was treason. Lots of people saying that, including here on HN. What changed, I wonder?

There's a bit of a difference between saying in advance that you won't accept the results "Unless I win" and asking for a recount with some evidence of potential irregularities in hand after the election is concluded.

It wasn't wrong of Gore to push for a recount in 2000 within the bounds of the law so long as when that process was complete he conceded, asked his supporters to let it go, and let the country get back to business.

It would be good to get more transparency into the process.

Basically, I'm thinking a giant anonymized excel sheet. I can generate my anonymous id and verify that I appear correctly. That's one part.

The other parts are making sure only real people voted (harder) and that the counting was done correctly (easier).

Hopefully, if they do that, they don't only audit electronic votes, but also all paper ballots (make sure that all ballots are legit (ie: if someone didn't vote, someone else didn't cast a vote for them) and no ballots disappeared)

I was wondering when we would finally see this, when I first saw the numbers a couple of weeks ago what I saw was pretty obvious evidence. I think I an election of this magnitude it makes sense to have everything thoroughly audited.

> hen I first saw the numbers a couple of weeks ago what I saw was pretty obvious evidence.

I was surprised by the result as well. But curious what did you see as obvious evidence?

We live in a post-democracy world, the people should choose whatever the elites tell them to, or the outcome gets changed if it's the not the right answer (Brexit, Austria, Trump, Le Pen?).

Who are the "elites" you're referencing?

Reading these comments, I am having a serious Deja Vu. This exact discussion took place in Slashdot after 2004 re-election of Bush (a study pointing out anomalies came out then too).

Is there a practical method to make the voting process transparent to audit yet able to maintain individual privacy?

Ideally the people should be able to audit the process.

What's wrong with normal paper ballots?

Conceivably there could still be fraud in counting the ballots.

It's a lot harder to commit fraud when there's physical evidence that anyone can recount, and the counting is done in a public place observed by a variety of people, and the ballots cannot so easily be tampered with without leaving physical evidence.

With computers, even if you bring in a certified, gold-master CD containing the software under armed guard, it's still a black box. There's no way to conclusively prove that the machine counts accurately and fairly. Tampering can be done without a trace. Compromise is always a concern.

Paper is always the best choice. Who cares if it takes longer to count.

Ok, I was just asking a question.

I haven't thought about it enough, but it does sound like paper is better than what we have at the moment. I don't disagree with you there.

If there's a possible way the process can be audited by the public without sacrificing privacy, that should be implemented.

This is BS.

https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/ is doing it

Here is the change.org petition we can all sign to make a difference:

https://www.change.org/p/demand-an-audit-of-the-2016-preside...

Every vote should count correctly.

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