Some thoughts about the reports of supposed evidence of election irregularities
electionupdates.caltech.edu
electionupdates.caltech.edu
Looks like we're about to have the same voting/election discussion we've had at least 6 times over the past month or so (most recently a day ago). If anyone's interested in reading what's already been discussed, here are links to the previous threads:
"Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13032199
"American Elections Will Be Hacked" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12921967
"Maryland will audit all votes cast in general election" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885396
"Cylance Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883356
"In Pennsylvania, Claims of a Rigged Election May Be Impossible to Disprove" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12790247
"Votes could be counted as fractions instead of as whole numbers" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841178
In Wisconsin, the counties that used paper ballots tended to be less white and better educated. That's why Clinton got more votes there, probably. It is unlikely that there is real widespread tampering.
That said, there is still good reason to audit all national elections. They're quite important, after all. The mad dash to say who won really quickly does a disservice to the process, IMO.
Agreed. Maybe it's late, but I'm leaning towards thinking auditing should be closer to the norm than otherwise. Kinda like testing? Get the system so smooth and clean that everything is obvious and trustworthy.
Edit: Okay, it is getting late. I just starting thinking of what an election Chaos Monkey would look like.
From the few second I thought about it, you could have some "approved troublemakers" that are VERY well controlled and licensed to go and do things like attempt to tamper with machines, multi-vote, ballot stuff, or something similar. If it's done in a way that they know exactly how many extras they put in (how i'm not sure, but it'd need to be bullet proof) they could basically "audit" election systems.
Currently, there is no legal way to "test" the system as far as I know.
If I get a "stamp of approval" to tamper with a voting machine, I could get to the point of being able to tamper, but not do anything. Or I could (if it was safe to do so) have it add 30,000 votes to a false candidate. It would be similar to how "white hat" hackers need to be able to show a POC but not actually do any harm.
Hell even having "false elections" could be a useful first step.
It wouldn't be perfect, but it could at least start figuring out where the weakness are.
That, I think, would be potentially useful.
Title. Attacking the Washington, D.C. Internet Voting System
Abstract. In 2010, Washington, D.C. developed an Internet voting pilot project that was intended to allow overseas absentee voters to cast their ballots using a website. Prior to deploying the system in the general election, the District held a unique public trial: a mock election during which anyone was invited to test the system or attempt to compromise its security. This paper describes our experience participating in this trial. Within 48 hours of the system going live, we had gained near-complete control of the election server. We successfully changed every vote and revealed almost every secret ballot. Election officials did not detect our intrusion for nearly two business days—and might have remained unaware for far longer had we not deliberately left a prominent clue. This case study—the first (to our knowledge) to analyze the security of a government Internet voting system from the perspective of an attacker in a realistic pre-election deployment—attempts to illuminate the practical challenges of securing online voting as practiced today by a growing number of jurisdictions.
Yeah, from what I've read I really don't think any type of online voting system is the way to go. Interesting that they pretty much owned the server. Without reading, I suspect that has more to do with the system architecture than it being a voting application.
The linked article says that all counties in Wisconsin use paper ballots, and thus the claim that there is a difference between counties that use paper ballots and other counties "cannot be true". Are you disputing this, or did you perhaps mean to say Pennsylvania instead of Wisconsin?
That's a problem in itself, isn't it? What are the reasons for this demographic difference in how the election is conducted?
In response, the opposition made strong claims that elections cannot be rigged, in spite of the verified evidence of experts that they can be rigged.
Net result: Trump wins an 'upset' election, that was actually rigged in his favor, whilst the opposition cannot bring itself to claim that is was rigged, as that would be a contradiction of their earlier defense of the voting system's integrity.
There already exists a flawless system for ensuring 100% accurate voting results: a distributed consensus network utilizing a public block chain. Voters get assigned public/private key pairs upon registration. Their vote is a simple transaction on the blockchain which they can validate anytime they want.
This argument that everyone's vote or at least the default method of voting MUST be absolutely inviolately private and secure while our most personal conversations and details of our lives be matters of government scrutiny seems, to put it in the most charitable light, "inconsistent".
A much more plausible explanation would seem to me to be that making voting more accessible regardless of security implications will change the voting demographics in ways that haven't been vetted and agreed upon by both parties in our two party system.
That hasn't stopped claims of up to three million illegal immigrants voting in the presidential election [1].
We know of course there's some illegal immigrant voting (no voter ID laws in some states + lots of illegal immigrants in those states + some very big motivation to vote = yes, of course they'll vote). We just don't know how much. Is it closer to 3 million illegal immigrant votes, or closer to only 30,000 votes?
Trump warning about rigging won't prevent illegal immigrants from going to the polls organically. However, it does put a damper on any potential plans the DNC might've had to have voters drive to critical districts and place votes there, as they've supposedly done in the past [2].
That said, I have a hard time believing the DNC could mobilize enough voters to really change the polls, even targeting key swing counties in key battleground states. Far more likely are rigged machines, like those encountered in early reports in Texas [3].
Of course, anything is possible - Trump could've done some rigging himself! But normally it would be counterproductive to seed the idea in everyone's minds that an election is rigged if you intend to rig it. Just because you won doesn't mean the meme goes away. You just create problems for yourself after you steal the election. Far better to play it like Hillary Clinton and calmly dismiss any talk of rigging: "Oh, posh, there won't be any rigging. Don't be silly!"
Also, as Clinton so aptly pointed out in the third debate, Trump has a tendency to accuse anything he might not win of being rigged (like the Emmys). This is more a general strategy of his than anything else. It's analogous to how ball players and coaches yell at referees that their play calling is atrocious and one-sided, in the hope of influencing things to go their way. In this case, Trump was likely whipping up his base + aiming to discourage any possible / prospective plans to rig things on the other side.
[1] http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/immigration/item/24630-...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDc8PVCvfKs
[3] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-25/texas-rigged-first-...
Can you provide some corroborating evidence for that?
the important point is that all elections should be audited, and not only if you have statistics suggesting that something might be fishy.
And repeats other conclusions which say that there are no signs of something fishy in the currently available data, at least based on initial statistical analyses.
If so, I totally agree we need to have samples of all elections verified to at least get bounds on error rates.
Eh, the same stuff was said after Bush v Gore and it died down within a few months of inauguration. You can see it happening already, most people are uninterested in pushing this.
If you mistrust the computer vote count reread the ballots (and manually count them if the doubt persists)
But someone on the premises can. It's not as if there was never election fraud before computerisation!
Election fraud is possible in any system, but it's a lot easier when the system is purely computer-based.
It is true that counting paper ballots in the US is a more time-consuming process than elsewhere, because it's perfectly normal to vote for thirty different elected offices in the US and say, five referendums.
For instance, this was the first election in Wisconsin where voters were required to show a photo ID, a measure which barred 300,000 people from voting. Trump's margin of victory in Wisconsin was only 22,525 votes.
In addition to voter suppression, there were also large unexplained discrepancies between exit polls and vote counts. [1]
[0] https://www.thenation.com/article/the-gops-attack-on-voting-...
[1] http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/can-we-count-election-...
Why should I be able to vote for the country's future without ID?
[0] http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-why-voter-i...
I pointed out how disruptive this would be to the country and the fact that Clinton has acknowledged that Trump won, and that Trump will probably end up with close to 2/3 of the electoral votes, kind of a landslide. I stated that we could have mass violence in this country if the election were overturned this late after the election.
Our friend said that mass violence was better than a Trump presidency, which seems like a really stupid point of view. I find it troubling that his view seems to be reflected by many people. In my opinion, we should respect the office of presidency, give Trump a "honeymoon" period to see what he actually does, and most importantly, get very politically active before the next interim elections.
"Could"?
There will be a civil war if Trump's presidency is revoked. Count on it.
By the way, how many Democrats are there in the Army, Navy and Air Force? How about the National Guard? Law enforcement? How many Democrats own guns?
Democrats are funny people. "Mass violence is better than a Trump presidency."
Be careful what you wish for.
And yet Republicans have been using crypto-revolutionary language for years, especially after deciding to make the Tea Party their proxy in order to gin up fears of Obama's "radical marxist ideology".
This isn't a matter of only one party or the other wanting bloodshed. The Second Amendment has deeply ingrained into the American political consciousness the premise that revolutionary violence is not only justifiable but periodically necessary for a free state - that ideal, coupled with the polarized political atmosphere that requires everyone to view their opponents as evil and their every political action illegitimate, makes violence seem inevitable.
Luckily for our Republic, far more American armchair revolutionaries are willing to talk about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants than are willing to do the gardening themselves.
I think you'll find that the game theory behind a winner-take-all simple majority vote leads almost inevitably to exactly that.
The one dynamic responsible is what I call "the Price is Right phenomenon". In that game show we're both guessing a price and the closest guess wins. If you bet $2 and my guess is $4, I'm still going to say $2.01 because I've captured the middle-ground. If the price is $2.04, far closer to your best guess than mine, I'll still still win. Whereas if I expressed my true beliefs I'd have lost.
Note that I also win if the price is $200.04. This parallels the support you get and accept, because in a one-dimensional political system (all a single vote can express) all you have is left and right. All nuance in the other side is lost in the fact that they'll outlaw your gay marriage, or they'll let your daughter get an abortion, whichever way you swing.
This leads to hypocrisy such as saying "A vote for a third party is a vote wasted" and then being upset at a party for accepting the support of unsavory characters (who you've just told not to waste their votes.) In a two-party system, which is what first past the post produces, your enemies are, by necessity, friends with your enemies.
It's not people who suck, or that we deserve ourselves, it's specifically the system we use. With a broken system there is no way to properly state your preferences, and to the degree you can you may have to pull the lever one way to try to go the other. In any and all other aspects of lives we demand better. We don't let the bank or the grocery store offer us such poor options for expressing our preferences. We're doomed to live this until we have more input than 0 or 1 (and hardly that, in a swing state...)
Investigate Approval Voting and push for it in all public elections in your name.
I don't recall such an atmosphere being present in prior elections. I don't recall ever witnessing so much divisiveness among Americans as I have the last few weeks. This election was particularly heated, and, frankly, I blame the Democratic party and the Clinton campaign for that.
The Clinton campaign somehow managed to convince roughly half of the country that the other half are actually akin to, and just as evil as, Hitler supporters. Such thinking has no basis in fact. It's her characterization of half of the population of the US as "deplorables" that caused such enormous divisiveness among Americans. In response to the election, many democrats have resorted to name-calling (racist, sexist, etc.), fraudulent claims of violence and rape, actual violent attacks on alleged Trump supporters, and temper-tantrums in general. This reaction only serves to fuel the division. And, because of Clinton's tactic of demonizing her critics and non-supporters, her supporters feel absolutely justified in these actions. After all, if you had a chance to stop the Nazis from taking over, wouldn't you do anything in your power to do so? Hillary, whether she intended to or not, gave her supporters a free pass to be utterly ruthless towards everyone else without compromising their consciences or their morals.
It seems to me like many of Hillary's supporters never even gave Trump a fair listen, given that all of their arguments against a Trump presidency seem to be counterfactual bullshit straight out of the campaign propaganda machine. There are plenty of legitimate arguments to be made against Trump, but vague accusations that he's a "white supremacist" and a "sexist" and a "Nazi" seem to be par for the course, and have no empirical foundation whatsoever.
Everybody needs to take a deep breath, take off the propaganda goggles, and have a look at the reality around them. Instead of writing off your fellow Americans as bigots, give them a chance to explain where they're coming from. Seek some understanding of your compatriots instead of being so quick to deride them.
Let me help you read that quote: "you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic"
Half of Trump's supporters. That's roughly 20% of the country. And yes, if they're racist, sexist, homophobic, etc, they are deplorable.
> Everybody needs to take a deep breath, take off the propaganda goggles, and have a look at the reality around them.
Cough, yes. You really should lay off the propaganda.
> Instead of writing off your fellow Americans as bigots, give them a chance to explain where they're coming from.
No. If you're telling me what to do in my bedroom, I don't give a rat's ass. If you're racist, I don't care what anecdotes made you that way. If you're trying to tell me who I can marry, I don't care in the slightest why you feel that way.
You don't want me in your kitchen telling you what to do, so don't pitch a fit when I don't care for you telling me how to run my life.
Stop trying to control people and they'll stop pushing back.
> Hillary, whether she intended to or not, gave her supporters a free pass
You're equating mean words with Trump's racist scapegoating, his stated intent to kill families of terrorists, deport people born here, etc. Get a sense of scale.
> never even gave Trump a fair listen
A fair listen doesn't mean hang on his words, it means to listen until he's made it obvious that he's clearly unfit for the position.
Maybe you believe he's smarter than all the generals, etc, but if I heard that ignorant bravado from a coworker or a presidential candidate I'd put them in the stupid pile.
For years before the election he went on about Obama's birth certificate. Him and the racists. But yeah, you can tell yourself that he had a real legalistic reason for asking Obama but not Clinton, Bush, etc.
> frankly, I blame the Democratic party and the Clinton campaign for that
I'm sure you do.
> Stop trying to control people and they'll stop pushing back.
Ironically, I'd wager that a significant number of votes were cast for Trump as a kneejerk reaction (i.e., pushback) to some extremely vocal groups on the far left making conspicuous attempts to control other people. The "Social Justice Warriors", the "PC Police", and the "Special Snowflakes" have, for the last several years, been loudly and publicly shaming people who don't share their opinions. These are the same people who decry bullying and use their hashtags to raise awareness about "cyberbullying", and then turn around and try their best to get some "toxic male" who criticized Anita Sarkeesian in a tweet fired from his job. The same people who emphasize diversity and equality while systematically silencing and excluding anyone with so-called "privilege". The people who are "helpfully" pointing and wagging fingers at "racists" (who may or may not actually be racists — the word gets tossed around so often nowadays that it's bordering on meaningless) all the while wearing T-shirts emblazoned with references to an actual black supremacist movement.
The reasons for Trump's election are varied, complicated, and much more nuanced than "toxic masculinity and white privilege".
I don't like the outcome of the election any more than you do, but it's made even worse by all the tantrums being thrown over it. The power of the president is constitutionally limited for this very reason, checks and balances and all that. And, frankly, once we got through the primaries, I wasn't going to like the outcome of this election no matter what. President Bernie would've been nice (too bad the Clintons colluded with the DNC to give him the shaft), or even Rand Paul (too bad he's a boring, down-to-earth guy lacking in outrageous, showy behavior or anything particularly radical to put forward... and, for all I know, Trump colluded with the RNC... I wouldn't be surprised at this point (cash rules everything and whatnot)). I'm more worried about the American people at this point than I am about the president. Shit's tense right now.
Right. I totally agree. I mentioned this just upthread, though in a slightly different context.
The 90% of sane voters are defined by the crazy 5% at either end, because you're either in one party or the other...
Some candidates and some parties are better about not endorsing these loons though, which is all we can ask for. At least to not have their nonsense codified.
> The "Social Justice Warriors", the "PC Police", and the "Special Snowflakes" have, for the last several years, been [...]
Even though I'm closer to their side than the KKK types at the other end, I too see them as a toxic corruption of the proper message. I do think we need to get rid of bullies, but I don't think that simply having an unpopular attitude is a problem unless you act upon it to actually discriminate, etc.
I don't know the anti-Sarkeesian tweets you mention but I've seen many other baseless fits pitched, so I can imagine.
> The people who are "helpfully" pointing and wagging fingers at "racists" (who may or may not actually be racists — the word gets tossed around so often nowadays that it's bordering on meaningless)
Yes, and being someone who cares about actual racism, this bothers me. We can't get proper treatment for real issues if we're executing people for tweets.
> [...] while wearing T-shirts emblazoned with references to an actual black supremacist movement.
Yeah, I don't know how people can openly support any racist group in the name of wiping out racism.
> I don't like the outcome of the election any more than you do, but it's made even worse by all the tantrums being thrown over it.
I remember just as many tantrums from the candidates in the previous elections. (Asking for recounts, mocking the person asking for recounts, etc.) The protests are somewhat new, but they're a peaceful expression of disgust, not riots or anything. They seem totally reasonable, considering the toxic messages flying around.
> President Bernie would've been nice (too bad the Clintons colluded with the DNC to give him the shaft)
I agree, but I'll point out that both political parties are intended to do this. Because similar candidates are "spoilers" in a first-past-the-post election you need a way to weed out people like you but with slightly less chance of winning. The only issue is that they did it behind closed doors.
This won't be fixed until we have a better process, such as Approval voting, that isn't vulnerable to these problems.
> for all I know, Trump colluded with the RNC
I have no faith that he wouldn't have, but it seems unlikely given how much nasty infighting there way.
> I'm more worried about the American people at this point than I am about the president.
Well ultimately, that's the right stance. The president, even elected and in power, can't do anything on his own. Everything he hopes to accomplish can only be enacted by the people. If we do terrible things under his rule it'll be because we were already willing to and just waiting for someone to come along and justify it.
Had the Germans fought a civil war in the 1930s instead of accepting their populist leader they and the rest of the world would have been better off.
What you energetic Godwinians forget, is that Hitler was a socialist and abused the executive powers of a massively oversized state to obtain his dictatorial powers.
Powers that the outgoing President of the USA pushed to new horizons in a government bureaucracy larger than has ever existed.
Perhaps if the Godwin-kin stopped creating turn-key totalitarian states, we wouldn't have to suffer from an endless list of genocidal dictators.
Or did you think Hitler was a conservative?
I'm just saying that without standards, whatever they are, you'll accept anything.
And "it avoids civil war" isn't a justification because in some cases we'd be better off if the entire country in question burned itself to the ground in an internal struggle rather than inflicting it on the rest of the world.
> did you think Hitler was a conservative?
Wow you've got a Hitler fixation. I wasn't really talking about him, just our tendency to elect bad people and how in retrospect the fact that they're legally elected is no justification for what they end up doing.
No, I think he was a sociopath who threw the jews under the bus for convenience. And his policies didn't fit any right-left divide because neither liberal or conservative is a codeword for genocidal.
If you want to continue this line of thought, an interesting question to ask yourself is "If I put Hitler's words into the mouth of those the candidate preferred by the self-identified conservatives, and the candidate preferred by self-identified liberals, which group most-supports those misattributed statements?"
Oh, was there another populist leader the Germans should have rejected in the 1930s? Do enlighten me.
>Wow you've got a Hitler fixation. I wasn't really talking about him [...]
Projection at its finest. See above.
"LITERALLY HITLER!!!!!!!" is the totality of your argument. Perhaps you should broaden your critical thinking landscape.
> was there another populist leader the Germans should have rejected in the 1930s?
Pray tell, which politician do you think I'm comparing to Hitler?
I'm certainly referring to Hitler. I am German. He's the last one of those in my country? Are you appropriating my culture?
But I'm not saying either of the US presidential candidates are Hitler, literally or otherwise, or even very much like him.
Pay attention here... I'm only saying that "legally elected" is almost the least important thing about them. What's important is how they'll govern, not if they managed to win a badly run popularity contest.
I do agree with the OP that his friend was hoping for something silly - violence in the street to stop Trump. But, unless the OP had a line where he'd wish for such a thing, he's actually the naive one. There certainly are some examples, like the one I shared from my homeland, where it's worth almost any internal pain (even civil war) to stop the legally elected candidate from assuming power.
Not to mention that this entire election cycle was one where bad actors from all directions took advantage of the poor discernment of the American electorate to the point where truth, innuendo, dubious claims and outright lies were given equal weight in the decision making process of many. Informational chaos has now been proven to be a winning strategy (and not just because Trump won) so why wouldn't that carry on post-election?
While I am no fan of the man, and have no doubt that he would fiercely have contested a loss, I don't think that it is quite as you have described it. What I remember is that he said that he would "keep you in suspense", and that he would accept the election results "if he was satisfied", never explicitly that he would only accept a victory for himself.
I think the "I'll look at it on the day" comments came a bit later.
[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/20/politics/donald-trump-i-wi...
Because even then he said, that he is not going to say that he wil accept a loss, no matter what happened.
Because the results of a single state can swing the total so wildly out of proportion with the state's population, doing recounts against the paper trail (which otherwise would never get looked at) seems like a reasonable thing to do.
The Electoral College is exactly based on a state's congressional representation. California has more people, thus more electoral votes. Each electoral vote represents roughly 700,000 people within a state.
While state lines are arbitrary, states are not: they represent a sovereign entity within the United States much like Belgium is a sovereign state within the EU despite Belgium having arbitrary borders. To think otherwise is to fail to understand what the United States is: a federal system with divisions of power allocated by the Constitution. The interests of the people of Louisiana are vastly different than those of New York -- the system represents that reality.
The more interesting question is if we would have this discussion if Hillary had won? Popular vote does not determine the presidency -- that has been true since the beginning; it isn't like anyone was robbed.
If Trump had lost and Breitbart had conducted some statistical analysis to prove that the vote was rigged, it wouldn't even make it on Hacker News. Every election one side or another tries to justify their losses but rarely does such a justification ascend to high art as it is apparently doing here. Ultimately the bottom line is that the media state-by-state predictions were wrong and now there is hand-wringing to rationalize it. National polls are meaningless yet we continue to subscribe to their irrelevance.
That's not how any federal system works. They are more like unions of states than one big government and in a union the less powerful partners deserve some protections.
Really, the problem is capping the number of representatives at around 450. We should have something like 1000-3000 members of the house, which if distributed by population would fix most people's problems with the electoral college.
Basically, Congress got selfish and broke the balance of power for the country to entrench their own, and now the states that don't do much have too much say, and basically slow the country down.
I'm not sure that this synonymy is justified.
The plain fact of the matter is that the representative system was implemented for two reasons 1) necessity in a pre-industrial society 2) to actually limit the power of the people.
The fact that #2 was intended to make us safer (avoid a tyranny of the masses, etc) doesn't change the fact that our government is intended not to listen to our opinions.