A used voting machine from the 2016 election | Hacker News Reader

A used voting machine from the 2016 election

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223 pointsjpindar107 comments

My county uses a bubble form which I then place into a scanner and I can see the counter on the scanner increment. I can print out a sample ballot from the county website ahead of time.

This seems like the best system to me. Most Americans are very familiar with bubble forms and there is a clear paper trail while still allowing electronic counting. The only downside is the cost of the paper ballots, and I suppose, not allowing for last minute changes. I don’t know how accessibility issues are handled, but I believe there are attendants to help with that.

There’s just no way I will ever trust an touch screen voting system, especially from a single manufacturer. Maybe a system where a touch screen system from company A prints out a receipt which is then scanned by a scanner from company B and both systems have to match. Maybe.

Meanwhile the parties are fighting over voter ID though so I don’t see this getting any real attention.

Honestly, I don’t see how people can be concerned about an audit trail without being concerned about voter id. It seems like the two go hand in hand.

Why bother with the audit trail if you can’t verify the voters themselves?

Large scale voter fraud is much more difficult to pull off, especially if the rest of the process is well audited?

One person committing voter ID fraud can feasibly vote a handful of times. One person hacking a voting system can feasibly alter vote totals by hundreds or thousands.

> One person committing voter ID fraud can feasibly vote a handful of times.

Yeah, and scaling voter fraud up in many if not all states is _extremely_ hard. You need at least:

- a priori knowledge of who is registered but will not vote at each voting location; even one double-vote could blow your operation

- a large number of people who are willing to actually cast the fraudulent ballots

- logistics to shuttle your malicious voters between voting locations to cast their multiple ballots, without raising suspicion.

Like the scene from gangs of new York? Where they vote, shave, vote again...

  a priori knowledge of who is registered but will not vote

You can indentify large numbers of such candidates with high accuracy even without complex programming, let alone anything approaching AI, and the number of prospects can be huge in registrars which don't purge dead/moved voters. There is often an order of magnitude more unvoted ballots than the vote margin for most offices and measures.

And generally, the party central committees get both registration data and turnout data for the entire county for free.

If you control the machines, then it's actually pretty easy - you simply alter the votes of people who actually voted. There's no paper receipt or general mechanism for voters to verify they voted how they think they did. And it's absent for a good reason, which is that a nonrepudiatable vote receipt opens elections to coercion. A malicious machine could use a registration database (available to campaigns) to target elderly or otherwise likely tech unsavvy voters - people, who even if they found out their vote was altered, would probably have their complaints dismissed as user error like butterfly ballots in 2000.

If your manipulation is spread across counties, and flips what would have already been a close election, it would almost certainly be undetected. Even if it was detected, the winning party (who doesn't even have to be in on the con) will defend the result. And without ironclad evidence of malfeasance, courts will be hesitant to give the appearance of overturning an election result.

It's critical that we have real security in our elections.

So have both?

> One person committing voter ID fraud can feasibly vote a handful of times.

But a bus full of people driven around committing voter ID fraud can alter voter totals.

> But a bus full of people driven around committing voter ID fraud can alter voter totals.

...unless you make even a single mistake in your assumption of who will keep the secret or who will not vote so you can vote in their place.

But it's essentially risk-free. A false voter has left behind no identification, and video at the polling place is not allowed. Even if the affected genuine voter eventually casts a successful provisional ballot, the fraudulent ballot is also counted and included regardless.

> Even if the affected genuine voter eventually casts a successful provisional ballot, the fraudulent ballot is also counted and included regardless.

That seems incorrect.

It is correct. Think about it. How would you pull that ballot back out of the system to invalidate its votes? Those votes are by definition secret.

Because legislators pushing for voter ID have outed themselves consistently to be using the tactic to disenfranchise large swaths of citizens?

Voters are ID'd. When I go vote I have to volunteer my name and my address. That's identification.

But it's also public info, right! What if someone else just walks up and gives my info??

Then I won't be able to vote. I'll have to file a provisional ballot and a complaint that someone stole my vote. These sorts of things are tracked and it turns out it's very rare.

As a means of altering an election outcome, it just does not scale. Even to fraudulently elect a town dog catcher, you would need hundreds of people to fill out fraudulent ballots, one by one by one. Where are you going to get those people from? Why would they spend their time doing that? What's in it for them? What incentive would that have to keep it a secret?

Can you see why it is dumb to worry about this kind of vote fraud?

> Even to fraudulently elect a town dog catcher, you would need hundreds of people to fill out fraudulent ballots, one by one by one. Where are you going to get those people from? Why would they spend their time doing that? What's in it for them? What incentive would that have to keep it a secret?

What if someone (perhaps a political campaign or party) with some kind of vested interest and a whole lot of money broke off a couple hundred dollars for a few hundred people?

Seems like there's money and possibly NDAs involved, in that scenario.

What if someone (perhaps a political party member) with some kind of ends-justify-the-means mentality thinks its for the greater good if they go around voting fraudulently? What if that person convinces a few other like-partied folks that it's for the best and they go along with it?

There's certainly many possible scenarios for people committing some form of election fraud.

> What if someone (perhaps a political campaign or party) with some kind of vested interest and a whole lot of money broke off a couple hundred dollars for a few hundred people?

If those people are OK with committing a felony for a few hundred dollars, ok, but I doubt most people would even entertain the idea.

It's a huge risk, a personal risk, and takes a large number of people who all have to be trusted.

And then any NDA they sign will be made irrelevant as soon as one of them gets immunity for testifying against the organizer in what would inevitably become a RICO case.

> Seems like there's money and possibly NDAs involved, in that scenario.

You think there's such a thing as an NDA enjoining silence about a criminal conspiracy?

How are you going to recruit hundreds of people without hitting one single person who talks about the recruitment? Going off of typical political activism conversion rates, you'd have to start with at least thousands of people to find a hundred willing to take part.

NDA would not solve this problem because people would only sign the NDA after they were recruited. (And NDAs cannot compel silence about criminal activity anyway.)

> There's certainly many possible scenarios for people committing some form of election fraud.

Sure, and there are lots of scenarios where a voter ID law doesn't stop them either, like if the criminal masterminds pay a few hundred dollars to have some fake IDs made. Did you think of that scenario?

What there is not is evidence that this happens more than rarely, or is a problem for American elections.

Meanwhile there is tons of evidence that restrictive voting laws prevent legitimate votes from being cast. In short, voter ID laws cause far more vote irregularities than they prevent.

I used to work in politics. It's hard enough getting 40 people to show up at an event with free food in beautiful weather. You'll never get enough volunteers that look normal enough or are skilled enough to look normal enough to pull this off in dozens (hundreds?) of places without getting caught even once. There are easier and more reliable ways of hacking the vote (voter suppression, which you may have heard about).

I gave you a vote because this seems like an honest question. I suspect the downvotes are because you seem to believe a highly political myth (that voters are not ID'd or that fraud is widespread).

FUD about voter fraud has been debunked over and over again, sometimes even by Republican officials. It's hard to do and just doesn't seem to be happening.

It is an honest question. I’m familiar with the debate and I honestly don’t understand why it’s such a hot topic.

From a sheer systems design standpoint, it’s one of those things that seems like a reasonable thing and the opposition has never made a lot of sense to me.

From an audit trail standpoint, if we are taking measures to better ensure integrity of elections it seems like you would want to do both. Do it with whatever measures are necessary to ensure that people who would have difficulty obtaining an ID have some means to do it.

It just seems like if we have a goal of removing questions about election integrity, we should go the whole way.

It's because it disenfranchises people without ID for no good reason. Fraud of this type doesn't happen. All voter ID does is make it harder to vote as it requires people to do more unessessary work to vote.

From a "systems design standpoint" it's adding a feature for a high cost that that isn't needed and makes the result of the system worse as fewer people will participate. Overengineering at the expense of the user.

In a perfect world I understand your point and in an ideal system everyone would be easily able to get the ID they need. In reality some people will find it harder than others to obtain the ID. The difficulty could be raised in areas where people in power wish to suppress the vote by limiting supply and people with less free time or money may not be able to get it.

Making it even harder for people to vote is undemocratic and there is no reason to add this extra layer because there isn't really a problem that is solved by it. If there was strong eveidence then the trade-off might be acceptable but this really isn't the case. There is also a high added cost to the system. The discussion only exists because fewer voters generally means proportionally higher turnout for republicans and this is why they are cynically suggesting it.

The true intentions of the populace in an election would be effected much more by the number of people who are excluded by a voter ID system than they ever would be by the statistically insignificant levels of direct voter fraud.

I genuinely hope this helps you understand the other point of view.

For some people, in some communities (that lean left, weird), obtaining and maintaining physical photo ID is non-trivial. To the politicians that those people won't vote for, they have exactly zero incentive to improve their access to voting.

If getting a state-issued picture ID was free, easy, and convenient, I don't think nearly as many people would object to the requirement. But somehow that's never mentioned by those that want to "ensure election security". Because for far too many of those people, what they actually want is fewer minorities and low-income people voting.

> If getting a state-issued picture ID was free, easy, and convenient

I agree this is inadequately discussed/addressed.

It might still be remarkably expensive overall to implement, but voter IDs could be handled at the local level, as voter registration often is, with similarly lightweight documentation requirements. Ideally, registration and ID application/issuance (for the next election) would be mandated for every polling place.

It could have the added benefit of being an additional/secondary piece of identification (technically even government-issued), something that can be out of reach of someone low on income and/or time, even once they've obtained the state ID.

> voter IDs could be handled at the local level

Handling this at the local level introdces opportunities for limiting supply in areas where it is beneficial to the local party in charge to suppress the vote.

> Ideally, registration and ID application/issuance (for the next election) would be mandated for every polling place.

Why? What is the benefit? Voter fraud of this kind in minimal so what justifies the added cost?

> It could have the added benefit of being an additional/secondary piece of identification ... something that can be out of reach of someone low on income and/or time, even once they've obtained the state ID.

Why should people need a secondary ID? The issue is that low income people don't always have ID and you're suggesting the could need two forms of ID to vote. What makes this easier to obtain for low income people than other forms of ID?

> Handling this at the local level introdces opportunities for limiting supply in areas where it is beneficial to the local party in charge to suppress the vote.

That may be true but has nothing to do with my original point, which I perhaps didn't make clear enough originally, is that the lack of discussion around ease and cost of IDs tends to result in the tacit assumption that the only suitable IDs would be existing, state-issued ones, whereas easier, cheaper options could be mandated.

> Why? What is the benefit? Voter fraud of this kind in minimal so what justifies the added cost?

I'm making no assertion as to the underlying benefit of requiring IDs in the first place, but lighter weight documentation requirements would be easier than a state ID and presumably cheaper. Co-location with polling places would make it at least approximately as easy/available as the voting itself (far more so than a state DMV).

> you're suggesting the could need two forms of ID to vote

I'm doing no such thing, and it's an uncharitable reading of my comment to accuse me of it, considering I pointed out an added benefit. Opening a first bank account would be easier with two forms of photo ID.

> That may be true but has nothing to do with my original point, which I perhaps didn't make clear enough originally, is that the lack of discussion around ease and cost of IDs tends to result in the tacit assumption that the only suitable IDs would be existing, state-issued ones, whereas easier, cheaper options could be mandated.

This wasn't clear thanks for clarifying. But I have little faith that a new form of ID would be any easier to obtain than current options. Ideally we'd just make the current state IDs easier to obtain but even then they still shouldn't be necessary for voting if we truely want to count the opinion of as many citizens as possible.

> I have little faith that a new form of ID would be any easier to obtain than current options.

It's hard to see how having yet another option could make getting any ID overall more difficult, but, of course, merely easier isn't adequate.

It has to be so easy and frictionless (in addition to being free) as to avoid voter suppression. As such, it would have to be at least as easy as current voter registration (which itself is not necessarily easy enough to begin with).

I have more faith that, if this is possible, it would be doable by augmenting existing election bureacracies to include photo ID issuance, than retrofitting existing DMV bureacracies (and adding locations?!). (I also think that even just attempting a DMV retrofit is likely to end up being a boondoggle/moneypit of breathtaking proportions, at least for the larger states [1])

[1] Witness http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/14/local/la-me-dmv-proj...

If you would like to take a systems design approach to looking at the U.S. federal election system, then you need to consider the costs of voter ID laws, not just the benefits. Otherwise you're not actually taking a "systems design" approach.

Voter ID laws will help prevent people impersonating one another and stealing each other's votes. But they also prevent legitimate voters from casting votes, if they don't satisfy the voter ID requirement. If the latter effect is larger than the former effect, your voter ID law has introduced a net negative impact on the U.S. election system.

Because the goal of an election system is to accurately count legitimate votes, not just to not count illegitimate votes.

> It just seems like if we have a goal of removing questions about election integrity, we should go the whole way.

Election integrity is also compromised if citizens are not permitted to vote.

If you'd like to better understand the opposition to voter ID laws, Google can do a lot for you. The ACLU is not a bad place to start, though:

https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...

Why is it when voter ID laws are proposed by legislators, they never propose a way to get IDs into the hands of eligible voters who don't already have them?

Nothing about giving citizens IDs at 18, nor existing or easy pathways to get a voter ID if you don't have one. Nothing about registering for IDs at the polls, nor programs to ensure that vulnerable populations like the elderly have IDs. There's no assurance given that polls won't enforce ID requirements until a majority of voters have IDs, which should be the default stance of such laws.

Voting is an important right and I'd expect our elected representatives to treat it with deference.

>Why is it when voter ID laws are proposed by legislators, they never propose a way to get IDs into the hands of eligible voters who don't already have them?

In an odd and absolutely unrelated coincidence, republicans who push these laws also close dmv’s in minority areas, change their hours to make it harder for working class drivers to access them, and instruct dmv personnel to obscure the fact that id’s are free.

"This seems like the best system to me. Most Americans are very familiar with bubble forms and there is a clear paper trail while still allowing electronic counting."

The problem is that the paper ballots may never be hand counted if the margin between the candidates given by the electronic vote counting machine is far enough apart.

Of course, whoever hacks a vote counting machine can give any vote count they want, so they can set the margin however wide they want.

The only way to really be sure of the totals is to do hand counts of paper ballots, with representatives of each party participating or at least observing the entire count.

Machines should never be trusted.

It seems like any electronic-based voting system should be subject to randomized audit via manual recount of its paper trail, regardless of reported margin. This way we can reap the efficiency rewards of electronic systems while also becoming aware if wide-scale tampering has taken place.

That would be excellent if you had to modify hundreds of machines to influence an election but the case now is that even a few strategically chosen machines could drastically swing an election.

So audit those machines. It's still a small number.

Spot checking isn't enough. To claim that spot checking effectively enforces integrity is turning a blind eye, and shrugging at cut corners.

It's not about the technical problem, it's about the perception from people of an electronic vote. People that didn't grew up in the tech revolution are going to be skeptical anyway, and I'm not sure about the ones that are full of social induces doubts about everything. It seems to me we are trying to solve a non existant problem

>>Of course, whoever hacks a vote counting machine can give any vote count they want, so they can set the margin however wide they want.

Exit polls give you a pretty good idea, within a margin of error, of who is winning. If somebody is winning by a large margin and you want to change that by hacking voting machines, it is very likely to be detected by the exit polls.

I'm guessing you didn't vote in 2000.

In a real dispute exit polls are worthless.

Just to play devils advocate here, would it be much harder to place people on the ballot counting committees who might incorrectly record it?

I'm not sure I've ever seen a video stream of ballot persons actually counting paper, so it may not be monitored publically

Russia successfully infiltrated the NRA, I'd imagine local ballot groups wouldn't be much harder for a foreign adversary to do

I know this is hard to imagine but I'd love to see a situation where a small community actually gets together and "on good faith" (this is the nearly impossible part, if not impossible) agree to record their votes pre-voting, anonymously, and PROMISE to vote the same exact way when they officially vote.

After the votes are tallied and it's said to be certiefied and "officially" over and counted from whatever government entity that community would check their results against the "official" ones.

I know that exit polls are designed to get an idea of what's going to happen but I'd love to see a scenario where a community, ahead of time, put this type of security in place to test and see if the people counting the votes / people creating these machines / any outside forces had a hand in tainting the election.

It wouldn't matter what party you voted for, it wouldn't matter who the candidates are, and hopefully people no matter their political beliefs would all agree that finding out if their vote truly matters or not is more important than any sort of partisan bickering.

It's nice to daydream though, is it not?

I'd love to see a situation where a small community actually gets together and "on good faith" (this is the nearly impossible part, if not impossible) agree to record their votes pre-voting, anonymously, and PROMISE to vote the same exact way when they officially vote."

I was going to suggest that such people could just film themselves voting. But then I realized that with today's technology that's easily faked.

The concept of ignoring paper vote counts for large margin victories is entirely why we should always audit the paper trail.

Democracy needs opsec. Something about "eternal vigilance"...

"Democracy needs opsec"

That's a t-shirt right there.

You describe the UK system, this video somewhat shows it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U19GzqfGdqM

My county uses the bubble form too. Accessibility is handled by a touch screen system (with headphones), which prints out a paper ballot. It's quite refreshing-- these guys usually mess things up.

We use something similar here (broken arrows pointing to each option, connect an arrow to indicate a vote).

What I never understood was what the selling proposition was for the black-box-no-paper-trail machine. You're selling a complex tech product to a very traditional, low-end bureaucracy that wouldn't normally jump on complex tech products.

It's probably not about cost of ballots. Even ignoring the up-front cost of the machines, you're going to have to spend quite a bit of money storing and securing the machines, reprogramming them after each cycle, and I wouldn't be surprised if the software is on a subscription basis. i suspect there may be legal requirements for things like absentee and sample ballots that mean you still have to print some paper forms anyway.

Accessibility seemed the best argument-- a machine with big buttons and pictures is easier for low vision or mobility users, but there's no reason the machine couldn't be an assistant only-- make your choices, and it prints a regular bubble form ballot you confirm before dropping in the box for counting.

Why can't the machines be open sourced in the sense that all the code, privacy encryptions, physical design, bill of materials, supply chain and manufacturing is done by the public via a voting system and any citizen has the freedom to inspect any part.

Because that would make voter suppression harder.

I think you're describing the opscan machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_scan_voting_system

Doug Jones is the recognized expert on these particular systems.

http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/optical/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_W._Jones

Of all the available and proposed systems, opscans are the least bad, for the USA. (Better would be manually counted ballots, but that'd require some unpalatable changes to be feasible.)

If I was king, I'd require open source (hardware & software), hardwired to boot off a WORM media (eg mini CD-ROM). The media would be purpose burned per election, enumerated and notarized, and their physical chain of custody guaranteed, to be warehoused for future inspection.

The tabulation would be RAM only, with a report printed when the polls close.

Source: Election integrity was my issue.

I like the ram only aspect but I wonder if the risk of losing all that data in a power disruption is worth it? Seems like it would make a temptimg target for "accidents" in areas where many people vote a certain way and some group wants to disrupt this process. Voting in the US is already a huge ordeal of waiting in line for hours, a lot of those people probably can't / won't come back to revote if the volatile memory erases the machine data.

Just rescan the ballots.

The only truthworthy system is built on mutual distrust (checks & balances). For instance, while I was a poll inspector, everything required two participants, representing both sides. And all actions be done in public.

Every secure system is going to rely on some source of trust. Wheather that’s certificate issuers for SSL, a non-biased Judge, or the trust of the developers working on the bitcoin protocol, trust doesn’t just emerge purely from systems, there is always some root source based on societal norms.

If you were king, there wouldn't be voting in the first place.

Actually, just for kicks, you might find it interesting to know that quite a few historical monarchies were essentially democracies with extremely limited enfranchisement. A setup where - instead of having a bloody "game-of-thrones" civil war to decide the king - they instead had a large body of nobles vote on the king, was actually pretty common.

In fact our Electoral College, as a name, comes from one of these - during the medieval age, in the western heartland of europe (vaguely covering parts of france, switzerland, germany, italy), there were a bunch of little fiefdoms led by nobles who banded together into a big federation called the Holy Roman Empire. They all collectively voted on which noble would become Emperor, and it took several hundred years before one family was able to bend it into being hereditary.

This is basically still the case in the Vatican, Malaysia and Cambodia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_monarchy#Current_uses

I disagree that you can call any situation with such limited enfranchisement a "democracy".

I guess the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Sweden are just dreams. I suspected something might be up with Belgium, but I had no inkling about the others.

There was a lot of hoopla in the media over easily hackable voting machines before and shortly after the Bush vs Kerry Presidential election. Afterwards, the Democrats screamed fraud and vowed to get rid of those easily hackable voting machines. Then they apparently forgot all about it and moved on. The machines are still there. The vulnerabilities are still there. The results of any election that they play a role in is suspect.

Then Trump vs Clinton came around, and it seems no one remembered that the easily hackable voting machines were even there. But they were. What role did they play in the election? Without a paper trail, we may never know.

Apart from the travesty that is the easily hackable electronic voting machine, there are also electronic vote counting machines. In my own district, we voted on paper ballots which where then directly placed in to electronic vote counting machines. If those are hacked they can give out any vote total the hacker wants, perhaps just outside the margin required for a manual recount.

Any election where either electronic voting machines or electronic vote counting machines were used should not be trusted. When there's no paper trail, it's even worse, but even where there is the laws might not allow a hand recount.

The use of either of these types of machines might explain why exit poll numbers and predictions have been so wildly off the mark in recent years.

Exit poll numbers weren't off. Predictions were only off because people ignored the actual polls and inserted their own biases into the interpretation of said polls, and thought popular vote == winning.

That's my understanding too, that despite being heavily data driven, the Clinton campaign (and most of the polling agencies as well since they were using the same techniques) didn't have anywhere near a correct model for a "likely voter". That biased the results of their total model heavily towards Clinton.

It's very hard to come up with reliable likely voter models, not least because there are significant changes in people who vote every time. The opinion polls in the 2017 British general election were out, for example, because in the event unusual numbers of unlikely voters came out to vote Labour. Things were obviously going to be different that time (Labour had elected a deeply unlikey leader and repositioned itself) but no-one had any solid evidence how turnout patterns would change, or to what degree.

So yes, inaccurate likely voter modeling is a serious problem. But it's really hard if things are changing, politically.

Oh absolutely, it's a nearly impossible task. You can't even trust current polls asking people if they're likely to vote.

If we had paper trails, this claim could be even more confidently asserted.

Well, hopefully paper trails don't have any identifiable information connected to the votes or else you end up with vote buying and coercion attacks.

Of course not. I go in, I vote, the vote is recorded electronically, and a piece of paper that only indicates who was voted for is spit out. No personally identifiable information.

It's not like this is hard. We were doing paper secret ballots for literally centuries before electronic voting machines came along.

There was a poll that normalized the data by assuming 98% of African Americans were in favor of Clinton based on a minuscule sample size heavily dependent on African American women which didn’t raise a red flag for me BUT that poll assumed that Black voters would come out with a greater turnout than for Obama which I thought was ridiculously untrue. Now this was a public poll and not their internals, but after reading that I placed some friendly wagers that trump would win certain states (he won 3/4 I predicted).

At the time I thought Clinton was a superior candidate to Trump, so I did message a Clinton campaign member my concerns and was ignored. I posted on a Clinton forum and got blocked for being a right wing troll and was told they were ahead in Arizona and competitive in Texas, so there’s no way they need to be concerned about the states I mentioned. The group think was absurd. No dissent allowed.

I bought Chasing Hillary by a NYTimes reporter and that absurd elitism and overconfidence and refusal to hear any real dissent was a recurring theme in that book. (I wouldn’t reccomend it, but the biggest lesson I learned there was the Clinton campaign played everything so safe. A dozen reviewers checking every joke, every line, every answer so every comment Hillary spoke became devoid of substance and too safe and many good plays were shot down if any of a handful of people disagreed with them).

Even a Chimpanzee can hack a voting machine!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4-wQhtRiP8

>Chimp Hacks Diebold GEMS tabulator

>Black Box Voting produced this film in Sept. 2004, teaching Baxter the chimp to delete entries in the Diebold audit log (without even a password). Yet in 2008, over 1,000 locations still used this tamper-friendly system. This is the real Diebold GEMS system, and a real Los Angeles vote database, which we ourselves altered as well to introduce "Dr. Evil." Baxter then deleted the Dr. Evil entries, to remove all traces of evidence that would show tampering of the Los Angeles election. You can download your own version of GEMS at BlackBoxVoting.org to try this yourself.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/dumbold-voting-machine-for-th...

>Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims 1

>At first look, it appears to be a fully functional voting machine. But it actually has a lot of infuriating bugs, hidden features, gaping security holes and malicious easter eggs that simulate problems with real voting machines, and it shows illustrated pop-ups to educate players about the real-world problems and issues of electronic voting.

> Then Trump vs Clinton came around, and it seems no one remembered that the easily hackable voting machines were even there.

Some people remembered and that was part of the reason many supported Stein's (Green Party candidate's) recounting effort. Unreliability and ability to hack those machines played a a significant role in the level of donations received and all the support.

> Any election where either electronic voting machines or electronic vote counting machines were used should not be trusted.

I mostly agree. At least it would remove the doubt and uncertainty and people can focus on other issues. So I would say have paper ballots, manual counting in addition to electronic, and add voter IDs on top of it. Voter IDs, if anything, just because it gets brought up every time, so fine, give everyone some of those. India somehow managed to do it but it ends being this contentious issue in this country which I don't quite understand.

> The use of either of these types of machines might explain why exit poll numbers and predictions have been so wildly off the mark in recent years.

Exactly. Even if there was no fraud, say that's the best case scenario. There were recounting efforts, allegations of every type, poll result discrepancies, articles, blogs, endless discussions on it. Just add up all the time, money and energy spent. It's just not worth it.

FYI, Voter Action (now defunct) proved in a court of law that Kerry won New Mexico.

Among many other problems, their touchscreen voting machines didn't count spanish language ballots.

Part of the settlement was NM had to junk all their new machines and go back to opscans.

Given the circumstantial evidence and coverups, it's entirely reasonable to assume that election integrity problems were widespread. But we'll never know, because the evidence was destroyed, often illegally (eg despite federal injunctions).

As for why non-Republicans don't talk about this: Because it's a trap. Priming the public with the idea makes it easier for someone else to come along and seize the initiative, despite any reality. And few non-Republicans know how to wield the bully pulpit.

This sounded interesting and I had trouble looking up the details. For others, the Voter Action site is available on archive.org[1] and from there the court deposition for the Lopategui v. Vigil-Giron case and several other documents are available.

Searching for the aforementioned case turned up another case wherein Vigil-Giron (the NM secretary of state at the time?) and several others were indited for additional shenanigans[2].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140831100709/http://voteractio...

[2] https://www.abqjournal.com/14230/updated-ex-secretary-of-sta...

Thanks.

Wow, I didn’t know about [2]. Unbelievable. But not surprising I guess. I was friends with the Voter Action people. Their inside baseball version of the story was depressing.

It's not actually true that no-one remembered the easily hackable voting machines were there. Trump dredged it up and made a lot of noise about it, so naturally all the good Resistance folks on social media insisted that this was a Trumpian lie and it was actually impossible. Wired even ran an article claiming it would require some ludicrously absurd conspiracy to rig the election: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/wireds-totally-legit-guide-rig... Like, this wasn't just ignored, people were actively fighting against the idea that it was true for partisan reasons.

This only changed once Trump won.

This seems like it would be very interesting but a series of Tweets seems to be just about the worst possible medium for this.

Here's the entire thread (tweets combined):

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1019955719964160006.html

Thanks, that's a million times better

You can make this argument almost anytime you see "a series of tweets", but I agree this instance is particularly bad.

I really wish people would just write a blog post, and link to it with one Tweet.

Almost no one would read it. I've done it both ways. People read threads. Blog posts might get traffic if you stumble on an uncontested search term. You might say "just link it on Twitter!"

Doesn't work. No one clicks.

Why? To me, it is presented as a long page of posts in chronological order, like a blog post divided into sections.

For the same reason webpages don't typically put paragraph breaks in between every sentence for long form articles?

And excessive visual markers between paragraphs makes it the ‘worst possible medium’?

Canadian federal elections are still done on pencil and paper with cardboard ballot boxes. Manually counted, double checked and recounted at each polling station.

However, a Canadian election is much simpler because you're voting for just your MP, there's not dozens of choices of things to vote for like sheriffs, state reps, etc.

a ballot looks like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=canadian+federal+ballot&num=...

Provincial and municipal elections happen similarly but occur at different times and on different schedules.

I'm surprised this hasn't gotten more traction here, but that's likely due to the issue joekrill already pointed out - a tweet stream is annoying and painful. It's too bad, there's a lot of interesting detail here.

In case anyone was actually interested in the outcome of the research, it's here https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1019955719964160006.html , and so far there's nothing substantial. They say they're going to replace the boot screen.

While I welcome a teardown of a voting machine I wonder why it's mixed with the conspiracy theory that the Russian state falsified votes. You'd think there are enough interested parties to make the Russian state an unlikely culprit even if evidence of tampering should be discovered.

Russia tampering in the election isn’t a conspiracy theory. It is a well reported fact.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_...

The text of lolc's comment says "the conspiracy theory that the Russian state falsified votes"

Can you say more specifically where your link covers that, I didn't see it.

The dismissive phrase "conspiracy theory" implies the conspiracy to interfere with the election is in doubt. Others think that it's reasonably well established, and I think the link was to support that.

The lack of proof so far that votes were falsified is a separate issue, but given the existence of the conspiracy, it's unclear why one would rule it out.

> I wonder why it's mixed with the conspiracy theory that the Russian state falsified votes.

How is that a conspiracy theory?

> You'd think there are enough interested parties to make the Russian state an unlikely culprit even if evidence of tampering should be discovered.

How many of those interested parties were actually identified as culprits in widespread hacking of election related systems in the 2016 election?

It's a conspiracy theory because it says the Russian state conspired to falsify votes. Up to now I haven't seen good evidence of that. So it's a theory.

You say there was "hacking of election related systems"? What happened? Maybe I'm just out of the loop?

According to the recent indictment of GRU hackers, they first broke into a state board of elections database and stole voter information. Then they broke into computers of a vendor that provides software to verify voter registrations. Then they sent "over 100" spearphishing emails with malware, posing as the vendor, to people involved in administering Florida elections.

It doesn't seem to be in doubt there was a conspiracy, although it is probable that all of the consequences are not mentioned in this indictment. The indictment mentions other states, but focuses on Florida.

https://www.vox.com/2018/7/13/17568806/mueller-russia-intell...

Thanks for the link to the indictment. With those accusations I can see why people think about tampered voting machines. Still very far from actual tampering in my view.

And that's where I wonder why at the outset of an investigation into whether voting-machines have been tampered with, the Russian state should be assumed to have done it.

Are there other nations that we have proof that they tried to tamper with that election? They of course need to prove it before deciding, but it seems to me that it is prudent to suspect the Russian state at this point.

Votes could be affected by preventing people from voting as well as by changing votes after the fact. The known facts point to either or both as plausible, assuming there was an opportunity.

You're certainly not alone in your doubts. Many people have assiduously been not assuming Russians had anything to do with tampering with the election every step of the way. Guccifer 2.0 was supposed to be a random Romanian hacker and yet it is now confirmed he was a member of the Russian military team attacking the US.

It's not helpful to dismiss stuff as a conspiracy theory these days in a general sort of way. The reason is that disbelieving one "conspiracy theory" requires you to believe in another, larger one. If you don't believe in the indictment, you are necessarily positing a massive conspiracy to frame Russia. There's no apparent simple, comforting explanation that doesn't involve large conspiracies.

One might also think it unlikely that they’d invent a way to secretly open tamper-proof vials of urine so they could dope Olympic athletes, too, but here we are.

"While I welcome a teardown of a voting machine I wonder why it's mixed with the conspiracy theory that the Russian state falsified votes. "

I don't think we can say with certainty that they didn't. We know they were hacking into other voting-related systems. We know they hacked a voting systems vendor and spear-phished hundreds of election officials. And a Russian oligarch-connected investment firm bought a company that hosts Maryland's statewide voter registration, candidacy, and election management system; the online voter registration system; online ballot delivery system; and unofficial election night results website.

None of this directly confirms that votes were changed, but it's indicative of a heck of a lot of activity around our elections, and it would be very odd if they weren't making efforts toward changing votes. Possibly to the extent of having operatives in the US to do so or bribing election workers, though I have no evidence of either.

> I don't think we can say with certainty that they didn't.

And so we can't with many other actors. Why single out Russia?

> We know they hacked a voting systems vendor and spear-phished hundreds of election officials

From where I am those claims have not been sufficiently proved. But yes, depending on the credibility you afford leaked NSA documents, it's a reason to focus on Russia. Still I want to caution against the conclusion that evidence of tampering means the Russian state must have done it.

> Possibly to the extent of having operatives in the US to do so or bribing election workers, though I have no evidence of either.

A classic conspiracy theory. It's nice in that it works even when the scheme is exposed as even rumors of it destabilize U.S. politics.

I would hope that such a device would be wiped and/or factory reset before being auctioned off. However I've worked in IT long enough to know how all too often, that doesn't happen.

That said, I believe any claim that there was evidence of this machine having been tampered with or compromised should be viewed with some skepticism unless we can see said evidence side by side with a known-good machine. How is one to evaluate it otherwise if there's nothing to compare it to? Any thing dredged out of that machine's guts could genuinely seem suspicious, but how are we to know such wasn't simply the vendor's incompetence -- especially with as much incompetence in the design of these machines as has been brought to light so far?

Is it even possible to have a known-good machine? If we're potentially dealing with state actors here, the entire supply chain could be compromised, so even machines fresh out the factory might have backdoors.

This is one of the few forums where more than a tiny minority would even understand the vocabulary of the analysis as to whether the machines are fraudulent. This is a huge problem and should prevent such machines ever being used.

Even if they are 100% fine and better than paper ballots people are relying on third party expertise to say it's ok. Everyone understands or can very quickly, ballot box stuffing, systematic fraudulent counting of paper ballots etc. It's not just being honest in voting and counting it's being obviously so and readily understandable that is critical for democracy. These machines,v even if otherwise perfect, are neither. Don't let them near your election. Surely. It's insane.

We should still use paper records with identifcation. If there is a problem with some people not having access to proper ID lets solve that problem instead of leaving our firewall down on election security to support the people still using ssl so to speak.

Someone should give one of these voting machines to mikeselectricstuff.

Yea, listening to EEVblog for too long makes my ears hurt. Mike is much more chill.

So was evidence found of tampering or not?

No evidence was presented, but lots of attention was gotten. I guess we are waiting in breathless anticipation for the "results". I doubt anyone doing this seriously would post a tweet thread like this before actually doing the work.

Does anyone know this guy? Is he competent or something?

Twitter is horrible

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