Georgia defends voting system despite 243-percent turnout in one precinct | Hacker News Reader

Georgia defends voting system despite 243-percent turnout in one precinct

arstechnica.com

141 pointsBender76 comments

I've lived in Georgia most of my life and we've used these voting machines as long as I can remember. I've never felt comfortable voting on these machines. You get the card from the poll worker, you put it into the machine, you make some choices, and then you hand the card to another poll worker on the way out the door.

Nothing about that process gives me confidence that the votes are actually counted after they are cast. I believe they are counted because I still have some confidence in government. Unfortunately confidence in government is eroding and these poor processes are not helping.

There's a similar process in California, but you get a receipt. Does georgia offer a voting receipt?

I voted in Missouri using one of these machines. You can print a receipt but you cannot actually have the receipt, you just see it slide behind some clear plastic.

The machines used in Georgia do not print receipts. Full stop.

The California receipt lets you know later that your ballot was counted- very handy when you mail it in or cast a provisional. The ballot itself is paper. Or, at least, that’s how my county does it.

No, there’s no receipt. That’s what’s so confidence eroding out it. All you have to show for your effort is an “I voted” sticker with a peach on it.

Thank god they have the stickers, at least. The foundation of our democracy.

No, GA doesn't provide voting receipts.

Receipts are problematic as they enable compelled voting.

Which is?

Which is where someone pays you to vote a certain way. It follows that they want proof, so the receipt shows proof of your vote.

I think it's also likely to cause harassment outside of polling places with gangs on sidewalks asking to see the proof that people voted for their candidate. You DID get a receipt, didn't you?

Seems like someone could get a mail in ballet and sell it to somebody else?

Yes, this is why I also don't really like mail in voting despite it being so much more convenient.

I've heard lots of stories where the head of the household fills in the mail in ballots for the whole family.

Of course!

Abuse of mail in / absentee ballots are one of the few frauds that actually happen. The elderly and tight-knit religious groups are particularly vulnerable.

I think he is referring to cases in the past where politicians and political parties would pay people to vote and require they bring the slip back to prove they voted for the right guy.

The receipts do not show who you voted for, only the fact that you voted. They can only be used after the election to lookup online whether you voted, but again, it will not show your voting choices.

Apparently the receipt itself doesn't show the votes. There's a way to check that the votes were registered correctly (online and involving a PIN) but it's not as simple as just looking at the receipt.

Obvs vote buying / intimidation could still happen but I'm not sure it would be practical at scale.

The receipt shows you voted, not how you voted. It’s a strip of paper along your ballot; marks go elsewhere.

That sounds completely useless, other than confirming that some action was taken and making you feel good.

I could see the potential usefulness of a receipt that was in a locked drop safe for audit/internal control purposes.

> I believe they are counted because I still have some confidence in government.

Why would you? Don't. The ballot casting system should be inherently safe regardless of trust in any government official. That's how it's done in most democracies.

>appeared that 276 registered voters managed to cast 670 ballots, the piece describes numerous other issues with both voter registration and electronic voting machines. (In fact it was later corrected to show 3,704 registered voters in the precinct.)

The headline is incorrect. The turnout was 18 percent.

I think the point is that the system thought there was 276 registered voters. The system was clearly wrong, and was only corrected after the lawsuit.

But that system is not the one who cares about if the voter is registered, nor does it know who has arrived in front of it - that's checked by the officials before that. It only counts anonymous votes.

The only reason why it "needs" to know the number of registered is for cosmetic reasons, to display some statistics , i.e. to go from "x people voted" to "x% of expected people voted" that are nice to have but don't affect the integrity of the votes in any way.

Perhaps, though it’s not a good sign and we don’t have all the details.

No, the headline is correct in that the issue is that it was reported to be 243 percent.

In my opinion, the headline did not intend to reflect the actual number of voters who turned out to vote. Instead, the headline highlights the shocking disparity between the data reported by the voting machines and their supporting software compared to the actual data. I suspect it will be clear to the majority of readers that 243% turnout is unreasonable and impossible.

America goes big, I am proud of our 243% turnout. Why be satisfied with 100%? This great country wasn't built by standing around or sticking with the status quo. No Old-European socialist has managed to break a 100, but we did and we should be proud.

This is the best comment on the reddit thread about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Atlanta/comments/95o3g8/georgia_def...

It's not exactly a "nothing to see here" issue just because the issue was fixed. Further, I'm not exactly brimming with confidence that the new numbers themselves are accurate. Why should I be?

That's kind of the issue. The suit is alleging that the system is prone to error. To say that there is no problem, and no need for a suit, because - um - we simply made a fairly common error and now we fixed it ???

I mean, that's what these people are alleging. That the system is prone to errors.

So whether you believe the original numbers are correct, or you believe the new numbers are correct, or you believe there are likely a different set of numbers altogether that better reflect the reality, the premise underlying your belief has to be that numbers have been reported in error. Logical consistency for adherence to any of the possible positions demands a concession that either the first set of reported numbers were erroneous, or the second set of reported numbers were erroneous. Or, indeed, both sets of reported numbers were erroneous.

Thank you. I'm one for thinking the Republicans are crooked but the headline claim borders on tinfoil-wearing conspiracy.

I find the use of paperless voting machines extremely suspect. In the best case supporters of paperless are naive or have had their palms greased by the machines' suppliers. In the worst case they're actively being used to tamper with election results.

The longer officials hem and haw over replacing them the more I fear the worst.

I want a paper trail and an id. I don't see why we cannot have both as each camp has reasons for it piece of the puzzle. proof of residence is just as important as the paper trail.

but what good is a paper trail that does not include a code that can be scanned to verify it was actually accounted for?

> what good is a paper trail that does not include (feature)

A hand-recount then becomes possible.

It might be possible to have a system that allows you to prove that your vote was counted, but if you want to prove it was counted correctly, then you open the door to vote buying and coercion.

Edit: It seems that technologies now exist to fix this problem. Link below courtesy of tzs.

> but if you want to prove it was counted correctly, then you open the door to vote buying and coercion.

How so?

If you can prove that you voted for who you voted for, you can sell your vote to a third party. They can ensure that you're not betraying them.

This is why taking a photo of your vote is forbidden in some places. So the third party cannot ask for photographic proof of compliance.

That's not quite correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity

Thanks for the link. I hope that catches on in more places.

I don't think that helps with the vote buying implications though does it? Not that I really think vote buying would be such a problem.

A paper trail doesn’t disinfranchise anyone. It’s an important detail.

> Proof of residence

Does the US actually issue real proof of residence to its citizens? Or do you use the ridiculous "utility bill authentication" system of the UK?

I love that they wiped and degaused the servers holding key evidence. Cause why would you do that if you had anything to hide?

It doesn't look good, but isn't proof of guilt. Did they say why they did it? I'm wondering if they're required to reformat the machines X days after an election result has been certified. I can't think of other legitimate reasons though.

It's not good.

"On July 3, Marks' organization and state voters filed their lawsuit, and on July 7, technicians at KSU wiped the server. When the case later moved to federal court in August, technicians wiped at least one additional server one day after a federal judge was assigned to the case."

https://fcw.com/articles/2017/12/08/wray-fbi-georgia-electio...

It's not that formalized or that well thought out of a process overall. How voting is conducted is fairly federated, and CES had a huge unsecured dump of voting data from all over the state open to anyone who knew about it. The guy at the Black Hat conference covered it pretty completely, I think.

Just assume that the people involved in the voting process don't understand data management and storage practices or things like access control or asset value and have no budget to train or retain, and it makes sense. The upload interface was depracated, unpatched Drupal of that's any indication of their IT effort. Set it and forget it.

From what I was told, the FBI already had copies of the data, and I'm sure a college who gave the state some space and services to run things didn't want to be responsible any more than a datacenter would want to be for hoating a MEGA storage node after the Dotcom raid. Get the hot potato out of there, let the law enforcement handle it.

This means no data was lost or rendered unavailable, just that it would be the FBI's responsibility to furnish that evidence in event of any further lawsuits.

In my mind, if you are working in a official government role and you knowingly destroy evidence of a potential crime, you are already guilty. It doesn't matter if there was actually a crime that was concealed by doing that, the public has a right to transparency and to have a thorough investigation conducted to determine if there was a crime, and you wrongfully deprived them of that.

It doesn't matter if there is some law requiring you to destroy that evidence, because there are also laws requiring that you not destroy evidence of crimes.

Considering its government I'd normally automatically point to incompetence as the likely culprit 90% of the time, as it seems our common standards has decreased to this point as the new "normal" for public service. But there have been enough intentional data erasures by politicians/agencies in the last decade where I'm no longer convinced this is always the case.

They let the FBI image the servers in question before wiping them, which is really all that's necessary for them to investigate the hack.

If you click through and actually read the other article it was updated 12 hours after it was original published to reflect that they were wiped AFTER they were turned over to the FBI to image the drives and preform analysis and that all the data would be made available in the lawsuit. Kinda like this article had to be updated to reflect that this click-bait headline is not really true ether. But don't worry in a couple of months in a future post they will again refer to that one time when Georgia had 243 percent turnout with out mentioning it's not really true.

Independent of whether paperless electronic voting systems are specifically banned by law, buying and using them creates the appearance of deliberately enabling fraud; the consensus among professionals in the relevant fields is that they're unacceptably insecure.

So why don't we prosecute the voting officials who did this? Or at the very least get them out of sensitive positions?

They should be voted out of office immediately! Oh, wait...

"Despite some early hiccups, polls show that 417% of voters support using these voting machines."

The thing that really bothers me about this is that there's zero reason for something like a voting machine to not have at least a minimal paper trail and proper air gapping. Municipal townships should not be putting anything online without hiring a professional company that's actually required to maintain standards (such as bill pay). Since most poll workers are volunteers, there's zero way that this is possible. Using magnetic cards that aren't good enough for financial transactions doensn't pass muster. Voting should be at least if not more secure than financial transactions.

In the form of a press release, but Senator Wyden gets it:

https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-paper...

I spoke with a voting reform activist in San Francisco about a year ago. I expressed my opinion that one's vote should be securely auditable. He was horrified. Such a system could be used to buy and sell votes. (In other words you could prove who you voted for to someone else, if you were so inclined.)

I can't help but think both sides intentionally talk past each other in order to maintain the status quo.

What would be so horrifying about buying selling votes? (other than the fact that it is punishable by up to 5 years in prison :-)

Political campaigns could be run more efficiently (directly paying voters instead of a barrage of ads on radio, tv, youtube, billboard, every yard sign). Citizens may even pay more attention to important issues as they decide from whom they wish the accept payment. There would be a strong economic incentive to ensure that all votes are reliably cast and accurately counted. Depending on how voter incentives are taxed, local jurisdictions may even have an economic incentive to discourage (or encourage) gerrymandering.

Just to be clear:

Our current election system is rag-tag, federated state-by-state, mostly-insecure, run by non-technical volunteers, and cannot leak a national database which links citizens' identities to their vote.

Your election system perfectly implements a standard set of zero-knowledge proofs, probably implemented and maintained by experts. These experts can count and cryptographically prove the totals without being able to link citizens' identities to their respective voting choices. At the same time the citizen is granted ultimate control over their data such that they can reveal it to a third party in exchange for payment. Thirdly, a given citizen's voting data is plausibly deniable to any other party so that the third party offering payment cannot aggregate and sell the data. (Otherwise you'd be building a public nuisance that tyrants could leverage to punish citizens for anything in their now non-repudiatable voting history. This is also why I write "perfectly implemented" above.)

Do I have this right so far?

Actually, I think I'm okay with all "paid" votes being public. That would be analogous to a campaign finance disclosure.

Campaign contributions are currently public information and future tyrants/public servants are free to reward that information however they like.

You hand the election directly to whichever foreign intelligence service can buy the most votes?

The foreign intelligence services would have to compete with the petrochemical companies, Hollywood studios, NRA, tech companies, so on and so forth. I think everyone agrees that making choices for a representative democracy is hard and it would be great to have an opportunity to receive all the help we can get!

This isn't how it turned out historically.

Tragedy of the commons. Everyone would just sell to the highest bidder, except a couple idealists.

The USA economy runs this way and it has grown to be one of the largest economies in the World and had provided it's citizens with one of the highest standards of living in the World.

Why are you skeptical of the voting reform activist's reasoning? Secret balloting was introduced in the UK and the US in the latter half of the 19th century precisely because political machines abused non-secret balloting (systems in which a 3rd party has the ability to inspect one's vote) in the way he described. It's not a theoretical concern.

There are lots of reasons.

- Technical. You can create auditing systems that require a secret number the user is given at the ballot. They are also shown other numbers that would show different results to deceive people who might try to coerce. This is very off the cuff, there are certainly far more elegant solutions that effect the same result. It's hardly a difficult problem to solve with technology.

- Reality. Regardless of whether cameras or photography is allowed in a booth phone video is silent and many voting areas have completely curtained off booths. People could use this to confirm and sell their votes. Problem is nobody's buying, which leads to point three.

- Practical. Voting in the US used to be heavily restricted. Each and every vote was crucial. The total number of people voting used to be smaller than the margin of victory between candidates in "close" elections today. To have any effect in modern elections you'd need to carry out an extensive system of vote buying, which is illegal -- you'd get busted incredibly fast. As America has become increasingly politically polarized, you'd also almost certainly end up getting reported by the very people you're trying to buy votes from.

> You can create auditing systems that require a secret number the user is given at the ballot.

You can also have paper ballots. They are understood by everybody and do not rely on a handful of high-trust individuals to come up with flawless software. You can ensure votes are counted without revealing identity by using scrutineers.

> many voting areas have completely curtained off booths

Closed off booths are a legacy of lever-pull voting machines. Semi-open is fine and allows officials and scrutineers to spot people photographing their ballots.

> To have any effect in modern elections you'd need to carry out an extensive system of vote buying, which is illegal

You can also just make it impossible as well as illegal. It's worth noting that even in elections where vote buying and vote menacing don't change the result, they cause harm in themselves. Some individuals are deprived of their vote by fear and the overall legitimacy of the system is corroded.

> To have any effect in modern elections you'd need to carry out an extensive system of vote buying, which is illegal

But this isn't a new feature of politics. It was equally true during, e.g., the period when Tammany Hall controlled New York, and vote buying was common then. When a political system is corrupted, law enforcement tends to be as well, and nominally illegal practices can flourish, even openly.

This is part of a trend—Georgia deleted election data from 2016 when a lawsuit was filed: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/10/26/computer-file...

How is that not destruction of evidence? Seems clear Georgia has a lot to hide.

Current KS Republican primary spread for governor is 197 out of > 300k votes. This system needs to be accurate and verifiable.

And one of the candidates is the Kansas Secretary of State, overseer of the process.

Which is good, as he is one of the few concerned about vote fraud.

Kobach has only ever been concerned about forms of vote fraud that don't show any signs of actually existing, and only then as a pretext for policies that make legitimate voting more difficult as a tool to disenfranchise populations likely to vote against him and his party.

Thinking he is actually concerned about vote fraud is like thinking Donald Trump's cries of “fake news” are signs of a deep and abiding concern for journalistic integrity.

Same goes for Georgia. Brian Kemp is currently the Secretary of State of Georgia and has indicated he will not step down. https://www.wabe.org/kemp-robust-systems-will-keep-georgia-e...

https://www.wabe.org/candidates-set-abrams-kemp-will-compete...

... wasn't the election integrity commission was mothballed by blue states?

That "integrity" commission was largely tasked with voter fraud, not overall integrity. See which states are doing the most egregious voter-list purging (i.e. using first name, last name comparison to determine if two database entries are the same; ignoring: middle initial, race, DoB, etc.)

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