Private equity controls the U.S. voting machine industry
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
[1] https://crypto.stanford.edu/pbc/notes/crypto/voting.html
Probably.
Can you explain what you mean? I've never heard that expression before and it's.. confusing.
For example, if I were running for a relatively high office that took a lot of funds to compete, I'd openly take funds from any legal source. And that might make me more inclined to meet with those organizations over given issues. However, it would be up to me to decide what is best for my constituents in my votes/actions over specific things.
We talk all day about corruption of the money/companies, but way too little voting out all the congress-critters that should not return. More people need to start voting against incumbents regardless of party to stir the pot and get some new blood into things.
It's a feature, not a bug...applied empirically to the modern electoral mechanism.
Honestly I feel the solution to this is: lowest bid, but the company cannot charge more than their bid and needs to have completion/bankruptcy insurance. That way companies that routinely under bid will go bankrupt/have the bankruptcy insurance bills increase until it becomes unprofitable to underbid.
Unless the definition of free has changed.
Which, in this world, it seems to have.
It’s exactly like that. No one knows how to solve this problem. The link you added are merely class notes and assume away fundamental technical problems, without even getting into practical issues.
But I will also add that the methods described in my original link are perfectly viable from a technical perspective, just slightly impractical from a UX perspective.
I just don't get the opposition to that. It seems like it's in everyone's best interest (those that are honest and are looking for a fair foundation to build from that is).
The party in power is expected to lie cheat and steal to maintain their position and the opposition parties are supposed to keep them in check. Adversarial systems seem to work pretty well since the incentives align -- way better than I would expect an honor system to work at least.
Any system that depends on the existence of angels is pretty much doomed from the start.
What does this mean? Who are the rule enforcers?
So in general it's not enough for them to be bipartisan, they need to be a group that collectively opossss every action someone takes. When all the dust settles the only things people will actually be able to do are the things permitted by the rules.
Also, claiming that if you had a genie that could make your candidates win it would be silly to refuse is kind of not great. I think for a lot of people that it would be downright disturbing to use that and they would instead realize that if their candidate lost then that is the will of the people and that's democracy and what we all supposedly should want. Trying to make it anything but is basically cheating, which you are admitting if you had the opportunity you would gladly do. I'm not sure I would claim that as happily as you have.
You're almost arguing that corruption is the norm and that it really can be great if it works in your favor. This is a pretty disgusting argument.
We have fair elections so that the losing party can accept the results and move on.
You might be able to get away with defining such processes as fair but it wouldn't really align with what most people mean which is representative.
We're talking about the belligerents working the system for partisan advantage. Everyone accepting the process and results is the (practical) definition of fair.
What are you talking about? Mathematical fairness of various voting systems? Totally different discussion.
Further, since appropriations are (mostly) done locally, the "surface area" is quite big. Like the parable of the boy plugging the dyke with his fingers.
For example, I was able to block the purchase and use of gear that added the voter's id to their ballot. In my jurisdiction alone. There are roughly 2,000 counties in the USA. So to protect everyone's secret ballot, that fight would have to recur many, many times.
Alas, saving democracy doesn't pay very well, nor does it scale.
The difficulty is that building a secure voting machine is a problem similar to building secure, spam-free email. No matter what trade off you make, you will trigger violently angry responses from some group.
To be even more clear there are almost no regulations in this space other than what the companies themselves say they regulate/control/test. That's not regulation, but government simply buying from the only options that are out there who currently poorly regulate things themselves.
You're basically saying that building a perfect voting machine is impossible so they're all faulty so we should be okay with faulty ones. You seem to be an engineer from your twitter, which is somewhat shocking for me. In engineering (mechanical, electrical, software) if you said to your boss "hey, we can't make this thing perfect so we shouldn't even bother because someone will complain about it" I'd imagine your boss would fire you and find someone that wasn't so black and white who would actually try to implement something and then make it better.
Also, your comparison to spam-free email doesn't actually help your case at all. If you went to google years ago before they created gmail and said 'I heard you were going to try and make a secure and spam-free email system, but that in doing so you'll make tradeoffs and some people will be angry with it' I imagine they'd laugh you out of the room. Moreso today if you said that to them since they have built that system and generally most people like it.
Out of curiosity, where are the 'violently angry responses from some group' happening? All I see are people fighting regulation and the use of better systems and people who are dismayed by that and are trying to make things right.
My guess is that it's because if you dig into the details, there is little actual control being exercised by those PE firms, making this a non story.
While I'm genuinely concerned over security considerations, not to mention equipment. It's hard to coordinate even the paper/scantron style ballots. What bugs me more about the visual/touch computers is the time that those stations take relative to cost... a few cardboard privacy booths and scantron is much better, but we're spending billions on systems that are demonstrably worse.
And anything over the internet is a non-starter now. In the end, I really hope that more states/districts realize how bad the cost/benefit of the computer voting stations are. Not even considering the coordination, lack of paper trail, before considering the relative consolidation and closed-source nature of the system.
Disclosure: I work for a company that does ballot printing and other election services, but not voting machines specifically.
The current voting machines have problems, and I'd rather use paper ballots today, but let's not make the mistake of thinking that paper ballots are the ideal long-term solution. Remember "hanging chads" and voter confusion caused by the ballot layout in Florida back in 2000?
Don’t use punching machines. Use separate ballots per candidate. The voter selects the ballot for her candidate, folds it and drops it in the ballot box. Simple and secure.
Right now to reduce fraud, many mail in juristicions will have an envelope with a voter and specific ballot type (local districts include different water, power, school, fire, police, etc which may be different from someone on the other side of your street). And the ballot only has the ballot type/combination... the outside is scanned to match the inside, and the inside ballot is then separated/randomized to prevent tracking coordination.
Do you understand how much crap would have to be coordinated between envelopes and ballots to support such a system? We aren't just voting for a single office, in some places it's over 50 offices, with hundreds of candidates.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
https://www.themonitor.com/news/local/article_983f423e-d3e9-...
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/fort-wort...
A single person at a polling location committing fraud affects one vote, but a few people committing mail in fraud can affect hundreds or thousands of votes. “Helping” people vote, while not illegal, is definitely ripe for abuse. “Want to keep your social security checks? Here, sign this ballot.”
In person voting with your thumb dipped in dye just like they do in developing countries along with photo ID, along with auditable paper ballots is a sure-fire way to eliminate fraud. Those that oppose this generally are the ones who benefit the most from the current system.
Every year there are stories of polling places having "technical difficulties" or being "moved at the last minute" in certain neighborhoods. Roads get closed down, signs directing people where to go to vote are not put up, and 4+ hour lines out the door become common place in areas where those in power want to suppress votes.
In contrast, with vote by mail people don't have to take a day off of work, they don't have to wait out in the cold for hours, and they don't have to risk not being able to vote at all if their local polling place decided that all the machines are "no longer working".
its like this is a flaw of intelligent civilization that Carl Sagan didn't think about. it's not global nuclear warfare, it's not climate change, it's not some mad virus...
it's that the species becomes disinterested in performing maintenance because maintenance tasks don't produce a dopamine rush. the civilization becomes too incompetent to perform even the most basic upkeep on the structures they set in place - whether physical like roads and bridges, or social-political, like election systems.
nobody becomes famous or wealthy for performing upkeep.
The problems in 2000 were all about data not be correctly recorded. That was solved a long time ago. There never was a need to start transmitting the data electronically.
Now we can use electronic gathering of the data AND automatic counting of the physical ballots to help prevent fraud. But replacing physical ballots with electronic vote collection wasn't really needed.
But lobbyists saw an opportunity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/opinion/midterm-election-...
I can't help but think, if private equity already controls the industry, that there is ample room for a startup or non profit or even a government owned business to disrupt the industry. Create real secure optical scan voting machines based on the best practices that have been come up with, and with independent audits and sell them with a contract where the machines are updated with security fixes for a fixed period.
Sell the machines a bit like razors, The machines themselves are relatively cheap, but come with a required subscription to the security fixes for the lifetime of the machine.
They're making their own OSS tabulators. I've been out of the election integrity game for a while, so I'm not immediately familiar with the scope of their effort.
Any one wanting to reform USA's election administration stack should start in LA. Help their effort. Lobby to import their gear to their own jurisdiction. Study their effort, roadmap.
https://osvtac.github.io/files/meetings/2018/2018-09-13/pack...
https://osvtac.github.io/meetings/2018/2018-09-13/agenda
In contrast, the City and County of San Francisco is working on developing and certifying an open source paper-ballot system.
I've had prior run-ins with Dean Logan. A leopard can't change his spots. I'm now mad at myself for thinking things have gotten better.
Thanks again.
The most difficult issues is the shear number of ballot combinations in most cities is staggering with different districts by type. You may have the same water district as your neighbor across the street, but different fire and school districts. It's complicated to say the least. Even for optical scan options.
disclaimer: I work for an election services company, but not with any voting hardware. The company is mostly in printing/coordination of ballots themselves. It's a complex issue to say the least.
Clearly not.