Georgia election server showed signs of tampering, expert says
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
I have no hard data, and this is from 2017/2018, but it is very sketchy when the secretary of state, the office which oversees elections in GA, runs for governor, doesn't resign ahead of time, doesn't allow any investigations into the electronic voting systems, doesn't push forward any paper trail requirements, and subsequently wins the election for governor. Everything Kemp did and didn't do was suspect as it relates to elections.
I have zero faith in GA election results. And until the State moves off of these electronic systems and/or installs a paper trail, and brings a sense of integrity back into the election system, I will continue to feel the elections in GA are without integrity and potentially illegitimate, no matter who wins in any given election. This is outside of any political affiliation. This is the core of our country not being properly governed and protected.
EDIT>> After some research, it looks as if GA is getting a paper trail after a court order required the state to move off the previous electronic system. Now it looks like they're installing BMDs which can be verified by the voter prior to scanning to commit their vote. Of course, there are plenty of articles relating to how hackable BMDs are as well.
Of course, the right solution would be paper ballots that aren’t stupid.
Much like computer interfaces, it doesn't matter how much you dumb down the experience, there will always been dumber people.
I know that sounds harsh, but part of my job is building web sites for low-education people. There's a ton of research into this problem, much of it very interesting, and some of it just downright amazing.
For example, I follow a recommendation to use "Go" instead of "Search" for search submission buttons because more than one study has shown that a remarkable number of people with low education and poor computer skills will just click the Search button without typing anything in the search box because they believe the computer will actually read their mind and know what they want to search for. I shit you not.
The next time you're looking at your logs and you see clicks on search buttons with no text entered in the search field, it may not be a bot. It may just be someone struggling to understand your web page.
For the types of web sites I build (healthcare), I don't get to just ignore a certain group of people because they're inconvenient, or don't fit into my assumptions about how people should work or behave.
I don't see how substituting "Go" for "Search" improves anything.
The research shows it works. I'm going with the research, in large part because it involved actual testing on actual people and not just people in cubicles making presumptions.
I've experienced it as well, where the page literally says right there what to do, and I get calls from confused users not sure what to do.
I want to say "Did you read what it says 2 inches above where you clicked?" But I never do and am just polite to them.
You didn't see it in the studies you ran, or are you just thinking about through your perspective instead of that of the low-education, tech-illiterate users?
I'm not bringing up this specific instance for no reason—the 2000 election caused a lot of states to redo their voting systems in a relatively short amount of time, in order to make them understandable. In many (most?) cases, that meant moving to digital voting.
Something like a scantron ballot (which is digitally counted, but has a paper backup) is pretty darn good. Not perfect—some people will be confused—but if you put instructions at the the top with visual examples, it's pretty darn understandable.
There is one reason, which is that if you give the voter a paper record stating who they voted for, that voter can be shaken down upon leaving their polling place by goons hired by one political machine or another demanding to see that record. That sort of thing used to happen all the time back in the heyday of machine politics, as the dominant machine would very much want to know if you actually voted for their candidates or not -- particularly if they'd paid you before election day to do so.
The paper would be kept by poll workers so the electronic count can be audited.
My state has paper ballots that are counted electronically. I feel this is a good compromise and allows much easier vote total auditing.
This is really not much better.
Given the number of questions voters are voting on (at least in CA and WA, there's usually 30-50 things to vote on), hand counting everything would be immensely time consuming.
I read one of Jimmy Carter's memoir and one of the times he covers was when he was running for some office in Georgia - must have been in the late 60s/early 70s. Carter mentions some flagrant tampering then. GA elections have been rotten for a long time
The usual voting location was moved to the edge of the district to a building with limited parking despite a large Church being located next to the usual voting location. Due to undersupplying voting machines the waits were 2hours +
Average wait in traditional Republican areas was under 15 minutes.
The GOP controls the Voting committee.
I have every reason to believe that was intentional.
[0] https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2009/wahlcomputer-urteil-bverf...
I wonder if you had a pilot? Afaik, elections canada runs things the same way all around the country.
Five years ago HN was filled with people foaming at the mouth, "We should have all electronic voting! There's no reason not to!"
Today, the pendulum has swung the other way, and people are clamoring for paper ballots, my guess is because we've learned to no longer blindly trust technology.
Voting is one of the few fields where the HN mindset isn't automatically technology=better.
Which is itself misleading - no living expert understands a computer system end to end, from silicon to microcode to code and compiler, not to mention the massive chain that went into making the code running on the machines.
That's all assuming the black box the expert is looking at is the same one he thinks he understands, and no chip- [1] or compiler-level [2] vulnerabilities were inserted, or the whole thing wasn't simply replaced with an identical-looking device.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/adding_backdo...
[2] https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html
If we can’t agree on a bipartisan basis that this isn’t acceptable, what does that mean for our future?
Edit: actually, she did get in "trouble". That faux controversy helped sway the election against her.
The sitting president communicates on an unsecured iPhone. The WH staff is using alternate email systems and messaging to actively avoid leaving a trail.
Let me know your concern about that and I'm happy to continue this conversation. Otherwise, you're engaging in partisan politics here and that's not good for HN.
The voting power of Georgia residents may have been compromised here, but the voting power of the rest of the country was unaffected. In a popular voting system, that would not be the case (if the fraud increased reported voter turnout, seizing more voting power into the fraudulent election, for example).
Another way to look at it is that each other state's Elector selection process is their business. The Constitution does not provide any assurances that other states will choose their Electors by any particular process, but instead specifically reserves that for each state's Legisature. A state would be within their rights to choose them winner-take-all, in proportion to the popular vote, or by a random draw from a Powerball machine and you and I would have no say over it (as non-residents).
Similarly, the entire election is the business of every citizen. "Their business" has a direct impact on my life, so I should have some say in the matter.
>The Constitution does not provide any assurances that other states will choose their Electors by any particular process,
The Constitution sets up the electoral college. That doesn't make it a good system.
In no universe does the electoral college mitigate corruption on the federal level. In fact, one could argue that it makes corruption worse, because a candidate only has to win a few key states to tip the election, regardless of the popular vote.
The alternative is only counting the popular vote, which only serves to disenfranchise the majority of states.
Without the electoral college, a candidate would only have to campaign in and win three or four large states, and the rest of the nations and its concerns can be ignored.
That concern is the whole reason we have the House/Senate system: So that large states with lots of people in the House of Representatives don't run amok. The Senate balances that out.
The majority of red states are also the majority of the population, so this doesn't check out. (Trump states ~180mm to Hillary's ~140mm.)
https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results
>Trump 46.4% votes 62,984,825
>Clinton 48.5% votes 65,853,5165
But this system already exists via swing states. Voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida determine the election currently, just look at how much is spent on advertising in those states compared to non-swing states. Look at how often candidates visit Ohio vs Kentucky.
The idea that the electoral college equally franchises all Americans is purely a myth.
Would incentivize just campaigning to get as many people to vote as possible in the highest density population centers, meanwhile most people don't even pay attention to politics and have no interest in it.
These people really should not be voting in the first place and a system which encourages vote harvesting even more than it already is encouraged is not a step in the right direction.
Are you arguing that it’s bad when all Americans are encouraged to vote? That sounds like a functional democracy to me.
I agree with many of the Founders that the people often get in their own way, not thinking rationally and focusing only on the short term.
The will and petty desire of the mob needs to be balanced against what is really good for the nation in the long run.
That's not exactly true though, because of the electoral college Republicans in California don't bother to vote, since their vote doesn't count.
If you didn't have an electoral college then the popular vote count would have been different.
You can't change the rules of the game after the fact and say "look we would have won", without also considering that people would have played differently with different rules.
Regardless, it's a moot point, because according to the Constitution as written, those electors are supposed to only be accountable to themselves. The idea being the community electing the most level-headed and educated amongst them to make the decision everyone else would be okay with.
Most states don't respect that intent since the formation of the Party system, so really what we have now is little more than an abomination completely unintended by the Founders.
Despite what the ballot may say, voters in the various states are voting for electors, not for president, and the votes can't be added together into a meaningful number.
You could certainly take the numbers, along with registered party affiliation and other demographic data, and historic data from more contested elections in the various precincts, and guess what the vote counts might be at various levels of turnout (including scenarios where more eligible but currently unregistered persons turn out to vote), and those guesses would likely make for a much more interesting discussion than just pointing out a number that seems like a statistical oddity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_House_of_Re...
With the electoral college, we don't hold a popular vote.
This provides compartmentalization of corruption --- if election officials in some state cause an extra 10,000 votes to be counted for their preferred candidate, it may affect their state's selection of electors, but can't influence the results of other states. In a close election by popular vote, 10,000 votes could be very significant.
Additionally, the electoral college provides compartmentalization of natural disasters. If there's a blizzard in some state (or several), their voting turnout will likely be much lower, and there is no provision for makeup elections; however, we can assume that voters of different parties will have reasonably equal difficulty getting to the polls, so within the local area, the resulting ratios should be similar to results of a non-disrupted election. However, the disrupted states would cast many fewer votes, so other states would have more influence; if the state was highly in favor of one candidate, it could be a big swing.
With a popular vote, a corrupt state (or precinct) can manufacture votes, and if they can plausibly manufacture enough votes in a close election, that can swing the election too.
-- Joseph Stalin (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stalin-vote-count-quote/)
https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/United_States...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/nra-guns-sec...
You are, however, correct in the sense that the constitution does not "give you rights." Your rights exist a priori, the constitution merely enumerates a few of them.
In the post-Heller legal interpretation, the start of the 2nd amendment is fluff with no meaning or force. But the phrase, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," was central to the intent of the amendment in an era where every able bodied white man from 20-40 was expected to participate in an organized militia organized by local government and the state. The protected right to bear arms and what arms you were to bear belonged to the militias. And the militias included so many that they really were, "the People".
See https://www.nraila.org/heller/conamicusbriefs/07-290_amicus_... for a detailed verification and for references to dig further in.
The fact that a statement has been used in propaganda has no bearing on whether or not it is correct. As the saying goes, "Ideas are not responsible for the people who hold them."
The statement was wrong because it is wrong, and I gave a citation written by professional historians demonstrating that fact.
That the statement is popular because of NRA propaganda is a separate issue. See https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/nra-guns-sec... for a reasonable explanation of the history behind why that claim is true. And for documentation of the fact that, until said propaganda, that claim was widely and rightly rejected.
I have no reason to doubt that he has made up his own mind based on information available to him. However I also have no doubt that if he lived in any era before the NRA propaganda took hold, he would not have come to that opinion. Because it is an opinion that basically nobody ever held.
My key point was that there wasn't a right for a person...to keep and bear arms. There was a right for THE PEOPLE to do so as part of a militia. With two major points to be kept in mind. The first was that not all militias were government organized. The second was that this right was a protection from federal interference. For example Virginia didn't want Congress deciding to undermine how they ran their militia. Furthermore it is important to understand that the phrase "bear arms" at the time referred only to military service. Carrying your hunting rifle was not "bearing arms", and there are multiple court cases from that era affirming this understanding.
Now back to militias. It varied by state and time period. The brief goes into some detail. But for existence at the time of the Revolution Virginia had a state regulated militia. Pennsylvania couldn't by its Constitution, but many local areas had their own militias. (For example towns would to defend against Indian attacks.)
But in all cases, militias were set up so that the general citizenry would serve as an army in time of crisis for defense of the state or themselves. And this idea had a long history behind it.
Which is why after the justification you list, the enumeration is clear.
"the right of the _people_ to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
It doesn't actually say "arm's considered safe by the government", "people considered safe by the government", "people trained by the government" or anything else. Might be convenient for some if it did, but it doesn't. And given the history of private cannon/schooner/etc ownership it might surprise you to know that the laws in effect today are quite restrictive with respect to the historical understanding of the amendment. Which is why many consider the NFA banning machine guns and related laws to be unconstitutional, and lacking a serious challenge. Partially because the NRA mostly supported it.
Many of the cases the 1934 regulation stands upon are flimsy, obviously racist rulings against people without means.
So, I would be really careful making augments against it. And just so I'm clear, I consider both political sides to be more than willing to twist the meaning of the constitution to justify their goals. Same as the "Christians" that used the bible to justify slavery or to treat women as second class citizens.
Incidentally I failed to look up the actual law of the time. But the 1792 militia law included every "free able-bodied white male citizen" between the ages of 18 and 45. Which, in a world that only paid attention to white men, basically was "the people".
The subject of the 2nd Amendment has always been the People. The militia part of the statement cannot standalone as a substantive independent clause, therefore it is a qualifier of the primary independent clause, namely, that that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
The militia is not the one being granted an immunity to infringement of a right. It's a part of a supportive reason for the explicit grant of immunity to infringement to the right held by the People.
And if you don't think the Founders weren't writing that with the idea that what they wrote down wouldn't eventually turn itself into a tyranny that would need to be violently upset by the People, to whom was recognized in the Declaration of Independendence to hold the absolute right of revocation of consent to be governed, and the right to assemble and replace such form of government that successfully provides them service, relief and defense, then I think accusations of naivete or misunderstanding may need to be contemplated whilst staring into a mirror.
And even that brief brings into question motivations. Or particular bias for one interpretation or another.
Note this gem.
>The fact that references to the keeping of firearms are so few and terse, or that the modern academic controversy over the Second Amendment has been forced to squeeze so much modern interpretive blood from so few evidentiary turnips, is itself an indicator of how minor a question this was at the time.
I reject this implication. Nobody takes the time to write down or make a big fuss about a settled question, and it was clear that, yes, many were worried about the details of how military might would be structured; but no one was seriously prepared to say "Golly gee, let's let the government decide whether or not I have the right to own a particular machine that makes me a political obstacle to whatever abuses they may want to perpetrate whilst in office."
Also, you have to take into account the fact that jurisprudence is constrained by the principle of least action, especially when dealing with high level fundamental rights.
Considering the outright rejection of British authority, and the adoption of firearm culture in the United States to the current day, I have great difficulty taking anyone who points at Heller seriously.
But hey, let's dig into some of these.
>This was “indeed, a publick allowance under due restraints, of the natural right of resistance and self- preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.”
Note afterwards the copious backpedaling on the quote with extensive reference to every other potentially limiting part of the argument but no reference to "when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression".
This being British, that isn't necessarily surprising. To an American, however, that last part is the far more important part.
Here's another tidbit.
>There is no direct equivalent in the American declarations to the selective Protestant “subjects” invoked in the Bill of Rights of 1689...
I would hope not, given that it's always been a settled question that your religion in this country isn't something the government is allowed to infringe upon, and furthermore, arguments of "legislative Supremacy" disappear when you actually read the bill of rights in order, as the First Amendment reads,
>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The Second then read with the first as context,
>A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The implication is carried through that just as the Government, through the mechanism that is Congress is prohibited from passing a law which violates the rights enumerated in the first Amendment, so too is it prohibited in legislating those rights secured by subsequent ones.
I'll keep reading this, but I'm not having much trouble challenging assertions or interpretations I'm pulling out of this; I'm just lacking in that unfortunately I wasn't around to argue with these gentlemen when it mattered, and am now stuck with people trying to shove it down my throat as to why they are right and I should be happy and thankful for being enlightened as to why my rights are being infringed upon.
Basic English grammar is actually ambiguous. Does "the People" mean "the People as a group" or "each of the People"? In other words is it a communal right or an individual one?
Nobody takes the time to write down or make a big fuss about a settled question...
And the point is that the understanding of what a milita was, how it worked, and the fact that it was a system that had been in place for close to a thousand years. (Having been created by Alfred the Great for defense against the Vikings.)
There is no direct equivalent in the American declarations to the selective Protestant “subjects” invoked in the Bill of Rights of 1689...
I would hope not, given that it's always been a settled question that your religion in this country isn't something the government is allowed to infringe upon, and furthermore, arguments of "legislative Supremacy" disappear when you actually read the bill of rights in order, as the First Amendment reads,
No, it hasn't "always been settled". In fact 1689 was long before the USA existed, and while British colonies then allowed freedom of religion, all but Pennsylvania had official state churches with government support. And within living memory, many of the colonies had had restrictions on what religions were allowed. It was therefore by no means automatic that laws passed in the New World at that point would not follow the British precedent.
Furthermore the British had good reason to have that religious test. At the time Catholic doctrine supported the murder of excommunicated monarchs, they kept track of who they believed the rightful monarch of England was (never the one that the English believed to be their monarch), and the English believed in the truth of a variety of plots both real (Guy Fawkes) and imagined (the starting of the Fire of London) by Catholics bent on overthrowing the English monarchy.
Therefore allowing weapons for Catholics rather reasonably could lead to the destabilization of the government.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/opinion/second-amendment-...
From the security experts affidavit filed in Georgia court today:
15. On December 2, 2014, while the KSU server remained vulnerable, a new user named "shellshock" was created on the server. I have created the below timeline of activity related to the shellshock user after fusing logging data from multiple sources. The timeline may not be complete:
16. 12/2/2014 10:45 — the user mpears09 is modified using the Webmin console
12/2/2014 10:47 - shellshock user created using Webmin console
12/2/2014 10:49 - /home/shellshock/.bash histovy last modified
12/22014 11:02 - /home/shellshocWshellsh0ck file is deleted
12/2/2014 1106 - bash patched to version 4.2+dfsg-0.1+deb7u3 to prevent shellshock
12/2/2014 11:40 - shellshock user disabled using Webmin console
17. The file "bash history" is a kind of log that typically records all the commands a user executes. For this user, though, the file contained a single command to logout of the server. The single command to logout is suspicious since a file was created and deleted in the user's home directory, leading rne to believe the "bash history" has been modified. This indicates to rne that the "shellshock" user may have been hiding their activities.
Whether maintenance of some aspect of the CES server was part of his role at KSU at the time or if records exist of someone asking him to do that (or, say, to patch drupalgeddon and he did a 2-for-1) is what I wonder.
Dark times in America ahead.
This is generally what the end of free society looks like.
I remember working at a polling station as a teenager during the 2004 election. One elderly lady needed help understanding how the machines worked, so I showed her how you tapped the buttons on the screen.
Well, this woman had lost a lot of fine motor control. After selecting her choice for president, she went to hit the Next button. Her hand shook so badly that she skipped about five screens worth of races.
I asked her if she's like my help going back to choose candidates for all of the races she accidentally skipped. "No," she replied, "I got the important one."
I'm thankful that this experience, and many others from working the polls, eroded my faith in the system early on in life.
"Grassroots organizing", or bottom-up pressure on the government, is a thing in the US, but I don't know the mechanisms by which it acts, beyond getting people to sign petitions once in a while.
I suspect most other people in the US don't know the mechanisms either.
You can hold out hope that there will some day be a ruling that changes this. But I am dubious.
To quote my brother on the USA vs China, "China is a nation of crooks ruled by honest men, while the USA is a nation of honest men ruled by crooks. It remains to be seen which is worse." This is one of the examples that I would cite for the US version of that.
I mention race because it is clearly a likely central motivation for malfeasance in this case, an election for a state with a history of disenfranchisement of its large black population.
Anyway, here's something:
Funny how that happens when the logs and other evidence that would verify problems happen to have been destroyed.
There are documented cases of both, but the Heritage website, documenting about 1,200 over a period of at least 20 years (I didn't check every state, but the earliest I saw was 2000) is an insignificant amount of voter fraud over 20 years and hundreds of millions of votes cast. Even if they underreported by a factor of 100, that's no threat to democracy.
Or how about tampering with ballots after they have been cast like http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/election-fraud-is-rea...?
(Of course if you go back a little ways in history, the most egregious was probably Tammany Hall. Election fraud has a rather long history.)
There are some risks about not having the privacy of a voting booth, but in general it seems to work pretty well.
In addition, most neighborhoods have drop off boxes where you can deposit your ballot, untouched by postal authorities.
In the past, polling places with lax security could "lose" an entire box of ballots. Nowadays, if a couple thousand ballots disappear from a certain zip code, the authorities would be on it pretty quickly.
In Washington state where I live and has email balloting, the central location is a secure county election facility that invites citizens to visit in person and through the internet to watch the counting process as it happens.
In the 2016 election, out of 2 million votes cast, they found something like 54 cases of voter fraud, mostly people voting after they'd moved out of their district.
Election fraud in Oregon is equally rare -- the big one in 2016 was a Republican volunteer in Clackamas County attempting to toss out a box of dem voter ballots. I don't remember the specifics but I think they were caught almost immediately.
The security thing is absolutely a red herring to discourage more states from adopting vote-by-mail, pushed by anyone who benefits from low turnout, because vote-by-mail significantly improves turnout without threatening election security in any meaningful way.
It's not a problem.
[Summary to remind you: "Don't trust voting software and don't listen to anyone who tells you it's safe.]