CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history | Hacker News Reader

CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

cisa.gov

147 pointscmurf191 comments

Eight states[0] still have electronic voting systems without paper backups. They're un-auditable. I'm not going to weigh in on the current politics of this situation, but US Election security is awful, now, and since at least 2000.

I actually did my degree thesis on designing electronic voting systems (and built one), and ultimately concluded it was impossible to make them fully secure. The best you can do is paper backups and random audits to detect anything illicit followed by a full audit if that fails. No paper backups results in it being undetectable.

Computers are good at making things more efficient, but in terms of election security the inefficiency is a feature (i.e. it takes more people to alter votes, and the more people you add the harder a lie is to keep).

[0] https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/457168-report-says-...

I'd rather have someone hack 1700 local elections than one 'national standard' quite frankly. The inefficiency delights me

People are always rallying to add blockchain for voting without realizing that the paper ballot is a proof of work that predates it by a significant margin.

Yep. I approve both measures

I don't think you need to hack 1700 local elections to swing the vote.

I'm fully for a fast electronic count for preliminary results, that are then hand-recounted for the formal validation and final results (up to a month later).

yeah I just don't understand the downside of having a paper backup just in case. Is it the cost? The US already spends a ton on election, what is an extra paper print gonna do?

What’s your thinking on the “request” process of mail-in ballots?

To me, it’s wild to think all one needs to request a ballot is a name, address and ssn... and on top of all of that, you can get the ballot sent to a different address...

This quickly goes down the rabbit hole of identity and identity theft in the USA in a more broad sense. Our entire system is build on similarly flimsy "identity" from banking, to medical records, and even getting copies of a birth certificate/driver's license.

I would say though that "scale matters." If an electronic voting system is compromised the "scale" could be the entire state, and millions of votes, but each time a mail ballot is stolen via identity theft, you're risking it being detected/getting caught, so it ultimately scales to fewer than thousands of potentially problematic votes (which is bad, but not democracy breakingly so, like electronic/computer voting insecurity).

Right on — the thing that worries me most is that Equifax’s breach didn’t cause much of a stir... someone was/is sitting on that trove of 140m records.

To me it’s wild that anyone would want voting to be anything but universal. Shouldn’t they send ballots to every person legally allowed to vote?

Riiiiight. Just look at how districts are gerrymandered to realize this is not what politicians of either side want.

Every person legally allowed to vote should be able to vote.

No votes should be cast by people not allowed to vote.

Mail-in ballots are not secret ballots and that's dangerous. There's a reason a workplace cannot be unionized in the US without a true secret ballot.

Mail-in ballots are secret ballots. The way they work is that they have two envelopes: you put your ballot in the inner envelope, which has no indication of who is casting the ballot. All of that information is on the outer envelope. When processing the ballot, the information is checked on the outer envelope; once verified, the inner envelope is then handed to another station to be opened and fed into the counting machine while the outer envelope is discarded.

> Mail-in ballots are secret ballots

I’ve knocked on doors in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Many registered Democrats (usually the wife) denied being Democrats when their partners were around. I thought this was an error in our data until I revisited the neighbourhood. Husband wasn’t home. Wife scolded us. He is an ardent Republican and wouldn’t appreciate how she votes.

Mail-in ballots let voters verify their vote to third parties. That opens them up to external influence, positive (pay for votes) or negative (fired for voting wrong).

We had no choice this year. But there is a real tradeoff in privacy for vulnerable people. We shouldn't lose sight of that trade-off while pushing for turnout.

Isn't the actual problem the abusive relationship and that pressure to vote a certain way a symptom? The solution isn't to ban mail in ballots for those that want to vote that way, but to offer assistance to empower people to get out of that situation. It's already illegal to take a picture of your ballot to address these kinds of abuses.

> Isn't the actual problem the abusive relationship and that pressure to vote a certain way a symptom? The solution isn't to ban no mail in ballots for those that want to vote that way, but to offer assistance to empower people to get out of that situation.

If a voting system requires zero abusive power dynamics to work, it’s a bad system.

Also, banning mail-in ballots isn’t the only solution. Early voting is an alternative to mailed ballots. Letting someone re-vote a mailed-in ballot at a poll site is a fix to the cited problem, though it introduces complexity.

All of the above seems like the best solution

I agree. Was just responding to OP saying “mail-in ballots are secret ballots.” They are not. To return to our status quo of secret ballots, a mail-in ballot system needs additional thought.

How exactly do mail in ballots let voters verify their vote to third parties?

They fill-in the ballot in front of them and seal the envelope.

Or worse the voter gives the other person the empty ballot with a signed envelope.

Mail-in ballots are absolutely not a secret ballot.

A secret ballot is one in which each voters vote is anonymous to EVERYBODY.

Spouse, parent, landlord, employer, union boss, social worker.

Case in point https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/limestone...

This doesn’t work the same way in every state. In my county of CA you only send back a single envelope with the ballots folded over. Instead there is a serial number you can tear off to validate that the ballot was counted.

So it’s not doubly secret in the way you describe: https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/vote-by-mail/pdf/guidance.p...

They're not secret at all. They can be canvassed and frequently are, by pushers who pressure people to vote a particular way.

Isn’t it reasonable to want the people who make a decision to know what they’re making a decision about? I want all the informed voters to vote but, by and large, uninformed voters make the outcome arbitrary.

I forget who said it and I won't even get the quote exactly right, but I'm reminded of something I once heard:

> The greatest thing about a democracy is that every idiot is allowed to vote.

> The worst thing about a democracy is that every idiot is allowed to vote.

Yeah, the problem is coming up with a test that actually identifies who’s “informed” without biasing the electorate unfairly.

If democracies don't allow idiots to vote, that creates a disenfranchised class that does not accept the government as legitimate. An important role of democracy is to stave off class conflict, arguably just as important or moreso than having a government that serves the people efficiently.

A proper long-term solution is to have governments invest in critical thinking skills and education, but of course, it's a catch-22 situation.

Mail in voting is probably secure, but there are enough concerns where many countries with healthy democracies limit who can vote by mail: https://www.newsweek.com/voting-fraud-real-concern-just-look...

> Here is what we found. Besides the United States, there are 36 member states in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Forty-seven percent ban mail-in voting unless the citizen is living abroad, and 30 percent require a photo ID to obtain a mail-in ballot. Fourteen percent of the countries ban mail-in voting even for those living abroad.

But to return the ballot, you need to match the signature with the one on file, which is very difficult to do at scale.

Unless signature matching is deemed unnecessary as in PA

Do you have a copy of your thesis online? I’d be curious to learn more.

Sorry no, my college only publishes Master's and PhD level thesis.

I don't think you can avoid the politics of the situation because when it comes to presidential candidates, when the R candidate wins, much will be made of how broken the system is, from vulnerabilities in voting machines to fatal flaws in the Constitution itself (viz., the Electoral College). When the D candidate wins, we are assured that election security is airtight, there's no evidence of significant irregularities, and "the system works".

This has nothing to do with the factuality or legitimacy of flaws in the system -- in short, yes, I believe you that there are severe problems with the apparatus we use to conduct elections, but there is strong pressure to ignore and even deny these problems, because doing so helps solve the bigger, more important problem of getting Trump out of office. I don't want Trump in office, but I cannot admit to any legitimacy to the claims of vote irregularity in the 2020 election, even theoretically based on your expertise because even if it were true, it would be a "fact that gives power to the enemy" and thus must be treated as a falsehood. That's why if you post about it on Twitter, a little note will be attached to your tweet with a link that says the U.S. elections were perfectly conducted with no chance of fraud.

While you've been downvoted, just to answer your points, this was an announcement by CISA, which is the government department specifically entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring the system was secure from fraud.

The argument about the Electoral College is one about the process, not the mechanisms. By definition, the Electoral College is undemocratic in that for a choice of a national leader, people in smaller population states have a greater say than those in larger states.

You can argue that as the United States of America, that is a majority of the States that get to vote for the President, but not even the original writers of the Constitution thought that. The reason for the Electoral College was to put a break on the possibility of a populist being elected.

So the original purpose has proven to be unachieved, the argument that States should vote for the President instead of people is completely undemocratic.

To be fair, that's very true for many places. Although I would also argue that there are many places (not referring to US) where electronic voting is safer than paper ballots purely because politicians know how to hire gangsters to blow up trucks carrying votes or trace and blackmail voters due to corrupt officials.

I'm not fully familiar with American politics, but out of those states the only that comes close to mattering in terms of EC outcome (this election) was Texas I think? And even then, it's unclear if it was that close considering most of the polling was off by 3-4 points. Then again some other states were spot on, so we'll never know if that was the case for Texas or if they were hacked.

Hmm, I voted in Texas and there were definitely paper ballots, the vote was on a machine with a printer and a scanner was used to actually place the vote.

Yep, these new machines seem really good.

I heard (discussions with folks online) that in other parts of the state they are still using the older machines, which the voter just has to trust to record their selections correctly. I think I've heard they are transitioning away from these.

I see, I guess the article is outdated. I was just going off the 8 states listed there.

Are banks auditable? (Yes.) Do they have paper backups of everything? (Not that I'm aware of.) What's the difference? Honest question.

If your bank account balance is wrong, you can tell for sure that it's wrong and then explain it to the bank and get it fixed. If your vote was counted wrong, you'd never know. For them to be equivalent, the secret ballot would have to be abolished.

Maybe each ballot could include a one time pad that you keep to verify the vote.

You could verify your own vote but nobody else could.

It could be very simple to use, like a qr code that links to a public api showing the encoded ballot data, and a second qr code that you scan to decrypt it.

Not being able to verify who you voted for is by design, it's an important feature to prevent people from being pressured into/persecuted for voting a certain way, or selling their vote.

If there's no way to verify your specific vote you can just lie about who you voted for.

Hence why you would want to use a one time pad... It would be easy to choose a key that would show any particular vote cast any way you want. Only you would know how to verify your ballot.

It's utterly insane to me that you can't even verify your vote was counted and for which candidate. But a communities of hackers defends the security of voting.

> and for which candidate

That's by design, it's an important feature to prevent people from being pressured into/persecuted for voting a certain way, or selling their vote.

If there's no way to verify your specific vote you can just lie about who you voted for.

People notice when you take money from them directly but seldom take notice when its taken from the community chest.

The difference is that transactions at banks aren’t anonymous.

If you could only see the bank’s final balance with no insight into how much each person deposited and no cash in the vaults, the bank’s reported balance would be pretty meaningless for audit purposes.

How are votes anonymous? You write your name on the ballots and they have a barcode.

We can know _who_ voted, but not _how_ they voted. These are explicitly kept separate so that you can’t sell your vote or be persecuted for how you voted.

We might know which 10 people put money in a bank, but without transaction amounts, it still doesn’t help with the audit.

Canadian here. We still count ballots the old fashioned way and get our election results out the night of the election (typically). Presumably that scales linearly.. more voters means more ballot boxes and more officials counting and auditing. This seems like a solved problem to me.

Why doesn't/wouldn't this work in the US? My guess is the complexity of your ballots -- we typically vote for one person and every couple of years there might be a referendum question.

That and having Elections Canada run everything instead of each province rolling their own protocols.

Imagine that: a non-partisan agency, much as the police and fire services are also non-partisan.

It's always non-partisan until it becomes partisan somewhere along the line

The police are not non-partisan, at least in USA.

It's hard to imagine any worker staying non-partisan when one party is threatening their paycheck.

One of the main reasons it is taking so long is the volume of mail-in ballots is extremely high compared to prior elections. And on top of that, in several states, Republicans were adamant that vote tabulation not begin early to deal with this volume, with the entirely foreseeable result that counting took far longer than necessary.

Right. That's this year. What about the last 20 years of US elections?

What about them?

Presumably you’re thinking of Florida in 2000, where the margin of victory was 0.0092%, and thus exceptional care in counting was merited. As far as I can recall other national elections have been timely in the last 20 years.

In most elections, the election results are clear by the time I go to bed normally.

I'd also like a citation on the Canadian counting.

There last election wasn't particularly close and from my understanding the mathematics of someone other than Trudeau + Liberal party winning were pretty much set.

Republicans wanted ballots to be tabulated up front. This is completely false. The debacle of overnight ballots showing up at the 11th hour past the closing of the polls is another reason to tabulate them as they come in.

But it still doesn’t answer the question - in Canada we count all the ballots the same day BY HAND. Why is this so hard in the US?

The only thing that I can think of is that your elections staff are grossly under-allocated?

17 million votes don’t take as long to count as 175 million?

Why not? Larger countries have more places voting happens and more people counting. It parallelizes almost perfectly. Slow counting is almost entirely down to resource allocation.

Another possible factor is that US elections generally see far more races on the ballot. In my ballot this year, I had to vote for US President, US House, US Senate, State House, State Senate, Councillor, Register of Probate, and three referendums. That's actually a pretty light ballot; in the past, I've also had to vote for races such as County Auditor, Recorder of Deeds, County Clerk, Soil & Water Conservation District Commissioner.

It obviously takes far longer to count ballots by hand when you're dealing with a dozen races instead of one or two.

Actually most places I'm aware of count paper ballots. Germany, Sweden, Australia all use paper ballots as far as I'm aware (unless something changed recently) and in all of the countries results are typically in during the night of the election. And many of these countries have also significant option in their votes, I mean Australia's preferential system means you have a lot of choices (if not going with the party preferences).

I think one reason for the US system to be this complex is essentially corruption, i.e. funnelling money to the makers of voting machines. The other reason is that the US system highly encourages parties to try to get votes of the other party discounted based on technicalities.

It still boggles my mind that in the US, the first modern democracy the system developed to discourage voter participation

My ballot had 35 positions to vote on.

I sometimes wish we had a separate federal / state / county / town vote to keep the practice up and reduce the overhead of individual voting periods.

It isn’t unless you have valid mail in ballots that haven’t even arrived by Election Day.

The ballots are much simpler in Canada. I remember getting a ballot that was the size of a 4' x 6' card. Put a check next to the candidate you want as the MP in your riding. Done.

The US ones can be multiple pages where you end up voting for a dozen candidates across multiple federal, state and local offices, plus a number of ballot initiatives. It's kind of nuts.

But I agree the old fashion paper and pen is the best system. It doesn't matter how theoretically secure some high-tech digital voting system is - unless every voter can understand how it works you'll always have people who think it's fixed. Actually, even with paper and pen people will think it's fixed, but you at least eliminate a ton of the unknown because of the physical record.

I mean, Canadians also have local and provincial elections and referenda, no?

Yup. But local, provincial and national elections are different events. Referendums are occasionally attached. Ballots are almost always one question for provincial and national.

And regardless, all elections are run by a non-partisan agency. Just like the health service, the police service, the fire service, and the garbage service.

I really don’t think that that’s going to be the savings you think it is. Counting votes isn’t front-loaded with a flat rate cost or subject to duplication of effort. Having a single federal elections agency isn’t going to help if you have a super complicated ballot.

There are plenty of things to vote for though, and usually it's considered a good thing to put things on the ballot in presidential years because presidential elections have the highest turnout.

My Washington ballot this year was a double-sided single page bubble sheet. I'm not sure how much easier it's supposed to get.

Why do you keep bringing this up? Do you mean that these services are centralized? Because elections are indeed run by “non-partisan” (whatever that is supposed to mean in this context) agencies here in the US, but they are not centralized at the federal level.

Nonpartisan would mean not dependent on elected officials declaring a party.

Generally speaking, in most US states the person certifying the election result is the Secretary of State, an elected official elected while affiliated to a party. There was a whole brouhaha when Brian Kemp was running for governor of Georgia while also the Secretary of State, because that looked like a conflict of interest in a hotly contested election.

The only way to get non-partisan would be elect panel to oversee the administration of an office, and let each major party with 30% or more in office have equal # of votes. Like picking teams for school sports. It'll end up 50/50. Let the speaker of the house be the deciding vote for ties.

Judges shouldn't be appointed by the fed but be randomized by computers for a database of vetted lawyers/judges who could assume the role, and all federal judges only serve for the case they're called in for (basically reverse jury duty).

Non-partisan? I mean, they are controlled by the elected government, who appoint people to do what they want. With the exception of elected sheriff's in the US, I wouldn't say it's less partisan. Take a look at what's going on in Alberta with the new Conservative gov't. Plenty of "non-partisan" government agencies are raising hell over the new policy direction.

The argument against this is that generally speaking, US presidential elections are considered the most important, so turnout on any election on “off” years, or even “off” days, is considered a sure way to get less voter turnout. Is this not a pattern observed in Canadian elections?

I'm not sure I follow. Assuming I have this right, there are no "off year" elections in a parliamentary system like in Canada. Elections occur when the government in power receives a vote of no confidence. In a minority government situation this could be the first session after an election. In the rare occasion that a government makes its 5 year term limit, the PM will "drop the writ" at a strategic point to queue up an election.

Municipal elections do occur on a schedule here, but I don't think that's relevant since it's hyper local.

American elections for president are every 4 years, as are most other offices.

Pretty much without fail, any election that isn't a presidential one has lower turnout if not also scheduled with the presidential one, since many Americans will only show up for the presidential elections. Which is why the ballots tend to be long.

Granted, I don't think this makes them very complicated; my ballot had plenty of offices this year, and it was essentially a one-page double sided bubble sheet, with accompanying voter guides sent in the mail. It's not very hard.

Your population is also less than that of California alone.

Yes, and of course this should be irrelevant given that as the poster said, presumably these things scale linearly.

There has been progress since 2000. While some states still have electronic-only voting machines, the trend seems to be away from them toward paper mark-and-scan. In addition there is greater awareness of the value of risk-limiting audits. Heck, Georgia is voluntarily hand-recounting their entire presidential ballot. And the debacle in Florida in 2000 has arguably led to better ballot design as well.

I took the CISA statement to be relative to this progress, not a statement of absolute quality.

Touch screen systems were encouraged by the "Help America Vote Act", which was supposed to make voting easier for disabled people while making it less reliable for everyone else.

The best technology was probably the big mark-sense forms, where you filled out a huge paper ballot on card stock, and then took it to the ballot box and put it in a slot on the side. The box pulled the ballot in with rollers, scanned it, and dropped it in the sealed translucent box underneath, where you could see it, blurred. So there was an immediate electronic tally, and paper ballots for re-counting.

Ballot printing was a big cost with that system, but the machines were cheap.

From the article:

"Pennsylvania, Georgia and South Carolina are on course to replace all paperless voting machines by 2020, while Arkansas, Virginia and Delaware have already completed this process."

We're lucky; they made it just in time. Imagine if this was a potential concern for Georgia or Pennsylvania right now.

To save you a click, the 8 remaining states are Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kansas, Indiana, Kentucky and New Jersey. I hope Texas and Indiana, at least, follow suit soon.

I’m in Kansas—we had a mark-and-scan thing this year. Maybe it’s not that way statewide?

Can I read your thesis?

I did an undergrad in Cybersecurity. Every system can never be fully secure, so election systems therefore can’t be an exception. I did physical security in the USAF long ago, same, you can’t be fully secure.

Layers, more of them, help to secure a system.

TIL, electronic voting machines are CLOSED SOURCE (hardware and software) - that should be completely unacceptable in an open democracy.

It makes me wonder how a statement like this can be proved.

> There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised

When it comes to something as important as elections the mantra should be: don't trust. verify.

I don’t see security flaws with closed source software that prints backup paper ballots. If anything, it’s better than an open source machine that doesn’t print a paper backup. Those paper backups can be even audited by the voter at the moment they vote. You’re not going to be dumping the source code from a voting machine that is in use.

There’s no need to compromise. When it comes to making elections trustworthy, we should pull out all the stops, even if it’s slightly inconvenient to make the software open source.

Does any company offer a competitive voting machine with open source software?

Security through obscurity is a horrible way to secure anything, but especially voting machines.

> I don’t see security flaws with closed source software that prints backup paper ballots.

There's room for asymmetric errors in input, in the direction of a favored candidate. Still way better than the kinds that are electronic only, but not as good as paper-first.

Fully agreed.

The key thing with closed Vs. open source isn't simply the ability to find defects (design & bugs), but also right now election officials/security experts in some cases aren't allowed to verify election software per the software licenses! That's an untenable position to be in.

Open source isn't some panacea, but it puts you into that position where "verify" is even conceptually possible. I still believe we need paper backups and random audits, but we can do multiple things at once and should.

I'm a free software fan, but I don't see that open source matters here.

How do you know the machine is running the program whose source code you're looking at, instead of some other program that looks superficially like it?

If a machine produces convincing evidence of what it has done, e.g., a print-out that (1) the voter can meaningfully check before depositing, and that (2) is audited with at least spot checks or formal recounts later, why does it matter whether it is open or closed source?

Not only that. Vendors can deploy unknown, unapproved firmware updates:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/04/georgia-election-ma...

They deployed a mystery closed-source software update right before the election. No matter which way you slice this, it's sheer incompetence and smells fishy (even if it isn't fraud).

If you want to project security, you don't do this kind of thing. It's insane. It's like the plot of a Hollywood movie.

do you have a source for this? i don't doubt it's true, i am compiling evidence for claims like this

Sure, here's the source. [1]

[1] https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/spalding-county-experiencin...

"vendor for the machines notified them at 7:05 a.m. that there was a problem with an overnight update to the system"

"They just said it was a glitch in the system"

I can't speak to this particular situation but it's worth noting that last-minute-just-before-polling-begins updates are the norm and happen pretty much every election.

In/around my hometown, for example, the voting machines are "securely" stored in between elections, until just before an election, when they get 'em out to set them up, test them, etc.

Whether they installed updates an hour before an electiion or two weeks before an election, it can still be made to sound "fishy" by anyone who wants it to.

"Why were they installing a so-called 'update' an hour before the polls open?" versus "Why were they installing so-called 'updates' on the voting machines two weeks before the election?"

Obviously, they were installing hacked firmware in either case, right?

We should trust them more because the repo is still being maintained?

Its probably easy for us to think from where we are sitting that counting votes must be one hell of an easy application to write. Let me try.... ah yes, it indeed was very easy. The funny about ones ignorance is that one doesn't notice it even when one notices it.

Assuming it was a legitimate update I wonder what that dude felt like when he realized it was needed.

> Assuming it was a legitimate update I wonder what that dude felt like when he realized it was needed.

Yes. It's very wrong, and possibly fraudulent, but I suspect more likely someone screwed up (or possibly a vuln was found). Likely someone had a cold chill down their spine when they realized what was needed.

Either way, two weeks or two hours, it's a problem.

Firmware updates should be done by the election officials, not the company. If my mom can update her router firmware, then I think an election official can do it.

The fact that remote updates are even possible point to a much, much bigger problem. Do we really believe the devs working for Dominion (or whatever company) can outsmart the elite teams working for nation-state intelligence services?

Also, this software should be open source and auditable by any concerned citizen.

It's a joke to believe these systems are secure at all. We saw with Stuxnet how air gapped nuclear reactors could be hacked with USB drives. It's patently absurd. Even if you do test the equipment, there could be sleeper code that only runs on election day. It's absolutely nuts that we trust anything other than ink and paper with a fingerprint and signature.

> It's absolutely nuts that we trust anything other than ink and paper with a fingerprint and signature.

This is the only way for secure elections.

If it would hard or impossible to produce evidence of tampering, it’s easy for that statement to be true.

Not only are they closed source, but insanely sometimes they have REMOTE ACCESS enabled. [1]

The companies involved can only be described as utterly incompetent in security. [2]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/the-myth-of-the-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_Systems_%26_Software#...

> It makes me wonder how a statement like this can be proved.

>> There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised

I suppose it might depend on how you read that statement. One person might read it as "There is no evidence (that exists/that will exist) that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised", in which case some backing would be desirable. Another person might read it more like "There is no evidence (that we're aware of) that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised", in which case proof technically doesn't need to be provided, as one can truthfully state that they are not aware of evidence of an event independently of whether that event occurred or not.

I always read "we got pwn3d" disclosures this way. For example, it's common to read something like "we have found no evidence that the hacked data has been (ab)used ...".

Cynical me just assumes they decided to leave out the rest of the sentence, "... because we didn't actually go looking for any such evidence", therefore they can ("honestly") "plead ignorance".

I was just about to make an obnoxious, downvotable joke to that effect!

On what basis? Because there aren't any rumors of Russian meddling being sowed by the opposition this time? There are multiple states with no paper audit trail, closed source electronic voting machines, multiple dubious last-minute decisions made around postal ballots due to COVID, no easy way to verify the voter roll.

Making a claim like this reeks of partisanship.

Your comment assumes the nature of wrongdoing is equivalent on both sides.

Isn't that the null hypothesis?

"Unprecedented" times. An "unprecedented" election. An "unprecedented" election process.

And no problems. Really?

FEMA, also a gov-based entity, has had multiple "practice rounds" and it still can't get it right. Rare does the gov get it right, let alone first time.

I have to stick with the tried and true: Trust but verify. And self-verification isn't good enough.

Wow this comment has been here for 2 hours and isn’t drowning in downvotes...

> Making a claim like this reeks of partisanship.

Ah, yes, CISA, that noted partisan Democrat-loving group:

> The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was established on November 16, 2018 when President Donald Trump signed into law the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act of 2018 [..] > On November 13, the United States House of Representatives voted unanimously to pass legislation creating the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Very partisan, assuming you accept that the Democrats and Republicans are one party.

Just because a department was created under one administration, doesn't mean the people that work there care for the people in that administration, or owe any loyalty to them. I assess actions and claims on their own basis.

Obviously not, and they _shouldn't_ owe any loyalty to the administration. But it's quite peculiar to assume that they _do_ owe loyalty to the other side.

No chain of custody, closed source voting machines, ballots sent to people who didn't ask for them based on known-bad voter rolls...but sure, I'll just take some random government agency's word for it.

Better than taking some Hacker News rando's blanket dismissal of the work of thousands of poll workers across the country.

10,000 votes were discarded by a Court in Pennsylvania [1]. At least someone in US is bothered about making sure the elections were held in a legit manner rather than some Hacker News rando's blanket dismissal of allegations of voter irregularities!

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/11/12/pennsyl...

These dismissed ballots weren’t even electronic; they were mail-in ballots that were cured during an extended deadline.

While I disagree with throwing out any vote, the ballots were thrown out because they didn’t comply with the law, not because a third party interfered or hacked the election system.

You can disagree with the law (and disagreeing in this case is reasonable!), but that doesn’t mean our elections are insecure.

> While I disagree with throwing out any vote, the ballots were thrown out because they didn’t comply with the law, not because a third party interfered or hacked the election system.

I am sorry but I never said or implied anywhere that a secure electoral system means it cannot be interfered/hacked. You don't need to hack if you have insiders do the bidding for you. But let us keep conspiracies aside for a minute. The issue is not even someone attacking the system. The system is weak in and itself. Why? There have been many "software glitches" that switch votes from one candidate to another literally overturning the election result. Be it Antrim County or Oakland County. These "glitches" or in some cases "human errors" show the elections are not secure. How can you call something "secure" when you have 6000 votes switching from one candidate to another? You don't even need a foreign actor to destabilize the elections when the system is so poorly designed that it can screw up on its own!

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/oakland/2020...

Quoting:

“Apparently, there was a technical glitch in Rochester Hills. And so I actually ended up winning by a little over 1,100 votes,” said a chuckling Kochenderfer.

The margin was 1,127 votes, to be exact. That gave him a 51.67% share of the total (with 48.23% going to his opponent, Hartman).

The fresh result buoyed the incumbent’s spirits but also had him worried about how to prevent future election errors, he said.

“I’m very grateful to the officials who caught the error, but we need to ensure that we catch these issues, or prevent them entirely,” Kochenderfer said.

"People are acting like fixing our elections is a partisan thing when it shouldn't be partisan," he said, adding, "we do have a very, very good clerk in Rochester Hills."

“A computer issue in Rochester Hills caused them to send us results for seven precincts as both precinct votes and absentee votes. They should only have been sent to us as absentee votes,” Rozell said in a text message.

"some random government agency"

Not remotely 'random', moreover, nobody doubts that there can be flaws, the issue is the degree to which they happen and relevant impact.

Voter rolls will never be perfect, the issue is 'how close' they need to be, and what other elements are in place.

The head of CISA will likely be forced out for this.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/12/cyber-official-chri...

That would be sad. For a politician/executive type, he seems like a decent fellow.

Was there a reason CISA needed to release a statement? I haven't seen anything controversial in the news. As they say, if you have to say it...

I have a few comments going back a couple of years predicting how electronic voting will cause civil unrest because it is so vulnerable to being discredited. Edward Snowden even recently tweeted a prof's video about the same thing. Everybody who had given the issue any serious thought at all already knew it was an inevitable problem. Luckily, the U.S. has a process for dealing with contested election results, and the parties will litigate it to its final state.

I'm just hoping for a very cold winter to keep people inside.

> Was there a reason CISA needed to release a statement? I haven't seen anything controversial in the news.

You haven’t been paying attention, then. Trump has been screaming fraud for days. This statement is a direct response to a completely baseless, evidence-free claim he made earlier today that 2.7 million votes for him were destroyed.

> Was there a reason CISA needed to release a statement? I haven't seen anything controversial in the news.

Perhaps not if you read reputable outlets but if you take a look on Facebook, Twitter (including the President’s account) and YouTube you’ll find a frenzy of conspiracy theories about voter fraud. None of it with any real evidence attached, but it’s spreading like wildfire in many social circles.

Of course, this statement won’t really do anything. If you were the “Deep State” rigging an election this is exactly what you’d order CISA to say!

It has been all over the news in the US of trump claiming voter fraud. Apnews fact check has been full of the debunked claims in the last few days.

https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-ap-fact-check-joe-b...

https://apnews.com/article/ap-fact-check-election-dead-voter...

https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-tr...

https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-us-news-m...

https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-ap-fact-check-joe-b...

Edit: I have removed the link because someone else found errors in it.

Original: AP claims there's no evidence of "dead voters", but this list seems to indicate otherwise: [redacted] It's obituaries matched with returned absentee ballots. I've inspected a dozen or so entries and it seems legit.

Very interesting, thanks for that.

I’m curious where you got a link to that. Looks like it’s from an account that was registered only yesterday... so there’s really no evidence (at least on the repo itself) that it’s “crowdsourced”.

I'm not who you replied to. But I saw this get crowdsourced live on Twitter a few days ago.

IIRC the original list was a pastebin with ~8000 identities and this list was the final result after testing each identity individually on a state of Michigan website.

These aren't dead voters, they're living voters who happen to have the same name and birth month/year as a dead person.

As evidence: I spot-checked three random entries. In all three cases, I could find a Whitepages.com entry for a person with the same first & last name, in or near the zip code where the ballot was for; but the obituary was for a different city.

Entry 962: The voter is registered in zip code 48602 (Saginaw, MI). Whitepages.com lists a resident of Saginaw, MI with the same name and age as the voter. But the obituary is for someone who lived in Eastpoint, MI, which is 100 miles away. Howmanyofme.com estimates there are 6,000 people in the United States with this same name.

Entry 302: The voter is registered in zip code 48076 (Lanthrup Village, MI). Whitepages.com lists a resident of Southfield, MI (which is a city surrounding Lanthrup Village, MI) with the same name and age as the voter. But the obituary is for someone who lived in Detroit, MI, which is 17 miles away. Howmanyofme.com estimates there are 1,600 peple in the United States with this same name.

Entry 707: The voter is registered in zip code 48162 (Monroe County, MI). Whitepages.com lists a resident of Carleton, MI (a city in Monroe County, MI) with the same name and age as the voter. But the obituary is for someone who lived in Novi, MI, which is 48 miles away. Whitepages.com also lists at least three other individuals in various parts of Michigan with the same name and age range.

I've filed this as an issue on the Github repo: https://github.com/votesunshine/votesunshine.github.io/issue...

It's very irresponsible for you to be spreading these rumors. You should make it right by spreading the truth instead: go back to wherever you found out about this page, and let them know that it's actually just a case of different people with the same name.

Thank you for pointing out errors in this data. Out of an abundance of caution, I have removed the link from my original post.

The mainstream news I listen to (radio stations while driving) just says there is bellyaching from the campaign, but it is so dismissive of anything the whitehouse says that the question of election integrity does not seem to have registered with them. That's why I was surprised CISA had to say anything.

If you are interested in the issues, of course there is no limit to the depth of the rabbit hole you can run down, but the media position here has been its usual expression of disgust for anything outside its perceived status quo. Mainstream news is like listening to teenagers reading out texts from their dad with eyerolls.

"I haven't seen anything controversial in the news"

It's literally on every page of the news.

The Trump campaign is trying to discredit the results of the election by any means possible.

The issue of 'electronic voting' is only a concern were there to be an election among regular people, interested in determining the actual truth.

It's much worse when people in positions of power just make up the truth 'because they can'.

Whatever Trump says, evidence or not, maybe 20% of the US population will believe.

If he Tweets it, it's 'true'.

This is why we're really concerned about information propagation - now the vast majority of people will 'believe' what's on the news because it's the job of journos to determine the truth - we don't have time as individuals to hunt down every little irregularity. That's why integrity in the media system is really important.

Social Media has no institutional integrity whatsoever - and there's absolutely no amount of 'evidence' that will convince certain people against what their 'Dear Leader' said.

Any random person can start a meme, and that meme becomes 'truth'.

'The Stolen Election' meme is a populist ploy, not one based on any real evidence of systematic problems, it's a fabricated narrative.

'Both sides' are guilty of a lot of bad narrative-making but this one is particularly pernicious.

Don’t forget about the other 20% who will believe anything sourced from an anonymous intelligence official

You mean like Wikileaks?

No, the 20% not 'believing' just the 'Anon. Official' - they are believing the information on the basis of verification by a journalistic institution with supposed credibility.

'Anonymous Sources' are a mainline source of journalistic information, and journos basically put their entire credibility on the line when they vet info and then communicate said information.

The press didn't lie when representing 'anonymous officials' in 2016 rather, they communicated the information. Where the press did a 'bad job' was misrepresenting the nature of Russian-Trump relations, which basically were nill.

The MSM seriously cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump for a long time, frankly I think 'everyone actually believed it' and it was a surprise when it turns out Trump and his ragtag team were lying to the FBI for really no good reason at all and in fact had really no direct connections to Russia. Too clownish even to be actually corrupt, unless they actually were in some cases - as remember some major figures in Trump's campaign were eventually indicated. Trump's campaign manager, buddies, personal lawyer - all ended up in jail. That's not 'nothing'.

Ironically, if Trump & Co. acted responsibly during the Mueller investigation - his pleas of 'Unfair!' might have actually worked, but he's such a liar that he only makes himself look guilty.

But Trump's lies, in contrast to media spin, are a whole other level of falsity - he literally invents facts without any basis whatsoever.

He's not 'spinning' the facts, he's literally inventing them.

On election night when he said 'If they count the good votes, I win, the fake votes, they win' - this was probably the most dangerous statement he's ever made, he was verging on plunging the US into a garbage African Republic. At that moment it was clear that he had to go, he's a greater threat to the Republic than any foreign invader. He's willing to destroy democracy for his own power and vanity.

His world view is literally: "If I win it's because I'm great, if they win, it's because they cheated" irrespective of any reality.

Fox News, in the lat few days, has had to pull away from his statements quite a few times, it's shocking.

>because it's the job of journos to determine the truth

You got that wrong, that absolutely not their job.

6,000 Trump votes in Antrim County, Michigan were erroneously given to Biden for a period of time because a voting machine was configured incorrectly.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/election-security-when...

Trump is advocating the idea that this is actually super super widespread and tons of his votes were given to Biden, not just temporarily, but permanently:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13269262268885442...

A laptop and USB drive used to program voting machines were stolen right before the election according to the Associated Press. [1]

The company who claims they cannot be used to manipulate machines has a laundry list of serious security lapses and incompetence. [2] Including remote-access to voting machines?!?! uncovered by the New York Times in 2018. [3]

[1] https://apnews.com/article/voting-machines-voting-custodio-e...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_Systems_%26_Software#...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/the-myth-of-the-...

How was this quantified? If there are numbers to demonstrate it's the most secure compared to previous years, why not show them? Qualitative statements with no foundation only draw speculation.

There are lots of good ideas to make US elections more secure and trustworthy that are low-hanging fruit, easily implemented.

Here's my prediction: None of these excellent ideas will be implemented by either party, and so people will continue to be baffled by the US system. "How is it possible that the US has such chaos every election season?"

The potential for bumping up "our guy" in a close race is way too appealing to the party in power. When the reigns change hands, the new party could take the time to tighten election security, but to what benefit? They are now in control. Making things more fair to the other team would only hurt their chances.

Election fraud is deeply ingrained in the long democratic political history of the US, from the very beginning. Direct democracy was an untried, unknown concept when the country started. No one but a few ivory tower eggheads who read dense philosophy books really understood what it was all about: "You mean if our guy gets more pieces of paper into that box than the other guy, we can award ourselves all of the government contracts?" It didn't even necessarily start out as nefarious or unethical, just clueless.

See also "2020 Is An Election Security Success Story (So Far)" [1] which Bruce Schneier referenced and summarized here [2]

[1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/2020-election-security-success-s...

[2] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/11/2020-was-a-se...

"All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary."

A possible solution to the electronic/paper issue might be literally just receipts.

You vote in a 'machine' and it prints a 2 receipts - one for the 'backup' and one that you keep with some kind of encrypted/encoded data for non-repudiation.

You go online with your private receipt number and it can validate your vote.

If the electronic count is not accepted, the physical 'receipts' are coded so they can be counted very quickly by laser scanner.

> You go online with your private receipt number and it can validate your vote.

What precisely do you mean by "validate" here? Would this scheme make the ballot non-secret?

If each ballot has a unique ID and there is no association between the person voting and the ID, then the voter can retain that number, possibly by tearing off a section of the ballot as is done in CA, and check that number online to verify their vote was tallied as expected.

> there is no association between the person voting and the ID, then the voter can retain that number

This seems somewhat contradictory. The voter retaining possession of the ID creates a link between the ballot and the voter, doesn't it?

Then again, it does open the door to plausible deniability, though correctly pulling that off could introduce new complications and/or avenues of attack.

> and check that number online to verify their vote was tallied as expected.

"as expected" is the key phrase here. If it includes seeing what candidate(s) the voter voted for (i.e., trying to verify that the ballot was read correctly), then that seems like it would break the secret ballot. If it means just checking that the ballot was included in the count without revealing precisely what candidate(s)/issue(s) the vote was for, then that might work.

> The voter retaining possession of the ID creates a link between the ballot and the voter, doesn't it?

Yes, but it's only known to the voter. If they choose to dispute the results, then they give up that anonymity, but I think that's worth it. What other option do you have? As a voter, I should be able to verify that my vote was recorded correctly.

> Yes, but it's only known to the voter.

One of the more common complaints I've seen with similar schemes is that it opens the door to vote selling and/or voter intimidation.

> As a voter, I should be able to verify that my vote was recorded correctly.

I agree that this can be a desirable property for a voting system to have. Unfortunately, it has to coexist with other desirable properties (e.g., a secret ballot), and at least from what I can tell it appears that some of those properties can be mutually exclusive [0, 1, 2 with 1 being the PDF of 0].

(Fair warning, the literature is well over my head for the most part, so I wouldn't be surprised if I misinterpreted something.)

> What other option do you have?

I honestly don't know, off the top of my head. Presumably there's continuing research into different voting systems, but in the end it'll come down to what combination of desirable properties and ease of implementation people will be willing to live with.

[0]: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-12980-3_...

[1]: https://www.lsv.fr/Projects/anr-avote/PUBLIS/CFPST-08.pdf

[2]: https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/40575

What's wrong with selling your vote? Politicians get to do it. Why can't I do it?

How does it open the door to voter intimidation? Someone steals my ballot receipt and checks who I voted for?

> What's wrong with selling your vote?

Depends on your point of view, I suppose. Some might argue that it distorts the democratic process, some others could argue that it's merely an extension of exchanging promises for votes.

Unfortunately, this is not an area I'm very familiar with, so you'll probably have to look elsewhere for well-reasoned analyses.

> Politicians get to do it. Why can't I do it?

Someone else doing something wrong is rather poor justification for you being able to do something wrong.

Of course, this is contingent upon you believing vote selling is wrong; if you think it is acceptable, then the unequal treatment can be something worth addressing.

> How does it open the door to voter intimidation? Someone steals my ballot receipt and checks who I voted for?

It basically boils down to someone with power over you sitting you down in front of a computer and asking you to prove who/what you voted for, with some kind of negative consequence if you refuse or picked the "wrong" candidate/issues.

Stealing a ballot receipt in lieu of asking you to show the result yourself is another way to go about it.

Many techies want Biden. Others want Trump. Many would probably prefer someone else. But very, very few would see the integrity of this election as more than an intern-level joke.

If you've ever worked in an environment where money was changing hands (banking, trading, etc) or where security was the real deal (three-letter agencies), or even in the insurance industry, you know that election integrity controls are a half-baked freshman project by comparison.

(For myself, I don't care who wins. I don't believe it matters. But don't piss on me and tell me it's raining.)

Everyone is saying this because Donald Trump is a dangerous moron but the fact is that the election process in the US is a complete basket case, most notably in the number of people it excludes from voting by design.

The first thing that came to mind was that quote from the Richard Jewell movie (which is a good watch). Jewell's lawyer has a secretary with an Eastern European accent and they are talking about a newspaper article where the gov't says they have evidence that Jewell is the Olympic Park bomber.

“Where I come from, when the government says someone's guilty that's how you know they're innocent,” she says. “It's different here?”

Incidentally, that same lawyer is now working on election fraud cases for Trump.

In order to secure the vote we need open source machines, verifiable ballots (including online verification), complete chain of control, body cams on anyone handling ballots, transparency to public and party observers via cameras, multiple isolated tabulations (verifying they all agree), and also strongly verifiable voter ID. Nothing in this process should be left up to chance. I don’t accept the stance that a lack of evidence of fraud means that fraud isn’t happening or that a better process shouldn’t be designed.

> verifiable ballots (including online verification)

Is this at odds with secret ballots?

Not if you split the info on the ballot in two halves, who voted vs. who they voted on

Ah, that's a slightly different definition of verifiable than I had in mind. I was thinking of schemes to allow voters to not only verify that they voted, but that their vote counted towards their intended candidate.

I suppose it depends on what precisely is to be verified. The scheme you describe allows for verification that a ballot has been received/sent/counted, depending on details, which may or may not be verifiable enough depending on who you ask.

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