The ‘Most Secure’ U.S. Election Was Not Without Problems
govtech.com
govtech.com
And of course "there is no evidence that any large scale voting fraud took place". Uttered to me by multiple people who I know understand that there can't be any evidence.
You needed to provide your signature which was matched against voting records.
Also no-one has said that mail voting isn't full proof only that it's very difficult to exploit it in the volumes you need to swing an election.
This is not correct in many cases.
> “We conclude that the Election Code does not authorize or require county election boards to reject absentee or mail-in ballots during the canvassing process based on an analysis of a voter’s signature,” the state Supreme Court wrote in an opinion
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/23/pennsylvania-court-...
> it's very difficult to exploit it in the volumes you need to swing an election
When the margins of victory in several states are so small, this seems to be merely conjecture.
Your conspiracy theory is based on the assumption that tens of thousands of votes can be cast fraudulently and matching records without anyone noticing, let alone leaving any trail, and that this can be pulled off on such a massive global scale and so uniformly and stealthily that it just resembles real votes cast by real people.
Isn't that a little bit incredible?
I mean, the only objective statement behind that conspiracy theory is that you feel the wrong candidate won the elections. That's the whole basis of this whole election dispute. The rest of your argument derives from there. As the wrong candidate won then there must have been a conspiracy to get votes for that candidate.
What really boggles the mind is that these absurd and totally idiotic conspiracy theories sprang up after we saw an incumbent openly sabotaging elections by barring people from voting, by putting up barriers to mail voting, by purposely degrading postal delivery services to force votes from being shipped, let alone counted, forcing votes out because of technicalities such as delays in delivery and counting, and more eggregiously arguing in public that votes on his competitor, and only those, should be simply thrown out.
But somehow that doesn't raise questions. What raises questions is if voting normally could be trusted.
2. Phrases like “absurd and totally idiotic” do not help you make your argument with this audience.
3. I don’t think the phrase “massive global scale” means what you think it means in the context of a US election.
4. This audience builds global IT systems that have improved in performance by several orders of magnitude over the last few decades. Other than 0-1 technologies like the birth of human flight, no other tech evolution compares. The minds of the audience are almost immune to boggling. The black hatters especially. Suggesting your mind is so easily boggled only generates pity.
Address systematically the individual voting irregularities post-election as they arise and people will listen to you. As has been par for the course for US elections for over 250 years...
That's exactly what you're pushing: a theory of how some people have conspired to do something. Is this not true? Is this not the essence of all these outlandish and baseless theories on how there were people conspiring to rig the US presidential elections?
If you disagree, please do point out exactly which part of your argument does not involve neither a conspiracy nor theories.
What really amazes me is folks who complain about mail voting being insecure, without even having an understanding of how mail voting works.
Either explain to us the attack vector against mail-in voting that resulted in wide-spread fraud, or withdraw your claim.
Your explanation needs to also explain how this attack circumvented the various defense-in-depth official and unofficial checks (Ballot status tracking, signature verification, voter pre-registration, sealed ballots, spoiled ballot tracking).
> Uttered to me by multiple people who I know understand that there can't be any evidence.
The purpose of these defense-in-depth checks is to identify tampering, if it took place. Explain how they were circumvented, or retract your claims.
I feel that there's a corollary to Schneier's Law [1]. I'd phrase it as "Any person can think they can break a security system that they don't understand, or don't want to understand."
[1] “Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it.”
Either explain to us the attack vector against actual SHA1 certificates that could result in wide-spread faking of certificates, or withdraw your claim.
Your explanation needs to also explain how this attack could cicumvent the various defense-in-depth official and unofficial checks (certificate transparency, certificate revocation lists, limited time validity)."
I hope we can at least agree that this is not the way to argue about security protocols at least when it comes to crypto.
Either be an expert on the subject, or defer to expert consensus, or provide clear evidence for why the experts are all wrong. You've done none of these.
I can't believe that in 2020, I have to assert, on a technical forum, that people making technical statements about security should either know what they are talking about, or provide evidence to back up what they are saying.
The answer to your rhetorical question is clearly that the news that it's 'most secure'. This claim is ridiculous at best. Also why news agencies like Fox News abandoned Trump is because you can't push the story of fraud.
If people distrust the election system and then what? Coup? Another secession? What are you going to replace it with? The same problems still arise.
The future looks good though. Direct democracy with optional representation or multi party proportional representation via single transferable vote. This can solve these problem.
Why are they so afraid to release the data if there wasn't any shady business going on?
We already know the votes and times so I would hope that is the full extent of data collected by the voting machines.
Why not gather all this metadata, and see if it aligns with the actual vote data?
I've seen some videos emerge on social media with recount footage, it's totally uncontrolled to say the least. I find it hard to believe that most jurisdictions are providing an accurate count, the controls simply aren't in place.
The single largest problem with this election is credited to one man who called fraud without any substantial proof. Problem is, the man is currently president, therefore a figure of authority. However, he's currently losing lawsuit after lawsuit with regards to his fraud claims.
> Most recently, a story began circulating online that suggested U.S. intelligence had requisitioned a nefarious supercomputer called HAMMER, upon which it was running a program called SCORECARD in order to manipulate vote tabulation on a grand scale. The HAMMER and SCORECARD story has been shared widely on rightwing media channels, despite the fact that CISA quickly shot the theory down.
Ah, I suppose Matthew Dillon's HAMMER...
Almost every proclamation from the Republican Party and Donald Trump has no merit and will not hold up in court.
HOWEVER.
I, and many ones like me, have spent the last 4 years worrying that Russian interference would only increase in this election. We have observed the Republican party do NOTHING to protect the integrity of the US elections, and we could only assume they were doing so out of an express knowledge that any interference would be beneficial to them.
Just in OCTOBER, FBI officials said "Russia’s hackers appeared to be preparing to sow chaos amid any uncertainty around election results", and the now fired Christopher C Krebs said "Russian hackers recently obtained access “in a couple limited cases, to election jurisdiction, an election-related network," [1]
The universal expectation was that Russian interference would be to help Donald Trump because he has been much weaker on Russia than any president that ostensibly cares about freedom and democracy would be.
But Donald Trump lost. Does that mean that there was no electoral interference? Surely not. Surely, there was. The most likely explanation is that the sheer number of Biden voters overwhelmed any Russian meddling (if only because it was focused on the wrong states like Ohio and Florida which didn't end up mattering).
But now, the tables have turned. "Electoral interference" is no longer the rallying cry of the Left to explain why Trump won. It's now a rallying cry of the Right to explain why Trump lost.
Which means that now to protect democracy, reasonable-minded people find themselves proclaiming that the Election was the most secure in history and all discussion of fraud is a conspiracy theory.
This is deeply messed up and uncomfortable, and is the fault entirely of the post-truth Trump Cult that works backwards from the outcome they want to have rather than any reality.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/russia-electi...
There is plenty of 'rigged election' fear to go around, for sure. Donald Trump overperformed expectations in both 2016 and 2020, so it would be just as rational for Democratic voters to wonder if someone had their thumb on the scale as it is for Republican voters to feel that way because he lost.
Personally I don't think it's very easy to meddle with our elections and I think any discrepancies are likely to be innocent mistakes. I don't doubt that foreign governments play games with us, but I expect they limit themselves to social media manipulation and not actually trying to muck with the voting process.
There's much screaming about fraud, with no evidence for it, and a large helping of misinformation. (People complaining about dead people voting is a great example of this. Someone casting an early ballot, and dying before November 3rd is an example of a dead person voting... But not of election fraud.)
If we're going to blame the Russian boogieman for the milk going sour, have you considered that maybe their election interference mostly consists of casting doubt on the election's results? Or of the 2016 playbook of spreading alt-right propaganda?
Sure, anything is possible, and maybe Santa Claus is real, but if you want right-thinking people to listen to you, you need to find evidence. So far, the evidence for wide-spread, systemic fraud has ranged from 'non-existent' to 'withdrawn when asked to swear on it under oath' to 'completely rubbish'. That doesn't stop the losing party from throwing a temper tantrum, and refusing to accept the results.
- What was the extent of Russian interference in 2016? Was it just media manipulation or did it go further to also include voter fraud and hacking of election systems?
- How much did that interference contribute to Trump's win in 2016?
- If the prevailing notion for the last 4 years was that nothing was done to fortify election integrity, shouldn't we have expected to see similar or greater interference from Russia in 2020?
- If there was Russian voter interference in 2016, and nothing was done to fix that in the last 4 years, how much trust should be put in CISA's statement of no evidence of manipulation?
- Is this just a perfect example of the uncertainty about our democracy that Russia intended to instill all along?
To quote Randall, "don't trust voting software and don't listen to anyone who tells you it's safe."
The most valid reason to be opposed to voting software (and it's my personal reason) is that it's almost certainly easier to compromise an electronic voting system--even a very high quality system--than it is to compromise a paper ballot election. With a paper ballot election, it's probably easier to just rig public opinion by compromising social media companies.
I would also suspect that we could make it even harder to rig a paper ballot election if we elected by popular vote such that (for tight elections) the malicious actor would have to compromise a lot more than just a few key counties in a few swing states.
The possibility of malicious code is much more of a problem when people stand to profit from a bug.
I'm not saying it's impossible to make a publicly verifyable, tamper proof system, but it's definitely harder than flying a shuttle.
No, because the loser of the auction would have every incentive to cry foul.
[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...
It is not so clear that there is a reasonable mechanism by which they could rig elections. When they make the hardware and software they have no idea what candidates will actually be on the ballots when the machines are used.
Voting software isn't that. The current state of voting software is best described as "horrifying".
That's not to say it has been exploited, the only time that _may_ have happened _might_ be the Georgia, 2016, case, but as the evidence was destroyed, we have no answers. [1]
Whilst this year's DefCon didn't go ahead, there are have been voting machines at several of the conferences in past years. Like last year, where vulnerabilities discovered in 2016 were still present. [0]
The experts in the matter call for paper ballots. They are scalable, and far harder to compromise, by _several_ orders of magnitude.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/12/def-con-h...
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2017/10/georgia-destroyed-elect...
I would disagree with you here. The problem isn't social, or political. The problem is one of economics. It simply isn't in the interests of those manufacturing the voting machines to make them secure.
They go unpunished for flaws, and it isn't legal, most of the time, for anyone to try and peak beneath the covers and see if there are flaws present.
They have no incentive to make things secure, and can simply attack anyone who tries to look at their security, with a high degree of success.
In a simple cost/benefit analysis, it is cheaper to ignore security. They will continue to get the government contracts, regardless of whether or not they are deemed to be more or less secure than their competition. Why would they bother?
Well, the guy who said that just got fired for saying it so... regardless how you feel about that, not sure he is the best source here.
He also fired the Attorney General that would not fire the investigator that was investigating him. The newly appointed AG immediately closed the investigation.
Being fired by this president arguably INCREASES one's credibility.
"Ga. secretary of state says fellow Republicans are pressuring him to find ways to exclude ballots" [1]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/brad-raffensperger-g...
He was fired not for saying it was the "most secure in American history", but for refusing to toe the party line.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cyber-officials-exclu...
See also - https://www.cisa.gov/rumorcontrol (which includes sources for their claims)
The important takeaway is, the election itself was reasonably clean. There weren't any major breaches the way we saw in 2016 where both parties had emails stolen. But, in terms of disinformation little changed, there was still massive foreign and domestic issues.
Which of these two has (1) the expertise to evaluate the facts on the issue of security of election systems, and (2) the absence of a strong motivation to misrepresent them in the direction of their public claims:
(A) Chris Krebs, JD, former Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Infrastructure Protection, former Director of Cybersecurity Policy for Microsoft, former Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Infrastructure Protection, and most recently Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or
(B) Donald J. Trump, BS (Econ), former brand marketing kingpin, former reality television star, and, unless he succeeds somehow in discrediting the results of the recent public voting, imminently-outgoing President of the United States.
Also, if you are still undecided, recall that Chris Krebs didn't just say it on his own, he was relaying the conclusion reported in the joint declaration [0] of the two coordinating councils working on election security for the CISA, which included both industry representatives and representatives of the secretaries of state and election directors of the states, as well as experts from CISA.
[0] https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-electio...