So what are the facts??
* electronic voting machines
* credible claims of foreign interference in elections
* credible claims of organized state agent hacking of US digital infrastructure.
* voting machines with designs and source code which are secret, and no way to know if they're working as advertised.
We have cryptographic protocols for honest, verifiable, anonymous elections, which we don't bother implementing. It's all an honor system, in a government without much honor. We, quite frankly, have no way to know if votes are being counted correctly or honestly.
As much as I disbelief Trump's claims of this election being rigged by democrats, the claims that we have excellent election security are false too. We have a huge chunk of the country openly lying about election results, and another half lying about election security. Two lies don't make a truth.
If our current elections aren't being manipulated, you can bet future ones will be. It's easy for an organized state agent to do, and if it wasn't being done before, it will be now. And fixing this will be almost impossible post-Trump, because Democrats.
We do?
- Everyone can verify who voted (so number of votes equals number of voters)
- Everyone can verify their individual vote was correctly and uniquely counted
- All votes are released under unique, anonymous identifiers, so anyone can recount all votes
- However, no one can verify anyone else's vote individually
It's pretty awesome! I've watched with gradual shock and horror as voting machines came out and seemed almost designed for riggable elections.
The question I've had with this is whether you can prove who you voted for. If you can, you can sell your vote and prove tongue buyer that you voted correctly.
That's also my concern with mail in voting.
If you're trying to buy my vote, and I'm trying to sell it, I could give you my unique anonymous number, and you could verify my votes. But I could also vote a different way, lie, and give you someone else's unique number, and you'd have no way to know.
You could ask for a special ballot too, where, for example, I vote a particular pattern (yes/no/no/yes/yes/no), to encode things, ideally picking ones that aren't likely to come up in practice, or other complex schemes, but these generally have work-arounds.
At the end of the day, though, it'd be cheaper and easier for you to require me to wear a pinhole camera to vote, do a mail-in, or otherwise. Plus, we had open voting for much of history, and it worked okay. If we went back to the risk of illegal vote selling versus the risk of wholesale election fraud, I'd take the former which seems like the lesser of two evils (and much easier to police too).
This violates the secrecy of the vote. I can threaten you to vote for someone then force you to prove you voted according to my orders.
> If we could do away with anonymity — if everyone could check that their vote was counted correctly — then it would be easy to secure the vote. But that would lead to other problems. Before the US had the secret ballot, voter coercion and vote-buying were widespread.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec...
of course every fix creates another problem
The problem is closed, proprietary, secretive, touchscreen voting machines. For all we know, Biden won Texas. Or perhaps everyone wrote in Putin as a joke write-in. We just don't know.
For how this works in practice, Applied Cryptography has a nice, readable explanation.
Techniques like Zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption and multiparty computation exists, but none of them are sufficient for elections. The security requirements are simply too complex, and we can't require that every voter manages a private keypair to issue their votes from an electronic device they can't audit.
Paper voting is safer.
* You have a list of votes. That's public (and not correlated with the above) by anonymous tokens.
* You have an anonymous token, which lets you verify your own vote.
If the list of people who voted doesn't match up to real people, that's detectable. If I go into Massachusetts and find 10% of the people claimed to have voted don't exist, I can confirm fraud. If someone who didn't voted has there vote counted, that also confirms fraud.
Anyone can count up and add up the votes. That's public too.
And anyone can confirm their own vote was counted.
Why exactly should Democrats block any attempts at improving election security? The Democrats even introduced several election security bills the last couple years that all got blocked by the GOP..
At this point, the Republicans are mid-flop towards election security, while the Democrats have made statements which will be very hard to back out of, so I think we're seeing the fish flipping.... You can even see this in action, as every single one of these posts is trending toward negative infinite upvotes, where just a few months ago, they would have been trending towards upvotes. Even a mild pointer to a textbook on cryptography summarizing a cryptographic protocol is now at zero.
I'll be delighted to be proven wrong, though. Democrats will control both chambers and the presidency. If I see crypto-secure voting, I'll be delighted. I just don't see it. At this point, Democrats are firmly in the voting-is-secure-nothing-to-see-here camp. I understand why given the unpleasantness in DC, but it is, as a point of fact, not secure. That doesn't mean it's been rigged, but it does mean we should fix it.
I’m sorry but that is way too reductive. For one thing, there’s a bipartisan consensus (for better or worse) on a lot of foreign policy, which is a pretty huge area.
And, your comment obscures the meaningful differences in ideology between the groups of people each party represents. And the different interests of those groups.
The Democrats are far from perfect. But it’s not a “both sides equally bad” situation.
Well, maybe it is when it comes to corporate money in politics. But even there you see bipartisan consensus on the fringes, I think, plus iirc the Republicans were basically all about Citizens United.
But yeah money in politics is a big problem on both sides. To be fair, it’s been a big problem in all of politics throughout all recorded history.
Which doesn’t mean we can’t (and haven’t) made some progress.
My own observation is that we saw major progress with the Renaissance, then the Enlightenment, the Constitution, and so on. Progress slowed around a hundred years ago. From around 1920-1970, we had progress on issues of representation, race, and gender, but otherwise, political behavior gradually drifted towards the Nash equilibrium.
1970-2020, progress mostly stopped, and we've pushed hard to optimizing to game theory. Politicians who now get elected play a near-optimal game, and playing this game is overt.
To make progress, we'd need significant reform of the system.
I would argue, though, that a statement like "money in politics is a big problem on both sides. To be fair, it’s been a big problem in all of politics throughout all recorded history" is very reductionist.
For most of history, it wasn't so much money as military might. If I had money and you had military, soon you'd have both. Money was a component of buying military, but it was just one component (see Rome v Carthage for an example, or Athens v Sparta).
I'd much rather be controlled by someone corrupted by money than by a corrupt warlord where I'm a serf. Democracy is a big step up. We just need another step up right now... and pretending we don't is actively harmful.
Um if nothing else a LOT in the US happened with regards to women’s rights and feminism between 1970 and today. And LGBTQ rights.
Oh yeah - Obama! First black President. Kind of a big deal when it comes to race and social justice.
Also it’s just a hugely broad statement you are making. I’m not gonna speculate about the sweep of hisiory.
Also your point doesn’t really address the specific points I mentioned - real, actual differences between the parties.
[EDIT: For example if the Republican Party suddenly endorsed the Green New Deal (or other climate legislation) I don’t see the Democrats who already support such legislation flip-flopping.
Same with gun control laws.
And with more federal pandemic relief funds to individuals and states and cities.
And the Affordable Care Act.
And abortion.
And so on. ]
And it's exactly what game theory predicts.
To go with even your first example, Nixon created the EPA.
Flops happen when both parties go too far left or too far right. At that point, it makes sense for the "crowded" party to leapfrog and grab the coveted center.
Like, I don't think the Democrats became less invested in environmental regulation when Nixon created the EPA.
Or with healthcare. Or abortion.
You can't just point to a flop and use it to say "oh both parties are the same and don't really stand for anything."
I think what I said was that both parties try to be just at the 50 percentile mark of voters, since that wins elections, while candidates try to be at the 75th/25th percentile since that wins primaries (and then sprint to the center).
If both parties are at e.g. the 36th and 37th percentile, the 36th percentile party can jump to the 38th and be wildly successful. That's what happened with surveillance. After 9/11, the electorate shifted, and Republicans leapfrogged the Democrats, leading to a lot of success.
Both parties fundamentally want to win first.
Whether that's good or bad depends on what you compare it to. You can view it as lack of spine, or as a democratic check-and-balance.
And I appreciate your clarification that (if I’m understanding correctly) you do believe there are currently some meaningful differences between the two parties.
The percentages bit I didn’t really follow (where’s the data/evidence? Or is this a theory?), and, if I’m being honest, on a day like today with the attempted coup and all, I simply don’t have the motivation to parse and understand more of what you are trying to say.
But I appreciate your clarification and additional effort to explain your intended point.
I totally could believe that.
But, be aware that just because you saw it in a left wing site (NYT, CNN, Vox etc), doesn't make it so.
Unfortunately, the few times something got me upset enough to actually try to track down original sources, I found the sites to be representing falsehood, on both sides of the spectrum.
Like, the complete and total opposite of the facts. Some twisted logic, omissions or half facts, but other times it seems they just said "facts be damned".
So, would be curious if you actually have sources, and if you actually looked up the bills and the riders, and the deals.
Some of these "stolen" elections took place under Republican state administrations, supervised by Republican appointed election officials. WTF are these people doing if tens of thousands of votes are sneaking through the system and they can't find any evidence of it, and say themselves the election was fair?
Trump did exactly the same thing in 2016, claiming massive vote fraud and that the election was being stolen from him. Not only did he provide no evidence, but his own Justice department and subsequent administration was unable to find any evidence. If he really though the electoral system was so badly flawed, he had control of the House and Senate to do something about it, so why no voting reforms? If he actually believed his claims why didn't do something about it?
The truth is he didn't do anything because there's nothing to be done. He and his people know perfectly well the electoral system is fair, that's why they haven't bothered to reform it. There would be no point. In fact it would simply make them responsible for the voting system and thus unable to claim fraud anymore. Instead he's simply using claims of fraud as a tool to incite his supporters and avoid the ignominy of being a "loser". Something he has said many times he cannot tolerate.
Both his words and his actions show very clearly this is a pre-meditated attempt to undermine democracy in America.
It's like telling your grandma to install security updates, and her coming back saying no one has broken into her computer so it must be secure (while gramps insists someone has).
The simple fact of the matter is our elections are NOT secure, and making them secure would be cheap, and easy.
We have absolutely no idea whether the vote counts in the US are authentic. That doesn't mean anyone stole this election. That certainly doesn't mean Democrats stole this election. But it does mean we should secure them.
Of course, physical security is a cheap and easy step. The harder part is gaming our media. If attackers can help direct where voters vote with $$$, that's a cheap attack too.
As a footnote, if I were an attacker, of any type, I wouldn't even bother with the November election. The easiest place to attack is primaries. Both 2020 and 2016, we had among the weakest candidates among the crop win.
We're going from a con artist to a senile mildly corrupt lifetime politician of limited accomplishment. UPGRADE! I'll expect we'll move from major corruption to minor corruption, without an attempted coup.
What I think we deserve, though, is a politician with intelligence, vision, and integrity.
That requires fixing systems, rather than GOP pointing to DNC, and vice-versa.
Let’s be real that’s basically a part of politics. That’s not an issue with elections per se.
Plus it’s clearly easier to just use social media and targeted propaganda to manipulate voters.
I’m all for secure elections and improving that security.
But my understanding is that to date when people have taken a serious look they’ve found no meaningful evidence of fraud.
The real deal is if we got rid of the electoral college then the presidency wouldn’t come down to a few thousand votes in a few counties in a few states.
I reckon the US system needs to self-reform if it wants to survive. All democracies change their electoral laws from time to time. The current system appears unsustainable: roughly two thirds of the electorate now feel fundamentally disenfranchised (one third thinks it's racist; the other that it's corrupt).
I will mention that the split-down-the-middle thing isn't a property of electoral college. That's how you win in a democracy. If voters are distributed between 1 and 10 on some issue:
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10
I win by picking 5.5. Whatever you pick, you get a minority of voters. That's complicated by primaries. In the same system, if I want to be a ballot candidate, though, I can't do that. I want to pick 2.75 or 7.25 so the majority of my party votes for me.
Of course, things like charisma fit in a bit too, but for the most part, if one party runs a 2.74 candidate and the other a 7.24, the 7.24 has an advantage, and vice-versa for 2.76 and 7.76.
All that things like electoral college do is shift weights. Tight elections just means politicians have learned to play the game well.
A system where someone with 40% or 60% of the vote wins isn't fundamentally broken -- the underlying check-and-balance works. What is fundamentally broken are when incentive structures misalign.
Of course we do. Georgia did a full hand recount this election, finding no evidence of anything like what you're alleging. And many states do random-sample hand recounts every election. We didn't check every single vote, but "absolutely no idea" is way off the mark.
Indeed. A recount provides absolutely no evidence in either direction on what I'm alleging. Fortunately, if you'd like evidence, you can look for the auditable source code for my local voting machines on github. Didn't find any? There's your evidence of a transparency issue.
What many of these posts did provide evidence for are reading comprehension issues on web forums. But we knew that already.
Georgia electronic votes were all backed by voter verifiable auditable paper ballots. That's independent of whether the software is competent at arithmetic. A hand recount does, in fact, protect against fake totals.
Unfortunately, there are a handful of states that don't mandate paper backups. The solution for machines of that sort isn't open source—it's adding auditable paper.
It's simply a flat out repudiation of democracy.
"These people" also couldn't allege fraud in Georgia if we had fraud-proof systems. It's not rocket science. I wish we could point them to proof. We can't. We can point "these people" to pretty good evidence, but we wouldn't have this particular problem if we could point to hard proof.
We'd probably have a different problem, but it is what it is.
What evidence do you have that they couldn't? Plenty of people would make claims of fraud, even in a "fraud-proof" election systems. What would that even look like, in theory, let alone in practice?
What specifically out our current system leaves it open to the widespread, multi-state fraud that is being claimed by the president and others?
I mean, seriously. Look under the hood for five minutes.
This stuff wasn't even controversial among most liberals pre-Trump.
You imply that liberals have changed their position on this post-Trump, but I don't think you'll find these suggested improvements controversial to most liberals. But what do you mean by we can't point the people of Georgia to hard proof? I fail to see how addressing even all of the points you raise would suddenly convince the president and his supporters. The existing measures don't appear to have swayed them at all. So I don't think it's productive to pretend like this wouldn't be a problem if only we had some mythical "fraud-proof" system.
https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/historic_first_statew...
> Today, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced the results of the Risk Limiting Audit of Georgia’s presidential contest, which upheld and reaffirmed the original outcome produced by the machine tally of votes cast. Due to the tight margin of the race and the principles of risk-limiting audits, this audit was a full manual tally of all votes cast. The audit confirmed that the original machine count accurately portrayed the winner of the election.
> By law, Georgia was required to conduct a Risk Limiting Audit of a statewide race following the November elections.
> The differential of the audit results from the original machine counted results is well within the expected margin of human error that occurs when hand-counting ballots. A 2012 study by Rice University and Clemson University found that “hand counting of votes in postelection audit or recount procedures can result in error rates of up to 2 percent.” In Georgia’s recount, the highest error rate in any county recount was .73%. Most counties found no change in their finally tally. The majority of the remaining counties had changes of fewer than ten ballots.
We never have. The only way to know would be to personally verify the voter's driver's license, watch them vote and submit their ballot, count their ballot, and repeat for every single voter in the United States. Since this will never, ever happen, one could always make vague claims about authenticity. But without concrete evidence of fraud, it doesn't matter.
(2) Many of the machines with paper trails don't show the voter what's printed is the same as their vote (although I haven't looked at the models you refer to).
If there's a printer paper trail that the voter can see, that's a big step forward.
Whether or not something happened in Georgia this election -- and I don't particularly care whether something did -- the perfectly valid point is we have an insecure election system, and we should fix it.
In this context, though, security is NOT hard. We've just made the decision not to do it. I see no excuse for why I shouldn't be able to see the source code and design of the voting machines in my state, or audit any part of the manufacturing or voting process. This should all be open and transparent. A not-for-profit should be able to spot audit a hundred random machines around the US:
- Swipe a credit card to cover supervisor time
- In a secure facility, confirm the source code and hardware are as advertised on local voting machines
This just isn't rocket science.
Judging from downvotes and comments on HN, building political consensus around that will be neigh-impossible post-Trump. Click on my post history. Most of my comments are in the +3 to +15 range. Virtually all my comments in this thread are either 1 (not voted on) or between 0 and -4 (having gone to -6). None are swinging Trump conspiracy theories; merely pointing out the obvious: we need robust, auditable, secure voting.
It is. How many papers were been published in Oakland between 2000 and 2010 on election security? Lots. Clearly this is a problem interesting enough to capture the interest of computer security faculty. It isn't a toy problem.
In addition to technical challenges (open sourcing isn't magic), there is a very complex organizational challenge due to the decentralized structure of elections in the US.
But more importantly, making vague claims about hypothetical limitations of the existing systems while tens of millions of americans believe that actual literal fraud stole the election from Trump and are using that as motivation to invade the capitol building and disrupt the process of transitioning power between parties is tone-deaf to say the least.
Seriously.
It's tone deaf to one side, but I'm pretty scared since the other side has, just as wrongheadedly, convinced itself these systems work. I'm not worried about 50,000 votes stolen due to doublevoting somewhere or a mailtruck of votes getting lost. If victory falls on the 50.1% mark versus the 49.9% mark, that's okay. I'm worried because we have a system which IS exploitable and which WILL be exploited, if it hasn't already been.
Rigging US elections has incredible ROI for any foreign state actor, and simply isn't hard.
For the record, I made equally tone deaf comments when 9/11 happened and when COVID19 was in its early days. Now, they're common sense to most people. I don't want to wait for Russia, China, or North Korea to pick our next president before we do something.
Open source, transparency, and auditability won't solve the problem 100%, but they'll prevent most types of gross, blatant rigging. Cryptographic voting algorithms or paper trails will get us much of the rest of the way there. We don't need perfect security, but we need to be in a place where a single point of compromise can't break our democracy.
I'm serious. Go read the papers. You very obviously don't have a background in academic security. Because Oakland doesn't tend to accept stuff on trivial matters.
And in this context, you are choosing to jump into those conversations to express vague generalities and open ended speculation that can't be pinned down to any specific claims about anything in a context where a mob is looking to those exact themes to motivate their violence.
There's a form of dishonesty that comes from making untrue claims about voter fraud, and there's another kind that comes from the themes you choose to emphasize to fan on the flames of false arguments while being coy about whether you personally believe them. This falls in the latter category, and this is the problem people have with your comments.
1) Lying to them that elections are secure, and telling them to sit down and shut up
2) Taking concerns seriously and addressing them
Your premise is that #1 will prevent a violence. My claim is that #2 will.
You can flipped this around. We had a lot of violence and lawless behavior around BLM protests. What would have calmed people down? Telling them we didn't have racism, to go home, and shut up? Or providing a clear process to address their concerns peacefully?
I think most folks on the right will move on from the Trump election if the left knocks it off with "sit down and shut up," which is coincidentally the exact language right wing commentators use.
As a footnote, which concerns are valid is almost irrelevant. For this, what matters is which concerns people believe.
Especially not 10 days of "investigation" by congress who they already do not trust.
With that attitude -- that there are tens of millions of people who can't be trusted or reasoned with and need to be locked up and silenced -- civil war is inevitable.
"Those people" are human beings too. You might not agree with them and they might be wrong, but they're not very different from you. They're just exposed to different culture and information.
You are trying to equivocate between those specifically and indisputably false allegations and something completely different: a much more generalized and vaguely expressed set of concerns with election security writ large.
These have nothing to do with each other and yet you are equivocating between them.
We have reached an era of wrongthink- where even if you align slightly with the wrong side in your thinking, you are silenced. You are no longer allowed to agree with any portion of the wrong side, it must wholly be rejected.
We can loop back to election security when POTUS isn't trying to use it as an excuse for a coup.
This is similar to the common argument about voter fraud. Of course there was almost certainly basically no fraud to speak of in this election, like usual. (And that's important to emphasize, especially right now.) But the way this overall topic tends to be approached in general is very odd, to me:
There's a routinely used argument that concern about voter fraud is ridiculous because there's essentially been no significant incidence of it in modern history. This isn't unreasonable to bring up, but I think by itself is a very poor approach to risk assessment that's reminiscent of early COVID predictions/warnings/guidance and 2016 election odds from many of the same people. Especially when some foreign intelligence agencies appear to be getting increasingly brazen, and when considering that for most of the recorded history, voting was a lot less digitized.
There was almost no incidence of jets being deliberately flown into buildings as a form of WMD, until some people pulled out all their cards and exploited a "0-day", doing as much damage as they could in a single effort before a "patch" could be deployed. And sometimes it's simply a matter of no one making a serious, motivated attempt to do something until one day someone finally does.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-we-know-about-vote...
I was just trying to talk about this specific argument and how it's often used in isolation to create a certain way of seeing things that I think is based on shaky grounds.
I'm not trying to take any ideological stance, but just discuss epistemology in general. (Though for the record, I've only ever voted and will very likely only ever vote Democrat. I promise I don't have any ulterior motives regarding this topic and am a strong supporter of voter enfranchisement. Risk assessment in general just is a component of my job and hobbies.)
Epistemologically, that's why I believe these discussions should be evidence based instead of theoretical or ideological. We don't do a good job of figuring out what is going to work and what is not going to work until we've tried some stuff out. And it needs to balanced. There will be a few people who will try to cheat the system. As long as they get caught and it doesn't affect the election, that's ok. There will be a price to pay in legitimate votes who are unable to cast a ballot because of whatever countermeasures we put in place. The question is, did we strike the right balance?
https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign...
If the machines were switching votes so rampantly you'd think, of the millions of people who voted, more people would've raised concern at the polls when they noticed their vote for the president of the United States at the top of the printed ballot was switched.
Am I missing something?
Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kansas, Indiana, Kentucky and New Jersey.
These are the states you should be worried about. With no paper trail, there is no reliable way to audit the results.
States with electronic voting, which does not print out a paper receipt. But interestingly, no one is looking into these states for alleged fraud