Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
The core of defamation is (1) a false statement of purported fact that (2) causes damage (there are some exceptions to (2) that aren't relevant here). Most defamation cases you hear about fall apart on (1) - they target non-falsifiable statements of opinion, which can't be defamation because they don't purport to relate an objective fact. What makes Dominion's cases terrifying is that they are chock full of purported facts, all of which are batshit, and have so devastated Dominion's reputation, in a reputation-intensive business, that it had to hire private security to protect its employees from death threats.
What makes the case challenging for Dominion is that they will almost certainly be treated as a public figure for the purposes of the case. The standard for defamation of a public figure is higher than that of a normal person; we add a condition (3): actual malice or negligence, meaning Dominion must show that Giuliani either intended to destroy Dominion's reputation by spreading facts he knew to be false, or that he was at least negligent, acting with reckless disregard for the truth.
The problem is that it's not totally clear whether Giuliani believed any of his crazy-talk. It may actually be the case that Giuliani is just off his rocker. If he himself was sold by the (false) facts he received from others, he is a more difficult defamation target.
Here's attorney Akiva Cohen analyzing the case a bit:
[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor... - "Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statement he makes."
I think what you're trying to say is that the argument about malice is easier because as an attorney of record on cases involving allegations against Dominion, he "should have been" in a better position to know the truth than a layperson repeating the same nonsense.
And likewise, it's near impossible to prove a negative.
If we followed your train of thought, we'd be demanding that Hillary Clinton prove she didn't harvest adenochrome from terrified paedophilia victims in a pizza restaurant.
Which is pretty ridiculous, right?
That part seems bizarre. Surely he ought to still be culpable is he said false things with the intention to damage Dominion, even if he can convince the court that he believed the things he said. Unless, of course, you're talking about an insanity defense or a claim of provocation, but those a very different matter, and I highly doubt that's a viable route.
The same question came up with Trump's phone calls to the Georgia AG when the President was essentially threatening the AG to 'do something'. There is apparently a lot of materiality to the notion of how much the President actually believed the issue of fraud.
Which is an altogether amazing new line of defence: "If you believe the lie thoroughly, you're literally less culpable!"
Dominion seems to be very clearly a “Limited Purpose Public Figure” in the domain in which the disputed statements apply.
Their lack of general celebrity is a good argument that they aren’t an “all purpose” public figure.
But the defamer in this case is the President of the United States and his legal team. That sort of falls down.
I wouldn't call it unfortunate. If you don't want to be a public figure, one thing of which to steer clear is certainly the business of operating voting systems in the US presidential election. This is clearly public interest.
The Covenant Kid was thrust into the media and when he sued for defamation, at least some judges accepted the claim that he was a public figure — even though he was suing over the very thing that thrust him into the national spotlight.
Obama was a public official, so the standards for public figures that aren’t public officials wouldn’t apply.
A skilled liar would never for a moment reveal that they did not truly believe what they were saying, not even in private correspondence. Even in typical, not overtly evil companies, the saying "write for the subpoena" is passed around as advice for would-be upfront communicators.
Still, if criminals never made mistakes the justice system would convict almost nobody of anything.
I feel like Giuliani got himself stuck between a rock and a hard place here by filing actual lawsuits.
At that point, he either had to (1) include his claims about Dominion (which were extremely relevant to his lawsuits) and open himself up to perjury or (2) leave his claims out, providing pretty damning evidence in a defamation suit that he didn't believe the evidence himself.
He went with (2) and he only has a tiny bit of wiggle room to prove that he believed the claims / "evidence" but they wouldn't be useful to include in his lawsuits.
Powell and Wood relied on donations for their work and Wood in particular is a multi-millionaire many times over for some of the corporate work he's done. I'm sure Rudy is rich, mostly from the speech circuit post 9/11, but he's not Lin Wood rich. He probably needs to work to maintain his lifestyle.
Giuliani deserves whatever is coming to him.
It needs to be clearly and forcefully demonstrated that knowingly and recklessly and maliciously lying to the public with the intention of causing harm to a company or individual like this carries heavy consequences.
I feel like this is the problem with the discourse right now. It's understandable why you're making that argument, because the media has been saying that for months now. Because in fact a large number of cases were dismissed (so it's not technically a lie), but it's only rhetorically effective if you don't look at the details.
So then we end up with this massive polarization because one side keeps relying on an argument that sounds very convincing to their base who never hear the counterargument, but will never convince the other side who have, and then there is never reconciliation. Or even a motive to find more convincing arguments that there wasn't fraud, because they're only talking to their base and not even trying to convince the other side.
I don’t believe that is true. As far as I know, there weren’t really any claims of voter fraud from Trump’s legal team.
The so-called "actual malice" standard doesn't require proof of intent to damage reputation. It only requires proof that the defendant said the defamatory statement "with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not". New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964). (This is important because Rudy probably didn't care one way or the other about Dominion's reputation; they were just collateral damage as far as he was concerned.)
Notice that Dominion, in their filing comes right out swinging for that very ball. They start out with multiple cases where Rudy publicly alleged fraud then in the related court proceedings, did not alleged the same fraud.
Dominion makes a pretty good case in their filing that Rudy knew his sources were not reliable and so he avoided making those same accusations in court. They also show multiple examples of Rudy publicly making these fraud claims on his show while selling products like cigars and cyber security services. "just use the code word 'rudy' to get 20% off your purchase."
Even so, the entire idea that a group of hucksters can completely annihilate the reputation of a company based on absolute nonsense from a bunch of angry losers is a bit frightening.
Republicans have been claiming for years, completely
without merit, that Dominion has been involved in a
variety of vote-changing schemes
I also doubt Trump is the end point.
So now their owners[1] need to figure out how to get whatever value they can. This isn't a "campaign", it's just a business effort. They've been transformed into something like an IP holding company, where the IP is the damage suffered by the original outfit. They'll sue everyone they can.
(They'll also probably manage to recoup some value by selling what's left of the company to someone else who then rebrands them and tries to sell back into the markets that have been poisoned. Something very similar happened with Diebold a decade ago, which was then sold to ES&S and thence to, yes, Dominion.)
[1] No idea how they're structured, but per wikipedia they're a private corporation.
Software systems can easily be hacked, and it isn't easy to inspect and tell. A vote is a one time, one sided transaction. It's not as easy to detect fraud in an election as it is with say, a double entry banking record.
The only way I can think of to actually do this is to have some trusted party go out and randomly sample voting machines (i.e. check the software on the disk matches the reproducible builds of the open source software, and decap the machine's CPU and other hardware to verify there's no bugs).
Anything else can be foiled by malicious software or hardware.
I can already hear the politicians going on about how "being open source" lets "anyone put their own back door in! BE AFRAID!"
And that's impossible.
People who think open source is the solution to the voting challenge haven't given this problem much thought.
You claim that open source is NOT safer than closed source, what is your reasoning there? Security through obscurity?
When I learned that the US actually uses software in its elections, I was shocked. It’s unthinkable here in the UK.
Not just in the UK. Most Western democracies consider the idea completely crazy because nothing can be properly audited once papers are removed.
[1]: https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
From what I've read, there are some states/localities that have paper ballots they can check, including swing states like Georgia, where they did audit that exact thing.
But then there are other states that do not keep the paper trail, most of which went "red" according to an article I read but did not verify.
It's easy to say that software can just be hacked, but just because its a possibility doesn't give you the right to invalidate an election.
The people putting forward voter ID laws usually do the opposite. They want to make obtaining an ID more difficult and make that ID a requirement to vote. If we just say "getting and ID should be easy" but don't actually make it easy, and then we increase voter ID requirements, we are disenfranchising voters.
The biggest reason to doubt the "voter fraud" theories this time around is because of who is making the complaints, not because the voting companies (or the laws surrounding e-voting) are beyond reproach.
Well, there's also the fact that the folks advancing these theories are insisting that they're being "kept from gathering the evidence", when in reality much of what they're saying is contradicted by evidence.
For example, the instances cited in the lawsuit where Giuliani and others continued to insist that Dominion voting machines had changed the Georgia election outcome by flipping votes, even after the original results had been confirmed by a full hand recount.
That's a valid concern when you're dealing with a good-faith actor. But if voting machines are open-source (which I heartily support), they'll move on to baselessly discrediting something else to shape public perception. The problem isn't the technology per se. The problem is we're not dealing with a good-faith actor.
There needs to be a very high tolerance of criticism towards voting machines and the companies that make them. Ordinary standards of transparency are not enough, for example.
https://statescoop.com/georgia-buys-new-voting-machines-with...
Edit: grammar.
So, I think the dissenters at least got the skepticism part right. The problem, of course, is that a healthy level of skepticism should only inform the investigation of facts, and then perhaps new legislation and oversight. Without the investigation, oversight or legislation... the skepticism is pointless.
For example, it's unfortunate that gaming machines in Las Vegas have more oversight and regulations than voting machines. That doesn't necessarily there is a problem with voting machines, but it does mean we could do more to ensure there isn't a problem with them now or in the future. Dominion has not done anything to lose my trust, but when it comes our elections, we should have proper oversight over these machines (no matter who makes them since there are multiple suppliers for voting machines).
So many "skeptics" are actually incredibly trusting patsies, they're just trusting con-men instead of mainstream discourse.
Which is the tell that Trump didn’t believe his own claims of vote fraud. Bear in mind he pulled exactly the same stunt in 2016 claiming massive vote fraud but when he won never mentioned it again until 2020.
If he’d actually believed there was vote fraud or a chance of it, he would have done something about it. Investigations, hearings, technical audits, best practices and standards. Statistical analysis to identify issues (as against the analyses that do happen that show insignificant fraud). He had 4 years to sort this out. You’d think it would be one if his top priorities.
Of course none of that happened because the whole show is entirely performative. In fact doing anything about it would take his excuse away, because if he addressed vote security he couldn’t blame vote security issues on anyone else.
Voting machines didn’t steal the election. But they’re a terrible technology. - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/03/voting-mac...
And worst of all is ES&S' threats against folks who point out those legitimate flaws, e.g. SMART Elections, a journalism and advocacy group in NY.
ESS voting machine company sends threats https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2021/01/11/ess-voting-machine-...
What we need is evidence-based elections:
Evidence-Based Elections: Create a Meaningful Paper Trail, then Audit Andrew W. Appel* & Philip B. Stark* Georgetown Law Technology Review 2020 https://georgetownlawtechreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/...
And though we have improving evidence for correct tabulations in the recent elections, many states still aren't doing a good job providing evidence for ballot eligibility or chain-of-custody.
The best way to promote confidence in our democracy is to calmly stick to facts, not be swayed by politics, and work to make things better. For more on how we've done that in Colorado and elsewhere, see my page at http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/elections/corla/
We've already seen this happen–when YouTube started putting labels on all COVID-19-related content, deniers were unsatisfied by the sources presented because they have been indoctrinated to believe nothing mainstream can be trusted.
The correct answer is to prevent them from saying things.
They'll use any excuse to delude themselves that they're correct, because to admit otherwise is to admit that they were dumb enough to have been conned by a terrible conman. When they saw the morons attacking congress, they convinced themselves "people wearing helmets are Antifa, and all the attackers are Antifa plants...".
After all, is there any evidence for voter fraud in Russia?
> After all, is there any evidence for voter fraud in Russia?
The accusations of there being no voter fraud in the 2020 US election fraud aren't baseless: all the verification checks have passed, and for that to happen and fraud to have occurred would require a conspiracy of unbelievable scale and secrecy. Also, the claims that there is fraud are not just baseless, they're incoherent.
While Russia may make baseless claims their elections are fair, there's more than enough evidence to disbelieve them (like how they disqualify and murder their political opponents).
Dominion Voting Systems must prove that Rudy Giuliani was making up information to succeed in this court case. Unfortunately, defamation is surprisingly hard to win in the USA (which is why the US's Tabloid media can get so far with so many claims).
Dominion Voting Systems is not a public figure however, its a company. That... probably makes it easier to win this case.
Still, if Dominion's lawyers think that this case is worth pursuing (despite the difficulty of defamation / libel / slander), that doesn't bode well for Rudy.
See the leaked memos from Diebold here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~matth/lists/
In the case of Georgia, a full recount (by hand) was done on the paper ballots.
Dominion acquired all of the material assets of Premier, which was a renamed Diebold, from ES&S due to an anti-trust lawsuit.
Now, ES&S has issues, but you're not going to hear anything about that. Because ES&S machines are used in places like Kentucky, South Carolina, and Florida.
That's Dominion's statement. They're describing a pretty exceptional situation / distant from what I would think of as security research.
Obviously that's not a legally binding statement or anything but I think that at least illustrates what this situation is about.
This isn't a case of someone being mistaken or putting forth a good faith concern about security.
These accusations are based in nothing at all, disproven, and Giuliani and others just kept at it.
Researchers usually have actual evidence for concerns and so forth. And their motivations usually really is security.
This situation with Giuliani and actual security research seem completely disconnected.
You can see how they work in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9BDiO3JGTs
Had this election been entirely hand-counted, the same claims of fraud would have arisen. When a candidate declares in advance of an election that he can only lose if there is fraud, you can be sure he will act in bad faith if he loses.
Incredulity was all he needed to claim fraud - the numerous conspiracy theories explaining the fraud would inevitably surface after the fact. If it's not Dominion voting machines, it's dead voters, boxes of ballots showing up, and hand wavy claims of the opposition being in charge of the counting and abusing that role.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02613...
[0] https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
Does the future of voting not belong to online remote voting, like almost everything else? You can even buy a house from your phone now. In the future, we will know the results of the election as soon as the online polls close.
The future is paperless.
1. Voters vote by marking ovals with a marker pen on paper ballots.
3. The paper ballots can be counted by the optical scan machines that are already widely used in many places.
4. The paper ballots can be hand counted.
5. All the ballots can be published, allowing anyone to independently verify the counts.
6. An individual voter if they choose to can make a note of short alphanumeric code that is revealed when they vote for a candidate, and using that note later can verify that their vote was included in the total and went to the correct candidate.
7. An individual voter cannot prove to a third party that they voted for a particular candidate.
Here is a paper on such a system: https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf
Wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
Here is a paper showing how it satisfies item #7: https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502
Almost all of the cryptographic mojo takes place when the ballots are printed, so no modifications are required to the scanners. You do have to use a special marker to mark the ballots.
Doing the cryptographic verification of all the votes would almost certainly be done by software, but as all the ballots are published and the system is completely open and documented, independent parties can easily do their own counts. The software is also fairly simple.
It's funny how things change. Just five years ago, HN was awash in people shouting that paper ballots are not secure and everyone should switch to electronic. Now the conventional wisdom is the opposite. Much like the way that in the 90's, keeping a password on a Post-It note was considered not secure, and now it's the safest thing going.
Instead, time after time, we get shady software from shady people with disturbing political connections (I’m not talking the dominion thing either — this seems true for all voting software). The idea that crooked politicians hire crooked companies to wrire crooked software shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
Subscribing to this kind of "digital bad" dogma is lazy because you don't have to think for yourself.
But when people think elevator software is broken, they don't take the elevator. When (enough) people think voting software is broken, they topple governments and start civil wars.
And some people who disagree with you are still thinking for themselves. That "not thinking for yourself" is lazy argument.
This here is another example, nobody did any voting security research, some Trump associates just made up the idea, and were able to easily spread that messages to millions of people, playing a large part in inciting an attempted coup. The maker of that device is now suing for damages, as they should, and your concern is free speech again.
It seems almost performative.
https://www.youtube.com/c/RudyWGiuliani/videos
Of all the claims that stuck out to me is the suitcase video, since it time corresponds with a one sided spike of votes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUtmBrgIC9w
But you can also watch his commentary on the suitcase video here:
You can just sort of skim that. He made dozens of fact-specific allegations over the course of months (ie. not carefully phrased).
None of it matters, of course, because realpolitik, and the biggest sin of the viking cosplayers was believing that any of this evidence matters.
Ok but did you look?
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/politics/georgia-election-officia...
The only thing the statement adds is that they investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong. That is not the same thing as having observers. Even North Korea investigates its own elections and concludes that it does nothing wrong.
However, if anyone else is actually interested in an explanation of this incident from the people in charge of the election, check out this 60 Minutes clip:
Ralph was in charge at State Farm Arena when those videos were filmed.
Edit: yes, I called him and we spoke back in December for about 30-45 minutes. I originally called about the barriers blocking observers during the recount and then asked about the suitcases as well.
Not new. I've had paper voting receipts for at least 15 years. Probably longer.
Is this standard now, or on a state by state basis?
There are no voting machine standards. It varies by state, and in some states by county.
Some people see that as a flaw. I see the diversity of voting systems as a security plus. There was even an article in the newspaper shortly after the election stating that certain foreign governments looked into hacking America's voting systems, but it wasn't worth the effort because they were all constructed and implemented differently.
https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems
Hopefully they improved the security since then...
I know quite a few people that fully believe that voting is effectively a sham now.
Unfortunately this is because they want to believe lies. If they did a small amount of Googling or simply watched a mainstream news source, they’d find that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan all used auditable paper ballots or receipts.
7/8 states that use unverifiable electronic voting machines that don’t have a paper trail went for Trump (e.g. Louisiana). The other is New Jersey, which wasn’t even accused of fraud by Giuliani or Trump.
1) A block function so we could cut the massively-upvoted, one-sided comments and get to the impartial or contrary information buried underneath them.
2) A "unfade" button to see the massively-downvoted comments.
I've generally found when threads take on this imbalanced and highly-polarised state, the stuff on the top isn't the cream.
The tone of "I see no reason.. limited value" seems a bit condescending to what appears to be a sizable portion of HN that values intelligent debate, and there can be no debate with only one viewpoint.
True, but only if there's more than one thread on the page.
If @antirez is reading this, would love if you could provide any useful insights. FYI, I ask becuase of your background in research and development of "TCP Idle Scan" back in '98.
Dominion machines aren't on the internet. Dominion doesn't have centralized access to all of their machines.
Could they eg send out an army of technicians to every voting location and use some insane side-channel attack to physically read and flip bits from across the street? Sure. But by that logic it's also "not impossible" for you or I to launch the US nuclear arsenal.
I think saying that "it is technologically possible to see votes being counted in real-time or to flip them" is "technically correct" but obviously not actually correct in any reasonable sense.
So it's not just a LAN connection that would be isolated to the network in the voting place (what you'd expect).
They also reported sending out updates to the machines in some precincts after certification, just before the election: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/04/georgia-election-ma... (not sure of the current veracity of this but bookmarked it as it was interesting).
They are not arguing that it is impossible for such a system to ever be built, they're arguing that their system is not built that way. Voting machines are audited and have a chain of custody, it would be very difficult to argue that "someone could hack all the machines and install this capability" fits within the realm of possibility.
We had an election here yesterday. Each voter just filled in a pre-printed paper and dropped it into a box. COVID restrictions meant we had up to 10 minute queues depending on time of day, normally it's much faster. Each polling table is self-contained and had less than 1000 votes to count at the end of the day. They're just setup in school buildings on a Sunday when they'd otherwise be empty. Two hours after the election almost all of them had counted their votes, reported them centrally and that was available on a simple website anyone can see. There will be a central recount in a few days as a double check. It never finds any differences. Each of these polling tables is staffed with 5 or 6 people that double check what each of them is doing and makes it so there's a lot of people involved in the election further increasing the trust of the population in the process, because a not insignificant part of them take part. The scaling of the process is embarrassingly parallel so is workable for any size of country or election. I don't get why anyone would want to go through all the trouble of inventing these complex technology solutions to a non-problem that then create these huge attack vectors not only to actually do something nefarious but even more importantly to convince people that that has happened and rile up a mob.
It's certainly technically possible (which of course it is, if you control the software and access to the machine, you can do what you want).
https://securityboulevard.com/2019/09/voting-machines-still-...
Voting machines are by design undemocratic even if they act exactly as advertised. They allow centralization of vote counting, they are opaque mechanism and single point of failure which by themselves can cast doubt on the whole process.
The entire premise of democratic elections is that the government proves to the little citizen its supported by other citizens. A process which involves the government telling the little citizen the little citizen didn't provide evidence of widespread fraud isn't democratic, how can the little citizen hope to prove to the almighty government anything?
I'm sickened by the thought the same sham notion of elections can reach my country with the support of Facebook and Twitter.
I feel that open sourcing their code would definitely do the trick. It is kinda baffling that something as important as an election is ran on closed-source proprietary codebase.
Why would their code matter? Far more important than the code is the paper ballot audit trail their machines produce.
And that audit trail has been audited by multiple states, run by both Republicans and Democrats, after the election and found to be flawless. The machines counted properly. https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/historic_first_statew...
Thank you!!! There are tons of people who have spent their entire lives thinking about computer voting. Their recommendations are almost uniformly:
1. Dear god no.
2. If so, paper trail.
Looking at the source code when there's an auditable paper trail is a huge idiotic red herring. And, there is an auditable paper trail.
All right dstola: For the purposes of argument, I accuse you of being a thief who has embezzled millions of dollars from some company you've worked for. Instead of suing me for defamation for my lie, why don't you just prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you didn't steal anything? Maybe you could open source your bank account data, and all your movements to show that you couldn't have opened any secret accounts?
That's a ridiculous ask. The malicious accusation of embezzled is a lie that harmed you, and proving your innocence won't compensate you for the harm caused by that lie. These lawsuits are about the harm done to Dominion.
Also, no analysis of any kind would ever satisfy the people who believe the 2020 election was marred by vote fraud. That belief isn't based on evidence, and massive amounts of evidence to the contrary hasn't convinced those people. There's no reason to think one more report would make any difference.
Actually, maybe not open source, but otherwise that is exactly what would happen should I be suspect of being a thief. No reason why dominion cannot show their source code to professional investigators to get their name cleared right? If they are so vocal about being innocent, why not do it?
Well now they'll have to do exactly that in a courtroom. I can't think of a better place for it.
The prevailing opinion of election security professionals is that State election systems should be designed assuming the machines are insecure and the process should be tolerant to that fault.
That's why many states that use electronic voting or tabulation produce a voter verifiable paper trail. That means, when you're done voting the machine gives the voter a piece of paper that has their votes on it. The voter can check the paper to ensure it matches their votes, then deposits the paper record like a ballot.
State's can then use Risk Limiting Audits to verify a necessary amount of randomly sampled ballots to ensure that the electronic count matches the voter verifiable paper ballots.
So, if your concern is that the GA election was overturned by electronic tampering you would need to explain why the voter verifiable paper trail extremely closely matched the electronic tabulation.
This is a long-winded way of saying I agree with you. There are some states that use electronic voting or tabulation without a voter-verifiable paper trail and risk limiting audits. Fortunately, none of those states were "disputed" in this election. But those states should absolutely switch to these kinds of systems.
The identity of the voter is on the outer envelope which is separated from the ballot and destroyed after their signature is checked. An attacker could insert manufactured ballots to be tabulated after this process and there would be no way to know if they are legitimate or not - they’re anonymous now too so you can’t check with the voter and the voter can’t verify their vote.
You can recount the ballots all you want if this attack occurred, because the fake and real ballots would be indistinguishable and unauditable.
So how are these voting machines complete bullshit exactly? What do you think the mechanism of attack is, and do you have any sources other than just your speculation?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/19/us/elections/...
In Floyd county more than 2,000 votes switched sides out of roughly 40,000 votes. So it now has a real world demonstrated error rate of 0.5% which is not insignificant. For example, I would not trust a calculator with a 0.5% error to do my taxes. I wouldn't even us it on an exam.
And why on earth does a voting machine require OggVorbis?
https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/voting_system/files/...
The lawsuit is about claims that are straight BS...
But these seem to record on each machine for a quick count the night of, but then also produce a paper ballot for an audit. Much better. It would be even better if the paper ballot was easy for the voter to quickly validate.
But as long as the machine is really just helping you mark a paper ballot, and it's the paper ballot that is "official" end the end, it seems much safer.
Hopefully you can see the problem with that...
That statement goes against everything I've read about voting in the U.S.A. However, I don't think I have actually read everything. What did you read? Is there a link that I can follow?
But tribalism still rules, so lots of praise abounds about how well things went. Mostly because their opponent lost.
Frankly, we need publicly auditable records. For some reason we can request practically any non-classified data from the government... but not fine grained, anonymous voting data.
That nobody seems to think this is a problem is... well, not shocking. But when the party that Hacker News largely opposes wins in the future, I bet (hope) there will be calls to improve our infrastructure.
I think maybe that's psychological bias at play and not, say, actual affirmation that the system is resilient, let alone adequate. The number of downvotes I've gotten without a single reply is quite suggestive of this.
Seriously disappointed in this community of some of the most enlightened technical and scientific minds in the world, right now...
The paper ballots can then be used for risk limiting hand audit afterwards to verify that the machine count was accurate, or in the case of a close race a full hand recount.
Such analyses are de rigueur in the development of software in regulated industries (medical devices, aviation, etc.)
Should the development of election systems software be regulated?
I wonder how they debugged the code then
Foreign agent hacker compromised machine stories are more interesting and shocking maybe.
Still, after the Georgia recount you'd think they would have dropped the machine claims but they kept at it.
Where did those stories originate in the first place though? And why? Maybe some of this will come to light during the lawsuits.
Powell and Giuliani's behavior and claims seemed pretty far out to me. Maybe they were misled, maybe they were just foolish and looking for a sensational story. Hope we find out.
Imagine how much we could cut out.
So my question is this: How much of those auditable trails have actually been audited, in what places, and in what numbers (I don't think spot checks will suffice to reassure people, the numbers need to be a statistically significant percentage in the most contested places), and, more importantly where are the results of these audits being published?
Even after the hand-count clearly confirmed that the machines had not switched any votes, Guiliani spread the same lie. This is actually documented in the suit.
Mind you, it is not that the vote-tally machines leave a paper audit trail. The vote-tally machines work by scanning the actual paper ballots.
Ah ty, this is what I was wondering, I figured the outrage was mostly posturing but still want to approach the issue outside of that drama. I mostly want to see where the audit results are published.
And FWIW, there are absolutely ZERO Fox News articles on either lawsuits, while every other news org covered it. I wonder why
BMO has something similar but it's $6,000. The rest (last time I checked) didn't really offer something like that.
Diebold used to be the bête-noire of computer security people. Not particularly relevant but Dominion inherited Diebold with one of their acquisitions.
0. https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006...
I am saying it would be good to have much more confidence in the voting system than we have. From any political persuasion.
How would this be used against researchers or watchdogs in your opinion?
Researcher: "Your machines have USB ports exposed, can flash firmware, connected to the internet, don't produce an auditable paper trail, and I hacked into a machine personally. 100% secure is demonstrably false."
Voting Machine Company: "Well, a third party verified that it is 100% secure so we're going to sue you (and probably not win) but it will cost you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend, unless you cease and desist."
That is what makes them legitimate.
And folks, let's not act like this is the first time voting systems have been scrutinized.
They are forced to sue to prove they are not in the wrong, however that will spun as choosing sides and they could be kicked out when the contract ends. For the cult, this company and the service they provide is just another cog that should be controlled and they will try to get some enabler in there.
If this leads to voting machines being pulled then at least something good came out of it?