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.
It's a criticism of the concept of anonymous ballots, not actually a criticism of mail in voting.
You can't say that without saying how large the sample is. Certainly, if the random sample size is "100% of all ballots" it would be enough.
Risk Limiting Audits take that into account. There's a rigorously backed formula for determining how big the sample size needs to be based on the margin of victory. The closer the election, the more ballots are included in the sample.
In fact, you're right that a _very_ narrow margin requires a random sample that ends up being very nearly or actually all votes.
Georgia is a perfect example of this. Georgia applied a Risk Limiting Audit to the Presidential Election. Because the margin was so close, the RLA required them to sample every single ballot cast. The first "complete hand recount" of Georgia was actually a Risk Limiting Audit.
Here is the GA SOS reporting out the results of that first statewide hand recount: https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/historic_first_statew...
As a made up example: maybe some precincts had scanners that worked 100% perfectly, and some had units that occasionally mis-scanned with a rhythm.
Georgia was the closest percentagewise in 2020. 4935487 votes were cast between Trump and Biden, and the difference was 11779 votes. However, even if Georgia went to Trump, Biden still wins, so you're forced to check states with even larger gaps.
However, even in Georgia, to claim the election should have gone the other way with 99% certainty, it is not hard to check wherever you want. This was done by many groups, for example here [1]. Of course, given the sheer idiocy of Trump followers and news support, they don't educate their supporters on any of this, because the facts destroy their claims.
Since voter records are public in pretty much every state (every one I've looked at over the past few elections let you download them), it's trivial for researchers to do this sampling. They do this every election, and that is how they make the statements they do about the extremely low rates of fraud - they did do the testing.
Trump and co did it too, and found nothing. They had the lists immediately, because they started publishing names they claimed were fraudulent, and in each case the media showed them wrong. So they were looking at the names.
And even with those names, and the ability to sample, they still didn't put forth any solid evidence. Sampling irregularities would have been enough to get more eyes looking. But they knew (just like Trump knew in 2016 with his Clinton 3M illegal votes charade that he eventually dropped) that this is a lie.
[1] https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/3rd_strike_against_vo...
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?
And why on earth does a voting machine require OggVorbis?
https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/voting_system/files/...
I have a bridge to sell to anyone who thinks Dominion has actually audited any of these external dependencies.
Do you not remember how problematic the purely paper voting systems were? How many errors were made in the voting and the counts and how long it took to get the final results in close elections? Florida 2000 is a famous, widely-known example. The computers are clearly better.
Also, Florida 2000 is a strange example, considering the present drama. We've only gone from a simple controversy to a more complex one.
Per Bruce Schneier:
> If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems, and you don't understand the technology.
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.
> Floyd County officials discovered about 2,400 ballots that election workers neglected to rescan after a scanner failed and results could not be retrieved from memory cards. Officials attributed the error to “gross incompetence” on the part of the county’s elections director.
Probably as many as review their grocery store receipts, I'd guess. Which is to say, practically none.
But regardless of the above -- the design change to include printed ballots was a big improvement in security and voter confidence in the election.
The QR code could mis-match the printed ballot on say 5% of the ballots and nobody would notice a thing.
Need a recount? Ok, just run em through again, and they'll read the same (wrong) votes again, no problem.
Only a hand count of the paper ballots would catch the mis-match.
Did that actually happen? I don't know. But if the machines are truly reading a QR code, that seems a glaring flaw regardless.
Because according to what I saw presented in hearings, the reading machines actually read the QR code made by ballot-marking-device, not the human readable portion of the ballot.
If true, that seems an obvious design flaw (to be nice) right there.
Assuming this is true, it would be simple to modify the printing software such that the QR code vote is different from the human readable vote.
A recount, by running the paper ballots through the machine again, would come up with the same result as the first time.
The only way to catch it would be to hand-count the paper ballots and compare the results to the machine counted votes.
Really though, the QR code should be eliminated, so that the voter is able to personally verify what the machine will actually read.
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?
Did the US court system show massive fraud? No. Did they show fraud that wasn't massive but could still have changed the outcome of the election? No.
Were you cheated out of winning the election? A thousand times no.
It was never heard in court. I think that's what people are upset about. If they felt it had its day in court, they would feel differently. Instead, they have the media patting their heads explaining that "it's all fine." Fraud didn't have to be proven; it simply had to be shown to have been possible. The question is whether protections were breached that keep fraud from not being possible.
Listen, I'm a "Bernie Sanders" Progressive. I didn't vote because both candidates were too conservative for me. I don't really have a horse in this race.
That said, this clip shows that the US didn't take its electoral systems seriously. Georgia hasn't applied a security patch since 2012? Really? And you and the entire media are telling me that it wasn't possible when this clip is pretty clear that it wasn't just possible but fairly easy.
It reminds me of when a blockbuster film comes out and it's a stinker, but a lot of money was dropped on it. So there's an effort to make up the opening weekend by having the media sing its praises. "'Cats' is an amazing film!" But it doesn't work. Your strategy isn't working and won't work. The only way forward is to let it have its day in court.
You're right, that's what the courts are saying. I don't think most people are buying that, though. There's too much video evidence and testimony to dismiss every motion. Georgia, for example, is a mess. To say that it's fine is taking the result you want and working backwards. (Again, I'm a Bernie Sanders guy. I don't like either of them! :-)
It's like a clean room. You can't have video of people walking in with their outside clothes, without going through the processes and then say, "You have to prove that it contaminated the room." You don't; it's enough to show the process was tainted. There's enough evidence to show that with the existing video and hundreds of witnesses.
The clip I linked to shows that our electoral systems are a train wreck in many states, especially when compared to other countries. (Go watch it.) Now we're screwed. Tens of millions of Americans feel (pretty validly) cheated out of their vote and it has created a no-win situation.
I hate this topic. What are you working on? Any new insights? :-)
States and election officials of states run elections. They are given a lot of latitude in how they run elections, limited by state law and state constitution edits that are also controlled by state legislatures. State courts can only evaluate wrong doing based on those rules, laws, and such, if they are messed up, the courts can't fix them unilaterally.
> You can't have video of people walking in with their outside clothes, without going through the processes and then say, "You have to prove that it contaminated the room." You don't; it's enough to show the process was tainted.
That is not how law works in the USA or any country that I'm aware of. You have to prove that wrong doing occurred, not prove that wrong doing did not occur. The burden of proof is always on the accuser, not the defendant. Science works the same way (something is a theory if it can't be disproven, not if it can be proven that it can't be disproven).
State Constitution changes are often controlled by the people, ultimately, not the legislature, which has occasionally been used in Presidential election cases to argue that such State Constitutions cannot constrain regulation of state elections because they are not under the exclusive control of the legislature. The federal courts have, IIRC, consistently and emphatically rejected this logic, though.
I'm saying the wrong doing is invalidating the electoral process.
A crime is a crime regardless of whether it effects the outcome. It is fairly straightforward to prove that you stuffed a thousand ballets if you actually did that, we just have to show evidence of what you did! It is impossible to prove that you or someone else didn't stuff ballots, because it is logically a possible that it occurred. IE proving existence is something that is possible, proving non-existence is something that is impossible.
> I'm saying the wrong doing is invalidating the electoral process.
I'm saying that there is simply no evidence of wrong doing so the courts have nothing to act on. We haven't even made it to the "should the wrong doing invalidate the electoral process" yet.
This is substantively false. As well as the cases that did actually go to trial, many of the other cases heard the allegations and the descriptions offered of the evidence for them, viewed them in the light most favorable to the election challengers, and determined that they could not support the claims of any actual violation.
The only thing that didn’t happen in those cases, is the other side didn’t have the opportunity to find additional defects in the challenger’s evidence, but since the claims and evidence offered for them were inadequate to support any violation in the first place, that’s not really consequential.
A prevailing opinion about apples doesn't apply to oranges.
Instead of thinking of them as "voting machines with a paper trail," think of them as "reliable, trustworthy paper ballots that are made clean and uniform using a machine."
The point is that the output is a paper ballot which can be (and often is) hand-counted for auditing and verification purposes. Paper ballots rule.
Suppose candidate X beats candidate Y by 20% according to the machine count. You can then pull a randomly selected subset of the paper ballots and count them. You only need to pick a fairly small subset to establish that the 20% machine count is accurate to within a margin of error much smaller than 20%.
This is called a risk-limiting audit.
If X beats Y by 10% according to the machine count, you need to include more paper ballots in your risk0limiting audit.
In general, the closer X and Y are, the more paper ballots need to be in your audit.
If it is close enough, like it was in Georgia, the risk limiting-audit turns into a full hand recount of all the paper ballots.
Most elections, though, aren't that close, and you only need to hand count a relatively small random sample of paper ballots to with very high probability verify that the correct candidate was declared the winner.
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.