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Comment by ibejoeb | Hacker News Reader

> Smartmatic accused Rupert Murdoch’s network of promoting a false narrative about the 2020 election

I can't wait to see the evidence. That'll prove that the devices are auditable. They are, right?

If anyone in government really wants to have a notable legacy, here's how: petition the USDS to create an integrated open-source election system, and get people like Matt Blaze and Harri Hursti to run a red team against it.

Enough with the foreign companies creating and operating black boxes. Enough with the smears against people who call for entirely reasonable verification while we have absolute top-tier experts regularly showing us that these systems are deeply flawed. Make elections trustworthy.

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The most incredible factoid for me: These machines, the Smartmatic machines, weren't even really used in the election.

>Smartmatic technology was used only in Los Angeles County, California in the 2020 election. The system we provided to LA County does not count, tabulate or store votes.[1]

A single county in the whole of the United States used them. Verifiable or not, there's nothing this company could of done to change a national election outcome.

Someone somewhere started repeating that Smartmatic currently owned Dominion when their only connection was that they had sold off Sequoia Voting Systems——which Dominion currently owns, more than a decade ago.[2][3] Once that false factoid got in the system it was a convenient enough fact for some political factions that it got repeated everywhere.

[1] https://www.smartmatic.com/us/smartmatic-fact-checked/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartmatic#Sale_of_Sequoia_Vot... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems

Yeah, one of the things you are expected to accept right off the bat going into the conspiracy "evidence" is that all of these companies are essentially the same entity: Diebold, Dominion, Sequoia, SmartMatic, and Edison Research. Once you buy that, you'll also buy that they're all owned by communist China.

I thought it was Venezuela?

Same thing, as far as conspiracy theorists are concerned.

That is a critically important point. Their willingness to conflate entities that are distinct to other people gives them a broken worldview that is very hard to understand.

I can't wait to see the evidence. That'll prove that the devices are auditable. They are, right?

When Fox talking heads are claiming Hugo Chavez had a hand in the design, and "The Smartmatic software is in the DNA of every vote-tabulating company’s software and systems", I don't think the ability to audit the machines will come into play. What will come into play is whether or not any of Fox's unsubstantiated shit-talking can be taken to be true. IANAL, and I have might have a particular dislike for all parties involved, but I don't think we'll get the evidence we'd like to see.

I agree with the anti black boxes, but it won't solve the disinformation. Once the code is available someone who is either ignorant or intentionally lying will make up some story about how it's vulnerable - and the lay people will eat it up because they want to believe it, and will believe they have proof.

That seemed to have happened even though the code wasn't available. So yes, you are absolutely correct, people will lie, willfully or ignorantly.

> If anyone in government really wants to have a notable legacy, here's how: petition the USDS to create an integrated open-source election system, and get people like Matt Blaze and Harri Hursti to run a red team against it.

Check out the nonprofit VotingWorks, which is far along in already doing this: https://github.com/votingworks For example, their system has been used in Mississippi in real elections.

Awesome, thank you.

What makes you think people will accept The One True Machine from the feds is any better?

Source code. If they don't like it, they can audit it themselves.

Or, you know, they can do what they always do - take a piece of totally benign information (in this case source code), confidently and wrongly contend that it's a back door for the socialists and scream about it on fox news.

How will they know the source code they're reading is what's on the machines?

An important part of elections is for people to understand and trust the process. Paper is easy to understand; you and a bunch of your neighbors counting paper votes is easy to trust. Maybe mix in a machine to speed up the process that is also verified by hand.

Yet I can't help but think nothing will convince those who so easily believe in a vast conspiracy to alter election results spanning multiple states with different political leanings and cultures.

You can use homomorphic encryption that allows the vote (after-the-fact) to be auditable but secure and allows individuals to validate that their vote was counted accurately.

Microsoft has a project that seems to work in this direction:

https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard

Ah yes, the average citizen will definitely trust that "homomorphic encryption" isn't just some nonsense made up so the election can be rigged.

The difference is that with something like ElectionGuard - as long as the encrypted result is publicly available - you would remove an entire class of complaints that people have with the current system - individuals would be able to validate that their personal vote was counted appropriately, and you would be able to audit the authenticity of every vote without disclosing/revealing who individuals vote for. Unlike the current system which allows opportunity for fraud and is not always auditable (at least not immediately), the actual voting infrastructure and procedures do not matter as much if we can independently verify the authenticity of the _outcome_.

Many of the people who believe in election fraud do so because the leader of their tribe said there's election fraud and social psychology leads people to tend to believe the things that the leader of their tribe says. This is a human condition issue, not an evidentiary issue.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of why so many people don't trust this election, and it has nothing to do with the technology. They don't trust it because the loser of the election has made up baseless claims of fraud - so that he can continue to line his pockets with his supporters' donations. And those supporters are in far too deep now to accept that they've been hoodwinked for so many years.

Giving up secret ballots has its own issues. Always worth considering, but giving people a way to verify their own vote could lead to vote buying: "vote for X, keep your mouth shut, and show me the verification for $$$".

I’d wager money that “homomorphic” gets interpreted as “gay power rangers” by easily 30% of the voting public in the United States.

The thing that really keeps elections secure, practically, is adversarial observers. If you want people to have faith in the election, this is the system to explain, and demonstrate. You can even go be an observer if you like.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the conspiracy theorist mind. Observers for Trump still lied about fraud after being granted tons of audit/observation access.

You vastly underestimate the imaginations of conspiracy theorists. And the gullibility of those who follow them.

Source code, binaries, and a reproducible binary build system. If you don't modify your compiler to enable reproducible binaries, YOU'RE AGAINST DEMOCRACY.

Can you give an example of what you would characterize as "smears against people who call for entirely reasonable verification"? And while you're at it, who you consider a "top-tier expert"?

It seems to me that the people getting served with lawsuits weren't just concerned about vulnerabilities and calling for verification, they were outright claiming that the election was stolen. And stating made-up ideas about how it was done as facts, at that. Like Sidney Powell saying Dominion machines were designed to count Biden votes as 1.26 and Trump votes as 0.74.

If all they wanted was verification, well, Georgia recounted all the paper ballots by hand and compared the results to what the machines scanned. So did Antrim county in Michigan. So did Dane and Milwaukee counties in Wisconsin -- which Trump's campaign paid $3M to recount. Those recounts didn't show a problem with the machines.

If you believe it was stolen, you have to believe they faked the recounts too, or that they recounted fake paper ballots fabricated to back up the original numbers. But at that point, is it really about the voting machines? You could take the machines out of the picture completely, have an all-paper election, counted by hand starting on Nov 3, and have the exact same allegations that you don't trust the count.

> who you consider a "top-tier expert"?

The authors: https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/voting-village-repor...

Fair enough, I agree those are experts.

Have they been hit with lawsuits or smears? Are they alleging that the attacks they demonstrated were actually used in this election?

Dang, you've got a lot of insurrection apologists in your disgusting community. You complicit sack of shit.

This is unnecessarily rude and not deserved. I get that elections are divisive times in America but that's all over.

We've had decades of technologists and cryptographers being wary of digital voting, however many years of the voting village at Defcon where the only challenge left now is how quick you can exploit it not whether you can.

As an aid beside regular paper voting I think it's probably fine but disliking electronic voting is bread and butter for the types of people who visit this site.

I don't see anyone supporting "insurrection" in the comments.

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