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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> But I completely and whole heartedly support any audits, lawsuits, investigations, whatever that anybody wants to do.

Improper “audits” are not harmless, they risk destroying (both as evidence of what actually happened, and, in the case of operational equipment, as usable equipment) the items subjected to the audit. That's (both for ballots which have been compromised by the “audit” process and voting machines) been an issue with the Arizona audit.

You can't believe in election integrity and blindly support “any audits, [...] whatever that anybody wants to do.” They are fundamentally mutually incompatible.

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Consider what you're saying about auditing machines. That if a nefarious person has access to them, that it renders them untrustable.

Also consider what you are saying about the ballots, that if a bad person gets access to them post facto, that that is bad.

Neither of those things should be true in a well functioning election system. If the machines are vulnerable to a bad person touching them, then scrap them all.

If the ballots can be tied to voters (as is the accusation in AZ), then the system is broken. MUCH work has been put into to preventing that from being possible. If it is possible, then the election is flawed.

"The Arizona Republic reported in May that because Senate Republicans had given private companies and individuals unfettered and unmonitored access to voting machines, the county might need to expend significant funds and time to ensure the equipment would meet federal, state and local requirements for certifying and protecting election equipment. Hobbs, the Secretary of State, later informed the Board of Supervisors that election technology and security experts, including at the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, unanimously advised her that the machines should not be reused in future elections because no methods exist to adequately secure them.[49][50]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Maricopa_County_president...

>unanimously advised her that the machines should not be reused in future elections because no methods exist to adequately secure them.

Yes isn't that more of an indictment of the machines than anything? Shouldn't these machines simply be able to get a new image written to them and be good to go?

Again if part of the security model of the voting machines is "nobody except trusted people can touch them", then they shouldn't be in use.

Do you use your computer to do anything secure like log in to your bank? How about you give me 1 week with your computer out of your control along with any BIOS/UEFI passwords, then after I return it to you would you still trust it to log in to your bank? Would you think you could sufficiently vet all the software and hardware to ensure I had done nothing to the computer?

Now instead assume I am only given 10 minutes with your computer, and not even the computer it self, just a touch screen with no access to any of the physical ports, and I'm only allowed to use a very limited guest account that can only run one program that is auto run and the account logs out if that program closes. Would you feel safe using that computer afterwards?

> Shouldn't these machines simply be able to get a new image written to them and be good to go?

If you lose trust in the hardware there is next to nothing you can do in software to rectify the problem. The quote "no methods exist to adequately secure them" might be going to far, but it's entirely reasonable to say it would be cheaper to buy 5 new machines than it would be to fully verify and recertify 1 of the spoiled machines.

I would trust it approximately as much as I trust voting machines which aren’t built on open source platforms.

Given that most computers are already backdoored before you buy them and that they spend more than 1 week with the manufacturer I would say that this is an argument against electronic election machines.

I honestly never understood why anyone (except these who manufacture them) would support their use.

Could you show your homework? In particular, how many is "most", and which manufacturers and chip lines are affected?

You are not my teacher.

Never claimed to be. You claim to have an argument, and I want to know more details. Of course, if you don't have evidence to support your argument...

Try to be politer next time and you might just get what you seek.

Tone policing is boring. It sounds like you don't have evidence. Stop spreading anti-democratic propaganda; you sound like a cryptofascist.

> Shouldn’t these machines simply be able to get a new image written to them and be good to go?

If they can be trivially reimaged, that’s already a security problem.

They can go through the entire recertification process with any necessary rebuilding, but the cost of that when you have no certainty what might have been done is unlikely to be less than, and may be much more than (ad hoc diagnosis being much more expensive than production-line manufacturing) just buying a new certified machine.

So…do these machines seriously not go through a recertification process for every election?!

That seems catastrophically stupid.

> Also consider what you are saying about the ballots, that if a bad person gets access to them post facto, that that is bad.

> Neither of those things should be true in a well functioning election system.

A bad person with physical custody of ballots and associated records to perform an audit can also destroy or alter the ballots and/or associated records. Even if the ballots and associated records are structured and authenticated in a way which makes it impractical to convincingly alter data, ballots and aasociated records can be altered or destroyed in ways which make subsequent review impossible. That has been the main concern with ballot handling in AZ.

>> But I completely and whole heartedly support any audits, lawsuits, investigations, whatever that anybody wants to do. I say audit and go through discovery as many times as people want.

> Also consider what you are saying about the ballots, that if a bad person gets access to them post facto, that that is bad.

seems that 1 bad actor can taint the ballots for future discovery.

also, unlimited discovery just leads to a Gish Gallop. looking for traces of bamboo, kinetic artifacts, routers, etc.

>looking for traces of bamboo, kinetic artifacts, routers, etc.

How many conservative friends do you have? I don't think people understand the positive effect that the Arizona ballot has had on their faith in the election.

It was "we're looking for bamboo fibers because there is a claim that these ballots were printed in China, where bamboo is used to make paper, and we didn't find any, so that seems unlikely."

Those CrAzY things actually have a calming effect on the conspiracies, not a fueling one. There are some people who are susceptible to conspiracies who will never let this go (in the same way that their left leaning counterparts never let Russian collusion stories, or governor kidnapping plots go), but for your average, not-that-into-politics conservative voter, the audits are good.

The audit hasn't produced its report yet. They haven't said anything about bamboo fibers one way or the other.

If they had discovered something obvious, it's likely that they would have leaked it (and gotten their report in on time). But I suspect that they'll find something to point out in their draft report due next week -- not a smoking gun, but something sufficient to show that the fraud was just too clever to have left one.

So I'll be curious to know what your conservative friends think when the draft report is released next week. I imagine there will be an HN article about it, so I'll keep an eye out there.

Those people are now 100% convinced that the election was fraudulent... I don't see how that's a good thing?

Which group is 100% convinced the election was fraudulent?

The vast majority of Republicans think the election was stolen - https://www.prri.org/spotlight/the-big-lie-most-republicans-...

That number is likely even higher, now, after the crap that the GOP is pulling in Arizona. One of my close friends (a conservative, who doesn't even like Trump) is now convinced that the Democrats somehow stole the election. It's insane.

Which thing do you think will do more to convince your friend that the election was clean?

1) You are not allowed to look at the ballots, and if you do you are traitor. Just trust us and stop asking questions.

2) Look at these things as many times as you want.

I point out that there have been multiple audits, already, and no proof of fraud was found.

Doing a third audit, with zero oversight/accountability, is not a serious attempt to detect fraud. It's a means to "discover" wrongdoing that can't be proven/disproven and further confuse people about what really happened.

Unfortunately option 2 isn't what's being offered here in any legitimate way. Instead there is a stream of bizarre theories which are given as much publicity as possible, before being quietly discarded and replaced with the next one.

The point isn't to reach the truth, but to cement in people's minds the idea that a massive crime has occurred, based on the psychological bias of "there's no smoke without fire", despite all the smoke being generated by a smoke machine.

This strategy of misinformation has long been known, and was portrayed quite brilliantly in the 1962 film "The Manchurian Candidate":

> Are they saying: "Are there any Communists in the Defense Department?" No, of course not, they're saying: "How many Communists are there in the Defense Department?"

https://www.quotes.net/mquote/121163

> How many conservative friends do you have? I don’t think people understand the positive effect that the Arizona ballot has had on their faith in the election.

Your friends may be different, but all the public evidence I’ve seen is that Republicans and Trump supporters (not exactly the same universe) have gotten less confident in the 2020 election over time (including the course of the AZ “audit”), not more.

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