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Comment by aristophenes | Hacker News Reader

The Colorado Secretary of State is unintentionally showing the conspiracy theorists are correct. A single person having physical access to the voting machines, months before the election, who has different political views from the Secretary, is enough to make those machines unusable. When the entire election in a district is run by officials from a single political party, with unlimited access to the voting machines, what is the other political party supposed to think?

I had no opinion before now, but clearly these machines are unusable anywhere.

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This is the opposite of reality.

Colorado resident here. The CO Secretary of State has been proactive about everything election related. There's complete, transparent procedures for voting, there's educational materials about the risk limiting audits that get done for every election.

All registered voters get a ballot in the mail. You can return them by mail, use a secured drop box which reside in locations under security camera. You can check your ballot's status on-line, and get email updates. You can also vote in person, should you want, on election day.

Some yahoo state rep introduced a patently-unfair bill that would have made CO do things like stop counting on midnight of election day, which would almost certainly leave large fractions of ballots uncounted no matter how you vote, mail or in-person. No way around that. Thankfully, the CO legislature is not particularly crazy this year, so it failed.

The conspiracy theorists caused the breech - the Mesa County Clerk is the one that c illegally copied the voting machine hard drives and gave the images to other conspiracy theorists.

You are putting the blame exactly in the wrong place.

You missed my point entirely. The fact that a "breach" could happen and is something that is dangerous means the conspiracy theorists are correct. They feel about the Secretary of State like you feel about the Mesa County Clerk. If the situation was reversed and the Mesa County Clerk was the Secretary of State, would you feel confident about the elections? Who is getting access to the voting machines and what are they doing?

If having access to the machines means that you can affect the results of the elections, and the public cannot safely audit that, then these machines are unusable at all times.

You trust the Secretary of State. You think everyone in the state and country should trust the CO Secretary of State. Fine. But eventually an untrustworthy person gets to that seat of power, it's naive to think corrupt people wouldn't try and succeed. And from that point on they decide election results, and only other corrupt, complicit people run the government. The only real skill they need is to appear trustworthy, as grifters are already good at doing.

The conspiracy theorists just think this has already happened.

We should have a voting system that you would feel comfortable to be overseen by your ideological adversaries.

I trust the CO Secretary of State because she has done the right thing for her entire term, and been open about it, and made educational efforts well before the... conspiracy theorists... got to it. I'm a CO resident, and I pay attention to election issues. I read the CO procedure on risk limiting audits.

There's no way that any procedure would have satisfied the current crop of... conspiracy theorists... because they were determined to find something to overturn the election of some candidates. Tina Peters is a case in point. She violated the procedures.

There's probably voting systems that some ideological adversaries could oversee that I would be OK with - the current CO system comes close. Like I say, I'm a CO resident, and I looked into it.

That said, you should google for Ken Buck, a north central CO Representative. You can find audio recording of him pressuring the Republican Party equivalent of Clerk and Recorder to illegally change election results. Why he's still got his seat in Congress is beyond me.

In hindsight of the lastest US elections my country decided that paper voting is the way to go for the immediate future.

Voting is also an issue of trust of course...

> If having access to the machines means that you can affect the results of the elections

They disabled the security cameras and did something with election equipment, which is now set aside as evidence.

They need to investigate. This would have happened if it was a paper voting machine or a ballot box with votes in it.

This isn’t a “conspiracy theorists are correct” moment. This is a show that the voting system does indeed have protections and supervision around it that identities tampering and resets the supply chain.

It's good to also think about security of paper ballots. Usually, in the United States, public observers from all political parties are allowed to be at all polling places and observe (and help count) all the votes. There is a limited amount of time between the vote and the count, and in that time anyone can watch to make sure nothing is tampered with.

This is why people get uncomfortable with vote counting taking too long or ballots being moved and stored before counting is done. The accountability is gone and whoever controls the process has the ability to tamper.

If these machines need to be observed at all times to prevent tampering, just forget about it. It's unrealistic. Even if they can be protected the public can't trust that, the only people who could truly confirm that would be the people who are in the position to tamper with them.

The Mesa County Clerk wasn't trying to hide what they were doing. If any other County Clerk wanted to tamper and not hide, well we wouldn't be having this discussion because no one would know about it, even if there is a video feed on the machines. Has this happened anywhere else? Can you, as a citizen, confirm no other voting machines in Colorado (or elsewhere) have been tampered with?

Your issues with vote counting taking too long are decent, but the Colorado 2024 election, didn't take too long. Cory Gardner conceded on election night, for example. Since only a particular election is contested by these... conspiracy theorists..., and nobody is trying to get Gardner reinstated I have to conclude something else motivates these... conspiracy theorists...

The Mesa County clerk is indeed trying to hide what she did. I believe she's on the lam, and in hiding right now. It looks to me like the Mesa County clerk took it upon herself to foul the process in illegal ways because the CO procedures worked, despite whatever legal things that Clerk could do. This seems like a pretty standard technique for overthrowing a democratically-elected government: manufacture a scandal, throw out the real results, put in fake results, pass new laws preventing any of your political opponents from taking office ever again.

We're at the "manufacture a scandal" stage.

2024? Are you from the future or something?

Obviously the count took less than -2 years, which is even quicker than getting an instant result.

Don't be pedantic. I'm arguing in good faith here, typos are possible.

Vote counting going too long is a partisan ensuring votes against them get counted last.

Not counting votes is a compromise favouring the party that ran the election.

You shouldn't put them away and start the next day, sure, but you should definitely not stop counting

> The conspiracy theorists caused the breech - the Mesa County Clerk is the one that c illegally copied the voting machine hard drives and gave the images to other conspiracy theorists.

Back when voting machines were made by Diebold and the conspiracy was that they were tipping elections in favor of Rs, this sort of thing would have been taken as absolute proof - by the kinds of people who are today trying to play this all down as not concerning (I guess because it's a contrived or unlikely attack) - that we shouldn't use the machines and that election results could reasonably be doubted.

No. Diebold machines were quite different. What Mesa County is having problems with, and what the... conspiracy theorists... are having problems with, are vote counting machines.

Colorado has paper ballots, not voting machines. Votes are counted electronically, but risk-limiting audits are done on all elections. Some percentage of the paper ballots are selected and counted again. They should come within a percentage of the overall count. A failure of a risk-limiting audit triggers a recount. My memory is hazy about procedures after this.

The huge problems with Diebold machines were multiple: you voted on them. They counted the votes, with no other record, and no receipt to the voter to ensure that the machine counted as the voter wanted. There was no record of the votes other than electronic in the machines, so recounts were meaningless. Diebold's CEO was a partisan, and announced it. Anyone of integrity would have problems with how Diebold did things.

The Mesa County situation is completely different. Paper ballots which can be recounted by hand or electronically, and provide the voter with some small assurance that their ballot is marked the way the voter intends. Systems in place to notify voters that their ballot is in the mail, accepted for counting, and then finally, counted.

Wouldn't a receipt be illegal? You shouldn't be able to prove your vote to a third party

In a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT), the voter doesn't keep the receipt. They're collected just like paper votes and used for auditing.

I remember when I got my vote ballot in Mail while I was living in Denver.

Then I remembered I was not a citizen.

I don't believe you. Did you register as a voting citizen? What's your immigration status? Got any proof of this at all?

Not here to make you believe.

But it is easy to prove and I got called for Jury 2 times too.

It was strange and I got surprised, talked to a friend that said it was not possible. Then I show him the papers and he got more surprised.

I did lookup the laws and saw that casting a vote while not being a citizen was a crime then as good guest I follow the law and did nothing with that.

Being a good guest is a tenet to me.

For me it was strange because in my country you can only vote in person, you have to vote at sunday/holiday and that is it. If a second turn is needed another day.

No mail, no extra days.

I remember this crazy feeling : "whooa they vote by MAIL! Like.. The post service works...amazing"

same thing with paying bills by mail : "Whoa, you put the check on envelope and send it? nobody steal it? serious? there is a person there that gets the check?"

And that was the year the MJ became medicinal and CO flipped.

Conspiracy theorists will be crazy.

And I did not request anything that was the most crazy thing.

I knew a guy who was Canadian, but had a summer job in the USA. Everyone got told they needed to register for the draft so he did and got drafted into the US military for the Vietnam war. Someone figured out he wasn’t American at some point, but they didn’t let him out, he just served a year at a base in the US instead of being deployed. And he didn’t even get citizenship out of it. He was not super bright.

The thing is, the line of reasoning that electronic voting is fundamentally not securable to a sufficient public standard was being advanced a lot before the election, and has a lot of evidence to support it.

E.g. here's sci am on 2016: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/election-sec...

Contesting only elections that don't go your way and providing dubious or nonsense evidence (see various thrown out lawsuits) is simply subverting the process and the electorate.

If they're unusable, then they're unusable everywhere : and the election needs to be run without them.

> When the entire election in a district is run by officials from a single political party, with unlimited access to the voting machines

This probably shouldn't happen. Unfortunately, hyper-polarisation has.

> A single person having physical access to the voting machines, months before the election, who has different political views from the Secretary, is enough to make those machines unusable.

According to the article they disabled the security cameras monitoring the machines for a week.

Once someone deliberately breaks the chain of custody on voting equipment, whether it’s electronic or a paper ballot box, it becomes suspect. Not only that, but the machines are now evidence in the investigation, so they have to be set aside anyway.

Replacing the equipment was the only option. There is no perfectly secure voting system that isn’t affected by chain of custody breaks.

There’s a reason Taiwanese elections look like this: https://thediplomat.com/2020/02/taiwans-electoral-system-put...

You hit the nail on the head. Election systems must be obviously honest to low information voters in the other party who don’t trust the election officials.

"I had no opinion before now, but clearly these machines are unusable anywhere."

All politics aside, it's fairly obvious that electronic voting machines can be very dangerous unless they're handled very, very, very carefully. The contracts for these machines aren't going to the best of the best, they're going to the lowest bidders. As a software engineer, the idea of going from manual, verifiable tabulation to opaque software is completely horrifying.

It is significantly harder to forge thousands of paper ballots. Not impossible, but not nearly as easy as manipulating opaque software or simply gaining access to these machines.

People can actually observe and confirm the tabulation process currently. All machines should be open-source and easily audited if we want to inspire any sort of confidence in them to the average voter.

Ah yes. The conspiracy theorists really showed us! Next, proud boys and Q will team up to buy a pizza place, kidnap a bunch of kids, and create a kid prostitution ring.

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