Why would I trust anything with "off the shelf" parts (China) and elections in California?
You've listed two pieces that are not truly in favor of legitimate or honest elections.
You've listed two pieces that are not truly in favor of legitimate or honest elections.
> How Does a RLA Work?
> A risk-limiting audit examines a random sample of paper ballots, comparing them to the machine count to ensure that the winner actually won.
> The number of votes needed to manually count depends on the margin of victory. The closer the margin, the more votes we manually count. The RLA confirms that, if a full hand-tally were performed, it would give the same outcome.
Put another way, the malicious voting machine plays a game: It makes the first move by lying about the tally and incorrectly claiming that candidate X wins.
If the machine claims X won by a large margin, then a small randomized recount exposes its lie. If the machine claims X won by a small margin, then a full recount is performed.
Crucially, with high probability (it can be set arbitrarily high), the faulty voting machines get caught the first time they attempt this, and then are thrown away.
There are some voting machines in use in the US that do not keep paper trails. There's widespread evidence of systematic fraud with those machines in swing districts, going back to a least 2004. (Old paperless mechanical machines had the same problem.)
Uhh, citation please?
particularly with the claim of “widespread” and “systemic abuse” casually tossed in.
do we doubt machines have been hacked? of course not, you’re on hackernews, we all attended defcon voting machine village, but yes, “widespread” and “systemic abuse” needs to be backed up with something more than, “it happened to joe and jim two streets over so obviously it happened to jill next door.”
The claim is “widespread evidence of fraud”. I’d like to see any of the widespread evidence and not hand wavey back tracking to “could be compromised”.
Requiring the evidence to be widespread in order to acknowledge the risk is real and impactful is shortsighted and “hand wavy”.
i’m sorry, that’s a very bold statement to make without a number of reliable citations…
Eye On Ohio: The Informed Citizen's Guide to the 2004 Election http://hamburgsteak.sandwich.net/mirrors/EyeOnOhio/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_election_vo...
https://www.amazon.com/Was-2004-Presidential-Election-Stolen...
https://www.projectcensored.org/voter-fraud-august-2005/
https://www.amazon.com/Stole-Americas-2004-Election-Rigging/...
The difference is that the voting machine incumbents wrap their hardware and software in unfair licenses with single source provisions so municipalities end up paying a huge markup over retail to get “certified gear”.
In San Francisco one of the voting machines I managed as a poll manager in 2018 was a early pentium machine with a BIOS and floppy. These machines were never designed to be remotely attested let alone tamper evident like modern Chromebooks.
Anyways, the VotingWorks systems are all based on paper ballots so hand counts and risk limiting audits are options if the hardware is found to be untrustworthy.
It does not stop people from stuffing ballot boxes, but it does stop people from fudging the machine count too much.