Wi-Fi sniffers strapped to drones: odd plan to stop election fraud | Hacker News Reader

Wi-Fi sniffers strapped to drones: odd plan to stop election fraud

arstechnica.com

36 pointssunbum133 comments

This demonstrates such a poor misunderstanding of how elections and elections equipment work, that this can only be assumed to be a fundraising stunt.

I've been a poll worker in Ohio off and on for 3 years, and at no point does any polling location send any voting data over any network of any kind. There's literally nothing to hook a router or access point up to that contains any votes.

* At least in my county, the electronic pollbooks in each voting location ARE networked to the other pollbooks in that location so that we can see WHO voted, etc. but this is just the pollbooks, which is necessary to prevent folks from voting twice by trying to check in at a different pollbook. Each electronic pollbook is also backed up by a paper pollbook, and we reconcile all the totals several times a day to make sure that we have an accurate count of how many ballots have been issued and how many ballots are in the ballot box.

Hidden wireless (5g! Get cancer while you vote!) modems implanted in voting machines in secret by kim jun un and the illuminati! /heavy on the sarcasm

I suspect that the point of this technology is to experience false positives, thereby sowing further discord and distrust. They will find signals everywhere, if they are even indeed interested in bothering to filter for them, and will claim this is evidence that the next election is being stolen.

I’m not into Lindell or whatever is going on here, but that said closed source voting machines that are not open for audit and have remote access setup really do not sound like the ideal platform for trust. Really if you wanted people to distrust these machines I couldn’t think of a more perfect solution for distrust than that.

And then sue anybody who questions the machines security.

Loads of people raise concerns about electronic voting machines without getting sued, it's making wild direct claims that they're switching votes while writing in internal emails you know it's false that gets you in trouble...

I’m talking appearance which is not necessarily the same thing as reality. Public trust is about appearance.

One of the biggest problems with these nutjob movements is that they're playing off very real problems to fuel their circuses. Proprietary untrustable voting machines have always been a major problem. You used to be able to bring this up, and since it wasn't a partisan issue, people would at least hear you out even though they understood little about the technicals. But these days if you talk about it to most people or without including a bunch of nuanced disclaimers, you're pigeonholed as if you're part of this mentally ill cult. So reasonable opposition/criticism gets pushed into this shitty position of just having to support the status quo, despite seeing its glaring problems and injustices.

This statement is basically a metaphor for really any political issue. Modern political discourse is about picking sides and entrenching defenses rather than developing reasonable, nuanced takes on individual issues.

100% agree. I think it's just gotten much worse recently with the rise of Facebook geniuses and the like. I used to ignore both major parties, vote third party or deliberately not vote, comfortable that they were roughly balanced and would do roughly similar magnitude damage. I can't fully rule out just getting more conservative as I get older, but these days it feels like there's basically one half-sane option where the preaching-to-the-choir issues are at least still mostly the fringes of the party. The last primary election I found myself reading candidate blurbs on dogmatic issues trying to figure out which candidates were merely paying lip service to the expected narratives and wouldn't actually focus on them as a priority.

This has basically never been even slightly true. Look at Bush Jr normalizing torture and mass surveillance while starting a war based on false presences that killed a half million people and cost trillions.

Basically you threw away your vote because you didn't understand any of the stakes.

Oh golly gee, I'd never considered that before. Thanks for enlightening me.

Of course we have no data about the counterfactual where Gore was president instead. Half of Bush's wars were a direct reaction to external stimulus. The "Patriot" act was a bipartisan thing. And when the team in office did change, it's not like Obama did much of anything to roll back Bush's activities - hence the equivalency of considering both parties not terribly opposed to authoritarianism, just favoring different flavors of it.

Gore was for Afghanistan and against Iraq. It's hard to see him being for that war when he was against it in fact in our timeline

Furthermore the outgoing regime has a plan for al-queda which Bush ignored along with all the other obvious clues.

You ignored an election and a corrupt drunk became president and half a million people died.

So Gore would have just sat around twiddling his thumbs and not doing anything that Bush didn't do? That's the part you're ignoring.

FWIW that particular election I voted third party. And "show support for this bad candidate if you don't want to suffer this even worse candidate" is exactly the dynamic I reject, especially when the other tribe is doing the exact same thing with the candidates reversed. Also I was in a state that consistently goes one way, so pragmatic consequentialist arguments carry even less weight.

There is no reason to believe that Gore who contemporaneously expressed support for a different strategy would have followed the exact same track as Bush.

You can't actually reject that dynamic we are stuck with it until we fix it.

> There is no reason to believe that Gore who contemporaneously expressed support for a different strategy would have followed the exact same track as Bush.

and I have said nothing of the sort.

> You can't actually reject that dynamic we are stuck with it until we fix it.

according to you.

According to math and reality where you have 2 major parties that split the vote relatively equally.

- You can't win the presidency by the popular vote this means you could easily need 60-70% of the popular vote to actually get a majority of the EC vote. The major players can depend on "safe" states like Washington, California, Texas whereas you can depend on wasting massive chunks of your wins buying 1/4 of Nebraska and 1/3 of Wisconsin and winning exactly zero EC votes for all the votes you gained in those states.

- If you don't get 50%+1 EC votes it goes to the states which decide with one vote per state. The Republicans win this on numbers.

- If you take more from one side than the other then if you do not win you tank the side this is by definition more like yourself

The person with the Republican or Democratic Party nomination might in theory win by having a pulse and a mouth you will win if you are literally Jesus.

For any given action you can compute the expected benefit by multiplying the value positive or negative by the probability of that outcome and combining the possible outcomes. For instance we can asign for the sake of argument a Trump win with a value of -100 and the value of a hypothetical Biden aalternative candidate with major traction if successful as +5. Lets use the value of bidenv2 as our zero point not to say it is of zero value just a baseline.

Lets assign the possibility of a Biden alternative win at say 1 million to 1. If my trusty calculator is working the expected value of a Biden alternative geting substantial traction is -99.999895 the expected value of running Biden alone is -20 if he ends up with an 80% chance of victory after Trump gets the next year to fuck himself. The expected value of running my cat under the Democratic ticket is -100 because we will certainly lose.

This means your stategy is only slightly better than making my cat the Democratic nominee.

Dude the horse is dead and the meat has been fully tenderized, so you can stop beating it.

If it was actually dead people would stop bringing up the twin fictions that it doesn't matter which you vote for and voting for a third party isn't throwing away your vote.

Well the only choice you have is to not play that game. Opposition to valid criticism will take advantage of this and put the quacks front and center. The only choice we have is to ignore the quacks and call out anyone trying to equate us with them.

In the context of technical discussions about the insecure designs of voting systems based on machines, sure. But how does "not playing the game" work in the context of getting the larger public to care about the real issues, or even just getting election officials to? It seems like the whole dynamic increases the power of election officials to circle the wagons and insist "we're secure, trust us".

Well my point in general is that often, when bringing up contentious topics (and everything is contentious nowadays) you can't let people browbeat or shame you into shutting your mouth. That's what I mean by not playing the game. Don't let them trot out the quacks or otherwise get you to shut up about it and take their side.

It's not about getting "browbeaten or shamed", but rather whether it makes sense to apply energy to a certain topic at the expense of other topics, and how legitimate criticism gets abused to fuel illegitimate pop culture nonsense.

If I were a voting machine researcher or cryptographic voting was my hobby horse, my goal would still be to talk about voting despite the political circus. But rather I'm just a security generalist talking about these things casually. I can choose to spend effort talking about voting, or I can avoid this topic and spend my effort on topics that are more productive.

> But how does "not playing the game" work in the context of getting the larger public to care about the real issues, or even just getting election officials to?

On the plus side, there's already a large fraction of the larger public concerned about election safety. They might be worried about a lot of imaginary problems, but they can still be motivated to push back against electronic voting machines which is a win for addressing the real issues.

Election officials are already highly incentivized to make elections appear fair and transparent. That too can be leveraged to push back against electronic voting machines.

The trick is making sure the people who aren't conspiracy nut jobs aren't afraid to listen to and address the very real concerns with these devices for fear of being lumped in with the crazies on the other team. Insistence/persistence might help, but I think having well reasoned arguments and the support of trusted persons on the "right team" speak up about the issues might help too.

I'm all for empathizing with where people are coming from and trying to engage with that. But in my experience, people caring about an issue as a political rallying cry doesn't translate to them engaging with a topic to understand its specific details. Rather most people are just looking for someone to parrot back their party line so they can bond as being on the same team, and deviating from that script with any kind of nuanced point just gets you othered.

Also 'pushing back against electronic voting machines' isn't really the answer. First, in most places that ship has already sailed. Second, hand counted paper ballots are still quite open to tampering (just not scalable tampering). What we really need is cryptographic voting systems that allow the vote to be independently verified, which would necessarily be implemented with computers, but not in the way those "bad" electronic voting machines work - in other words a whole lot of nuance, especially for people currently getting suckered by snake oil salesmen with wifi drones and the like.

While open-source would be great, in reality who is going to be verifying the binaries on every machine? Human readable paper ballots backed by audits are the gold standard.

These people are so fucking stupid. There's just no being nice about it. They are void of any intelligence whatsoever.

I agree ... I am now a little more stupid for just thinking about this ...

These dummies think a wifi scanner will pick up anything useful and that they can somehow keep drones floating over concrete buildings where wireless signals are highly attenuated, voting takes place and afterwards, around 24-36 hours, and what if there is a cellular modem inside? It won't be picked up by some wifi SSID sniffer. And SSIDs don't have to be broadcast by APs. Total fools.

This opens up another grift opportunity - drones that can do in-flight battery swaps for these drones!

Call Lindell, see if he has any money left.

The best way to deliver lithium ion batteries to those drones is an 18650 cell packaged in a 12 gauge shotgun shell. They fit. And the show is more spectacular when they are fully charged upon impact with the target.

I suspect he is alphabet agency controlled opposition playing the role of the useful idiot to distract the angry mob with a red herring which can later be proven false, thus discrediting everyone who was concerned about election fraud. The tactic is used to perform character assassinations and to discredit conspiracy theories not by proving them false beyond a reasonable doubt but by casting anybody who asks questions as a nutjob.

What election fraud?

I call it negative intelligence - people who are so stupid they make everybody around them more stupid.

Honestly the real conspiracy is that Lindell and other dipshits are making legitimate concerns about voting machines impossible to talk about.

Or we could just offer secure voter IDs to everyone that is legally eligible to vote free of charge.

It could be like selective service. Sign up after your eighteenth birthday to vote.

Also, use scantron style ballots that use computers to automate vote counting but not vote casting, with members of all major political parties monitoring polling stations and vote counting to ensure everything is above board.

Or we could just offer secure voter IDs to everyone that is legally eligible to vote free of charge.

This exists, it's called registering with your address and then going to your local polling place.

Voter fraud is essentially a nonexistent problem.

One day you're going to look back at this comment and it will feel about as comfortable as Gate's yapping about 640k being enough for anyone.

I am curious what you think could happen. I did a lot of looking after all the allegations and all the lawsuits. It is remarkably secure today, all the lawsuis that have been filed, etc. and nothing was found.

Where do you think the vulnerabilities are that can be exploited?

This is why I imagine it was so weird to be Brad Raffensperger during / immediately after the 2020 election. He ran for GA Sec of State on a platform of election security. He took actions he felt were in pursuit of that goal. He was proud of what he had done and the security of Georgia's elections. He supported Trump in the 2020 election. I am not in agreement with some of his approaches but by all accounts he was passionate about his role and generally did his job of making elections happen.

Then his preferred candidate loses. The loser tosses accusations at Raffensperger and friends ranging from incompetence to outright malice. The loser claims the systems Raffensperger has been knee deep in the previous two years are insecure, suspect, compromised. The loser puts personal pressure on Raffensperger to "find" votes.

That had to be one hell of a "what did I do to deserve this?" feeling throughout that time frame.

Bill Gates never actually said that. He had a very detailed idea of exactly what was coming in the next year from that point on and what it would get used for.

Also using mail to register to vote has been used for over 150 years and current voter fraud is practically zero.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/exhaustive-fact-check-find...

Could be true; I also don't trust anything coming from Bill Gates these days, he has his icky fingers in too many pies.

Yes, and the longer a game is played, the more loop holes are found.

Could be true; I also don't trust anything coming from Bill Gates these days,

He explains it here. Where is the evidence that he said it?

https://www.wired.com/1997/01/did-gates-really-say-640k-is-e...

Yes, and the longer a game is played, the more loop holes are found.

This is vague FUD nonsense. What are you talking about and where is your evidence?

but why, voter fraud isn’t a problem in the US. trying to sate the lies of one political party won’t “prove them wrong” either, they’ll just fine new things to cry foul about somehow

Yes but it might make their claims ring more hollow. The purpose isn't to convince the diehard zealots, it's to convince the people that might be on the fence and could see it go either way.

Maybe Joe down the street isn't very much into politics, but he's been hearing all about these electronic voting machines being the source of fraud, and he know it sounds unreasonable, but it does introduce some doubt, especially when he finds out that no one knows what's in them and that people can access em "over the internets", it's enough out of his wheelhouse to get him wondering.

> Yes but it might make their claims ring more hollow.

It might do the opposite; "see, they finally admitted it's a problem!"

And this is how the Democrats have been painted in the corner.

Presuming there was no problem:

- Not doing any 'improvements' would result more of what is going on right now, an inability to prove the otherside wrong, and doubling down on the (near ridiculous) claim that it was the 'most secure election of all times'.

Presuming there were issues:

- Doing anything to improve them would mean that the one election they truly really wanted to win (i.e. defeating Trump), they will be accused of finally admitting that there were problems.

- Which means from their perspective, keep doubling down on the claim that it was the most secure election of all times

- OTOH if you didn't care that much about defeating Trump, and truly want there to be improvements if they are needed, then the Democrats claiming that these were the 'most secure elections of all times' just makes you start not believing it

Democrats are exceedingly good at letting Republicans do the painting.

In the real world, though, the good tools we already do have are being removed because of conspiracy theories. For example: https://apnews.com/article/voter-fraud-election-conspiracies...

> Earlier this month, Republican election officials from Florida, Missouri and West Virginia said they planned to withdraw from the group, joining Louisiana and Alabama. Former President Donald Trump, on social media, has called on every Republican-led state to leave, characterizing it as a “terrible Voter Registration System that ’pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up.”

>>>> "voter fraud isn’t a problem in the US"

Playing devils advocate here, how do you know that?

This whole argument dont look under the rug because if the rug isnt dirty then theyll shift their attention to under the couch seems afoul.

Well, looking at 2020, all the lawsuits that were filed went nowhere, generally for lack of evidence. Arrests and convictions for voter fraud do happen, but the scale tends to be very small and ineffectual at changing outcomes.

It's not that we don't look under the rug. The rug has been looked under, many times, and we keep not finding the monsters claimed to be under the rug.

The lawsuits went nowhere because the courts determined there wasnt standing in many of the cases. A party cannot get subpoenas to investigate without a case. No case == No Investigation or presentation of evidence.

So I would say its more along the lines that they tried to look under the rug many times but everytime they tried they got denied.

How is standing assessed? That there has been damages to the party. The party is claiming that there was voter fraud however most of the evidence they need to prove their damages require a subpeona which they need a court case to start gathering proof. Do you see the catch 22 there?

I am not a lawyer but presenting all your evidence before a trial seems poor form.

Some of them were dismissed for standing. Quite a few were dismissed because they lacked specific allegations and/or evidence.

You don't have to present all your evidence before a trial, but your filings at the start of the process do need to create a picture of the standing you have, the harm you've suffered, and the evidence you intend to present.

“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so,” wrote Stephanos Bibas on behalf of a three-judge panel. “Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” [0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-election-lawsuit-penn...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related...

United States Supreme Court Texas v. Pennsylvania et al. - Dismissed on standing.

Arizona Aguilera v. Fontes - Voluntarily Dismissed Aguilera v. Fontes - Dismissed Donald J. Trump for President v. Hobbs - Voluntarily Dismissed Arizona Republican Party v. Fontes - Dismissed Ward v. Jackson - Dismissed Bowyer v. Ducey - Dismissed on standing Stevenson v. Ducey - Dismissed

The case was dropped because by the plaintiff because even if the plaintiff won, they would still be short a few hundred votes.

Again , not one case was actually allowed to go to trial.

Georgia

In re: Enforcement of Election Laws and Securing Ballots Cast or Received after 7:00pm on November 3, 2020 - Dismissed Brooks v. Mahoney - Voluntarily Dropped Wood v. Raffensperger - Dismissed on Standing Pearson v. Kemp - Dismissed on standing Boland v. Raffensperger - Dismissed Trump v. Raffensperger - Dismissed Favorito et al. v. Fulton County et al. - Dismissed Trump v. Kemp et al. - Dismissed

Again , not one case was actually allowed to go to trial.

Im not going to list every single state but its very similar elsewhere. Dismissed for standing, jurisdiction, or trumps team dropped the suit voluntarily.

The statue of limitations is VERY short for elections.

Going back to the Catch 22, many of the personal testimonies the trump legal trump had saying they witnessed fraud were thrown out or could not be used until a trial. So, he cannot use a subpoena , and his witnesses were not allowed to testify. What would you recommend he do?

So now you get crazy schemes like Mr Pillow to collect data during the election so they have something to bring to court. At least that sounds like their plan no matter how wacky it is.

Now, I dont believe that Trump won. But I do believe they should've gave the guy his day in court. To deny someone that on the basis that they will just keep coming back looking elsewhere is not right.

By denying his day in court you have emboldened their supporters and disenfranchised independent voters who want secure elections, like myself.

You might want to ask yourself why Bill Barr, with the powers and visibility he had as AG/head of DOJ, looked at the pile of fraud allegations and told his boss it was a big box of nothing.

I'm sure he's just part of the conspiracy, or something...

A pattern of outcomes being similar isn't indicative of much when a large number of suits were filed with a shotgun approach. The only way you can sift through this from first principles is to read the legal briefs that were actually filed, and see for yourself if there is something substantive there.

I read and analyzed a sampling of two cases, and saw the same pattern where there were a whole bunch of straightforward banal claims plus a whole bunch of grandiose conclusions, without any logical linking of the two. The grandiose claims were widely quoted in the press though, despite being completely unsubstantiated. That was enough to satisfy my own opinion.

>>>...a large number of suits were filed with a shotgun approach. The only way you can sift through this from first principles is to read the legal briefs that were actually filed.

True and I think that's a good observation.

My takeaway from it was they were looking to get a trial and up against a fast approaching statue of limitations. I also think the fraud they claimed was very novel for a case. What evidence would a person need to bring forward to meet the criteria for standing in a federal election> I still don't know even though most of these cases were dropped for it.

A lot of the sound bites in the press focused on what I thought was frivolous political points on both sides so I think the answer is like many of the issues we are facing these days, in the middle.

However, I do believe giving Trump a day in court and having faith in the system would be overall the best to move the country forward. Maybe he is allowed to bring forward some evidence in his criminal trials for why he believed there was fraud? We shall see.

Playing devils advocate, lack of evidence is not the same as lack of guilt.

It is entirely possible that voter fraud occurred AND there is no evidence that it occurred.

Again, I’m not saying that happened, but I think there are some common sense improvements that could be made to the voting process that remove any doubts.

remove any doubts

There isn't much doubt from people that care about evidence.

Voter fraud can be difficult to prove. Voting in most parts of the country is optimized for anonymity and voter convenience at the expense of security.

I care about evidence, I believe it is absolutely possible to commit voter fraud and not leave any evidence of it, and I also do not believe that Trump lost due to voter fraud. All of these things can simultaneously be true.

I fail to see the harm in making our elections more secure, so long as we do not disenfranchise any legal voters.

I care about evidence

Then why don't you have any?

I fail to see the harm in making our elections more secure, so long as we do not disenfranchise any legal voters.

It isn't necessary and it does statistically disenfranchise legal voters.

If there is virtually no voter fraud why are you so set on 'making our elections more secure'? These pushes are always started by people who know the truth - they aren't solving an election security problem, they are solving the problem of making people who vote against them have statistically more difficulty to vote.

If the photo IDs are made available free of charge in convenient locations such as post offices, how would they be disenfranchised?

Again, show me the problem this is supposed to solve.

Also they aren't free in the US and they aren't always easy. Sometime you have to make appointments at DMVs and you have to get there as well. There are different fees and different durations per state.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/drivers-lic...

If you think about someone living in a city where they can take the bus and they don't own a car, they might not have a license. Then they might not get one just to vote in an election every four years that will just go the same way the state always votes (of course they end up not voting for everything else on the ballot).

Then maybe you shut down some polling places, split some up, move some around. Maybe you expire people's registrations early.

This is how you bend statistics to your side. It isn't about one person technically being able to navigate every obstacle. Every time the bus goes around a corner some people fall off and that's the point.

You are falling into the exact type of thinking that the people who create these situations want.

How much do you know about how elections are managed and secured today? How often have you interacted with election staff outside of casting a vote?

44 states have laws to run post-election audits, sampling the ballot pool and checking for statistical anomalies in the result [0]. This is one thing, and it's certainly not a complete solution to voter fraud...but I didn't know about these regular, legally mandated audits til I searched for election audit information. I do know about other things that help reinforce election security, like poll observers. From past jobs that occasionally provided IT support to local governments, I also have exposure to the physical security controls around ballots and polling equipment.

If you're well informed about election security, it might be more effective for you to bring up the specific challenges you feel need to be solved or gaps that need to be filled. Otherwise it's chasing shadows of threats and vulnerabilities that may or may not exist.

If you're not that informed, get involved with your local election office. They probably want volunteer pool workers and you'll learn a lot about the behind the scenes parts.

[0] https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/bestpractices/Electi...

because it is known. voter fraud rates are know and they are supremely small, way less than .001% of all ballots submitted. a cursory basic search will reveal articles like below, but there’re also academic papers investigating the phenomena

https://www.businessinsider.com/voter-election-fraud-statist...

> Sign up after your eighteenth birthday to vote.

Offer may differ for some communities, certain may experience having to sign up two counties over, in the basement, on the second Wednesday every odd month, behind a locked door with a sign "Beware of the leopard".

Better if everyone just gets enrolled by default.

There is a lot of things wrong with this but I have said that in order to get your tax refund you have to show proof you registered to vote. I'd like to say proof that you voted but that may be a step too far...

Agree, it should be easier not harder to register and to vote

Tax refunds? What are those?

Not sure if you’re being facetious, but some of us have too much of our pay deducted from payroll throughout the year compared to our tax burden, so the IRS returns the extra money to us.

Why not adjust your withholdings to avoid that?

Sometimes you can’t because of the way deductions work.

Did you happen to know that not everyone is required to file a federal income tax statement? The IRS does not require you to pay income tax, or file taxes, unless you make over $19,400 (as of 2022) https://www.irs.gov/publications/p501

It's really difficult to tell what percentage of people that applies to, but just for one example I got from Google, The Tax Policy Center estimates that 70 Million Americans do not need to pay income tax.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/tpc-number-those-who-...

I am only half serious about that....should have pointed that out. Interesting links though. Correct that not everyone with income is required to file, though they should. I did not know the income level was that high though, would have guessed half that.

Just a guess but I think that overlap is probably pretty large. I would think the majority of people who don't owe taxes are due to lower incomes who would not be required to file and that is offset with deductions....purely a guess though.

Also, not everyone gets a refund. I haven't had a tax refund in about 30 years, because I arrange any withholdings to match my expected tax bill.

> Better if everyone just gets enrolled by default.

But the whole point is that non-citizens are voting or multiple voting or non-resident voting is occurring.

The question is, how do you know that the person who is in the line to vote is the person who he says he is. Sure the name John Doe is on the list, but is the person standing in front of you is John Doe or not, how do you establish that?

It's so comical watching a country that claims to be first world struggling with this.

My shit country has solved this _ages_ ago:

Every citizen has an id.

The IDs are issued by each state, but they are all functionally the same. You will have no trouble voting with an out-of-state ID.

That ID is free and relatively easy to get.

Every citizen has an assigned place (building, room and ballot box) to vote, and it's usually close to their residence (you are expected to update when you move, it's also very easy).

Each ballot holds no more than 600 votes, average is around 300. Lines are uncommon, it usually took me like 5 minutes to vote.

Voting takes place on a Sunday, and most cities make public transit free of charge.

Despite the claims of a certain political party, state photo ID cards are easy to get here as well. They are needed for most benefits programs, banking, driving cars, air travel, purchasing items that are age restricted, and many other routine parts of adulthood. It is extremely unlikely that potential lawful voters would be disenfranchised by requiring a photo ID to vote. However, I fully support making a government issued photo ID freely available for those who don’t already have one.

What if national voter IDs were available at your local post office or military recruiting station? The availability and hours would be much better than most DMVs or welfare offices.

> Or we could just offer secure voter IDs to everyone that is legally eligible to vote free of charge.

The opposition argues that this is discriminatory and would favor richer voters.

If I understand their argument correctly, there is a non-zero cost to going to obtain these forms of identification that disproportionately impact the poor. You have to take off work, commute (potentially without a car or bus), pay a fee, be capable of understanding the instructions, etc.

> Also, use scantron style ballots that use computers to automate vote counting but not vote casting, with members of all major political parties monitoring polling stations and vote counting to ensure everything is above board.

The state of Georgia switched to these! They're awesome.

You digitally record your vote and get a printout with your selections. The printout becomes your ballot, and you're able to verify it before submitting it. The choices are super legible in big fonts.

There's a big QR code in the corner that an automated scanner can use to read the values, but a human can manually verify the printed names and ballot initiatives.

The printed ballots look like this:

https://cdt.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/imagecast-x-ballo...

This seems worse than scantron to me. An unaided human cannot read the QR code to verify it.

I agree with you - we still have work to do.

That said, if there's any suspected discrepancy between recorded choice and the QR code encoding, the ballots can be statistically sampled for divergence.

Scantrons might be difficult to implement for ballots with lots ballot choices or lots of options. You'd want to maintain readability for those with poor eyesight.

You probably don't want to hold up the line with people scanning the matrix to make sure it encodes the correct choices, either.

I'm not sure what the optimal solution is here, but we are improving. No more "hanging chads".

We have been using scantron ballots in Florida since 2002. (Statewide, that is. I think some counties were doing it before the reforms.)

I can't imagine any ballot that would be hard to encode on them.

> The opposition argues that this is discriminatory and would favor richer voters

Not quite. They argue that the kind of voter ID requirements that are being passed in several states are discriminatory because they are not free of charge. Some are free of any direct fees, but the indirect costs are often substantial, for the reasons you note:

> If I understand their argument correctly, there is a non-zero cost to going to obtain these forms of identification that disproportionately impact the poor. You have to take off work, commute (potentially without a car or bus), pay a fee, be capable of understanding the instructions, etc.

Worse, some states that have passed such laws have also simultaneously taken steps to increase those indirect costs. E.g., under the guise of budget cutting reducing the number of offices that issue state IDs, and reducing the hours during which the remaining offices processes ID applications. The offices that get closed are disproportionately the ones that are nearest to the most minority and poor voters, who also happen to the the voters who are most likely to not already have the ID, and the reduced hours usually mean no evening or weekend hours meaning many have to take unpaid time off work to go apply for ID.

I forget which state it was, but in a lawsuit over their new ID law plaintiffs found a list the committee that drafted the law made which listed a bunch of different possible forms of ID that people had, and for each also listed for each what percent of voters had it and their party and racial demographics, sorted by how much that ID would favor white people of the majority party in that state, and the final approved IDs in the law were all the ones the ones that favored white majority party voters.

Here are a ton of references, many of which contain a zillion links to even more research on this:

https://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AMERI...

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jul/11/eric-holde...

https://www.aclu.org/documents/oppose-voter-id-legislation-f...

https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/2018/Minority_Voting_Access...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a...

https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/4/7157037/us-voter-id-req...

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/07/644648955/for-older-voters-ge...

https://rewirenewsgroup.com/2014/10/16/well-actually-pretty-...

https://www.theregreview.org/2019/01/08/shapiro-moran-burden...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/heres-h...

https://scholars.org/contribution/high-cost-free-photo-voter...

https://now.tufts.edu/2018/01/23/proving-voter-id-laws-discr...

You have to go vote anyway, right?

Since rich people tend to make more money per hour, that is discriminatory to them too.

Honestly if there is one thing the US doesn't need it is more uninformed voters. I would love if one could require a test for civics or something before you could vote. Not discriminating anyone, no grandfather clauses.

One of the interesting by products of all of this is that elections are getting less secure instead of more secure. After all these allegations came out and if you dug into how elections are run, they are pretty secure - not perfect of course. Now, you have states opting out of things like the registry that can detect if a voter votes in more than one state. So, it will be harder to catch a person voting in more than one state now. I guess that only applies to presidential elections where that would be illegal but I am sure people have voted in more than one local election too and they should not have.

I live in Illinois and I don't know if it is free or not but you can get a sate ID here that is not a drivers license and use that to register to vote.

A national version could make sense. Since the more voters there are only helps one party, we'll never see anything like that on a national level no matter how much sense it makes.

Slight tweak - you're eligible to vote in the primaries if you'll be 18 by the general election.

That's almost the right way to do it. Just add some additional data printed on the ballots in a special ink that is normally invisible, and provide voters with a special marker to fill in the bubbles that reacts with the special ink to make it visible, use some clever cryptographic techniques to figure out what should be printed with that special ink, and you get this [1].

With that, people who just want to vote and trust that others will deal with auditing and counting go into the booth, fill in the bubbles for their candidates, drop the ballot in the collection box, and then just wait for the machine count to see who won, just like now.

But after the election all the cast ballots can be published allowing anyone to check the count.

Individual voters who noted a code that was on their ballot can check the published ballots and verify that their ballot was counted correctly (but they cannot prove to a third party that they voted for a particular candidate).

This system also allows a voter before voting to verify that the ballots have been correctly printed.

Voting systems with those properties are called end-to-end (E2E) verifiable voting systems [2], and there have been several proposals for such systems, including many that like Scantegrity do not rely on electronic voting machines.

Here is the original paper on this (PDF and HTML), and a paper proving that it is coercion-resistant [3][4][5]:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...

[3] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...

[4] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...

[5] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf

Its and interesting idea, but what do you do when Joes says his vote was miscounted?

Can you prove him wrong? Can he prove it?

Because if not, it all seems pointless to me.

This sounds close to what Colorado does. Ballots are hand marked and human readable, but machine counted. Risk limiting audits are performed for (I think) every election above small town level.

Ballots are mailed to every eligible voter, but you can go vote if you really like your precinct.

I can't wait to show up to the next election with some ESP32's configured to create networks like "Diebold System 1" or "Vote Reorganizer".

"ccp-electioncontrol-b490"

For several months, I renamed my phone to "Pfizer 5G Transmitter" so it'd show up when I turned my hotspot on.

Why bother performing election fraud using an online process? Just discard user inputs, use preloaded historical local voter registration data by age cohort, multiply the curve by some coefficients to make it plausible, and report that as the result. If the coefficients are known, a recount can "independently" be designed to come up with the same numbers. No network access is needed to produce completely controlled results. The network access thing is a red herring. There are more sophisticated ways to generate the numbers the powers that be want without raising eyebrows.

This can be surprisingly hard to get right. Look at the chart in https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/10/11/russian-... for an example. Humans are bad at making up numbers.

Are the nutty people and manipulators discrediting legitimate concerns about electronic voting machines?

I think it would be better if they limited their sabotage to UFOs, and french fries, and other things less fundamental to our society.

UFO news happens when some really bad domestic corruption stories are in danger of getting into the news cycle

I enjoy this meta conspiracy theory.

Don't forget about Titanic news...

Oh, cool! Free drones with (probably) Rapsberry Pis attached! I'll bring my net when I go vote.

I will LMAO if I see a drone hovering over my polling place. I might even be moved to tears if it's clutching a pillow.

Hopefully we'll be able to sign up and have them send us one for free so we can use it for things other than monitoring our local polling place.

So...make sure all of my voting machines are hard-wired Cat6 to a router that has no radio transmitters? I mean, how hard did they think about...oh...nevermind.

I sometimes wish I had the lack of integrity to look for opportunities like this and exploit them. Sell snake oil to those who are actively looking for snake oil. OTOH, a life lived with some degree of integrity (hey, I'm not perfect) has served me well enough so far.

Making open source, transparent, auditable, voting machines that can be trusted to be secure and are more efficient than physical counting is a very interesting challenge.

A challenge that I am sure politicians are not very interested in solving.

Why spending so much to gain the trust of your citizens if most people know nothing about cryptography anyway?

I guess nobody's told him about MAC address randomization.

(not that gathering SSIDs and MACs from random people in the vicinity who happen to have Wi-Fi on their devices has any value in detecting election fraud, anyway)

Why's the drone required?

It's not but I'm sure some very smart business person knew Mike Lindell was gullible and would fall for something crazy like this.

A box in the corner doesn't make for good TV. Drones flying around sure does.

Why would election centers allow a box to be kept in the room?

What might work better is people walking around with a backpack wearing Pineapple.

https://youtu.be/EbetD2LMbeQ

Suppose you do capture what you are looking for. How would you present the information to courts when you illegally captured the information.

Why drones? was my first thought as well. I think your answer is as good as any. Mike Lindell is an idiot.

Why not drones?

Sure, you could do exactly the same thing with a sniffer app on a normal phone, but drones sell better, at least for this ridiculous grift.

Even better when you label the "wifi montiroing device" as "WMD" and strap it to a drone.

Also, why do I even know this? What is life anymore? Haha.

I bet they are using crypto and AI, too, for the cyber. It's buzzwords all the way down. Grifters gonna grift...

>> Why's the drone required?

Id assume its illegal to put a sniffer into a polling place.

What makes the plan stupid is believing you can capture a supposedly covert intermittent low energy signal using a drone that can only hover about 10 minutes at a time.

Standing next to a building doesn't sound as good, marketing. Stuff like this actually makes me really sad because people should not really be this gullible.

It isn't, really. My impression is that anyone could just sit in a parked vehicle with one of these and track what info is available. But they're not flashy enough by themselves. The drones are the sizzle that sells the steak.

A lot of local election laws prohibit electioneering or any kind of campaigning or observation within X number of feet of a polling place.

I'm guessing putting a drone a hundred feet or so above a polling place somehow allows line of sight while still staying out of the restricted zone?

Why is anyone giving this guy oxygen. He's been laughed off the natural stage for years.

Is he giving this contract to the Cyber Ninjas too?

I don't believe the elections have any amount of integrity in the US. The system of controls in place are laughable at best. When the physical recount doesn't match the voting day totals, the original totals are kept (see Jill Stein vs Hillary in 2016). It's just pathetic all the way around.

That said, Mike Lindell is a fraud charlatan. The fact that Trump hitched his wagon, directly or indirectly, to clowns like him shows how weak of a statesman he really is. I agreed with many of Trump's policies, but his ability to execute is pitiful.

Manual recounts tend to be full of error opportunities, so that policy is pretty sensible to me. Maybe if you did a large number of manual recounts and took an average or the most common value or something, it might work. A single manual recount is not deserving of any trust whatsoever.

Manual recounts are a safety blanket for people who haven't thought through what it costs and what it actually gets you.

We're not talking about a discrepancy of 1 or 2 votes. We're talking hundreds of votes.

Yes, that tends to happen when you do manual recounts. That's my point. They're unreliable as hell.

You see a chance to validate a pile of 100k votes. I see 100k chances for human error.

That's not how recounts work. Please, inform yourself.

Ok, how about this? https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120202151713.h...

"Hand counting of votes in postelection audit or recount procedures can result in error rates of up to 2 percent, according to a new study from Rice University and Clemson University."

If you've got 100k votes to recount, you might have up to 2000 errors, according to this research.

It's absolutely how recounts work.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/arizona-republica...

> Election workers spent three days counting 850 ballots in Mohave County. They made errors in 46 races.

> Each ballot took three minutes to count, Tempert said. At that pace, it would take a group of seven staffers at least 657 eight-hour days to count 105,000 ballots, the number of ballots cast in 2020. Mohave County would need to hire at least 245 people to tally results and have counting take place seven days a week, including holidays, for nearly three weeks. That estimate doesn’t include the time needed for reconciling mistakes, or counting write-in ballots, Tempert’s report added.

This from a county that went 75% for Trump in 2020 and really wanted this to work, incidentally.

Unlike the Stein recount, it seems Mohave County actually possessed the ballots. I'm talking about 100's of ballots going 'missing' and having no paper trail whatsoever.

Also, 46 'races' out of 30k+ races, because for whatever reason, they count each individual vote up and down the ballot as a 'race.' So, 46 errors out of over 30k.

Tellingly, this article doesn't indicate whether the presidential race results were accurate within any margin, nor does it indicate whether the actual vote totals matched what was reported on election night.

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