Comment by nebula8804 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nebula8804 | Hacker News Reader

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>Lets take the obvious scenario, someone does a blatant large scale steal of an election. (they get access to manufacturer, set up their own firmware to be updated on all voting machines)

A DRE machine with a paper trail works by having the voter see the actual printed paper before committing the vote. How can an attacker overcome the paper record that has been verified by the voter before the vote is committed? Thats why I said that risk limiting audit where you perform statistical analysis on the paper ballots is the best of all worlds. It allows quick results and if there is either a close election or an anomaly from the audit then the entire paper backup is counted manually.

Fortunately many states have already laws on the books to automatically trigger a manual count if the election is within a specific extremely close margin but I believe they should also do the risk auditing on all elections which is still something that activists are working towards getting implemented.

>It's already too late. The winners will contest statistic analysis and say fake news then tie it and any recount up in lawsuits. (perhaps combined with arranging for some ballots to be destroyed in secondary storage so any recount would be contestable too)

That implies that the election staff is compromised. Each ballot has a unique serial number(at least in the states I have looked at).

>So why not avoid the issue entirely and go paper ballots with independent observers.

I have also been involved in a lawsuit contesting an election in NY. The bigger issue is not intimidation of staff or potential destruction of ballots(there are mitigations for both of those), its that when the ballots themselves are ambiguous (say in the case of a person marking a paper ballot incorrectly) then it allows legal maneuvers to dismiss ballots and swing an election which is exactly what happened in the recount triggered by the lawsuit. We had a number of paper ballots marked incorrectly and it was not possible to reach the voters in time to have their vote registered correctly so the election was lost by the person filing the lawsuit.

This issue would have been avoided by a electronic machine producing clean paper records verified by voters and are not ambiguous in a recount.

> This issue would have been avoided by a electronic machine producing clean paper records verified by voters and are not ambiguous in a recount

What happens if paper ballot is correct but machine then changes some small percentage of votes randomly when sending upstream?

You say there will be a recount, how would that work?, what would trigger it?, and what could a malicious actor do to prevent it from working?

Malicious actor that can have firmware modified (that seems like a easy target - compromise company making them), that can work up large crowds and have resources for lawsuits.

What would the end result be?

What would society look like after a few months of this?

>What happens if paper ballot is correct but machine then changes some small percentage of votes randomly when sending upstream?

If it does not change the outcome of the election then it does not have the intended effect. If the margin was so close as to change the election the laws on the books would force a complete manual count regardless. Nevertheless, you are proving my point about the risk limiting audits which would help to catch anomalies like this.

>You say there will be a recount, how would that work?, what would trigger it?, and what could a malicious actor do to prevent it from working?

If the margin is within a certain percentage (depends on the state) it forces a manual count of the ballots. I am advocating the risk limiting audits to help catch the machine acting malicious while printing the correct result on paper.

>Malicious actor that can have firmware modified (that seems like a easy target - compromise company making them), that can work up large crowds and have resources for lawsuits.

The lawsuits would still have to respect the law on the books. No machine is perfect but humans are not perfect either. In this thread I already discussed the incident in NY where they have paper ballots filled out by voters and then scanned. Humans messing up the ballots lead to the discarding of votes because they could not be validated. A combination of machine verifying human while human verifying machine is best.

You are missing my point.

We do not leave in an ideal world. Saying something should happen does not translate to it being done.

Example, Bush vs Gore was decided by the courts, not by recount.

So if that election was stolen, we will never know.

In that case, your whole argument falls apart, there should have been a recount but that never happened.

In that case, if firmware altered enough votes it worked.

" Justice Antonin Scalia, convinced that all the manual recounts being performed in Florida's counties were illegitimate, urged his colleagues to grant the stay immediately.[1] On December 9, the five conservative justices on the Court granted the stay, with Scalia citing "irreparable harm" that could befall Bush, as the recounts would cast "a needless and unjustified cloud" over Bush's legitimacy. "

Now replace Bush with Trump, have a blatant steal, work a lawsuit up to supreme court, have supreme court decide the same way.

>Example, Bush vs Gore was decided by the courts, not by recount.

That whole event was triggered by the "hanging chad" nonsense found in the poorly designed paper ballots that led to ambiguity.

>Now replace Bush with Trump, have a blatant steal, work a lawsuit up to supreme court, have supreme court decide the same way.

If you cannot trust the law then a speedy result works in your favor. If you have a quick electronic result plus have a risk limiting audit done the night of the election as standard practice it makes it harder to challenge the result. In a paper only ballot by definition will take longer and leaves the door open for every election to be challenged.

> That whole event was triggered by the "hanging chad" nonsense found in the poorly designed paper ballots that led to ambiguity.

You say nonsense but wikipedia says:

"a statewide recount would have shown that Gore received the most votes, according to the Florida Ballot Project."

So it seems that election result was changed successfully by machines.

That would not have happened with regular vote counting.

> In a paper only ballot by definition will take longer and leaves the door open for every election to be challenged.

Paper and counting with observers is much harder to compromise and more efficient then some machines. (see EU parliament elections)

Alas, you still argue machines are better when there's precedent of them changing an election result.

I don't have anything more to add here, thanks for the discussion, was interesting digging through wikipedia on this.

>So it seems that election result was changed successfully by machines.

Did you read the right wikipedia article? The ballots were paper ballots! The poor design caused people to vote for the incorrect candidate. What machine are you talking about? Certainly not DRE. There was no DRE involved in this state.

>Alas, you still argue machines are better when there's precedent of them changing an election result.

I am arguing DRE with risk limiting audits solves all issues. Fast turnaround with two way auditing.

Prominent election security experts are advocating the same thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-184ssFce4&t=1578s

>I don't have anything more to add here, thanks for the discussion, was interesting digging through wikipedia on this.

Its so funny to see how HN people tend to be so ignorant of the real world because they think they know best. After all they are hackers right? Sooner or later they always get smacked with reality.

> Did you read the right wikipedia article? The ballots were paper ballots! The poor design caused people to vote for the incorrect candidate. What machine are you talking about?

From same article:

"Florida later retired the punch-card voting machines that produced the ballots disputed in the case."

It looks like you haven't read the article.

I'll make it short:

- machines messed up, humans without machines would have not.

- attempts at recount were blocked by supreme court.

- bad result was used to alter election result.

As such, in your situation, if the voting machines you keep arguing for will produce wrong results, we can expect the same result, lawsuits and supreme court deciding election instead of the people.

Any "risk limiting audits" will be thrown in the trash if it's convenient. Same as the recount attempts in florida.

If you do not learn from history you are doomed to repeat it.

> Its so funny to see how HN people tend to be so ignorant of the real world because they think they know best. After all they are hackers right? Sooner or later they always get smacked with reality.

Kind if ironic, don't you think?

You keep arguing for a complex unproven system that is easily compromisable and needs risk limiting audits just to exist.

You are ignorant of real world risks.

You dismiss a simpler, resilient, proven, similarly fast without these glaring issues in EU.

You know best.

If voting machines ever mess up then reality will smack us all, same as in the past.

>"Florida later retired the punch-card voting machines that produced the ballots disputed in the case."

So they improved a bit? Thats good? They are still using Optical scanning with no risk limiting auditing which is not great. What are you even arguing anymore?

>machines messed up, humans without machines would have not.

You don't know that. You are making an assumption while improperly understanding what did happen. It wasn't the machines that messed up, it was the people caused by the paper ballot. I cannot believe it is so difficult to understand that a machine producing a consistent printout is better to verify than trying to decipher what humans have drawn in a circle.

>- attempts at recount were blocked by supreme court.

Again you are conflating two separate issues. The cause of the supreme court blocking the recount was the poor paper design. If the count was concluded before the networks called it then there wouldn't have been exposure to this seperate issue that activists needed to work on.

>Any "risk limiting audits" will be thrown in the trash if it's convenient. Same as the recount attempts in florida.

Not if there are laws and processes on the books or else you could just do anything like throw out the paper ballots with some nonsense stating they are tampered with.

>You keep arguing for a complex unproven system that is easily compromisable and needs risk limiting audits just to exist.

Its the system that all the election security researchers say is the best system for the US's complex ballots. I trust them more than some rando on HN. Not to mention that it makes sense.

>You dismiss a simpler, resilient, proven, similarly fast without these glaring issues in EU.

This is the height of ignorance, thinking that since something works in one locale that it automatically works best in all other environments.

>If voting machines ever mess up then reality will smack us all, same as in the past.

Hence two way auditing....

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