Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

I absolutely hate that fact. I am a human, I cannot read barcodes without a computer. Therefore, I cannot tell if the important part of what was recorded is correct.

Not sure if Colorado's are the same...

Either way it smells extremely fishy to me.

Neither did you have the opportunity to also vote for the other color of the uniparty and cross check the ballots to see they printed identically and according to selection

How is it any different than traditional voting, where you drop your ballot into a black box and trust the poll workers would count it correctly?

You can do random spot checks select boxes to make sure the machine is tabulating correctly. If they're all correct, you can be reasonably sure the others are correct as well, unless your adversary has incredible luck.

The electronic voting system issues in the 2000 elections motivated the Help America Vote Act of 2002 under which voter-verified paper records for audit purpose required for all voting machines (this requirement became effective in 2006); effectively, “voting machines” add ballot marking machines that may also be involved in convenience tabulation, but are always audited against hand counts of paper ballots, which are the ultimate authority.

Even this isn't secure now, because everyone can just photograph their voting card within the booth.

This trope that minorities are affected by voter ID laws doesn’t pass the slightest scrutiny. It’s also just plainly offensive and racist to assume minorities can’t show the basic competency to obtain ID when you already need it for so many things. Where were these complaints when everyone, including minorities, had to show documentation around their vaccination status for various things? Why isn’t this issue in every other country that does require ID to vote in elections?

> without any actual evidence that problems exist (as the investigations etc. did not result in such evidence)

A system not designed to generate data for such investigations will not turn up evidence. Just like with poorly designed software systems.

In this case it is clear we don’t have verifiable elections - you don’t need to understand anything deeply to know this, since it is apparent with your own ballot. So instead let’s design for something better.

I lived in a country which did away with many of the small elections, only to have the positions filled by toxic empire-builders.

We went back to elections, where a scandal was handled by electors, not union rules.

Parliamentary democracies are usually accompanied by competent, autonomous civil services. That’s not something America has.

Or we could invert a lot of the races. I am college educated but never involved in law, how can I reasonably pick a judge or DA? What I want is my representatives to choose one, and then have a very low threshold for a special election to fire (“recall”) the person if they do a bad job. And only need that because my representatives have shown that they won’t.

Any sort of non-in-person voting is a security nightmare. But I am very sympathetic to the people who want to make it easier. I think we should vote on a Saturday or Sunday instead of a weekday, we should make it a federal holiday in order to close as many businesses as possible, and I think that employers who stay open should be required to give paid time off to vote, that doesn’t count against vacation or sick leave.

In US elections, any alternative voting system would essentially require computers. With all the complexity, problems and mistrust that they bring. Also those alternative systems are subject to gamification as shown in recent elections in Alaska and France. No fraud or illegality, but the will of the people was arguably thwarted by introduction of confounding candidates.

Re: parliamentary vs US representation

US was designed to have a true republic (not a democratic republic) but with a democratic lower house as a counterbalance to a non democratic upper house. The 17th amendment screwed us as it made sure that all the drama from the lower house spread to both houses, and now our congress is entirely captured by lobbyists as every legislator now has to worry about financing campaigns. It wasn’t supposed to work that way.

The US was not supposed to be one big country with uniform laws. It was supposed to be N number of mostly independent states with a common currency + a common defense + a safeguards against states taking advantage of each other. The basic assumption is that most laws are not one-size-fits-all, and that each state should be largely autonomous and figure out the laws that work best for that state’s citizens.

The more people you try to put under the same set of laws, the more likely it is that the weak will be taken advantage of by the strong. Take California water management- the populous cities, in true democratic fashion, determine what farmers can do with the water on and under their land, and special interests can contribute to campaigns for favor and end up getting water rights to water on your land, because democracy!

But all these are the “why” of the US election system, which is kinda orthogonal to how we vote and count.

You can say this with a straight face about the presidential election because it's a statistical tie. But it's laughable at the municipal/county level. Even at the state level it's often not true-- e.g., in Ohio were savvy enough to reject a marijuana legalization referendum (which they overwhelmingly wanted!) because it would have given a tiny cartel control over growing it. That caveat wasn't in the text of the referendum IIRC, so somehow a majority of Ohioans defeated it using their "absolutely zero knowledge" of the inner workings of that proposed law.

> So then they turn to their favorite voting guides which just shifts the power to unaccountable political groups instead of making the single representative you elect responsible for figuring it out.

There's a human web of trust lots of voters use to navigate the complexity of voting. The more local you get the more effective it is. At the municipal level there's a chance you're web includes the people directly involved in an issue, in addition to people who can help you judge the veracity of those people!

> And there’s too many elections - non presidential year elections give the power to a motivated and vocal minority which is not what you want because it lets shit stirrers seize control when no one is paying attention.

Sounds like you're hedging here-- what exactly does "give the power to" mean? If you're saying that special interests have more power to slip in corrupting legislation or install lackeys during an off-year, that's definitely not true. The worst stuff gets passed through when there's a lot of noise to cover it-- like presidential elections or national disasters.

Such systems are better enough that businesses handling cash use them to count paper money.

Next to voting, or perhaps ahead of it, people surely value reliable accuracy in their money. So why not ballots?

Teachers and students understand how this all works, so it has a lot of trust.

Over the last 20 years there's no record of a non citizen voting in VA.

As a poll worker myself, there's nothing we would check election day that was that wasn't already checked during registration. Asking me to "verify" day of, beyond what we already do, isn't really feasible.

Recommend you work the polls and educate yourself on how your particular locale operates.

And purging them within 60 days of the election is illegal per federal statute.

Youngkin and the GOP are flat out wrong here. The courts have said as much so far. And yet here we are again having to explain all this to somebody who watches too much Fox News.

~7 million with no ID ~29 million without an up-to-date DL

So the incentive to automate things are bigger here.

Plus US Senate, federal congressional district, state assembly, state Senate, 7 judges, and 6 paragraph-long ballot propositions.

Not only your postcard idea wouldn't work, manual counting 3 pages (!) of a giant ballot would get prone to errors and be expensive rather quickly.

I think the current electronic plus storing the paper ballot for future audit if needed offers the best of both worlds.

Being a country with compulsory voting helps, because the system has to make it possible for everyone without a valid exceptional circumstance to be able to vote (would be unfair to be fined for not voting if you were still waiting in line to vote when the polls closed), and also they can quite accurately predict the kind of numbers they're going to get at the polling places.

As a result, there are a whole lot of separate elections conducted on the same ballot in the US, more than is typical elsewhere. This increases the tabulation load.

In Sweden you can vote by mail, but it has to be done in a private booth on a post office. You have to show ID, of course.

That means everybody votes secretly, even when voting by mail.

Firing people for not cooperating with something that is a crime under both federal and state law is a strategy that…doesn’t work very long for the criminals.

(Giving a large group of people who you don’t trust to vote your way that kind of criminal leverage over you in general is a pretty self-defeating strategy even without the intense incentives produced when you pile termination of employment on top of it.)

Also, near-universal mail-in voting isn’t some novel untested practice. Oregon has been doing it for more than two decades, Washington and Colorado for a decade, and even more states have adopted it between 2019 and 2022.

That's a felony isn't it?

Are you able to cite any evidence for this sort of conspiracy, or is this mainly conjecture? My search came up short. While one can certainly imagine it taking place, particularly in smaller groups, I expect there are both federal and likely also state laws that would make such activities illegal. At the very least, it would seem hard to hide at scale.

Is there any basis in reality for this?

Where is the line of accepted risk?

The fact that this is rarely discussed probably means that it rarely actually happens. Political beliefs between husbands and wives are usually quite correlated, I'd imagine.

The issue of maliciously voting for you elderly grandparent may happen, but is probably very very rare.

Does your knowledge imply the system is perfect? Is there more than one type of voter fraud? Do we mean just one or two particular federal elections or all elections at every level? What about internal party elections, have those all been extremely fair and above board lately?

There's obvious advantages to perpetrating this class of fraud. Historically we know this fraud has interfered in all types of elections at all levels. Why would this not continue to be a target?

I mean, even in your link, Step 1 includes mailing ballots in. Even recently we've seen the simple flaws in this insecure mechanism. How could you have such a level of confidence in this system? The fact the smart and well meaning people do is all the more reason to engage this subject more rigorously.

Perhaps a more generous interpretation to people making these claims is to understand that we are still not doing a good enough job at making our elections secure, easy, free and fair. For Hacker News this should easily be understood to be a technical challenge and one that the USA has yet again completely failed to succeed at.

It's literally that easy in Colorado.

Ranked choice voting is essentially doing multiple elections at a time, having to recount portions of votes every time a candidate drops out. That's a lot easier with computers.

I think the totals from every precinct could be made public in a way that they are verifiable from a central database, where the numbers add up to the total for the state and eventually federal count.

This is probably already happening, but people don't seem to think so.

We need results in as short a time as possible, ws have about 100 crore registered voters, of whom about 70% on average vote, meaning that the ECI must process 70 Crore votes, in under 10 hours.

Making that happen in a free and fair way is a logistical challenge, one that we undertake every 5 years.

One more large advantage of EVMs is making booth capture very expensive (because EVMs have a inbuilt rate limit, but a ballot box does not).

At any rate, with VVPAT being there, it adds another layer of security.

The US 2000 election was a fiasco of the failures of paper ballots. Officials spent weeks scrutinizing ballots and to this day nobody thinks they got it correct to within the margin of error.

That's when electronic machines came in. They are not necessarily better, but nobody who lived through that nightmare thinks fondly of the clarity of paper ballots.

There is standardization within all precincts of a county. And from my past experience as a poll worker, I can tell you why precinct reporting times can vary wildly within a county.

(Note things I say here are specific to the county where I worked.)

Anyone in line to vote by 8PM is allowed to vote. We (the other poll workers and I) could not start closing the polls until every voter had voted. If the local community did not trust vote-by-mail, then that polling place will likely see delays in closing due to lines.

One polling place often covered multiple precincts, so you'll see multiple precincts delayed simultaneously.

After that, boxes go from one queue to another, with multiple queues consolidating into one or two. So, a one-minute delay in dropping off your box to a collection point, may mean a two-hour delay in that box being processed.

> if you can interfere with just tallying

First off, that would require a remarkable amount of fraud. Second, that's why there are observers. It doesn't matter if it's 2AM on the Wednesday after election day: If tabulating is happening, you are allowed to observe.

Are you trying to say that the process doesn't work fine in Germany?

Prior to Trump, it was afaict an accepted fact among software people that closed source electronic voting machines were sitting ducks ripe for hacking.

We went from "don't trust Diebold" to "how dare you question Dominion."

Whether or not an election has actually ever been hacked at the voting machine level is a separate conversation.

It's going to be insane here.

This week alone we've had Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Tim Walz stumping here.

https://newrepublic.com/article/187597/pennsylvania-election...

Even the Brits don’t take anything at face value anymore.

And with one party transformed in the Monster Raving Loony Party, the other one can't do anything else but push its own agenda through when it can, so compromise becomes rarer and rarer. And it's not just Trump – remember the madness and obstructionism of the Obama years?

And yes, there have been times the Democratic party could have done better. No doubt. But it's absolutely not a "both sides" issue.

Source? I thought all the election fraud lawsuits/investigations for the 2020 election basically went nowhere?

Do you know of a vulnerability that allows someone to access the bios password hash but can't also be used to hack the election without bothering with the bios password?

https://x.com/atrupar/status/1852209432878342308

About the best I can come up with is a QR code displayed on the screen and on a printout that you can compare with a third party phone app. Machine results are tabulated, and the QR code sheet is put in a lock box separately. This at least provides some way to compare what the computer says you voted versus the QR backup ballot for audits. I'm sure there are holes in my idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRTvoZ3Rho

[1]:https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...

I am not a fan of Optical scan either. In NY back in 2019 I was a volunteer for a local election that was super close and we discovered that the machines rejected a bunch of votes. We then had to challenge the election and do a manual hand count. For the votes rejected by the machine that were not fully legible we had to find the voter who cast the ballot. I recall some ballot were rejected for stupid reason like there was a mustard stain on the ballot(this is in NYC ha ha). In the end I think we lost by 60 votes or so.

A good system in my mind is what NJ has moved to (although it seems like they have not moved to this system statewide which is a shame): DRE with paper trail. Essentially, the voter votes, the machine prints a paper record and shows it to the voter so they can verify. Once they verify, the vote is cast and the paper is deposited into a sealed box.

Unfortunately they only go back and count the paper for close races but they should really do it for all races.