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#election#system#voter#voting#https#fraud#should#elections#right#states
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Discussion (59 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Such a system could be added to the US without too much disruption if we did it gradually, say making it only apply to people born after 2030 so there is time to get all the support infrastructure in place.
Doing it quickly, and making it apply who grew up in a US without anything like that, would be a big and probably expensive effort. None of the proposals I've seen Congress talk about, or seen states talk about or that states have passed, have addressed this.
They say it is actually easy to get the required ID, but when you dig into the documents needed to get it if you don't already have a government issued photo ID it is a lot harder.
A certified copy of your birth certification is usually good enough...but most states require government issued photo ID to issue a certified copy of your birth certificate. Oops.
Also, for many older people, it can be hard to find where to go to get a birth certificate. That's all handled by the states, not the feds, and at the time many older people were born many states just recorded those records at the county level.
There are alternatives that allow can work around the lack of a certified copy of your birth certificate, or that can work around needing a government photo ID to get the birth certificate. They involve secondary documents, such as school records. Those don't usually have difficult ID requirements to get, but are even less likely to be centralized. You might have to go to the school district to get the records. For an older person trying to dig up old elementary or middle school records to bootstrap getting an idea that will often be difficult, even if that school district is still around and somehow the records haven't been lost.
The current system does in fact work well. It should be replaced with a stronger that could stand up against larger and more well organized adversaries than it has had to face before, but it is not urgent, and we have the time to do it right.
>Taiwan has a comprehensive household registration system. The compilation of the voter list/electoral register is handled by the Household Registration Offices 20 days prior to the Election Day. Hence, citizens do not have to actively register to vote, with the exception of citizens residing overseas during the Presidential and Vice Presidential election.
I don't think the Trump administration would be interested in pursuing this degree of vote access.
This is a fairly common system. Many countries don’t have voter registration as such because they already have a mandatory system household registration they use to track exactly where everyone is and verify citizenship and ID. For example, Germany: https://handbookgermany.de/en/registration
Unsubstantiated claims of election fraud should be punished severely. Politicians who baselessly erode confidence in elections without providing timely evidence should be ineligible for political office at least and potentially tried for treason.
It should not be fully transparent. I should not be able to look up who you voted for. That should be private information.
With that caveat in mind, to my eyes the election system we have is doing exactly what you’re saying it should do.
Without going too far back, https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/factchecking-clintons-vote...
There are valid arguments against voter ID requirements. Primarily that not everyone has ID. Any push for voter ID should be paired with a comprehensive program to aid folks in registering for a valid ID.
And yet it rarely is, because the aim of voter ID laws is to disenfranchise eligible voters, rather than clamp down on voter fraud. Voter fraud being something that has never been proven to have any effect on electoral outcomes. There has never been any proof any single election in the US has had its result changed because of voter fraud. It is a made up scandal.
There have been legit complaints about closed sourced voting systems for ~20 years and DEFCON has done a "Voting Village" for ~10 years demonstrating numerous issues, some of which were not addressed by the next elections. Transparency doesn't appear better either.
Is it speed to tally? Cost? Easier to screw with results?
The system right now is a security nightmare, a bad implementation of a bad idea. But anybody who lived through 2000 remembers that as even worse.
An even bigger advantage of scantrol systems is with two simple changes to how ballots are produced and marked you can greatly increase the security and audibility of them.
The two simple changes are:
1. When the ballots are printed you print some alphanumeric codes on them in an invisible ink, and
2. The voter fills in the bubble using a special marker provided at the polling place that turns the invisible code visible.
The scanning machines themselves do not require any modification. Voters vote the same was as before, and can ignore the code that becomes visible in the bubbles they fill in if they way.
By combining the clever chemistry used for the invisible ink and marker with some clever cryptography in how those codes are generated you can overlay and end-to-end auditable voting system on the scantron system. And end-to-end auditable voting system (also called and end-to-end voter verifiable system) has these properties:
• Individuals can verify that their ballot was included in the final count and they vote was attributed correctly.
• Any third party can verify that the ballots were counted correctly. The candidates, the parties, news organization, civil rights groups, and anyone else can check.
• Voters cannot prove to third parties who they voted for. This is called coercion-resistance.
Such a system was developed by several cryptographers, including David Chaum and Ron Rivest. It is called Scantegrity II [1] and has been used successfully in a few elections.
Here are links to a paper by its creators explaining it, in HTML [2] and PDF [3]. Here's a paper [4] showing that it is coercion-resistant.
With this system after the voting is done the election officials can publish all the codes that were revealed. A voter who wants to know if their vote was counted can check that list to see if the code that was revealed to them for that candidate is in the list.
The election officials can also publish some more information that along with the code list allows anybody to verify that the totals for each candidate were right without this revealing the mapping from codes to candidates.
With this we get all the pluses of paper system including hand recounts, plus fast machine counting that can be done with a simple single purpose machine that has no software that could be hacked, yet with the kind of end-to-end auditing that the electronic voting systems promise.
And it inexpensive to implement and operate. Around half of the districts in the US already are using the scantron machines.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
[2] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...
[3] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...
[4] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf
My question was: what's the argument in favor of using a proprietary electronic system?
There are better alternatives, and if legislatures were designed to come up with optimal solutions, we'd probably have use one of them. Instead we have inertia, because the Sainted Holy Founders thought inertia was good for a country, so they optimized legislative branches to be useless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
Gore probably won that election. I can't help but wonder about an alternate history where he became president and there was no 9/11 due to smoother handoff between administrations.
Gore attempted stochastic cheating in that election. There were a large number of uncountable votes because of incompletely punched out cards. That wasn’t a problem because, statistically, the errors would be randomly distributed between the candidates. But Gore requested hand recounts in only a few counties he had clearly won. The mathematical effect of that was to bias the recount in favor of finding more Gore votes. For example, if the county had gone 60% Gore, then for every 10 votes countable by hand that couldn’t be counted by machine, 6 would be Gore votes. Stochastic cheating.
There were also lots of shenanigans where precincts were adding partial recount numbers (where some precincts had finished counting and some had not) to the totals. There is a reason that the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Gore’s recount plan was unconstitutional. (The 5-2 part was only about the remedy.)
Note, they are also trying to change the USPS rules regarding mail-in ballots, such that the USPS will not deliver ballots either direction unless the recipient is on a list they are allowed to make. Public comment is open until July 2
https://www.regulations.gov/document/USPS-2026-1289-0001
Ensuring secure elections and auditing extensively seems like good practice. However the issue has become political and neither party is interested in that. The right claims fraud with no good evidence, in response the left has decided that our elections perfectly secure and to suggest otherwise gets you a sound "tsk tsk"
All the cumulative fraud uncovered nationwide, most of which was mistaken registration, discovered through existing processes, and didn't even favor a single party, never amounted to enough to even to turn even a single state.
Isn’t it weak, two point out that no one can find evidence after the fact, versus the proper alternative that no one can prove that they’re actually-secure before the fact?
Let’s just say that you were a bad guy and manipulating elections, wouldn’t you be bad at your job if someone could detect it after the fact? How many people would a conspiracy even take to pull of?
I don’t get the US system. The people mad at Trump and 2020 claims brush off all the ways the elections can’t be proven in favor that weeks or years afterwards no one can’t point to hard evidence.
And it has always been political and other things in the south.
A quick google will show that it has been a nationwide problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
Or Michigan, home of both Henry Ford (and his now-infamous Dearborn Independent, which still seems to resonate with most Michiganders that I've met) and Charles Lindbergh.
What you're describing is a rural areas problem, and the South, most of which has never really developed much urbanism (outside Atlanta and maybe Charlotte) has never had to "grow up", much like rural Michigan has never had to "grow up" and remains a hotbed of MAGA racism and plots to kidnap their governor, or the same way that much of Idaho has never had to "grow up" and is a common destination for Doug-Wilsonites and similar "trad" homesteaders. Drive an hour outside of Detroit or Lansing and ask the almost-universally-white rural folks what they think of Dearborn and they'll tell you all the same wild "sharia law" white-replacement conspiracy theories they've told me over and over again.
And of course, even Boston famously took rather poorly to the notion of desegregation – look up Boston's reaction to "forced bussing" (since the only way to racially-integrate Boston schools was to bring in black kids from outside Boston, since the redlining had been so severe there, and the city was covered in widespread protests).
I think this paragraph summarizes it nicely.
"The report, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, concludes that voting machines could be further safeguarded by, for example, updating their software, the sources said. It does not say the vulnerabilities have led to votes flipping, but examines security gaps in how the machines are used during U.S. elections."
My take is that they couldn't find anything that amounted to the level of fraud Trump needs to justify the deaths, chaos, and loss of faith in the system he caused, so they'll keep delaying it until they either find something or find someone willing to just make something plausible sounding up.
So does the left every time Trump wins.
From https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum..., among literally hundreds of other instances claiming the election was stolen, rigged, Russianed, whatever.