Rigged or Hacked Voting Machines

Why would anyone oppose instant runoff/ranked choice/"single transferable vote" voting?
 
ahhell said:
Wasn't meant pejoratively, I have been especially ignorant and especially unconcerned with the outcome of elections in my life. Chose not to vote in several elections as a student entirely because I knew I wasn't going to be in the same town come graduation and just didn't care enough about the long term future of that particular city while also not really knowing enough about my former home to cast an informed vote.
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Ah, gotcha. Thanks for clarifying. I apologize for impugning your motives.

There's a vocal "mandatory voting" faction here that seems to see being allowed to abstain as practically a crime against humanity.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Random voting: 100 people are randomly selected by a computer, and they alone get to vote. A great saving of time and money.
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Or, we could save even more time and money by just randomly selecting office holders. Given how professional politicians behave, this could work out better.
 
kellyb said:
Why would anyone oppose instant runoff/ranked choice/"single transferable vote" voting?
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The Republicans and the Democrats (as party organizations). Let's face it, the hope with IRV and other such schemes is that it will allow people to cast their vote for a third-party candidate before they cast it for their "safety" candidate (i.e., the candidate from the two major parties that they despise least), and that this will eventually result in those third parties gaining traction.
 
kellyb said:
Why would anyone oppose instant runoff/ranked choice/"single transferable vote" voting?
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Said person is probably all in on establishment politics and the idea of requiring leadership to work with the "outsider" wings rather than forcing the "outsider" wings to bend the knee is abhorrent.
 
theprestige said:
Double effort, double cost. Which kind of defeats the purpose.

The real problem with hackable voting machines is that you get what you pay for. No voting district is going to pay Diebold top-dollar for a truly secure voting machine. The way people talk about voting machines, they probably should be as secure as ATMs. But the fact is, they're not, because no voting district has the money to pay for ATM-tier voting machines.

What they have instead is a system of custody and oversight at the polls, which they assure us is sufficient to secure paper ballots, and which they assure us is similarly sufficient to secure voting machines. This is what allows them to buy voting machines they can actually afford.

And maybe they're not wrong.

Winning an election by hacking voting machines requires certain things:
- You have to know which district(s) you need to hack.
- You have to know how to hack the machine(s) in those districts.
- You have to have undetected access to the machine(s) in those districts.
- You have to be able to change the vote count(s) in a way that's both plausible and decisive.*

*You can omit the "decisive" requirement, as long as you're prepared to weather the recounts, the suspicions, the audits, etc. But this requires that you be very confident that your hacking won't be detected, even under heightened scrutiny.

I could see a corrupt mayor or state legislator, needing to flip only the machines in a single district, maybe seeing value in "hacking the vote". But for nationwide - or even statewide - races, there's probably too many voting districts and too much variance between them, for a direct hack of voting machines to be worth the effort.

Even if Rahm Emmanuel had gone to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and told her, "I can guarantee you Illinois", it still wouldn't have solved her problem in other states, and wouldn't have been worth owing a favor to Emmanuel.

That's why both the GOP and the DNC are experimenting with Russian troll-style social media campaigns, for the larger races. For the smaller races, I assume it's the same local machine politics and corruption it's always been. Just with more chrome highlights.
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I certainly agree with the first paragraph.

However I disagree slightly about the rest.

At least the US has lots of different systems, so any weaknesses would be unlikely to affect all the ballot. However, a few swing states could be important, and might reward attempts to hack them.

More importantly, I'd argue that elections need to be free and fair, and need to be seen to be free and fair. They also need to be effectively anonymous, but also amenable to investigation to verify that there hasn't been tampering.

With voting machines, I struggle to see how the last requirements can be met. I also can't see how electronic counting can be transparent either.

From the blockchain for elections thread:

jimbob said:
You are missing another point. The people need to understand and trust the process. I have no doubt that you know far more about computer science than me - although that isn't much of a plaudit.

I can explain the UK system in a few sentences

  • Each household receives a form for registering to vote and the householder fills the form in (with it being an offence to make a false declaration).
  • Shortly before an election, each registered voter receives a polling card with the details of the poling station (based in the electoral ward, and nearby and with only a few hundred people - in my constituency, it ranged from 88 to about 1500 per polling station)
  • The polling station opens at 7am and closes at 10pm but if you are in a queue to vote at 10pm, it will remain open until the queue has voted
  • When you go to the polling station, it's easiest to take your polling card, but not necessary. At the polling station, someone looks for your name and gives you a numbered ballot paper, and writes the number against your name.
  • You then go to the voting booth and put a cross in the box by your preferred candidate and put it in the ballot box
  • If there is suspicion of foul play, then the votes can be tallied to the voter but it would require an official investigation, and because the data isn't collated until such an investigation is started, under normal circumstances, there is no chance of leakage of who voted for who.

This system is transparent and easily understood. People can see that the votes aren't tampered with.

With blockchain, the fact that you are saying that people with computer-science backgrounds don't understand how it is going to be secure means that the system is not going to be transparent or trusted.

ETA: And the current systems are far from unhackable. I would contend that electronic systems are inherently vulnerable to advances in technology. Paper and pencils aren't
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*we might be rubbish at running referenda but are reasonable at elections
 
Donal said:
Make Election Day a federal Holiday on the first Monday of November

Automatic registration of everyone over 18

Voting Machines that produce a paper receipt and are audited before and immediately after every election. And a few randomly selected during the election (I know that will slow some things down, but I'd say maintaining the integrity of the vote is worth it).

Recounts for any margin under 5%

Rank choice voting with automatic run off

No indication of party on the ballot. Randomly change the order candidates appear on each ballot so people just can't go straight down the ticket without knowing who they are selecting

No announcing totals until the polls have closed

Free BBQ for all
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Since the chance of me ever again voting knowingly for a republikker are O, I would bring in my list of who to vote for if they were not party identified. Trumpf and the slime he spreads over and around itself have made that dead certain.
 
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Norman Alexander said:
We hold barbecues at polling places. You can get a sausage there. Some polling places are public schools, so they make a day of it - a school fundraising fete. Not only sausages but lots of other yummy stuff.
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Then I concur; mandatory voting in exchange for sausage is acceptable to me.
 
Donal said:
It makes each vote less consequential. The significant each vote is, the less value there is in warping individual ballots/boxes. So, either you expand your operation, which carries a world of security risks, or you move on to another method. Something crazy like "use policies that appeal to the majority of voters".
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No, see my above post.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Might seem intuitive but it's wrong.

The number of votes you have to fake depends on how close or not the election is.
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you are correct, however, if an election is very close, say less than a percentage difference, that's still a lot more votes if there are 500k votes total than if there are 50k votes total.

kellyb said:
Why would anyone oppose instant runoff/ranked choice/"single transferable vote" voting?
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Lack of understanding and fear of the complexity?
 
wareyin said:
I count no to hell no as animosity. Apparently you don't. Why do you say no to automatic voter registration?
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Why would I want to have a conversation with someone who interprets simple disagreement as animosity? That seems like a recipe for pointless bickering.

Do you believe it's possible to disagree without animosity?
 
I used to be an advocate of Ranked Choice / IRV voting but now feel there are much better systems to choose over that.

The best system is Star Voting



Next best is alternative voting, then ranked choice, and finally our current system.
 
That is rank choice voting, it just eliminates all but the top 2 in the first round
 
Donal said:
That is rank choice voting, it just eliminates all but the top 2 in the first round
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Star is basically a combination of ranked choice and alternative voting which takes the good aspects of each system while minimizing their downsides.
 
The_Animus said:
Star is basically a combination of ranked choice and alternative voting which takes the good aspects of each system while minimizing their downsides.
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Yeah, that is what it looks like. I like that system a whole lot, too. Thanks! I had never heard of it before!
 
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