Democracy is in trouble....

[johnny karate]

As I said, you are the one who should present evidence e-voting is safe, when it is almost universally not regarded as such.

I like how you make a claim and then tell me that I need to disprove it.

Priceless.

 

[johnny karate]

Ballots are only supposed to be mailed to registered voters, but they are often mailed to the wrong address. Only some states require signature verification, and the process of signature verification doesn't really work. It's hard to do mass centralized fraud, but easy to do small scale distributed fraud.

Cite needed.

 

[Dr. Keith]

Ballots are only supposed to be mailed to registered voters, but they are often mailed to the wrong address. Only some states require signature verification, and the process of signature verification doesn't really work. It's hard to do mass centralized fraud, but easy to do small scale distributed fraud.

If only there were some way to organize small scale distributed fraud that is significant enough to change the outcome, but small enough to not be detected.

That is the conundrum: it is a very risky enterprise that requires too many people to get any suitable impact.

If your fraudulent attack takes two people to pull off a 10,000 vote swing then you have a chance of making it happen. Sure, they face felony charges and certain financial ruin if they get caught, but they can keep it under wraps and get away with it. They can trust each other to be discreet.

But, if it requires 100 people to pull off that sort of swing then someone is going to screw up. You simply can't trust 100 people to keep something like that a secret. Then every single one of them is facing felony charges and financial ruin because Joey may get drunk and post about the plan in some back hole of reddit. And really, I think it may require more people than that.

In fact, it is one of those things where it requires so many co-conspirators that it is simply easier, cheaper, and far less risky to have them all go knock on doors and try to get out your votes.

ETA: This post is granting the assumption that small scale distributed fraud may be possible in some voting systems. I'm not at all convinced this is true, put it could be possible.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Zigg: "Ignore the fact that the Right absolutely is stealing elections, focus on the idea the the Left maybe theoretically could..."

 

[Bob001]

what constitutes e-voting for you?

A voting machine that leaves a paper trail is not really electronic voting.

I think for the purposes of this discussion "e-voting" is not about the machines used at the polls. It's about voting on-line from our own computers, like banking or shopping. Experts seem to agree that we are a long way from being able to do that securely, and a hack could be catastrophic.

 

[Bob001]

Ballots are only supposed to be mailed to registered voters, but they are often mailed to the wrong address. Only some states require signature verification, and the process of signature verification doesn't really work. It's hard to do mass centralized fraud, but easy to do small scale distributed fraud.

Where is the evidence that large numbers of ballots are being misdirected, and then used, instead of just being returned to the sender? All states have multiple methods of authenticating mailed ballots, even if they don't use a signature match (and most do). The question you need to answer is, at a time when a large percentage of eligible voters don't actually vote at all, how many people are willing to risk a felony conviction to cast one unlawful vote? Where is the evidence?

 

[ponderingturtle]

Zigg: "Ignore the fact that the Right absolutely is stealing elections, focus on the idea the the Left maybe theoretically could..."

But they COUNTED the votes cast by BLACKS!!!!!!!!!! That totally counts as the left stealing elections.

 

[catsmate]

It's funny that you don't see how your own name applies here.
The system is insecure. People don't have faith in it. You can keep trying to blame whomever you want to for that, but blame won't fix it.

Will you be providing actual evidence for this one of your claims?

What about gerrymandering, voter suppression and the biased Electoral College system? Those need to be addressed too, right?

Primus and secundus are being looked at.
Ultimus would require a constitutional amendment.

 

[catsmate]

Oh, look who is back slithering from shadows. That was quick, just nanosecond after inauguration.

I like how you insinuate there was, in fact, widespread vote fraud.

Well he tried to use Benford's Law (or parrot other idiot's flawed and defective use of it) to "prove" vote irregularities but was roundly debunked and then fled.

Always fishing for excuses for voting suppression and other authoritarian tactics, eh?

Indeed, they're "advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites".

What? No, that's crazy talk. It is not like Zig actually wants actual reform intended to address actual problems.
He wants to ensure one party rule under guise of "reforms to fix insecure elections" that incidentally will make harder to vote for incorrect types of people, like brown-skinned or living in place known for supporting other side.

Exactly. Keep the women and darkies in their place.

 

[catsmate]

The security of a system is not judged on what has happened, but what can happen.

The system isn't secure. There are too few mechanisms in place to actually detect and prevent fraud. That is true even if no fraud has occurred to date. Our elections are much more insecure than those of most other developed countries.

Evidence? Citations?

 

[catsmate]

Mail-in ballots, particularly as they are currently run, are horribly insecure. Paper isn't magical in that regards. It's probably better than internet voting, but it's still bad.

Evidence? Citations?

 

[bruto]

I think that, when a method of voting, such as mail-in ballots, is new and untried, there is some reasonable legitimacy in doubting the practice and wondering how secure it is. It is reasonable to make sure that it is evaluated carefully and run fairly.

When it hasn't been done yet, you can say "prove it works." Once it has been done and has worked, it's not so easy to say that.

Here in Vermont the governor and others in his party were quite dubious that mail-in balloting would work well. They worried not only about fraud but confusion and bureaucratic bungling. But the state is politically divided, and the Democratic administrators in charge of elections carried the day. So, instead of whining about it and making a big fuss and lying, the governor decided to do his best to make the plan he did not like work better than he feared it might. Not totally surprisingly, it ended up working.

Granted, Vermont is a small and traditionally bipartisan state, and the leaders of both parties are not a pack of thieves and liars, but I think it's possible to run a good election, by mail or otherwise, if the people in charge do their job properly.

 

[Bob001]

I think that, when a method of voting, such as mail-in ballots, is new and untried, there is some reasonable legitimacy in doubting the practice and wondering how secure it is. It is reasonable to make sure that it is evaluated carefully and run fairly.
....

The thing is that mail-in ballots are not "new and untried." Soldiers stationed away from home have voted by mail since the Civil War. Most states have made absentee ballots available routinely for many years. More people chose to vote by mail in 2020 than ever before, and many states made it easier. But the process itself isn't new, and it has never been shown to be unreliable.

I note again that five states conduct elections entirely by mail. Oregon's done it since 2000, and for some elections since the 1980s, and there have been no significant complaints, even from candidates who lost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote-by-mail_in_Oregon
https://www.vox.com/21401321/oregon-vote-by-mail-2020-presidential-election
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/oreg...ail-covid-19-trump_n_5eab16c3c5b6883aea388b44

 

[bruto]

The thing is that mail-in ballots are not "new and untried." Soldiers stationed away from home have voted by mail since the Civil War. Most states have made absentee ballots available routinely for many years. More people chose to vote by mail in 2020 than ever before, and many states made it easier. But the process itself isn't new, and it has never been shown to be unreliable.

I note again that five states conduct elections entirely by mail. Oregon's done it since 2000, and for some elections since the 1980s, and there have been no significant complaints, even from candidates who lost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote-by-mail_in_Oregon
https://www.vox.com/21401321/oregon-vote-by-mail-2020-presidential-election
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/oreg...ail-covid-19-trump_n_5eab16c3c5b6883aea388b44

Point taken. I think in Vermont the question was not so much whether it would result in fraud, but whether the somewhat hasty implementation would work fairly and efficiently, and I think there's at least a little room for worry there. And in the past, the application for an absentee ballot has been pretty well monitored in ways it might not always be when it becomes universal. There is, or can be, a difference in how ballots get into people's hands. States that have done this for longer and not on an emergency basis have had more time to figure out the day to day matters not just of checking lists, but printing and postage and sorting and counting. Making sure delivery is accurate, making sure there are mechanisms for those who don't get a delivery they should, and those who do but shouldn't. In places like my little town it made little difference, since Vermont is a paper-ballot state anyway, most of the ballots were delivered to the drop box on the town hall, and the main difference is that the poll workers had to open envelopes instead of boxes. Of course in a town of a thousand people, where everyone knows everyone else, or for that matter in a state of only a bit over a half million, voter ID is hardly an issue either, but in cities it can get a little more complicated, and enough worry to make sure things are done with extra care is not a bad thing.

As I mentioned, here in Vermont, the question was pretty quickly answered. The whole business worked well. We can be added to the list of places where this is the case, and thus added to the argument that those who claim the process is unworkably flawed need to find actual evidence beyond that abstract worry.

 

[Abooga]

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avi_Rubin:
Aviel David "Avi" Rubin (born November 8, 1967) is an expert in systems and networking security. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, Technical Director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins, Director of ACCURATE, and President and co-founder of Independent Security Evaluators. In 2002, he was elected to the Board of Directors of the USENIX Association for a two-year term.

Rubin is credited with bringing to light vulnerabilities in Premier Election Solutions' (formerly Diebold Election Systems) Accuvote electronic voting machines.[1]


Here´s a recent comment from this expert (from his blog http://avi-rubin.blogspot.com/)

Thursday, April 16, 2020
The upcoming election in the face of COVID-19
I was interviewed by David Troy of TEDx MidAltantic about the issue of the upcoming election in the face of COVID-19. We discussed the options of "vote by mail" and electronic voting (link to interview). Here's a summary of my thoughts:

Voting by postal mail is an increasingly attractive option for the upcoming November election. While “vote by mail” systems have several drawbacks, in the face of COVID-19 and the need to keep a safe distance among people, this option may be the least unattractive. It is important to note that a state that planned on having a poll site election may not be able to automatically and easily switch over to a mail-in system overnight. There are many logistical issues that need to be addressed. One of the challenges faced by election officials is that at the moment, it is not clear if the pandemic will subside before November. Given that it could take months to switch from the current plans to a mail-in system, state officials would have to start planning the change now, without knowing for sure if they will need to switch.

"Vote by mail” provides opportunities for vote selling and voter coercion. For example, a spouse or employer may have the ability to pressure someone to vote a certain way. Furthermore, the postal system is not immune to tampering. Still, wide scale wholesale fraud is probably more difficult to achieve in a mail-in system than in many other systems such as fully electronic or Internet based ones. In the current crisis we face, we may need to give up on the perfect for the sake of the good (or the least bad) and switch the country over to mail-in voting for this upcoming election. We still have over 6 months, and hopefully that is enough time for states to take the steps that they need to achieve this change. Several states already vote by mail, and those states’ officials can provide guidance to states who want to switch over for this coming election.

There is a risk that if many states switch over to vote by mail, that they will make the switch permanent. It would be a shame if future elections eliminate poll site paper-based voting because of this one-time necessary adjustment we have to make this year. However, we should focus right now on November, 2020. We’ll have plenty of time to worry about future elections. Hopefully, we will be rid of this pandemic and will be able to focus on providing the best possible election system in 2022 and 2024.

 

[Abooga]

Back in 2007 he wrote: (http://avi-rubin.blogspot.com/2007/03/todays-congressional-hearing.html)

[...]when I first studied the Diebold DRE in 2003, I felt that a Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) provided enough assurance. But, I continued, after four years of studying the issue, I now believe that a DRE with a VVPAT is not a reasonable voting system. The only system that I know of that achieves software independence as defined by NIST, is economically viable and readily available is paper ballots with ballot marking machines for accessibility and precinct optical scanners for counting - coupled with random audits. That is how we should be conducting elections in the US, in my opinion.

AFAIK VVPAT machines are used in the US. I still haven´t seen a comprehensive list of the types of machines used in different states. Such a messy way of doing it, without a centralised system...?

 

[Abooga]

Some confidence inspiring reading from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elect...everal types of,display tallies to the public.

Security reviews
The Brennan Center summarized almost 200 errors in election machines from 2002-2008, many of which happened repeatedly in different jurisdictions, which had no clearinghouse to learn from each other.[27] More errors have happened since then.

Machines in use are not examined to determine if they have been hacked, so no hacks of machines in use have been documented. Researchers have hacked all machines they have tried, and have shown how they can be undetectably hacked by manufacturers, election office staff, pollworkers, voters and outsiders and by the public.[103] The public can access unattended machines in polling places the night before elections.[104] Some of the hacks can spread among machines on the removable memory cards which tell the machines which races to display, and carry results back to the central tally location

 

[Ethan Thane Athen]

Where is the evidence that large numbers of ballots are being misdirected, and then used, instead of just being returned to the sender? All states have multiple methods of authenticating mailed ballots, even if they don't use a signature match (and most do). The question you need to answer is, at a time when a large percentage of eligible voters don't actually vote at all, how many people are willing to risk a felony conviction to cast one unlawful vote? Where is the evidence?

We don’t even have a signature match in the UK. You get sent your ballot card to your address and on polling day turn up, hand over the card, they cross your name off a list and give you a voting slip (which is not tied to your identity in any way). No check that you are the person named on the card. No need to provide ID. You put a cross next to your candidate of choice and put it in a box.

Far less checks than you have in the US and no-one shouts about voter fraud here.

I’ve never voted by mail but again I think that just gets sent to your address and you tick (cross) the box and put it back in the post.

 

[Abooga]

And you still wonder why Trump´s claims of election fraud seemed believable for many? IMO he lacked credibility because he had four years as president to tackle this problem and did nothing, then spread baseless claims right before the election, and also, when he started claiming that he won "by a landslide" and that he got "75% of the votes", anyone with a sane mind should have noticed that he was blatantly lying.

But all this does not negate that the system is crap. And noticing the reticence to address the problem, democracy is in peril indeed.

 

[Dave Rogers]

Evidence? Citations?

Donald J. Trump, Twitter, most of 2020.

Dave