theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Kestrel isn't describing simple arithmetic. He literally proposed a statistical audit. "Rolleyes" indeed.
Rigged or Hacked Voting Machines
- Thread starter Orphia Nay
- Start date
Kestrel isn't describing simple arithmetic. He literally proposed a statistical audit. "Rolleyes" indeed.
Donal
Philosopher
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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
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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theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
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.
Mostly no to hell no but this is interesting and I've never heard someone suggest it before:
I kind of like it.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Yes.
No.
Slow things down and increase cost, but I agree it's worth it.
Automatic recounts under a certain margin? Yes. That specific margin? Maybe.
No.
No.
No.
Yes.
There's no such thing as "free". Figure out who's paying for it, and why, and then we'll talk.
Upchurch
Papa Funkosophy
This is commonly known as "building the world's most expensive pencil."
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Pretty much.
The thing is, every school child is trained to fill in bubbles on a Scan-Tron form. Paper ballots with machine counting and human oversight seems like a about as cromulent a system as is needed.
Trebuchet
Penultimate Amazing
No. Everyone will leave town for the long weekend and not vote.
Hm, this has convinced me to reconsider. The the crowd that really doesn't give a damn select themselves out of voting. I could buy into that. This would have tendency to skew the actual voters to be poorer. So, sort of a progressive voting scheme.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
A Tuesday holiday makes more sense. Or a Saturday voting day.
But I'm one of those people who thinks that it's a perfectly cromulent use of your voting privilege, to look at the situation and decide that abstention (and spending the day doing something more important) is sufficient.
Donal
Philosopher
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So an informed electorate with more choices is bad?
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Nothing on that list has to do with increasing voter information. Maybe one thing on that list has anything to do with more choices.
And neither "informed electorate" nor "more choices" have anything to do with voting machine security, which is the actual topic of the thread.
Rule of So in full effect!
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ETA: I'm also switching my first "yes" to a "no". Instead of a Monday holiday, either a Tuesday holiday or a Saturday voting day.
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Donal
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Except more voters makes vote rigging a more expensive and less efficient proposition. So either you have to try another way than jacking a bunch of voting machines/ballot boxes, or you have to employ a lot more people to do it.
ServiceSoon
Graduate Poster
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Sortition: random representation.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
How so?
Its occasionally your duty as citizen to not vote. If you are especially ignorant or unconcerned about the outcome, you shouldn't vote.
More voters means you have to fake more votes to shift an election. Not really true if you can actually hack machines but still.
Also, I could be convinced that a lottery would be the best way to pick representatives or maybe candidates.
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Belz...
Fiend God
Then go back to paper.
Donal
Philosopher
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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".
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
I agree with the principle, but find the pejorative tone repugnant.
It depends if you're worried about a recount. If you can fake the vote counts without having to worry about the ballots, then flipping 100k votes is no more difficult than flipping 100 votes.
True.
So could I.
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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