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jmward01 3 hours ago [-]
The red haring is that voting is hacked or illegals are voting, etc etc etc. The -real- story is disenfranchising voters by making it hard for them or out-right steaming their votes in the courts. We don't have an election fraud issue in the us. We have an election legitimacy issue.
rayiner 2 hours ago [-]
So do you only secure your computer networks after they’ve been hacked? We should have transparent, verifiable election infrastructure, like Taiwan: https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo.
tzs 1 hours ago [-]
The problem is implementing that in a way that doesn't disenfranchise a lot of people. Most or all countries that have the kind of robust national ID system for such a system also make sure it is easy for every citizen to get the necessary ID.
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.
rayiner 2 hours ago [-]
Taiwan’s system is like voter ID on steroids. The key part of your quote is that voter lists are compiled by “Household Registration Offices.” In Taiwan, everyone has to register with a household registration office within 30 days of moving. You have to show up to the office in person with your national ID card, household certificate, and proof of address. So it’s actually more stringent than voting registration in the US.
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
collabs 37 minutes ago [-]
It is also worth noting that these mandatory registration schemes are free of cost or I guess free of cost at the point of service. I think if we require a voter ID / national ID card scheme, it has to be free of cost at the point of service as well. These services should be at least AT MINIMUM as ubiquitous as a post office and / or at least TWO full time locations with extended hours for every county / parish / etc.
The funding for this has to come from somewhere and it MUST be the federal government because my state / local government doesn't have money to even build a small sidewalk so it definitely does not have money for all this nonsense.
afavour 1 hours ago [-]
I think the point OP is making is that the Trump administration would never propose a system like that. They don’t want to replace voter registration with a mandatory system all citizens use as an essential part of their lives. They want to keep voter registration optional and want to gatekeep it in ways that make it difficult for undesirable voters (i.e. the ones they don’t think will vote for them) to register.
jpkw 3 hours ago [-]
Red Herring* - it's a fish, not a rabbit
pinkmuffinere 44 minutes ago [-]
You’re right, but that’s a distraction from the bigger misconception — it’s actually “Read Herring”. The idea is that the herring has already been documented (and “read” back), no longer deserving of additional discussion.
blacksmith_tb 4 minutes ago [-]
I have never heard that suggestion... if you can document it, the wiki entry would need an update[1]
Well, on the bright side, you can tell I didn't have AI write the comment for me! Thanks for the correction.
pclowes 2 hours ago [-]
Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important.
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.
rayiner 1 hours ago [-]
Faith in elections is a two-way street. The election system must also be fully transparent, minimize the degree to which voters must trust election administrators, and keep records that would allow evidence of voter fraud to be detected. You can’t punish people for not providing evidence if you’ve designed an election system that fails to keep the information that would allow anomalies to be detected.
afavour 1 hours ago [-]
> The election system must also be fully transparent
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.
vitally3643 25 minutes ago [-]
That's not what transparent means here.
mulderc 1 hours ago [-]
My states system is very transparent and has many systems for detecting fraud but people on the right claim otherwise and they are either ignorant of how it worked or just lying.
dawatchusay 1 hours ago [-]
This and a comment under it start with the exact same sentence. “Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important.” There’s something wrong here and it makes me doubt HN
morkalork 41 minutes ago [-]
Don't worry, various governments around the world are working hard to ensure online communities can only be accessed with ID verification. Will that ease your doubt in the future?
Voter ID is a "solution" to a nonissue problem of a handful of people casting votes illegally. Everyone clamoring to implement voter ID is a disingenuous liar with the motive of disenfranchising citizens. Disenfranchising large numbers of people is a far greater problem for faith in elections and election integrity.
afavour 1 hours ago [-]
I think you’ve spent a little too long huffing right wing media glue.
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.
baggy_trough 1 hours ago [-]
I think you’ve spent a little too long consuming left wing media. My evidence is that essentially no other developed democracies treat voter ID in this recklessly casual manner. Even the Obama presidential library requires ID to enter!
afavour 1 hours ago [-]
So, like I said in my previous comment, any moves to require ID in order to vote should be paired with comprehensive programs to make sure ID is free and easily available to all eligible voters. You haven’t considered why it isn’t?
> recklessly casual
I say again: there's absolutely no evidence that fraudulent voting has come anywhere close to changing the outcome of an election. Or had any statistical relevance at all. And there are a lot of people looking for that evidence.
plagiarist 16 minutes ago [-]
Which Amendment in the Constitution outlines the right to enter the Barack Obama Presidential Library?
ImPostingOnHN 18 minutes ago [-]
Repeating talking points instead of actually responding to the comment you replied to, is not making you and your side look very credible or competent.
Wait! Wait. Before you reply: I fear you may have read my comment but heard "repeat talking points again, attack person who was unconvinced by them". Please don't do that.
bediger4000 1 hours ago [-]
Voter ID does little to help there, since ballots aren't (and should not be) tied to a specific voter. Faith in tabulators, voting procedures and doing risk limiting audits help more.
caseysoftware 3 hours ago [-]
I'd love to hear the steelman - what's the argument in favor of using a proprietary electronic system?
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?
rayiner 2 hours ago [-]
It’s cheaper in the short term because these are COTS products. But that’s not a good reason. Voting security should be “zero trust.” We should count votes the same way the Taiwanese, without reliance on technology: https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo. Voting should be
jfengel 3 hours ago [-]
You must have missed the 2000 election. We hung for weeks on the vagueness of paper ballots. Both sides filed motion after motion to exclude some batch of ballots or other. There was a huge number of extremely unlikely votes in a place with a badly designed paper ballot.
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.
wahern 3 hours ago [-]
Florida was using a punch-card system, thus the infamous hanging chads. Fill-in-the-bubble scantron systems are much faster and less error prone; not as fast as purely electronic voting, but you get a reliable paper trail that is more transparent and much easier to audit.
tzs 55 minutes ago [-]
> Fill-in-the-bubble scantron systems are much faster and less error prone; not as fast as purely electronic voting, but you get a reliable paper trail that is more transparent and much easier to audit.
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.
I paid close attention.. and agreed that that particular approach was broken.
My question was: what's the argument in favor of using a proprietary electronic system?
jfengel 2 hours ago [-]
I think just the fact that it was the first thing on offer that wasn't the thing they were already using.
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.
9 minutes ago [-]
xethos 1 hours ago [-]
This is entirely unrelated to your point, but as you brought up the sanctity some Americans hold their founding fathers to:
How do some assume the American founding fathers thought ahead, and had it all planned out, with good solutions (instead of merely solutions),
...while also being aware of the Flynn effect?
mcculley 3 hours ago [-]
As a Floridian, I apologize for the 2000 election. But we have a much better system now. We have paper ballots that are scanned. We have an auditable fallback for untrustworthy machines. There is no reason other states cannot have the same.
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.
plagiarist 9 minutes ago [-]
Gore did win that election, but SCOTUS illegally decided it instead of a fair ruling requiring Florida to recount ballots using the same methods in all districts. Americans should have done general strikes and rioting.
I don't know about 9/11, but I doubt Gore's SCOTUS appointees would have made the incorrect decision on Citizens United. America would be in a better place today.
TimorousBestie 25 minutes ago [-]
> there was no 9/11 due to smoother handoff between administrations.
It’s an interesting counterfactual but I don’t see the mechanism. The hijackers were mostly in country by inauguration day. While it’s true that they weren’t really operating covertly prior to the attack, I don’t envision a Gore administration that could within months ratchet up FBI/CIA natsec awareness to a level that would change the outcome.
It’s hard for many of us to remember the “before times” now but back then there was a great deal of misplaced faith that foreign attacks on American soil were more or less impossible.
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.)
tzs 2 hours ago [-]
What about the butterfly ballots? The errors those likely caused would not be randomly distributed.
rayiner 1 hours ago [-]
When I say “errors” I mean votes the punchcard machines couldn’t read due to the chad not being punched out all the way. Those were the ballots that were at issue in the litigation (“undercounts”).
The butterfly ballot would have resulted in votes for Buchanan or double votes (ones for Buchanan + Gore if the person tried to go back and correct). Gore never actually tried to get those counted in his favor. And how could you know?
But the whole recount thing is stupid. It’s designed by people who don’t understand statistics. Any counting is a statistical process that’s going to have some measurement error. The Florida vote was almost certainly within that margin of error. The correct outcome then would have been re-voting, not a recount.
FireBeyond 11 minutes ago [-]
> Gore never actually tried to get those counted in his favor. And how could you know?
Whereas of course the Bush campaign was absolutely eager to ensure every vote, including those for Gore, were verified, right?
> The correct outcome then would have been re-voting, not a recount.
I do agree with you on this, entirely. Although even if that was the plan, the state of Florida is not exactly known for making poll access easy.
TimorousBestie 2 hours ago [-]
You either misremember or misrepresent WaPo’s reporting.
> In all likelihood, George W. Bush still would have won Florida and the presidency last year if either of two limited recounts -- one requested by Al Gore, the other ordered by the Florida Supreme Court -- had been completed, according to a study commissioned by The Washington Post and other news organizations.
> But if Gore had found a way to trigger a statewide recount of all disputed ballots, or if the courts had required it, the result likely would have been different. An examination of uncounted ballots throughout Florida found enough where voter intent was clear to give Gore the narrowest of margins.
So on this basis, GP has the right of it: Gore probably won that election.
rayiner 1 hours ago [-]
I was actually thinking of a much later CNN retrospective looking at various studies: https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-elect... (“Taken as a whole, the recount studies show Bush would have most likely won the Florida statewide hand recount of all undervotes. Undervotes are ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race.”).
The studies showed that Gore only would have won if counting over votes, which his team never pursued: “The studies also show that Gore likely would have won a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which are ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted at all. However, his legal team never pursued this action.”
Maybe if Gore had asked for a statewide hand recount the result would have been different. But instead he tried to stochastically cheat through selective recounts, which burned a huge amount of time on a process that was fundamentally unsound.
ImPostingOnHN 13 minutes ago [-]
Maybe you're right about your theory, but based on the above investigations, he won the vote anyways.
matheweis 2 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure that what’s happening right now in California is any better.. even Nate Silver is crying foul and this point.
k310 27 minutes ago [-]
Every Accusation is a Confession.
Voter fraud means:
1. I did it.
2. I need to blame someone else.
3. The more general definition of fraud is: anything done by someone who disagrees with me.
4. Jim Crow.
5. Must go.
edoceo 3 hours ago [-]
Is anyone aware of any viable, or close to viable open-source options exist? That also have capacity for something like a CA statewide election?
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steele 1 hours ago [-]
Grok is working overtime trying to hallucinate exploited vulnerabilities to call into question the US 2020 election results because the loser of that election is an demented egomaniac with daddy issues ossified longer than those draft dodger bone spurs.
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
What does USPS assume for chain of custody for a ballot? Do they hand them directly to a person?
cryptoz 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pclowes 3 hours ago [-]
Big claims require big evidence.
k12sosse 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
2 hours ago [-]
XorNot 3 hours ago [-]
The core of the problem is that you have to have mandatory voting. Sending someone a $30 fine because they didn't vote serves a very important function: it gets you an independent check that they were aware they didn't vote, or didn't turn up.
It's one of the core superpowers of the Australian electoral system: you can be fined for not voting, but also just about _any_ excuse will get you out of the fine - the fee itself is considered to be administrative and waived once you provide a valid reason.
But the system itself means that voter suppression is vastly more difficult: people are inclined to turn up. Or at least participate with the system. And the elections themselves then have a check system built in - if a whole district is getting fined, well now that's news - people complaining to media, sending letters etc.
atmavatar 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not opposed to making voting mandatory, but making election day a national holiday should come first.
While I'm aware many (most? all?) polling locations allow for early voting, the reality is that many people wait for election day, and the combined hassle of having to work that day and deal with sometimes multi-hour waits (due to Republicans repeatedly closing and limiting polling locations) inevitably leads to some not voting.
Of course that also ignores many of the other issues with our electoral system that convince many they shouldn't bother voting (e.g., the electoral collect and heavy gerrymandering disenfranchising large swaths of people), but those are a larger and more complicated set of issues to address.
gcau 2 hours ago [-]
>just about _any_ excuse will get you out of the fine
Hilariously wrong, and if it were true it defeats the purpose of making it mandatory.
Perenti 2 hours ago [-]
In my experience, ringing the AEC and saying "I thought I might have flu, and thought it best to avoid crowds" is enough to save AUD$50.
A huge difference between here in Oz and there in the USA _as I see it_ is that we are conditioned to vote, whilst you are conditioned to vote if you care enough. The fine here is just enough to be annoying, and given the streamlined process at most polling places (you still get queues) it's usually much less hassle to go to the local polling place (town hall or primary school usually) for half an hour. Given the existence of early polling and postal votes there's really not much excuse for _not_ voting unless you're religiously opposed - although I have avoided fines by calling ill-health.
hallman76 2 hours ago [-]
My brother in tech. If anyone wanted to prove voter fraud it's President Donald Trump. Trump's campaign filed 62 lawsuits. 61 were lost, dismissed, or dropped. The other was a technicality. IANAL.
Get the vagueposting out of here.
thin_carapace 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
3 hours ago [-]
Danox 3 hours ago [-]
Baloney…
tootie 2 hours ago [-]
Surely there's tons of evidence and we don't need to wait for a government assessment that has been teased for over ten years.
This has been litigated and investigated over and over and there's never been a shred of usable evidence. Fox and others were sued and lost unable to prove anything. Trump ran a voter fraud commission in 2016 and they just gave up with no findings. They have nothing. They have all the resources in the world to bring to bear and they can't prove a single thing.
rcpt 3 hours ago [-]
Seems to be an exclusive article that's also paywall. Anyone know the story?
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"
jordanscales 3 hours ago [-]
Pretty remarkable both-sidesism in this comment. One side _does not admit the results of the 2020 election_ and the other side says widespread voter fraud is not happening in the United States. Being a fence-setter on this one is intellectually lazy.
wahern 2 hours ago [-]
Conservatives in multiple states looked under every rock to find voter fraud in the 2020 election and largely came up empty handed. In Arizona they even forced a quasi-legal audit with their own citizens brigade, spending weeks pouring through records, then quietly admitted there was no systemic fraud.
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.
SV_BubbleTime 47 minutes ago [-]
I don’t get this.
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.
ImPostingOnHN 5 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
Isn't it weaker, to claim fraud so vast it changed a presidential election, while presenting no evidence?
Then, to ask for billion-dollar changes to voting, which also suppress voting, and when asked why, to shrug and then repeat the same debunked claims? I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I don't get it: the people mad at voting advocates and 2020 brush off proof that their claims are unfounded, yet they just repeat the same claims. At some point, it's malice, not ignorance.
what 2 hours ago [-]
Did you memory hole 2016?
Danox 3 hours ago [-]
All places, outside the American South in the United States don't have a problem, the American South however, is where it is a time honored tradition to make it hard to vote for some citizens.
And it has always been political and other things in the south.
blanched 3 hours ago [-]
The South does have this problem. But pretending it's /only/ the South does no favors to people who are disenfranchised elsewhere.
Tell me you've never been to Idaho without telling me you've never been to Idaho, where a considerable portion of the population (especially around Moscow, Idaho) wants explicitly to repeal the 19th amendment (the one that gave women the right to vote).
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).
"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.
what 2 hours ago [-]
> the right claims fraud
So does the left every time Trump wins.
pclowes 2 hours ago [-]
This is not comparable. A couple groups on the far left is not the same as the leader of the party. I don’t see any major figure on the left: Bernie, Obama, AOC, Biden, Hillary, Pelosi etc claiming fraud.
ibejoeb 1 hours ago [-]
> Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday.
It's very much on record that the Trump campaign reached out to the Ukraine to see if they'd dig up dirt on Hunter Biden and the Biden campaign in general, and that's what Clinton is referring to.
Unless of course you think incumbent leaders should be able to use foreign intelligence services as a part of their campaign strategy to attack their oppoosition?
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
The funding for this has to come from somewhere and it MUST be the federal government because my state / local government doesn't have money to even build a small sidewalk so it definitely does not have money for all this nonsense.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring#History
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.
> recklessly casual
I say again: there's absolutely no evidence that fraudulent voting has come anywhere close to changing the outcome of an election. Or had any statistical relevance at all. And there are a lot of people looking for that evidence.
Wait! Wait. Before you reply: I fear you may have read my comment but heard "repeat talking points again, attack person who was unconvinced by them". Please don't do that.
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.
How do some assume the American founding fathers thought ahead, and had it all planned out, with good solutions (instead of merely solutions),
...while also being aware of the Flynn effect?
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.
I don't know about 9/11, but I doubt Gore's SCOTUS appointees would have made the incorrect decision on Citizens United. America would be in a better place today.
It’s an interesting counterfactual but I don’t see the mechanism. The hijackers were mostly in country by inauguration day. While it’s true that they weren’t really operating covertly prior to the attack, I don’t envision a Gore administration that could within months ratchet up FBI/CIA natsec awareness to a level that would change the outcome.
It’s hard for many of us to remember the “before times” now but back then there was a great deal of misplaced faith that foreign attacks on American soil were more or less impossible.
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.)
The butterfly ballot would have resulted in votes for Buchanan or double votes (ones for Buchanan + Gore if the person tried to go back and correct). Gore never actually tried to get those counted in his favor. And how could you know?
But the whole recount thing is stupid. It’s designed by people who don’t understand statistics. Any counting is a statistical process that’s going to have some measurement error. The Florida vote was almost certainly within that margin of error. The correct outcome then would have been re-voting, not a recount.
Whereas of course the Bush campaign was absolutely eager to ensure every vote, including those for Gore, were verified, right?
> The correct outcome then would have been re-voting, not a recount.
I do agree with you on this, entirely. Although even if that was the plan, the state of Florida is not exactly known for making poll access easy.
> In all likelihood, George W. Bush still would have won Florida and the presidency last year if either of two limited recounts -- one requested by Al Gore, the other ordered by the Florida Supreme Court -- had been completed, according to a study commissioned by The Washington Post and other news organizations.
> But if Gore had found a way to trigger a statewide recount of all disputed ballots, or if the courts had required it, the result likely would have been different. An examination of uncounted ballots throughout Florida found enough where voter intent was clear to give Gore the narrowest of margins.
So on this basis, GP has the right of it: Gore probably won that election.
The studies showed that Gore only would have won if counting over votes, which his team never pursued: “The studies also show that Gore likely would have won a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which are ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted at all. However, his legal team never pursued this action.”
Maybe if Gore had asked for a statewide hand recount the result would have been different. But instead he tried to stochastically cheat through selective recounts, which burned a huge amount of time on a process that was fundamentally unsound.
Voter fraud means:
1. I did it.
2. I need to blame someone else.
3. The more general definition of fraud is: anything done by someone who disagrees with me.
4. Jim Crow.
5. Must go.
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
It's one of the core superpowers of the Australian electoral system: you can be fined for not voting, but also just about _any_ excuse will get you out of the fine - the fee itself is considered to be administrative and waived once you provide a valid reason.
But the system itself means that voter suppression is vastly more difficult: people are inclined to turn up. Or at least participate with the system. And the elections themselves then have a check system built in - if a whole district is getting fined, well now that's news - people complaining to media, sending letters etc.
While I'm aware many (most? all?) polling locations allow for early voting, the reality is that many people wait for election day, and the combined hassle of having to work that day and deal with sometimes multi-hour waits (due to Republicans repeatedly closing and limiting polling locations) inevitably leads to some not voting.
Of course that also ignores many of the other issues with our electoral system that convince many they shouldn't bother voting (e.g., the electoral collect and heavy gerrymandering disenfranchising large swaths of people), but those are a larger and more complicated set of issues to address.
Hilariously wrong, and if it were true it defeats the purpose of making it mandatory.
A huge difference between here in Oz and there in the USA _as I see it_ is that we are conditioned to vote, whilst you are conditioned to vote if you care enough. The fine here is just enough to be annoying, and given the streamlined process at most polling places (you still get queues) it's usually much less hassle to go to the local polling place (town hall or primary school usually) for half an hour. Given the existence of early polling and postal votes there's really not much excuse for _not_ voting unless you're religiously opposed - although I have avoided fines by calling ill-health.
Get the vagueposting out of here.
This has been litigated and investigated over and over and there's never been a shred of usable evidence. Fox and others were sued and lost unable to prove anything. Trump ran a voter fraud commission in 2016 and they just gave up with no findings. They have nothing. They have all the resources in the world to bring to bear and they can't prove a single thing.
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.
Isn't it weaker, to claim fraud so vast it changed a presidential election, while presenting no evidence?
Then, to ask for billion-dollar changes to voting, which also suppress voting, and when asked why, to shrug and then repeat the same debunked claims? I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I don't get it: the people mad at voting advocates and 2020 brush off proof that their claims are unfounded, yet they just repeat the same claims. At some point, it's malice, not ignorance.
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.
Unless of course you think incumbent leaders should be able to use foreign intelligence services as a part of their campaign strategy to attack their oppoosition?