I’m looking through my history and for some reason I’m not seeing it. I think it was in the last couple weeks, last month for sure. Matt Blaze’s Twitter feed is a likely place to have found it.
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We vote by paper ballot and mail here in Washington state. It works well. Postage is even free now, a recent change and I think a good use of my tax dollars. And if there is ever any question an audit-able physical record exists.
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Literally any voting plan that involves anything but paper ballots counted by scantron and, if necessary, humans, is nothing more than an attempt at election fraud.
~ A software developer.
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How often to I have to post this?
Cryptocurrencies are useless. Blockchain solutions are frequently much worse than the systems they replace. Here’s why.
– BRUCE SCHNEIER There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology
Bruce breaks down what trust means and shows that at some level you have to trust that a system is working as it should. Blockchains systems remove the human element and work outside of existing institutions. Thus WHEN they fail you lose your money, vote, or shirt.
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I feel like this would be a backup, like a redundancy so if there was a question of fraud there would be another record to go to. Even paper ballots can just get “misplaced”.
Yes but with paper ballots you can’t change the vote tally for an entire election with a couple lines of code.
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For people unable to mark a standard ballot, a ballot marking device is definitely helpful. But, there shouldn’t be two readable outputs, they could be different. Just the human-readable output, and make the computer able to read it too.
A side effect, a person who doesn’t need help should be able to fill out the exact same format too. Eliminating the need for many marking machines.
Many tabulation machines already warn of errors for under or over votes. Expanding them with screens to show the entire vote is a good idea.
That’s the step most places don’t do but should. Sample audits should be mandatory every election, not just when someone complains.
Notice, we’re both describing “Ballot Marking Devices” and “Tabulation Machines” not “Voting Machines”. Because in this type of system, the paper ballot is the vote. It’s possible to fall back and audit the paper directly without the machines. It’s the difference between using a machine to support a task that’s also checked manually, and giving total control the machine. Nobody should want to give the machine total control, we’ve all seen that movie…
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Yep, and: never underestimate the idiocy that says “we can use this tech now, so we will!”
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A little nonce in there will ask if the vote they are about to cast is against their interests. If they say yes, they get spritzed in the face with mint water and rejected for a half-hour?
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As an non-USian (Canuckistanian if anyone cares), I’m perplexed why simple things can’t work down there. Paper ballot, pen, cardboard screen for privacy, and a cardboard box to hold the ballots. The highest tech I’ve seen is anti-tamper cellotape to seal the box at poll closing.
For that matter, the idea of waiting in lines seems quaint. In 35 years of voting, federal, provincial, municipal, I have never once taken more than 5 minutes to vote. And I almost always do it in the just-after-work timeframe, allegedly the busiest.
I know the US has 10x more people. But shouldn’t things scale? Seems such a uniquely US problem. Perhaps this is “American Exceptionalism” at work?
Also: what was wrong with the software Microsoft developed for the 2016 election?
Da’ fuq? What could be the possible use of this?
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Those are all good questions, with relatively complex answers.
First, there seems to be an intrinsic need for politicians to gift political allies and donors down here with lucrative contracts. One glance at most of these companies providing high tech “solutions” to voting shows that many of them have connections to current or former politicians. It’s a clear example of the American system, where simple solutions are eschewed for those that provide monetary benefit to someone for their support. The bigger problem is no politician will hold these companies to the fire of proper security when it comes to these devices, or ensuring they provide a readily reviewable paper trail of the votes cast.
Second, there was a lot of grumbling about our “antiquated system” after the 2000 election, especially because of the fiasco in Florida with the recount. But the solution to a problem with punch cards didn’t have to be “electronic voting machines”, it could have been “how about a better paper ballot.” I’ll even cop to being strongly in favor of electronic voting machines at the time. That was before I became aware of the problems with such systems, which has become glaringly obvious in the last ten years.
Third, no two states are exactly alike. We’ve got 50 different voting systems for 50 different states. Some are nearly identical of course, but they set their own rules and policies, and determine what machines or systems they’ll use. That leads to a wide range of results. Some states never have problems. Other states constantly have issues. With no clear national mandate on what needs to happen, you end up with screwy systems that break down when things don’t go 100% right. Over twenty years of tech support and 2 years now of working upper levels of IT management, I’ve become a HUGE proponent of “what the hell do you do when your systems break down, because there are ZERO automated systems that don’t fail at some point.”
As for lines, well, that’s politics 101 in America. Spend too little money on elections, claim you have to cut state budgets which necessitates closing polling stations, and target those closures to areas where your political opponent has higher turn outs, almost always minority areas to reduce Democratic voting (this, along with gerrymandering, is why the Republicans dominate our politics despite being out voted in most elections). You funnel more people into lines knowing the wait will turn people away and you can suppress voting.
Things should scale, you’re right. But with the GOP controlling much of our country, the narrative here is “private enterprise and profits are the only thing that matters,” which leads to cutting budgets for the most critical of our rights, like voting. And that leads to no end of shenanigans.
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It is so incredibly non-viable. Here’s what you need to know about blockchain:
- It’s just a ledger - it records transactions
- Anyone can edit the ledger
- The security of the ledger is based on the fact that lots of people have a copy of it (if someone forges entries their copy won’t match the other copies).
- If you control fewer than half the copies of the ledge then you can’t forge entries. If you control more than half than you can forge entries.
Now apply that to a two-party electoral system. Basically at some point one party will have more resources/followers and will take control of the blockchain and that’s it, they just get to decide the outcome of elections. Alternatively, a foreign country (or block of foreign countries) will.
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Turns out the DNC is quite willing to reduce working class voting themselves when the working class wants to vote wrong.
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Mmmaybe, but the voting results come via large numbers of ordinary people in state and local governments. If someone truly rigged an election, I think we’d all know about it, and in the past, I think everyone assumed that would result in unified, non-partisan outrage.
If Russia made it so Turmp got 98% of the popular vote in 2020, we’d all know they’d done it, but what we didn’t know before now is that Republicans at every level of government would go along with it.
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Thanks so much for the detailed response. I did have a moment of clarity after I posted; no doubt a big difference between Canada & the US elections is due to your loose collection of states, with all the differences that brings. Here our federal elections are run by Elections Canada, provincial are run by Elections Ontario/etc.
Regarding the other nonsense, if indeed the GOP is responsible for most of it, how come the Dems can’t straighten things out when they’re in charge? Or do they become ratfinks once they in charge?
Also, what keeps the 2-party system alive? I assume once all but 2 parties are squeezed out, it’s really hard to expand beyond them. Off to Wikipedia I goes…
I also failed to mention we have our own problems. Such as the FPP system that can result in a winner that didn’t win the popular vote, as happened in the last Federal election. Seem to recall a younger Justine Trudeau promising election reform to address this, but it came to nothing.
Ah well, at least cannabis is legal from coast to coast to coast to border. 
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Assuming that Trump/Putin/Russia/China/whoever can’t rustle up enough computing power to run > 50% of the nodes on the network…
To hell with blockchain. The absolute LAST thing we should accept in our voting system is something that gives us a number but there is no human who can be held accountable for it working right.
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Cross posting from another thread, because enough evidence has come out to make it completely clear that this wasn’t just incompetence, they rigged it:
The fact that they won’t fix the errors makes it abundantly clear that they are rigging it.
This guy made a spreadsheet of the errors that shows that fixing them would put Sanders ahead of Buttigieg in SDEs as well as the popular vote.
I did a t-test on the per-precinct delegate errors for Sanders and Buttigieg, and the p-value is 0.0016. That means there is about one chance in 600 that this distribution of errors is due to chance, which strongly suggests that something other than just bungling incompetence at work.
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