If you want to have strong opinions about voting security, you should do as Matt Blaze recommends and sign up to be an election judge. I did it after my business partner 'lvh did, presumably at Blaze's urging, and he's right: you really can't comprehend fully what's going on in an election until you've worked on one firsthand. A lot of things you'd be inclined to think are major security problems probably aren't, and the converse is also true.
Wherever you are, it's probably easy to sign up (I did online) and they'll likely pay you to do it.
Some people might interpret this as gatekeeping, but it really is true. If you're serious about election security, you'll learn a lot very quickly by immersing yourself in the process and the people who do it.
For example, one often-overlooked advantage of traditional in-person paper voting is that you're entitled to spoil your ballot and request a fresh one. This protects voters from being coerced into voting a certain way and taking a photo of their ballot as proof, as there's no guarantee that the ballot in the photo is the same as what was submitted.
Some people might interpret this as gatekeeping,...
I don't think it is gatekeeping to suggest people learn something about a subject before developing & propogating strong opinions on it. Obviously this is one of the best ways to learn some of the ins and outs.
> This protects voters from being coerced into voting a certain way and taking a photo of their ballot as proof
I like that, and I think it's an important property of voting systems that people who want to implement online voting overlook. But isn't it undermined by absentee voting, or is there a similar mechanism for that?
Once you go online (not to be confused with electronic-in-person), you cant really hide your vote. Whoever is buying your vote can instead buy your credentials to vote.
This is true of all remote voting. The all-postal ballots in Washington and Oregon are certainly subject to this, and there is a certain rate of voter coercion that goes undetected, particularly within households.
For the proponents of all-postal voting, this trade-off is worth it for the sake of the increased participation rates. Democratic legitimacy can be very nuanced and delicate. A well-publicized example of voter coercion could destroy trust in the existing system, but then the well-publicized problems of lines and poor voting hours eroded trust in the previous system too.
But the idea has never gotten very far. In general, the idea of a collectivist state that is underpinned by citizen responsibilities has been subsumed by the idea of the state as service supplier, and the citizen consumer.
I'm only for mandatory voting if there is a 'none of the above' option and if the majority votes for that then the election is a do-over and the candidates on that ballot are forbidden from running in the next election and possibly more.
> I'm only for mandatory voting if there is a 'none of the above' option
You could write in a name, or hand in an empty ballot. Mind, nothing will come of this even if it's the majority pick, but you're never actually forced to choose a candidate.
Yea, mandatory voting is more of an assurance that everyone is given an opportunity to vote without encumbrance than that they actually express an opinion. I haven't seen a mandatory voting system that requires you to vote for a candidate out of a chosen list, that seems very dangerous.
If voting is mandatory than any impediments to being able to vote (like not giving employees time off) is quite limited by the fact that such impediments are illegal, in the US voter suppression sort of skates by on BS and lots of talking heads explaining how unmotivated millennials are.
I suspect an even bigger problem is that there are powerful players who seem to have have an interest in the opposite - that is, reducing the number of potential voters who actually vote. I can't imagine them letting mandatory voting go without a real fight.
There is a whole alt-right idea of "Demographic shifting" as a tactic being used to suppress their opinion. Unfortunately Americans are really stupid and conspiracy theories have gotten a deep hold on society.
> require voting in person, but make voting mandatory.
This is only feasible if employers are legally required to allow employees time off to vote. In many countries, election days are holidays, but attempts to follow suit in the US haven't gone anywhere.
In Vermont there is a state holiday for "town hall day" it's statutory so everyone either is out of work or getting paid holiday overtime and it's meant to encourage people to participate in their local town's politics - it is awesome and everywhere in America should have it.
Nope! You could easily require states to offer a full week of voting as a minimum, this would also cut down on the tactic of making long lines at voting stations to reduce turn out.
> Nope! You could easily require states to offer a full week of voting as a minimum, this would also cut down on the tactic of making long lines at voting stations to reduce turn out.
How can you do that without an amendment? As I understand it, states are free to choose the methods for elections (which is why there is such variety in the US).
From the whitehouse.gov site:
> Federal elections are administered by state and local governments, although the specifics of how elections are conducted differ between the states. The Constitution and laws of the United States grant the states wide latitude in how they administer elections.
If your point is that you'll eventually go to jail, after many years of warnings and chances to pay, I don't have an issue with this.
There are many actions we require of citizens. You have to pay your taxes, you have to show up for jury duty, you have to sign up for the draft. Why is showing up to vote a less important civic responsibility than any of those things?
> If your point is that you'll eventually go to jail, after many years of warnings and chances to pay
This may be the case in principle, but in practice I actually don't think this is enforced here in Australia.
Last time I neglected to vote in local government elections (because I legitimately didn't know they were on), I got a letter seeking an explanation, then a $20-ish fine, then no further correspondence and no credit record strike or any further consequences. (I think that may have been because The Greens won that election and they weren't interested in chasing people over tiny fines).
And yes I get that if after multiple court summonses and defiant refusals to appear or pay, you could theoretically end up being hauled off to jail, but I don't think this has ever happened in Australia.
I can imagine a magistrate just ending up rolling their eyes and saying "oh fine, go away".
But the "compulsoriness" of voting here does mean that more people pay attention and take politics seriously, and politicians have to try address the needs of the entire population and not play games relating to people's willingness or ability to vote.
That said, it is not compulsory to lodge a valid vote, and drawing genitalia on the ballot paper is a socially acceptable form of voting.
Unlike the U.S., prisoners in Australia are allowed to vote, which seems like a meaningful - if symbolic - check on government tyranny.
But prisoners, like everyone else, can still lodge a blank ballot paper, or one with any kind of message on it, including a drawing of genitalia. So, no, silent protest is not criminalized.
It only leads to logical absurdity if you insist on taking it there for rhetorical purposes.
All laws ultimately come down to a level of reasonableness in their application, and this one is no different.
In practice, in Australia, it’s a moderate and balanced approach that helps to bring about what is one of the more well-functioning and harmonious democratic systems in the world. It’s no big deal.
Besides, people who hate the system enough to want to overthrow it should probably come up with a more robust course of action than merely staying home on polling day.
Australia don't have even the the most basic inalienable rights (speech for example), and you just got done arguing that a selective enforcement legal system is a good thing. Now you top it off with equating forced voting to silent protest, letting murders vote, and (cringe) suggesting something "more robust" than free speech.
Next thing you know Aus will outlaw random numbers.
Given the mischaracterisations and both personal and nationalistic slurs in this comment, we're clearly beyond being able to have a respectful discussion on this topic.
But for the sake of setting some points straight, and correcting a mistake on my part:
- Australia's basic human rights are inherited from British common law, which is argued by some (generally conservatives from what I can see) as in some ways preferable than rights encoded in a constitution or bill of rights. Reasonable people can and do debate that, but for however much this counts, the (hardly left-wing) Cato Institute rates Australia as 4th in the world on its freedom index [1]).
- I don't support selective enforcement; the article I linked showed that the law was enforced, it's just not a heavy-handed enforcement, and thus the spectre of jail is overblown.
- You're not forced to vote; you can lodge a blank form. You are just required show up (or send in a vote by post), or pay a $20 fine. Which, I agree, initially seems like a heinous impingement on freedom, until you realise it's the best protection we have of a more important freedom: that everyone has the right to vote without interference by political operators who would seek to manipulate the system to arbitrarily prevent certain people from voting.
- I was slightly mistaken about prisoners voting; prisoners on sentences greater than 3 years can't vote. So, murderers or other serious violent offenders aren't voting. But the potential for governments to manipulate elections via excessive incarceration is vastly reduced, which seems like something that should be important to people who worry about government intrusions on freedom (of which I'm one).
- I'm with you on the profound importance on free speech; I just think people who want to send a strong protest to government would be better off finding another hill to die on.
- "Moderate" and "balanced" are important concepts in political decision-making, and "reasonable"-ness is a core concept in common law.
Ultimately, systems should be judged on their outcomes.
I was previously (indeed quite recently) of the ideological persuasion that saw things like compulsory voting as an unconscionable breach of civil liberties.
I now recognise that virtues can only be measured in relation to other virtues they either impede or promote, and that in practice it turns out that, this particular infringement of civil liberties leads to a far more important benefit: a democratic system in which nobody is denied their right to vote, and a society that is widely regarded as being as free and well-functioning as any.
Which is not to say I make great criticisms of the U.S. I like the U.S., and whether I do or not it's not for me to say it should change.
I'm just pointing out that the odious spectres people invoke whenever compulsory voting is raised, turn out not to be problems in practice in Australia.
Not if you can re-establish credentials after selling them and cast a second vote that silently spoils whatever the buyer sends. Though that might count as electronic-in-person, as you'd need some unsellable credential (e.g. live video of you showing your ID and the date-time, sending a fingerprint, etc) which can take precedence over the one you sold (a username/password, an earlier-dated video/fingerprint/whatever, etc).
But then I guess the buyer just waits til the deadline, and buys the live video of you establishing credentials and casting your vote for them, so you can't fraud them... seems a lot more convoluted though.
Nope, at least, this won't work in Cook County: even if you've mailed in a ballot, you can vote provisionally, and if you have your mail-in ballot in hand, you can spoil it on-site and vote normally. You could therefore "sell" your vote and still override it to vote differently on election day.
Of course it would work. A real world "attack" is more like a regressively patriarchal household where everyone "votes" at the dinner table. Yes, an 18 year old around that table could later make their way to a ballot station, but they'll run into their neighbors along the way, and if their swamp-creature of a father finds out, it won't go well for them.
I should be more precise. The voting system we have in Cook County accounts for the possibility that someone observed your vote, and that you might later want to rescind that vote. It does so imperfectly, as you note.
I will say that the system we have goes to some annoying lengths to try to maintain this particular kind of integrity. For instance, if you have vision problems and want your husband to help you read the ballot, we need triplicate signatures confirming that the assistance wasn't coercive. We had to stop people from helping family members, as if they were doing something wrong, which felt weird.
I've monitored elections in Ireland and the Netherlands which both have an interesting problem. They each use Proportional Representation and ranked voting. Voters filling in their ballots mark each candidate with a number indicating their preference.
There are routinely 10+ candidates in each constituency. That makes it easy to encode a highly-likely to be unique voter signature in the lower order numbers, which would make it possible to sell your vote.
To combat this, when the votes are unfurled from the ballot boxes in public, tallymen (independent checkers of the vote) are expected to record only the first preferences, and if you start marking any more, you can expect a conversation with the returning officer. They are keeping an eye out.
If you are a scrutinizer of potentially invalid ballots, which I've done a few times, you're also not allowed to bring or take any notes.
To do that with in person voting you have to physically move around enough people with enough fake IDs to actually swing the election. The difficulty of doing that silently without anyone saying anything is a protection in and of itself. On top of that you have to get that many people on the voter rolls to start with.
that's entirely a question of scale - I can imagine that it'll be trivial to scale 'online' voting fraud if you have credential access, whereas doing it in person naturally limits the total number of times you can do it.
Committing identity fraud in person, in locations likely to have an elevated police presence, is extremely risky and getting caught carries severe consequences.
More fun Cook County details: not only is there not an elevated police presence at our polling places, but the election judges are charged with making sure the local police are not hanging around within like a quarter city block, since the local police don't have any authority with respect to voting. We got to chase a cop away at our place.
(The Cook County Sheriffs police our vote, but there aren't that many of them, so if they're going to show up, it's because a judge called them out.)
Every poll site has a poll book of eligible voters (for that location). Voters present their ID, sign next to their name, are issued a ballot. In order for mass fraudulent voting, impersonators would have to choose IDs (of persons) they were very confident were not going to vote.
It absolutely is undermined by any sort of voting outside a polling station. If we’re being intellectually honest, all election systems present trade-offs. Polling stations have nice security benefits, but remote voting increase accessibility. That’s basically what you come to appreciate if you immerse yourself in these systems (and build a healthy skepticism for anyone who proposes seemingly simple solutions).
Tabulating ballots as they are received eliminates the secret ballot. Ballots should be sorted into precincts beforehand.
Many larger jurisdictions use high speed image scanners for their postal ballots and adjudicate voter intent electronically (no paper record).
Election integrity types consider postal balloting and touchscreens roughly equivalent.
The gold standard is poll sites where the ballots are tabulated onsite immediately after the polls close. Anything else compromises public voting, private counting, or both, in some way. Though sometimes the tradeoff is worthwhile, eg enfranchising voters.
The best mechanism for that is old fashioned investigative work, e.g. in the North Carolina 9th district election.
The worry is that, if everything works this way, some of the indicators used to discover this sort of thing are diluted. E.g. the first indicators in the NC 9th case were that one county in this district had a lot more absentee ballots than elsewhere, and the absentee ballots favored one candidate by an implausible margin. If all ballots are absentee, the former measure becomes useless and the latter becomes a much weaker signal.
In some jurisdictions, it's possible to vote in person after voting absentee (the absentee ballot is then destroyed without being counted).
Any system will have trade-offs, though—since ballot access (getting time off from work, childcare, transportation) appears to be a much more pervasive problem than coercion, it seems like the sacrifice would be worth it.
It's fairly straightforward to google this for the specific elections. Depending on the country, you can even do so as a foreign national, sometimes on the day of.
I recall compliance with the NV Gaming Control Board's processes to be painless compared to other regulated markets such as health care, but this is from the 80's. Can you say something about one dimension of the comparison such as change control in both cases?
I think you missed the point. Had HRC become president, she would have likely been impeached (in the House, not Senate) over emails. We have a criminal in office now who has made it 2 years without impeachment.
There are two parties are a double standard. If the Republicans thought votes were being stolen by Democrats, there would be swift and strong action.
One of the downsides of vote-by-mail is that it makes some ways of buying votes easier.
But it does have the upside of making participation easier (especially for people overburdened with work or other responsibilities). And the physical paper auditing trail makes it immensely better than all the electronic systems without that record.
It's not perfect - another potential flaw is late breaking information that might lead some people to change their votes. Still, compared to the mess where people don't vote because of long lines and taking time off work (most western countries vote on weekends) and so on... I think it's good.
No machines are needed for voting. Votes should be counted manually. Several tiers if error correction ensure honest counting and no manipulation. Counters should be paid well and be recruited from all parts of society.
Tabulation is the smallest part of the election administration software stack. Even when ballots are counted manually, vendors would still get their cheddar.
It would be pseudo-anonymous like Bitcoin. You would keep the mapping between public keys and real-world identities private. But perhaps some percentage of people would choose to waive their right to privacy, further strengthening trust in the system. Statistically, the public voters should be in line with the final outcome.
> But perhaps some percentage of people would choose to waive their right to privacy, further strengthening trust in the system.
This has the same problem. Didn't waive your right to privacy and provably vote for the right candidate - you're fired (or worse). That's why taking photos of a ballot isn't allowed, you can't have any way to show who you voted for.
Re: employer, you can just make this illegal and let the police deal with it. Your boss can probably get in trouble with HR for even asking who you voted for (as it provides fodder for a later discrimination lawsuit), though you're free to volunteer that information.
However, your "or worse" note still applies. E.g. a local gang could do the same thing, and they are unlikely to be stymied by illegality.
Huh? If you're asked to waive your right by your employer, I'm pretty sure you can get them in trouble by going to the media and make a fuss about it. This is a silly hypothesis.
I don't know if this is true. Assuming this is an established practice by large companies, there would also be a cultural notion (by managers agreeing with the sentiment, CEOs, famous executives espousing it) that hiding your voting patterns means you are voting for the "wrong people". Plus, by going to the media, you'll be permanently known to any future employer as a rat on your company's practices. While this is good for society it has personal consequences to you.
It's no different from an evil employer who forces their employees to vote and send a picture of their ballot today. Sure, taking a photo of a ballot is illegal, but that's not going to prevent it from happening when you're behind that little curtain. Coercing people to vote for your guy is illegal in both scenarios and you can and will get in trouble if you try and pull that stunt at any significant scale.
When you vote on a paper ballot, you are entitled to request a new sheet of paper if you've messed up a vote. In effect, this would allow you to take a picture of one ballot, toss it, and get another.
So, yes, it is quite different - an employer has no way to validate that an employee has voted a specific way. Any proof is not indicative of the final vote, unlike the proposed Blockchain solution.
As someone else in the thread pointed out, we already know of a better solution: paper. Any other solution so far turns out to be either convoluted and/or not as good.
Being physical, you would physically have to remove the previous vote first. This would require some combination of a chemical process, color matching, and/or glue piecing back on.
This all takes time, tight tolerances, and automation to a happen at an impactful scale, which minimal oversight would mostly prevent.
Compare this to an SQL statement to change a whole states worth of votes in a few hundred milliseconds.
You can always recount the paper.
Whatever solution, it require the limitation of involving something physical and difficult to manipulate.
Not really. Best practices in the field involve having representatives from many to all parties present at each step of the voting process, from the distribution of ballots at the booth, to the counting, to the archiving of counted boxes pending recounts.
In Washington State, photographs of each ballot are taken as the ballot is removed from the envelope and after it has been electronically tabulated. This prevents someone from replacing a paper ballot along the way.
Photos can be deleted. It would be detected and then law enforcement would or would not do anything.
A blockchain voting system would enable us to detect vote tampering, and then law enforcement would or would not do something about it.
What's the difference?
IMO, 99% of the people wont understand a blockchain system. To them it will just be "X won because a computer said so". So the question is do we want society to be filled with people thinking "I know those votes were made with pen on paper and were counted by my neighbors and trusted friends" or do we want society filled with people who think "it must be true because a computer said so"?
It’s easy to tamper with one ballot, but the level of coordination required to tamper with a large number of them quickly enough trends into the impossible category. Especially if you’re trying to keep such an operation a secret.
You could say the same thing about tax returns, credit reports, Facebook accounts, medical records, etc. For all these things an employer would benefit by coercing an employee to provide them to the employer. But the risk is worth the reward, so we still have these things. Why is a semi-anonymous voting database any different? I could think of some easy mitigations to your concerns with almost no thought. Make it so that only those who's vote hashes end in a certain number get their private key, so you have plausible deniability. Say 10%. A sample of that size should be enough to verify the vote.
If your employer uses medical records to disqualify you from a position or terminate your employment, get a lawyer because you have a case.
None of those things you mention should be something employers can act on. In many states it would be illegal to factor those things into decisions about hiring, retention, compensation or promotion.
Call centers get entire lists of registered votes (or what they last were registered as) when targeting for polls.
Now they do not come with who the individual voted for which is probably how they get around this.
So many times when you would call someone and say, "Records show you are a registered as a democrat/republican, is that correct?"
Rebuttal, "How do you know what I'm registered as isn't that illegal?"
Candid response, "Knowing who you voted for is illegal, I do not have that information, however your registered party is public information and any questions about who you voted for you can refuse."
Most of the time they didn't like that and hung up but meh throws arms up in the air not caring
If it’s even possible to waive anonymity, people will try to entice or coerce others to vote in a certain way, and require they prove it. That’s why taking a picture of your ballot is illegal in the US.
This isn’t just a theoretical concern - there are various real-life allegations of it happening, in Southeastern Europe and other places.
Meh, the concern of the integrity of the election itself is a thousand or a million times more pressing than the concern about somebody trying to coerce somebody.
Plus such coercion isn't impossible now, like you said it can be done with a camera. Presumably if you're being coerced by threat the "illegal" doesn't really help you at all.
It seems obscene to me to pass up such an obvious improvement like a verifiable record over such a theoretical concern.
>Meh, the concern of the integrity of the election itself is a thousand or a million times more pressing than the concern about somebody trying to coerce somebody.
1) Coercion is literally the biggest concern within elections. You put a big guy with a pair of brass knuckles outside of the polling location and he beats up everyone who comes out without a picture of his ballot with the right vote in place.
Theoretical? Lol. This WAS and IS common. This is why we have international election observers.
2) There's no integrity loss with paper if things are done right. Every ballot given out at a voting booth is recorded - you can't stuff the box as a voter. The only way you can do so is if election officials from all parties collude to fudge the books together, which they would need to do in view of the public as they man the voting desks, or under the supervision of the locale manager during the end-of-night count.
I don't have such faith in blockchain anonymity. Data will leak.
See the paper "Backpage and Bitcoin: Uncovering Human Traffickers" which talks about using timing based reconciliation, relationships between wallets, and superficial metadata within Bitcoin to deanonymize human traffickers:
The problem with blockchains in this situation is that your security has to be perfect forever. If anyone figures out a way to de-anonymize votes, they get all of them due to the public and append only nature of blockchain systems.
I suppose every election they could randomly distribute voter ids that are unique to that election? Ie, pull an I'd from a hat at the polling station then use it and keep it for verification?
Because now you can prove to anybody which way you voted, opening yourself to blackmail, bribery, or duress. The secrecy of the vote is crucial to its integrity.
Maybe you could move things down the chain: make it illegal for any entity (with perhaps some exceptions for anonymity compliant polling) to ask for voting proof, with very significant felony punishments (large organizational fines, jailtime for individuals).
You may not want to sell your vote, but others will. And the mere suspicion that other people can sell their votes erodes trust in the system, making it useless for a democracy.
> Statistically, the public voters should be in line with the final outcome.
Not likely. Social stigma means the "acceptable" candidate would have a larger proportion of the public votes than total votes. For example, the Democrat candidate in Chicago.
Yes. Voting. That’s how voting works. You go to the polling place, you confirm your identity with one person, then you go to another person to get the ballot. There is no linkage between your ballot and your identity, as they are done in separate and independent steps.
The voting system sends out postcards to registered voters with a temper-evident scratch-off covering, over a private key.
This key can be used with a personal computer, or public voting computer, each using the same open-source, audited software, to produce a printed ballot with a 2D barcode on it, and a printed voting token with a 2D barcode on it.
The ballot printout can be scanned and verified independently, before casting it, that all the choices are correct. Again, all using the same open-source, audited software as the public vote-recording computers. This printout contains a hash of the voting token. This is so a party can't just print out a bunch of pre-filled ballots, and then hand them out for voters to cast, and also useful for recounts and audits.
A separate printout encodes the voting token. It cryptographically verifies that a registered voter is voting now. The voter registration system associates a different hash of the voting token, a voter hash, with the voter. The voting system can associate the ballot hash of the voting token with the voting choices. If you have a voting token, you can compute the voter hash, look up the registered voter on the voter site, compute the ballot hash, and look up what their votes were on the vote-counting site. You can't tell whether that particular ballot is the one that counts for that voter.
Because up until the end of the election, the voter can also request a new token, which invalidates their previous ballot, and cast a new one. That token will also be associated with their votes and their name, but the official election system knows to count that one, and not another one. Or they can request a "provisional", "test", or "decoy" token, which can be used to cast a ballot that will never be counted.
Anyone that attempts to coerce a voter into voting a particular way, or who tries to pay for votes, can be given a genuine token that is later cancelled, or a dummy token that was never valid to begin with. They have no means of validating if the token represents a vote that counts until after the election is over. At that time, an audit or recount might show that it was a decoy vote. You can't work backwards from a ballot to see who cast it. You can't work backwards from a public voter registration to see how they voted in any election. You can only start from the set of tokens, verify that one belongs to a registered voter, verify that it was used to cast a ballot, and if you also have privileged access to the voter registration system, determine whether or not that token is the single authoritative voting token for that voter in the current election.
In a recount or audit, the voter registration authority consults its database, finds all the tokens valid for a given election, computes the ballot hashes for each, and prints out all the ballot hashes, including machine-readable barcodes. A sorting machine could be loaded with the list, and automatically spit out a pile of ballots to be counted, and a pile of ballots that don't count. Or a human could sort them by hand, by consulting the list of valid ballot hashes, and crossing out the one printed on the ballot they are looking at. Any ballot not on the list, or already crossed off of it, goes in the "don't count" pile. Then, once again, by machine or by human, the ballots in the "valid" pile can be independently counted for the office or issue in question, and compared against the original automated count.
The secret part of this voting system is the secret kept between the voter and the government with respect to "does this specific ballot count or not?".
Now explain how that works to non-programmers. You may not hand-wave, you may not ask them to trust a black box, and they must truly understand and trust your system.
And then you can compare that explanation to the explanation for paper ballots, envelopes, and voting urns.
The public's trust in a voting system is a very important feature of that voting system. That the public can participate in voting is also a very important feature. If voting is relegated to a black box that everyone should trust, because, pinky promise, a very clever person designed the black box, then people will stop trusting voting.
Well said. I like to remember that our highest goal is not to count votes correctly, but to build a stable society where we can be safe and happy.
I believe a foolproof computer system could count votes perfectly, but it may make our society less stable in the process. Our current population is not ready to understand a fancy computer voting system, and are not capable of distinguishing between a foolproof system and `print "I win!"`.
You are requesting new requirements that are not part of the voting system currently in use.
I currently have to trust a black box whose inner functions are hand-waved away such that I cannot understand it even if I wanted to. Established systems of voting have equally established attack vectors.
If someone cannot understand what a cryptographic hash function does, even if they don't need to understand how, they cannot function in civil society without trusting someone else who can. Someone might go to a hundred HTTPS sites a day, and the security works invisibly to them, with no complaints, and yet while voting once every two years, one of the simplest concepts in all of cryptography is suddenly a problem? It's simpler than Bitcoin. The public can handle it.
> You are requesting new requirements that are not part of the voting system currently in use.
They are absolutely part of the voting system currently in use.
I strongly suggest that you follow tptacek's advice in the top comment and volunteer as an election worker a couple of times so you get a feel for how the process actually works.
> Someone might go to a hundred HTTPS sites a day, and the security works invisibly to them
Most people have no idea why or how that is more secure than HTTP, they can't tell the difference, they don't need to know the difference. But the biggest difference is that in online banking or whatever, there are humans who can check if something's gone wrong, if your account has been hacked, you can call your bank and ask them what happened, and you can usually trust them to know what's going on and what went wrong, and you'll get your money back. Or not, and then you can sue them. Either way, it's fixable.
Voting has no authority that can fix things if something went wrong. The voters are the authority, which means that all the voters need to understand and trust the entire system for it to be authoritative.
You have suggested that I don't know how my voting process "actually works", and that I cannot know that without volunteering to help run an election. I do not agree with your premises. Furthermore, that's an ad hominem argument.
The black box I am referring to specifically is the optical scan vote tabulator machine that sits between me and the ballot box, in my current polling place. I have seen it multiple times, and examined it to the extent that I am able. When I lived elsewhere, there were different machines. Every one of them has been a black box to the voting public.
I very explicitly do not trust those machines, because I know how the grey boxes that build the black boxes typically work. The publicly available information about them does not inspire trust. They are defective by design, and stink of corruption.
Some places do have trustworthy elections, using publicly-observable hand-counted paper ballots, like in Minnesota; or slightly less trustworthy vote-by-mail for everyone, like in Oregon. Good for them. I have never voted in those places. Bad for me.
And voting does have an authority that can "fix" things. It's usually the secretary of state for the state, then the supreme courts for that state and for the US. I remember when the SCotUS threw the PotUS election to GW Bush by interfering in Florida's lawful elections process. They didn't back up the voters' authority in that instance. I have felt the frustration of statewide elections where I had a sense that someone was dicking with the results, and there was nothing I could do about it without putting so much effort in that I'd be turning elections activism into an expensive, thankless hobby.
I have zero trust in the current US elections process, and never believed that my vote actually counted for anything. I honestly don't know why I keep voting--gesture of defiance, maybe. I think the voting systems in every place I have voted have all been broken, from the enabling legislation all the way down to local procedures at the polling place. First-past-the-post is broken mathematically. Ballot access laws are cheating. Gerrymandered district boundaries are cheating. Restricted primary voting is cheating.
I can't do anything to fix the systemic flaws without spending 20 years becoming the controlling authority of a single-issue political bloc and fundraising it all the way to actual significance, but encryption math and open, publicly-auditable software is a lot less work, and could still help with the local procedures. Of course, we'd also need a trustworthy compiler that can produce bitwise-identical binaries of different machines, and a trustworthy computer to run the compiler on, and some way for the public to verify that the software running during the election is the same software that was compiled at the public ceremony. And then also assume that an attack on integrity might still succeed, and proceed under the assumption that the system is compromised, whether by intentional act or accidental mistake, by auditing the final results in a non-predictable way.
Buuuuuut... it's not really my job to restore trust in the system. That's up to the ones profiting from it. I have named a system that I, personally, could possibly trust. But it will probably not be adopted, because the trust comes from the tamper-resistance, and elections tampering is a feature desired by those currently holding elected office. In my estimation, voting in the US won't be fixed within the next 5 years, because there is currently profit to be taken by keeping it broken.
This is already a theoretical risk with vote-by-mail systems, and in practice it is Not a Problem.
Oregon has had vote-by-mail for more than two decades; there are present-day voters who were born after Oregon dropped polling places entirely.
Vote coercion is not a concern, after 20 years of practical experience with the system. Neither is voter fraud (something like 54 fraudulent ballots cast, out of 2+ million, in 2016; the vast majority of those were people voting in Oregon and in another state.)
The benefit, however, comes in the form of increased turnout; no need to rush to a polling place on a day that's very likely not a holiday for you.
I wish everyone would switch to vote-by-mail the way Oregon does it.
Sure. You get to be the one who explains how the Blockchain works to a bunch of octogenarians in Florida who can't quite figure out how a double sided paper ballot works.
Voting is already complicated enough. There are way too few people who fully understand all of the security implications of the Blockchain and all of the implementation details you need to get correct to make this a workable solution on the national level.
What makes the Australian Ballot (private voting, public counting) is the one-way hash of dropping one's ballot into the box.
All of the crypto systems I've studied try to accomplish the same with hash collisions. So that individual ballots get lost within the herd. Unfortunately, due the complexity of our ballots and the small size of our jurisdictions (elections are administrated per precinct), those hash collisions don't happen. One remedy may be to split complicated ballots into many simple ballots.
As of yet, I've not seen an electronic voting system proposal which states under which circumstances it will (likely) preserve the secret ballot and public count. A failing I consider to be gross intellectual malfeasance, willful ignorance, or both.
Im a blockchain noob, but if the election was driven by blockchain, how would one protect against Chinese mining warehouses trying to gain control of the network? What would a double spend attack look like? Again, just a blockchain noob asking noob questions
51% attacks only exist if the clients can fork. if your chain is not forkable (i.e you already know the size for an election thanks to census and voter records) there is no need for it as there is no need for miners even.
most other comments in this thread confuses blockchain with cryptocurrencies.
Really we're talking about public key encryption. In an ideal scenario, every voter would have a public and a private key. The government would have a list of public keys to determine who is eligible to vote. Each voter would hold their own private keys. Each vote is signed with their private key and then published to an immutable ledger that everyone can audit.
Herein lies the rub with blockchain systems. If they're public, they're attackable, and if they're private, they're slower, more power hungry, and less flexible than a plain old database. It's not a dumb question, but blockchain doesn't provide good answers :)
I'm no fan of the blockchain, but this may be in the middle ground where blockchain makes sense: multiple independent trusted-but-not-completely parties verifying each other's actions.
I still don't buy that blockchain is better than any of the other solutions that we've come up with for this problem, since (like with, for example, byzantine consensus) 50%+1 of actors being misbehaved breaks any security guarantee.
Democracies already have some reliance on trusted authorities, so why not just leverage those and assign the trust of the voting system to those established trusted authorities?
Also, blockchains are fun - they are not a magical salve.
A 51% attack would look like one source submitting a blockchain that's different from everyone else's, and effectively saying "my chain is longer so use it instead". Very noticeable, even if it might end up needing to be sorted out by courts instead of computers.
In my forum project, I use blockchain-like elements in the sense that when one replies to an existing comment, they include its hash in the reply text, which is then PGP-signed.
It is not a chain, however, more like a tree/web. And anyone can inspect the tree and re-verify its validity.
What is on the tree, however, is decided by me, the webmaster-operator. If there are troll comments that I want removed, they're gone. But I cannot forge something by another user, because I do not have their private key.
And anyone else can fork the forum and append to the tree in their own way, and I cannot stop them.
Blockchain is not the same thing as cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is just one application of blockchain. Double spend wouldn’t exist because we’re not talking about money, and the voting servers don’t need to be run by random public people. You’re confusing too many things here.
all social media (or any system) where you dont trust the entities that are holding your data are candidates for blockchain.
With blockchain based databases you can have entities that store massive amounts of data encrypted, but they cant read it or access it. The blockchain controls access to it. The data itself doesnt need to be replicated, just the access control. This resolves the issue of very slow blockchain databases.
The storage providers can charge the blockchain for storage and access.
blockchain disintermediates access control, storage, and display.
With open protocols for data, you could use any number of reader clients to access your (and other) data.
Once in the voting booth, how do you know the hardware or software haven't been replaced or tampered with? How would election officials know it? Open-source/hardware won't help you - it's still fundamentally a black box, and must be provable secure solely based on its inputs and outputs.
It would bring up extra risks as the machines would most likely then need to be connected to the Internet to be able to participate in the blockchain network.
Otherwise the reason we don’t have that is because there’s no money in it. Maybe if we allow the voting machines to also mine cryptocurrency when sitting idle...
> “To say that they don’t have any evidence of any wrongdoing is not to say that nothing untoward happened,” Raskin said. “It’s simply to say that we don’t have the evidence of it.”
What kind of "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" nonsense is this? Why doesn't this article talk about how DHS was caught red-handed hacking into GA election systems?
One way to make it harder for those who "own" the voting system to rig it would be to reform the voting system itself so that it isn't the first-past-the-post winner-take-all system we have today.
The dichotomy between our pride in the power of the individual to cast their vote and be represented in government, and the facts of how voting and vote counting happens (the security of the systems and the conflicts of interest involved) is so stark a contrast that I can only assume there are forces at work which have achieved full capture.
It's a shame that neither party is interested in fixing this issue. These problems have been known for many years, but regardless of who's in power in the Congress, nothing gets done about it.
This is a lie. The Democrats have tried at least six times in the last fifteen years to get money out of elections and make elections more secure, such as by requiring paper backups.
Every time they were blocked by Bush, or the Republican Filibuster, or Trump.
Election security is not a "both sides" issue. Democrats want more of it, Republicans want less of it, and this is bourne out very clearly in their voting record.
This isn't uniformly true: consider that New York's governor Cuomo blocked played a part in blocking reforms there for several years. It's not historically true, either, when you consider buying votes in the Daley machine of Chicago.
It's possible to talk about the politics of this on HN, but if we apply one level of generalization ("people in power for whom free and fair elections do not serve their interest"), we can have a less inflamed discussion.
My rejoinder to the grandparent is, "some states are better than others". This is well known, and the correlation with party is well known as well.
Cuomo is not a good example of an mainline Democrat. He sides with Republicans in the state senate as often as Democrats. The only NY politician with a worse approval rating is Mayor DeBlasio.
Election reform is a major piece of the Democratic party platform, and has been for a very long time.
Whenever it comes up in Congress, the vote is party-line: all Democrats in favor of more secure and less money-influenced elections, all Republicans opposed.
No, it's all Democrats in favor of things that they know will net them more Democrat votes, and Republicans against them, and vice versa, of course. Why are the Democrats upset about the census not counting "migrants" and going to court to block attempts to make the census only count citizens? Well, you could try to derive an answer from first principles... or you could just count votes, and come to the correct answer much more quickly.
Don't be so silly as to believe their spin about "getting money out of the election"; such reforms are not hypothetical things that may happen in the future, reforms have been passed are in effect, and, lo, money is still in politics.
> Why are the Democrats upset about the census not counting "migrants" and going to court to block attempts to make the census only count citizens?
You are a bit off on that.
The census is supposed to count everyone resident in the US, regardless of citizenship status or legality of their presence here. It's been that way since the Census Act of 1790. (And it does not count US citizens who are not resident in the US, except for Federal employees and their dependents).
The issue with adding a question about citizenship is that it might discourage some people from responding to the census, reducing the accuracy of the count. The Census Bureau estimates that about 6.5 million people will not respond if the question is included.
There are legitimate reasons for the government to want to know how many citizens are resident in the country, and how they are distributed, but they already have that data from the American Community Survey which does include a citizenship question (in fact, I believe, the same question they are trying to add to the census).
The experts at the Census Bureau unanimously recommended not including the question (as did six former directors of the Bureau, both Republican and Democrat). The Commerce Secretary overruled them, claiming that the Justice Department said it wanted the question added to somehow better enforce the Voting Rights Act. (Emails between the Secretary and the DoJ that were introduced in one of the trials over this show that this is not true--the DoJ told him that the question was unnecessary).
Here's a recent article that covers most of this [1].
This is a non sequitur response to an informed and interesting comment, which 'tzs clearly took pains to compose and which addresses in detail the claim you made above. You'd have been better off not commenting at all than writing this.
I disagree. tzs keeps trying to pin me down to disagreeing with "Democrats want the vote to be solid and the evilnasty Republicans keep stopping them", but the point I want to make is that the theory that parties act in their interest is far more explanatory than the theory that the parties act in accordance with their stated principles. (Stated principles are of some modest help in determining why the parties are made up of the specific interests they are, but it's far from determinative.) Do the Democrats believe that any of the measures that tzs defends is going to increase Republican voting, and they are pursuing them even so? That would be relevant. Give me some evidence of that and I'll admit at the very least a rare admission against interest, and at most that I'm wrong about this. But I don't believe it to be true. I'm pretty sure they think that if they get those things, they'll get more Democrat votes.
How exactly Democrats defend their position for policies that will result in Democratic voting power isn't that relevant for my point.
> I disagree. tzs keeps trying to pin me down [...]
Excuse me? I just went through 90 days of your comment history, and as far as I can see my comment above in this thread is the only time in there (before this comment, of course) that I have responded to one of your comments. I don't see how you can claim "keeps trying to pin me down" from that.
First, that is nothing at all like what 'tzs said, and it's rude to suggest otherwise. Second, this new argument essentially shuts down the whole discussion. What you're saying is that there's no explanation about census policy that can override your somehow-infallible observation that this is all a political sideshow. Why bother participating in the discussion at all, then? You've already made that point. Did you need to make it 3 times?
I have a problem with the pattern on HN of someone taking the time to make an informed comment, and then others trying to shut that person down with handwaving and shouting. If you want to rebut 'tzs, do the legwork and rebut him.
Democrats consistently oppose all forms of voter ID, which is pretty much standard practice in most other developed countries. The usual explanation is that it amounts to racial profiling in practice, which is true enough with the implementations that GOP proposes - but then why not propose an implementation that doesn't have those problems (again, like most other developed countries already have)?
Don't forget that Maryland remains one of the most heavily gerrymandered states in the nation, either - and that gerrymander was carried out by the Dems, and is currently being defended in court by the state admin.
I'm also not convinced by their stance on counting non-citizens for the purpose of representation. I am not a citizen, and I cannot vote - but the effect of the present system is that a vote is effectively allocated to me, but then handed over to whichever side is first past the post in any election in my district, amplifying their voting power without my consent. Supposedly this is because they still "represent" me - but it's about as meaningful as the representation that the American colonies ostensibly had in the British parliament prior to the revolution. If voting power irregularities that stem from the electoral college are bad - and they are - this is no better. So why are Dems supporting it? The cynical answer is that it gives disproportionate voting power to areas with large immigrant non-citizen populations, which are mostly urban and lean strongly Dem. I'm not sure what a non-cynical answer is; I can't come up with one.
On the whole, I believe that it is correct to say that Dems are much more often in favor of less money influence on voting and broader franchise. But given situational examples to the contrary, it seems less like a principled stance, and more like the party interests being in alignment with those goals more often than they are for GOP. Which makes sense for a party that relies on a broader, larger coalition of diverse voters, rather than a monolithic key support group.
No Democrat any where opposes properly identifying voters.
One's identity and eligibility to vote is verified upon registration.
One's identity is confirmed when being issued a ballot.
The current system works so well, until recently [1], that there have been very few cases of voter or registration fraud.
If you are you unhappy with forms of identification accepted to be issued a ballot, then you should advocate that all voters are issued a government issued identification for free. Which is pretty much standard practice in most other developed countries.
Requiring government issued ID to vote that is not free is called a poll tax. And that's unconstitutional.
To clarify, all references to "Democrats" in my comment above are to Dem politicians, not necessarily their supporters. If I could vote, I'd vote for Dems myself, and to the extent that I can participate in politics by supporting political campaigns, I exclusively support Dem candidates of the more progressive variety.
> If you are you unhappy with forms of identification accepted to be issued a ballot, then you should advocate that all voters are issued a government issued identification for free. Which is pretty much standard practice in most other developed countries.
That's exactly what I'm doing.
The question is, why aren't Democrats doing that? Where is a bill that would package voter ID together with free and easy to get government-issued identification? Put it on the table, then let GOP vote it down and explain themselves.
> Requiring government issued ID to vote that is not free is called a poll tax. And that's unconstitutional.
Agreed. Do you feel the same way with respect to other rights, though? For example, with respect to various licensing and permitting schemes on gun ownership and carry?
Because universal federal ID is unpopular and also potentially constitutionally problematic. Then Social Security numbers were introduced, there was a lot of opposition that had to be overcome, including two supreme court challenges that were decided by one vote. Whenever Republicans propose voter ID and Democrats attach universal ID to make it equitable, the bill dies because universal ID is a sticky topic.
> Do you feel the same way with respect to other rights, though? For example, with respect to various licensing and permitting schemes on gun ownership and carry?
There are no such schemes in the United States. Anyone over the age of 18 can buy a gun in all 50 states unless disenfranchised by some other action, like a felony conviction. Some types of guns and some types of carry require special licenses, like concealment and handguns, but there is no general-purpose "gun license": you can always buy long arms for better or worse.
Can you give an example of a bill where Dems attached a universal free federal ID rider? I haven't heard of that before, and would like to research more. Most complaints about universal IDs in US are about a hypothetical mandatory ID, but you don't need it to be mandatory in this case; just make it available free to any citizen that requests one. So I'm curious if Dems added a mandatory clause there, or if not, then how did Repubs justified voting against.
(Side note: I'm not opposed to a mandatory federal ID, personally. Given the existence of SSN, driver licenses etc, it's just codifying the status quo in a way that allows it to be implemented far more efficiently. If the feds are going to track me anyway, I'd rather them at least use that information to provide services to me in a more efficient way.)
As far as guns, for starters, it's a right to keep and bear arms, so we have to talk about licenses to carry as well, not just licenses to possess. These licenses aren't free in any state that has them, and can be extremely expensive in some, to the point of hundreds of dollars. And note that handguns in particular are the one type of firearms that was specifically cited as protected in Heller, so this can't be justified on the grounds that they're somehow exotic and outside of the scope of 2A.
But there are also jurisdictions where mere possession requires a license - for example, FOID in Illinois, or the NYC permits. Those apply to long guns as well. And they also come with fees - in NYC, you have to pay $140 just to make an application, and then another $90 on top of that for fingerprinting, just to own a long gun.
Then there are indirect fees imposed by various requirements. For example, most states with universal background checks implement them by requiring an FFL transfer with the usual NICS gate. But those are carried out by private dealers, who charge essentially arbitrary fees for them. Most laws do not set any limits on those fees. And since the check is mandatory, there's no way to avoid them, effectively requiring paying money to exercise the right to own. (There's some obvious irony here in those laws effectively subsidizing local gun stores, by letting them get a cut on every private sale, but it's a separate issue.) Same thing with mandatory training.
To be clear, I don't think that universal background checks or carry permits are bad, or even that licenses to possess are bad. As a gun collector, I'd actually personally prefer license to possess to the current NICS arrangement - it would certainly make my life easier! - and it's also more efficient at enforcement. The point, rather, is that charging for those checks and permits amounts to limiting a constitutionally protected right only to those who can pay for it, effectively turning it into a privilege. And in that regard, it is very similar to a poll tax, and I can't see how one can be opposed without opposing the other on the same grounds. I oppose both, and other similar arrangements (e.g. funding the justice system via court fees).
> Can you give an example of a bill where Dems attached a universal free federal ID rider?
Because IDs are a State thing? States issue IDs (except for Passports, which the Feds issue). The Feds can't make the States issue IDs to everyone.
One of the big oppositions to ID laws is that it unfairly hurts poor voters more than rich ones. If you look at the demographic without IDs, they're mostly poor, rural or a marginalized community like native Americans.
The feds can issue their own ID, and require that the states recognize it for the purposes of voter identification, at least for federal elections.
But you're right, "federal" was an unnecessary qualifier. I would also be interested in any such bills on state level.
> One of the big oppositions to ID laws is that it unfairly hurts poor voters more than rich ones
That is only so because the voter ID laws you usually see in US are intentionally designed to do just that. But, as I wrote in my initial comment in this thread, most developed countries have some form of voter ID without those issues.
Hence why I don't buy the argument that voter ID is inherently discriminatory. And, logically, if your opposition to voter ID is on those grounds, then there should be a reasonable compromise here in form of implementing it, but in a non-discriminatory way. Hence my question about whether Dems have tried that anywhere.
Americans have conflicted opinions about privacy, security, civil liberties. I, for one, opposed Real ID until I grokked the counterintuitive notion that encrypting demographic data at rest (PII) is only feasible by issuing and using GUIDs. That subtle realization only happened after working on privacy issues for years, and sadly is still difficult to explain to non geeks.
"Often in US discussions, the term poll tax is used to mean a tax that must be paid in order to vote, rather than a capitation tax simply. The Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified in 1964, prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote on payment of a poll tax or any other type of tax."
Yes, "poll tax" here refers to the narrow US meaning, same as OP.
Why do you consider my point to be trolling? Yes, it's an argument often brought up in discussions of gun rights and reasonable gun regulation (long before this one guy you referenced mentioned it). That's because there's an obvious analogy here. Both are constitutional rights. In both cases, governments effectively do not allow to exercise those rights without paying. And in both cases, the payment isn't connected to any rational objective by the state - if it did, all the fees would be strictly what's necessary to cover the administrative costs to issue them. You don't need to be a Republican politician, or even right wing, to reach the conclusion that both are wrong in the same fundamental manner.
In fact, it's a much stronger argument from the left perspective, because it discriminates on economic class, turning 2A a privilege for the rich. And it might surprise you, but there are actually quite a few pro-gun people on the left who genuinely care about such things. You just don't hear about it much, because the media spotlight is always on NRA and co, which oblige by providing plenty of extreme right-wing red meat for the headlines. If you go by those headlines, it's not surprising to feel like the right owns the topic entirely - but this ignores groups like NAAGA, Black Women's Defense League, Liberal Gun Club, Pink Pistols, SRA, Redneck Revolt etc.
I also have to note that, while the 24th Amendment did ban poll taxes for federal elections, it didn't apply to state elections. It was a separate SCOTUS ruling that banned them there as well, and they reached that conclusion from the 14th Amendment alone, without referencing 24A at all. On the other hand, there's Murdock v. Pennsylvania, which specifically said that "a state may not impose a charge for the enjoyment of a right granted by the Federal Constitution" - the case itself was about freedom of religion under 1A, but the principle is obviously more broad than that.
But supposing that such protections do require an explicit amendment to implement - if you agree that 24A was a necessary amendment with a good rationale behind it, why would the same rationale not apply to other protected rights in principle, regardless of the current inconsistent state of affairs in practice?
This is a Uniparty issue. There's several issues in the US that are always proposed by the minority party and blocked by the majority party. The reason is that neither party wants them, but both see an advantage in calling for them while in the minority.
The 2016 Democratic platform included a resolution for constitutional amendment to undo Citizens United in the first 90 days, do you think they were hoping to lose?
I provided a bunch of evidence over two decades of Democrats uniformly supporting election reform, and Republicans uniformly opposing. If what you say is true, it should be trivial to provide examples of the opposite, so why don't you?
"Citizens United in the first 90 days, do you think they were hoping to lose?"
The Democrats believe Citizens United hurts them and benefits Republicans. It does not challenge my core thesis.
"If what you say is true, it should be trivial to provide examples of the opposite, so why don't you?"
Republicans have, for instance, supported Voter ID laws consistently, while Democrats have vigorously opposed them.
You have two basic choices here. You can either agree this is an example of the Republicans attempting to improve voter security. Or, you can repeat the standard accusations that Voter ID laws are simply intended to hurt minorities and suppress their votes, in which case you're basically agreeing with my thesis that the party's interests in these matters are driven by their interests rather than their stated principles.
(The idea that voter ID is some sort of unmitigated atrocity is a peculiarly American one not shared by the rest of the world, which is why I infer it's a political position and not a logical one.)
If, of course, you attribute to the Democrats all their stated reasons and goals, but every time the Republicans open their mouths they're lying every possible way and have every possible bad motive, of course you'll end up with the result that the Democrats are just awesomesauce and the Republicans stink, but it's not an interesting result. The conclusion is entirely described by the measurement metric. At least if I apply an action-based interests-driven theory equally to both parties, I end up with a potentially-consistent result. And in the scientific sense, I can tell you, it's a very highly predictive theory. I sit up and take notice when a political party makes what lawyers would call an against-interest admission, because it does not happen often.
As has been discussed elsewhere, voter ID does not increase election security whatsoever. Voter fraud is vanishingly rare, and there are systems already in place to detect and mitigate it without requiring everyone to go out and buy IDs.
Democrats only opposed to Voter ID as long as IDs cost money to get. It is a poll tax, and poll taxes are unconstitutional.
The accusation that Voter Id laws hurt minorities is not baseless, it is literally the intent of these laws. Communications that were revealed during the discovery phase of the NC Voter ID suit show that NC Republican legislators commissioned studies to discover what forms of IDs are disproportionately relied on by black people and poor people, like welfare cards, military IDs, student IDs, employee IDs, etc. so that they can be excluded from voting with them.
Know what actually does increase election security and auditability? Paper backups, which Republicans in Congress are unanimously opposed to.
> The Democrats have tried at least six times in the last fifteen years to get money out of elections and make elections more secure, such as by requiring paper backups.
Couple of points. 1) "getting money out of elections" and "secure elections" are two entirely different problems. By grouping them into one, the Democrats make sure that there's a lot of opposition to it. And 2), for 2 years (2008-2010?) Democrats had full control of the Congress and Whitehouse. Why didn't they try then? I can tell you why: because then it would have become law! And then no more rallying your troops with the whole "elections are being stolen! elections are being stolen!!" cries.
I am mostly a Democrat, but I'm not willing to give them a free pass just because they're Democrats.
This isn't a complicated problem. State election agencies are underfunded and have to cut corners in order to survive. A simple federal cash infusion would solve 70% of this problem. The other 30% is coming up with sufficient election machine standards.
It isn't technically complicated, but it is politically complicated: free and fair elections are not in everyone's interest. The technical problem will continue to persist (or will be reintroduced!) so long as it benefits someone in power to have a broken system in place.
It's bizarre to me that elections are not considered a central component of natural security. It doesn't matter how many nuclear submarines you have if the very means of government are vulnerable to cyber espionage because of severe underfunding.
This problem was solved millenia ago, no focus group needed. The problem is power interests standing in the way of simple solutions. More money for more polls, hell yes. More money for "better machines" fuck no, that money goes to no good.
Or how about we don't use a computer at all, something as important as elections should have nothing to do with a computer. If the russians are that good at hacking elections, why take the chance?
Wherever you are, it's probably easy to sign up (I did online) and they'll likely pay you to do it.