The Colorado Secretary of State is unintentionally showing the conspiracy theorists are correct. A single person having physical access to the voting machines, months before the election, who has different political views from the Secretary, is enough to make those machines unusable. When the entire election in a district is run by officials from a single political party, with unlimited access to the voting machines, what is the other political party supposed to think?
I had no opinion before now, but clearly these machines are unusable anywhere.
Colorado resident here. The CO Secretary of State has been proactive about everything election related. There's complete, transparent procedures for voting, there's educational materials about the risk limiting audits that get done for every election.
All registered voters get a ballot in the mail. You can return them by mail, use a secured drop box which reside in locations under security camera. You can check your ballot's status on-line, and get email updates. You can also vote in person, should you want, on election day.
Some yahoo state rep introduced a patently-unfair bill that would have made CO do things like stop counting on midnight of election day, which would almost certainly leave large fractions of ballots uncounted no matter how you vote, mail or in-person. No way around that. Thankfully, the CO legislature is not particularly crazy this year, so it failed.
The conspiracy theorists caused the breech - the Mesa County Clerk is the one that c
illegally copied the voting machine hard drives and gave the images to other conspiracy theorists.
You are putting the blame exactly in the wrong place.
You missed my point entirely. The fact that a "breach" could happen and is something that is dangerous means the conspiracy theorists are correct. They feel about the Secretary of State like you feel about the Mesa County Clerk. If the situation was reversed and the Mesa County Clerk was the Secretary of State, would you feel confident about the elections? Who is getting access to the voting machines and what are they doing?
If having access to the machines means that you can affect the results of the elections, and the public cannot safely audit that, then these machines are unusable at all times.
You trust the Secretary of State. You think everyone in the state and country should trust the CO Secretary of State. Fine. But eventually an untrustworthy person gets to that seat of power, it's naive to think corrupt people wouldn't try and succeed. And from that point on they decide election results, and only other corrupt, complicit people run the government. The only real skill they need is to appear trustworthy, as grifters are already good at doing.
The conspiracy theorists just think this has already happened.
We should have a voting system that you would feel comfortable to be overseen by your ideological adversaries.
> If having access to the machines means that you can affect the results of the elections
They disabled the security cameras and did something with election equipment, which is now set aside as evidence.
They need to investigate. This would have happened if it was a paper voting machine or a ballot box with votes in it.
This isn’t a “conspiracy theorists are correct” moment. This is a show that the voting system does indeed have protections and supervision around it that identities tampering and resets the supply chain.
It's good to also think about security of paper ballots. Usually, in the United States, public observers from all political parties are allowed to be at all polling places and observe (and help count) all the votes. There is a limited amount of time between the vote and the count, and in that time anyone can watch to make sure nothing is tampered with.
This is why people get uncomfortable with vote counting taking too long or ballots being moved and stored before counting is done. The accountability is gone and whoever controls the process has the ability to tamper.
If these machines need to be observed at all times to prevent tampering, just forget about it. It's unrealistic. Even if they can be protected the public can't trust that, the only people who could truly confirm that would be the people who are in the position to tamper with them.
The Mesa County Clerk wasn't trying to hide what they were doing. If any other County Clerk wanted to tamper and not hide, well we wouldn't be having this discussion because no one would know about it, even if there is a video feed on the machines. Has this happened anywhere else? Can you, as a citizen, confirm no other voting machines in Colorado (or elsewhere) have been tampered with?
Your issues with vote counting taking too long are decent, but the Colorado 2024 election, didn't take too long. Cory Gardner conceded on election night, for example. Since only a particular election is contested by these... conspiracy theorists..., and nobody is trying to get Gardner reinstated I have to conclude something else motivates these... conspiracy theorists...
The Mesa County clerk is indeed trying to hide what she did. I believe she's on the lam, and in hiding right now. It looks to me like the Mesa County clerk took it upon herself to foul the process in illegal ways because the CO procedures worked, despite whatever legal things that Clerk could do. This seems like a pretty standard technique for overthrowing a democratically-elected government: manufacture a scandal, throw out the real results, put in fake results, pass new laws preventing any of your political opponents from taking office ever again.
I trust the CO Secretary of State because she has done the right thing for her entire term, and been open about it, and made educational efforts well before the... conspiracy theorists... got to it. I'm a CO resident, and I pay attention to election issues. I read the CO procedure on risk limiting audits.
There's no way that any procedure would have satisfied the current crop of... conspiracy theorists... because they were determined to find something to overturn the election of some candidates. Tina Peters is a case in point. She violated the procedures.
There's probably voting systems that some ideological adversaries could oversee that I would be OK with - the current CO system comes close. Like I say, I'm a CO resident, and I looked into it.
That said, you should google for Ken Buck, a north central CO Representative. You can find audio recording of him pressuring the Republican Party equivalent of Clerk and Recorder to illegally change election results. Why he's still got his seat in Congress is beyond me.
> The conspiracy theorists caused the breech - the Mesa County Clerk is the one that c illegally copied the voting machine hard drives and gave the images to other conspiracy theorists.
Back when voting machines were made by Diebold and the conspiracy was that they were tipping elections in favor of Rs, this sort of thing would have been taken as absolute proof - by the kinds of people who are today trying to play this all down as not concerning (I guess because it's a contrived or unlikely attack) - that we shouldn't use the machines and that election results could reasonably be doubted.
No. Diebold machines were quite different. What Mesa County is having problems with, and what the... conspiracy theorists... are having problems with, are vote counting machines.
Colorado has paper ballots, not voting machines. Votes are counted electronically, but risk-limiting audits are done on all elections. Some percentage of the paper ballots are selected and counted again. They should come within a percentage of the overall count. A failure of a risk-limiting audit triggers a recount. My memory is hazy about procedures after this.
The huge problems with Diebold machines were multiple: you voted on them. They counted the votes, with no other record, and no receipt to the voter to ensure that the machine counted as the voter wanted. There was no record of the votes other than electronic in the machines, so recounts were meaningless. Diebold's CEO was a partisan, and announced it. Anyone of integrity would have problems with how Diebold did things.
The Mesa County situation is completely different. Paper ballots which can be recounted by hand or electronically, and provide the voter with some small assurance that their ballot is marked the way the voter intends. Systems in place to notify voters that their ballot is in the mail, accepted for counting, and then finally, counted.
But it is easy to prove and I got called for Jury 2 times too.
It was strange and I got surprised, talked to a friend that said it was not possible.
Then I show him the papers and he got more surprised.
I did lookup the laws and saw that casting a vote while not being a citizen was a crime then as good guest I follow the law and did nothing with that.
Being a good guest is a tenet to me.
For me it was strange because in my country you can only vote in person, you have to vote at sunday/holiday and that is it. If a second turn is needed another day.
No mail, no extra days.
I remember this crazy feeling : "whooa they vote by MAIL! Like.. The post service works...amazing"
same thing with paying bills by mail : "Whoa, you put the check on envelope and send it? nobody steal it? serious? there is a person there that gets the check?"
And that was the year the MJ became medicinal and CO flipped.
Conspiracy theorists will be crazy.
And I did not request anything that was the most crazy thing.
I knew a guy who was Canadian, but had a summer job in the USA. Everyone got told they needed to register for the draft so he did and got drafted into the US military for the Vietnam war. Someone figured out he wasn’t American at some point, but they didn’t let him out, he just served a year at a base in the US instead of being deployed. And he didn’t even get citizenship out of it. He was not super bright.
The thing is, the line of reasoning that electronic voting is fundamentally not securable to a sufficient public standard was being advanced a lot before the election, and has a lot of evidence to support it.
Contesting only elections that don't go your way and providing dubious or nonsense evidence (see various thrown out lawsuits) is simply subverting the process and the electorate.
If they're unusable, then they're unusable everywhere : and the election needs to be run without them.
> When the entire election in a district is run by officials from a single political party, with unlimited access to the voting machines
This probably shouldn't happen. Unfortunately, hyper-polarisation has.
> A single person having physical access to the voting machines, months before the election, who has different political views from the Secretary, is enough to make those machines unusable.
According to the article they disabled the security cameras monitoring the machines for a week.
Once someone deliberately breaks the chain of custody on voting equipment, whether it’s electronic or a paper ballot box, it becomes suspect. Not only that, but the machines are now evidence in the investigation, so they have to be set aside anyway.
Replacing the equipment was the only option. There is no perfectly secure voting system that isn’t affected by chain of custody breaks.
You hit the nail on the head. Election systems must be obviously honest to low information voters in the other party who don’t trust the election officials.
"I had no opinion before now, but clearly these machines are unusable anywhere."
All politics aside, it's fairly obvious that electronic voting machines can be very dangerous unless they're handled very, very, very carefully. The contracts for these machines aren't going to the best of the best, they're going to the lowest bidders. As a software engineer, the idea of going from manual, verifiable tabulation to opaque software is completely horrifying.
It is significantly harder to forge thousands of paper ballots. Not impossible, but not nearly as easy as manipulating opaque software or simply gaining access to these machines.
People can actually observe and confirm the tabulation process currently. All machines should be open-source and easily audited if we want to inspire any sort of confidence in them to the average voter.
Ah yes. The conspiracy theorists really showed us! Next, proud boys and Q will team up to buy a pizza place, kidnap a bunch of kids, and create a kid prostitution ring.
I really hope I'm reading this wrong, but it looks like the key takeaway here should be that an official responsible for security completely subverted their responsibilities, allowed unauthorized access, and disabled monitoring... and the only reason anyone found out is one of their co-conspirators broadcast the resulting access all over the internet.
If the only way a bank (or its depositors) knew the bank had been robbed was if the robbers told everyone they'd robbed that bank, would we consider the bank secure, no matter what consequences employees faced?
There seems to be a fundamental failure of process with no plans to actually improve security in the future.
It was my understanding that going into the symposium, the issue of Mesa County’s machines was already on the radar and there was an active probe into Peters
That’s correct, because a certain conspiracy theorist published “smoking gun” screen caps of information on the voting systems in question, and there was unredacted information that led back to Mesa county.
Edit: I’ve read the OP from NPR more closely and it says the investigation predates this episode and was triggered by an unauthorized person showing up in some logs
Have predicted for years that electronic voting would cause civil unrest because in a highly contested election, it does not provide adequte physical evidence of vote integrity. The whole idea of electronic voting is designed to forfeit the integrity of a process whose entire legitimacy depends on the integrity of that process. As they say, this isn't the first time they stole from us, it's just the first time they've been caught. Anyone who has scratched the surface of this issue is unlikely to be persuaded by new assurances about new electronic voting controls, other than committed partisans who are fine if it's rigged in their favour.
The more interesting question is, what are the knock on effects of a popular loss of confidence in western elections held with these machines?
i would assume that the presumption of fraud would itself lead to greater degrees of fraud with the inherent justification among partisans being 'well the other guy is doing it so this is the only way we can keep up'. that in of itself might not be that bad but if the fraud or perception of fraud has potential to act as a force multiplier for existing instabilities and intra-party paranoias then it becomes very easy to imagine the process dismantling itself. it really seems like the experiment for this decade is figuring out just how much distrust institutions can take on while still remaining functional.
This story is wild. The headline is about the machines, but the article is really about some strange corruption within the department that led up to the breach:
> Griswold also said that one week before the breach, Peters ordered her staff to turn off the video surveillance system that monitors the voting machines and that it was only recently turned back on.
Somehow they ended up with an unauthorized person attending a procedure to update the machines, which then resulted in video and other information being posted to a QAnon-affiliated blog.
Replacing the potentially compromised machines is a good move, but it seems like the real story is that something has gone very wrong inside this government office.
> Peters ordered her staff to turn off the video surveillance system that monitors the voting machines and that it was only recently turned back on.
This is probably about the point where you should ask your boss's boss "is this okay?" rather than just following orders, tbh. The whole thing is bizarre.
All of Colorado uses paper ballots. These machines are only used to tabulate paper ballots. Each election is then followed by a risk-limiting audit to ensure the machines’ accuracy.
It frankly seems like a deliberate sabotage. It doesn’t help that the county clerk is apparently attending a QAnon conspiracy conference at the moment.
Any election official that shows allegiance to such theories should be summarily banned from ever holding public office.
No reason for your question to be downvoted. I've done my small part to reverse that.
I doubt the officials suspect the machines have been compromised, but they have no way of knowing. There are chain of custody rules to help ensure integrity of the systems. Those have been violated so the machines can't be used until they've been carefully examined and recertified.
Putting this in a money context might help some--lets say you owned slot machines that could have big payouts. Would you let rando unauthorized person to be alone with one of your machines in a private office, doing upgrades, and still trust the machine? Probably not. You'd want to take a look at it top to bottom before trusting it to do any payouts. The person might not have done anything wrong but you've got to be sure first, and since there are other ways these things could be compromised than just adding unauthorized software to the hard drive, a clean install isn't enough.
So far the claim is "an unauthorized person's name was entered into the log of people who were present for a secure software update conducted by Dominion employees" and not "rando unauthorized person to be alone with one of your machines." If someone seeing an update executed compromises the machines, that's a HUGE problem.
But I think you're spot on with the slot machine comparison. In a casino, asking security to turn off the cameras monitoring an area would be a breach in itself. They wouldn't do it and would report someone who requested it.
In this situation, "how could an official could order it?" and "why did the security team do it?" are both things to look into. Was this standard operating procedure? If so, for how long and when else did it occur?
And broader, are there other jurisdictions where they had similar security lapses? If so, when, where, and for how long? Further, were those machines also removed from service and analyzed?
I mean, _probably_. There's malware that's extremely difficult to get rid of, but probably it wasn't used here.
But it looks like they have elections coming up in a few weeks, so "do it on paper" is probably a not-unreasonable precaution, particularly given the general pattern of dodginess, in particular the thing about the video surveillance.
If nothing else, if you phone up the manufacturer and tell them that a weird pillow website devotee allowed some unknown third party to potentially mess with the machines, the manufacturer is probably _not_ going to say "yeah, that'll definitely be fine, use them"; they won't want to take the risk. This is probably a return-to-manufacturer job.
> How is one person being present during an upgrade enough to render the physical machines suspect and beyond repair/review?
As soon as an unidentified attacker has unsupervised access to a piece of hardware it's game over. An exploit that uses persistence features like embedding itself into the BIOS/UEFI firmware (see e.g. https://www.coresecurity.com/core-labs/articles/the-bios-emb...) can be very hard to get rid of - so hard that it's likely easier to dispose of the machines entirely.
It’s literally the first sentence of the linked article…
Edit — I see you’ve specified unsupervised where the article specifies “unauthorized”. However, given they turned off the security cameras I think it’s kind of splitting hairs
There were other people present, making it not "unsupervised". By ignoring this distinction both you and the above commenter are spreading disinformation for what appear on the surface to be nefarious political goals.
We have no way of knowing what went down in that location. The fact that unauthorized people were present with video surveillance turned off and the machines were running for a software upgrade is enough to assume at least one could have been compromised in a matter of seconds - if only by a sleight-of-hand hidden insertion of an USB stick.
They’re now evidence in an ongoing investigation. They don’t know exactly what happened to them because the perpetrators deliberately disabled the security cameras monitoring the machines before doing whatever they did.
Wiping them could destroy evidence or it could miss a different issue (hardware modification, for example).
The only reasonable response is to quarantine the machines as evidence and replace them with new machines with a known chain of custody.
> How is one person being present during an upgrade enough to render the physical machines suspect and beyond repair/review?
There’s more to the story, including someone intentionally disabling the security cameras that monitored the machines for at least a week. With a gap in the surveillance of the machines combined with a QAnon-associated leak and an intruder who misled the office, it’s time to start fresh and set the old machines aside as evidence.
Whole countries with public counting of paper ballots have election results faster than we do.
The phrase "voting system" is an absurdity. It highlights the overly complex, bug-riddled lunacy we have now.
A lockbox, under guard with multiple observers, collecting ballots over the voting period, followed by a public counting of the paper ballots is simple and fast. What we have now isn't.
Australia has a simple and trustable election system. Paper ballots, reinforced by the fact that more or less every citizen can get a job working on election day. Your duties include looking up people based on what they say their name an address is (no ID required; although many electors hand me their ID anyway) on a big electoral roll book, cross out their name, and hand them a ballot with your initials.
They go to one of the booths and mark their selection, and drop it off into a zip-tied big ballot box (that is visible to the general public, and of course election staff at all times).
After the polls close, the polling official cuts the zip-ties on the ballot boxes, everyone working sorts ballots into piles and count them, along with scrutineers from political parties who can watch. An officer-in-charge records and publishes the results continuously, and everything is saved and shipped for OCR-based recounting to verify the numbers. The process is federally operated and the same processes are followed everywhere.
Results are almost always revealed on election night.
The electoral roll books are processed centrally after every election, so someone who votes twice would be quickly caught. Someone who votes under fake names and addresses would most likely cross-over with someone else, hence an investigation would still happen. (We also have compulsory voting, which is another subject for debate, but it does mean "vote under multiple names" is mitigated without the need for ID laws).
The job pays reasonably well (A$457 for the day), more or less everyone who applies gets hired (I believe there is a bias towards maximizing first-time applicants), and it's hard to think about election fraud when every citizen can be part of the election process itself, and it's hard to conceive of how fraud can happen.
> The process is federally operated and the same processes are followed everywhere.
The US has state-run elections, as provided in the Constitution (Article II, section 1).
Each state could individually opt-in to use a federally run system (or portion thereof), but the feds can’t mandate it, absent a Constitutional amendment.
The USA is really a republic of states in many regards and the states have [or at least started with and in theory still have] a lot more power than in many other countries where the central government is stronger.
I agree with your overall preference. I’m not as sure that the 17th stripped power from the states, so much as defined how that power was elected. (It’s clear that it could make some difference but not clear that it shifts overall power federally.)
Because before the 17th the Senate was the State Governments representative in the congress. Senators represented the desire of the State Legislatures not the People of the states.
This is why all spending bills have to start in the House, because the House is the peoples voice in congress, and if they want to spend the peoples money it has to start with the peoples voice, not the States.
The US was to be a republic with only a single part of the new federal government democratically elected, there was / is a reason for that. Separation of Powers and distributed power being the key concepts.
By changing congress to have both the house and the senate become democratically elected the State Governments lost their voice in the federal government.
> The US was to be a republic with only a single part of the new federal government democratically elected
Just because the president is elected indirectly through electors, and Senators were elected through States, doesn't mean they were any less "democratically elected" than Representatives. You could equally say that the House of Representatives is undemocratic because democracy would require all laws to be approved by referendum.
Also, in case anyone still thinks that representative democracy is antithetical to the goal of a republic, and goes against the wishes of the Founding Fathers, they should consider Hamilton's words: "But a representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable."
>> You could equally say that the House of Representatives is undemocratic because democracy would require all laws to be approved by referendum.
I do say that, I know its probably a shock but I am not a fan of democracy. I believe democracy is 2 wolves and a lamb voting on what is for dinner. I do not support the generally popular idea that democracy is the best form of governance.
>>anyone still thinks that representative democracy is antithetical to the goal of a republic
It can go against the goals of the republic, democracy itself needs to be balanced against other powers. The US was setup to be a careful balance of interests, over the years we have upset that balance and today the democratic elements of our republic are antithetical to the goals of the republic as founded, which was to promote and preserve the Lockean philosophy of individual rights.
The democratic elements in our current system have replaced this idea of Individual rights, with the idea of collective rights... Has replaced the philosophy of negative rights, with positive rights. Has replaced individualism, with collectivism
Individualist like myself see this has a problem.
>>goes against the wishes of the Founding Fathers, they should consider Hamilton's words:
Personally I am not a big fan of Hamilton, and he hardly spoke for all the "Founding Fathers". Many people seem to have this idea that the "Founding Fathers" all sat in a room agreeing with each other. Far far from the case. They largely disagreed with each other, and many hated each other. Personally I am more of a Jefferson, and Franklin supporter than a Hamilton supporter. Hamilton had the desire to create a much stronger and more centralized federal government than many of the other Founders were comfortable with, He had to make many concessions that reduced the power of the federal government. Most famously he was opposed to the Bill of Rights even being included as he saw it as unnecessary...
No to me Jefferson was better founder... and if I was alive then I likely would have been a part of the Anti-Federalists...
> I believe democracy is 2 wolves and a lamb voting on what is for dinner.
What system would you support instead of democracy, and how would you convince the 2 wolves to support that system when they could just ignore it and eat what they want? At least under democracy, the lamb might get 4 years to emigrate, or persuade the wolves to become vegetarian.
Democracy may not be perfect, but the fact that human society has invented a system that is more peaceful and liberating than either civil war or dictatorship is something like a miracle, so I don't expect there to be something fundamentally different and better that humans could implement.
I do think that not all democracies are equal, though, and it's worth considering the possible options regarding voting systems, gerrymandering, mandatory voting, recall elections, the size of legislatures, campaign finance rules, and so on.
> The democratic elements in our current system have replaced this idea of Individual rights, with the idea of collective rights... Has replaced the philosophy of negative rights, with positive rights. Has replaced individualism, with collectivism
I think your disdain for current political and societal trends has been directed at the idea of democracy, but it is merely a scapegoat. If anything, democracy has made people feel more empowered and more individualistic, whereas allowing the states to elect the Senators on behalf of the people is a more "collectivist" approach. Also, I'm not sure how you can blame democracy for the philosophy of positive rights, except to say that most people in the US support the idea of schools and food being provided for poor children.
There is maybe an argument for requiring super-majorities for changing very consequential aspects of a country, such as the minimal set of powers granted to the federal government, or the minimal set of restrictions that the federal government can place on the individual states, but even that is a form of democracy, and if anything it is more collectivist to require a super-majority than a simple majority.
I don't want to put words in your mouth or misrepresent you, so forgive me if this is an unfair characterization, but if what you're actually saying is "I prefer how things were, and I wish that the system made it as hard as possible to introduce all these new changes that other people seem to want", then I would say that this is not a principled position on the system itself, it is a self-serving preference for whatever system would give you the outcome you wanted. Such a preference would fail the "original position" / "veil of ignorance" thought experiment, and therefore should be rejected.
> No to me Jefferson was better founder
Then let me also provide some other quotes, expressing his views on democracy and individualism. "It is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail."[0] "Every man cannot have his way in all things. If his opinion prevails at some times, he should acquiesce on seeing that of others preponderate at other times. Without this mutual disposition we are disjointed individuals, but not a society."[1] I don't know how representative those quotes are of his over all philosophy, and I think the Joker may have said something similar to the second one, but hopefully it confirms the idea that the modern trends you are reacting to have very deep roots.
This more-or-less describes the Canadian system as well. We get “voter cards” mailed to us that make it easier to look up the person on the voter rolls, that’s the only notable difference. And they aren’t required, similar to what you say.
Yes - it’s been a few years since I lived there, but this was effectively the process we used in my California county. I’ve come to admire the simplicity of Scantron-esque ballots vs. many of these overengineered touch screen systems.
At least in my California we do have touchscreens for people with disabilities who can’t read (they need an audio ballot) or fill out a ballot with a pen. But when the one time I worked on the polls, no one even used the touchscreen.
auditable paper ballots are only good if there is an actually full audit, that almost never happens, and today if you advocate for one you are a "far alt-right wing conspiracy theorist"
That is far far far different that what is being talked about fro AU and Canada, where there is no electronic middle man that is trusted first...
Georgia did two full recounts that didn't use machines[1]. It was observed by Republicans, Democrats, and independents, and it was organized by Republican state officials.
The audit in progress in AZ is a partisan sham that has been challenged as unnecessary and politically motivated by local Republican researchers[2] and officials.
Agree. I've voted in 4 states (NC, NY, VT, NH) and it has all been like above. And I've also served as election volunteer, checking absentee ballots against the voting rolls.
I appreciate the conspiracy theorists. Id rather have crazy people shout fire and things be looked at than have the election system taken for granted perpetually.
I'm trying to understand the operation of the rollbook. Is the voter required to go to one specific place to vote? This seems at least moderately inconvenient.
You can vote in any polling place in your state. If you are out of state, you need to go to dedicated interstate polling centers (or vote by mail).
The roll book is very, very big, and includes every registered elector in the state. It's alphabetically sorted by last name. Every election official gets their own roll book that they mark names off.
The way you are supposed to do it is ask:
1. "What is your name?"
(flip through the book and find the right page with the last name, usually just takes a few seconds)
2. "Where do you live?" / "What is your address?"
(find the entry with the right name and correct address; if you can't find it, ask them to go to the 'help desk' where a provisional ballot is provided).
3. "Have you voted before in this election?"
(they should say no, and then you initial a ballot and hand it to them).
These books are centrally checked after the election, so people who vote twice can be investigated.
I wonder and muse about this. Could we possibly use PKI electronically to do this? The gov sends you a private key as your a citizen. We anonymize it somehow. You sign your ballot. I don't have a clue how this would work, but it seems like it could be feasible.
Obviously, voting must remain anonymous. Could it happen?
I'm guessing this would be similar to presenting your SSN. Its troublesome. But regardless, I'd think that we could prove the voting record.
Edit: the more I think about this, I don't think PKI could work. Voter identification would always be available in some way shape or form. I'm not sure this can be solved with tech. Maybe we should just have paper ballets.
The system you're imagining might theoretically be possible using blind signatures, like the Ecash system invented by David Chaum. My understanding is that if you tried to spend the same coin twice, it would necessarily reveal enough information to allow the network to discover who the private key holder was, and invalidate their transaction.
Your final conclusion is correct, though. Any system which relies on people having to trust specialist auditors to tell them whether the "correct" software has counted the votes is a system which is fatally vulnerable to FUD and conspiracy theories, even if by some miracle the hardware and software were all open source and worked perfectly.
This is just a thought experiment. What if you registered to vote and the goverment gave you a $3.00 bill. This bill can't be used as cash (I guess, I'm just working through the problem).
You present....damn it I've already figured out a half dozen problems with this idea. Give the bill to your buddy and he can vote how he wants.
Do you have any ideas or recommendations to this problem? Every citizen whom is eligible to vote should be able to. Every vote should be counted correctly.
It is a hard problem to solve, and I would guess whoever solves this problem - especially for the long term - would be able to help out humanity in a way that hasn't been invoked in a long, long time.
Ughhh. The world is tough sometimes. Reminds me of Idiocracy - Your kids are starving. Carl's Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl's Jr. Carl's Jr., fuck you, I'm eating.
The UK has a similar system. You are required to go to a specific place to vote but these are normally very local and just for your neighbourhood, e.g. in the local school or church hall. My last three polling stations have been 0.1, 0.6 and 0.2 miles away.
There are 35k polling stations for 47m voters so each station has to process only ~1,300 voters in 15 hours. Queueing is unusual in my experience. Postal votes and voting by proxy are also options.
We have it similar in the Czech Republic, except it's around ~700 eligible voters per polling place. Since the upcoming parliamentary elections are likely to have a ~60% participation, a team of several people at any random polling place is facing the insurmountable task of counting ~400 ballots in several hours.
Voting in the UK is a very smooth process. It's very easy to take 5 minutes to go and vote before or after work, or during a break if you work locally.
I agree, the overly complex use of machines, followed by closed door counting, lends it self too much to impropriety. I think America has mostly honest elections, but after last year‘s election I am… Uneasy about the whole system. Simple is better.
In the case of Mesa County, CO, the breech of security was by a conspiracy theorist. There is no voter-level election fraud, so the USA doesn't need strict ID requirements. Colorado is particularly transparent about how they do risk-limiting audits of all elections, so fearing about electronic counting machines mis-counting is misplaced.
- Arguably unconstitutional changes to state voting laws less than six months before election day.
- Authorized election observers banned from their designated polling places on election day.
- Cessation of ballot counting on election day.
- Waiting until observers leave to count large numbers of ballots that were hidden under a table all day.
- Hundreds of thousands of ballots with no chain of custody records.
- Double standards about who is allowed to challenge vote certifications. Democrats challenged Trump's election and both of Bush 43's elections as is permitted in the Constitution. When Republicans did the same in 2021 they were threatened with impeachment and removed from committees.
I'm sure I'm forgetting other reasons to be uneasy.
None of these issues are true in Colorado, or Mesa County.
For other states, all these issues were addressed in more than one lawsuit each, and all such lawsuits were rejected.
The suits didn't get filed in one state, and appear before one judge. Multiple states, multiple judges. A lot of the suits were appealed, and failed on appeal, too. To be uneasy about this is to believe in a far reaching, many hundreds of participant conspiracy.
Further, the states in which these concerns were raised are all swing states. This seems suspicious in and of itself. Why not raise concerns about procedures in Colorado? It's a vote by mail state, and even in Colorado Springs districts, there was a big swing to Biden from 2020 results. Seems like you'd take on the easy places to prove a conspiracy, and you'd raise legit concerns. But no, swing states are the only places, it looks like trying to game the refs, to borrow a sports metaphor.
John Kerry conceded quickly in 2004, partly to avoid the weirdness that followed the 2000 election.
Gore as Vice President presided over the congressional vote to certify the EC vote. Which he lost. Nothing like Jan 6 2021 happened and the vote was substantially closer and fishier. I think the double standard lies elsewhere.
> - Double standards about who is allowed to challenge vote certifications. Democrats challenged Trump's election and both of Bush 43's elections as is permitted in the Constitution. When Republicans did the same in 2021 they were threatened with impeachment and removed from committees
Presumably they had in mind the objection to the certification of Ohio's electoral vote in 2004, which Wikipedia says was "only the second congressional objection to an entire state's electoral delegation in U.S. history"[0] (the previous instance being in 1877).
I'm not sure about the other examples, but it is true that the House of Representatives voted to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments. That may have been for reasons other than simply believing the spurious claims of election fraud, though.[1]
> Whole countries with public counting of paper ballots have election results faster than we do.
How many of those countries have as many races on a typical presidential-year ballot as the US does?
The US is also generally pretty fast to count its ballots; note that the election result is usually known within hours of polls closing, despite the insane number of races on the ballots. What happened in 2020 is there was an unusually high number of mail-in ballots, and this was combined with several states intentionally slowing down the counting process.
This system is simple but it’s neither fast nor available. The thing you have to worry about with this kind of system is ballot stuffing which leads to needing an additional requirement to verify each voter and observe them filling out and depositing the ballot. This creates a bottleneck at the polls which is why every election there are news stories about people having heat strokes or being turned away after the polls close.
It’s also not available because making people show up to a few set of fixed locations at specific polling hours will exclude people who don’t have access to transportation which is why during the Obama election the big thing was the Obama campaign providing busses to voters.
If you’re willing to give up some anonymity (only that you voted not what/you voted for) then mail in ballots, public drop-boxes, and walk-in deposits are much faster and more available. If you can mail in then great! Done. If you want to go to the polls then you fill out your ballot ahead of time, verify yourself with the poll worker and then drop it in the box. Done. 30 seconds a person rather than 10 minutes a person.
I think the culture in the US surrounding voting is the real issue. The discussion is always around security and integrity and making sure only the right people vote which are the kind of problems people who read too many Tom Clancy books care about. Meanwhile we only get at most ~50% turnout every year and people have to fight to actually cast their ballots. And we pretend that our election results actually mean something when half the country doesn’t vote and the sample that does is so skewed because the factors that keep people from voting aren’t random.
Hand counting of ballots works well when you're only voting for a single elected office. In the US, most elections involve voting for many different offices all on the same ballot.
Really, we should just be switching to using scantron style ballots everywhere. They're paper ballots which can be efficiently counted by a machine, and are super easy to manually recount later
> Really, we should just be switching to using scantron style ballots everywhere. They're paper ballots which can be efficiently counted by a machine, and are super easy to manually recount later.
Better yet, switch to Scantron style ballots with some clever mathematics in how the ballots are made, and some clever chemistry in how they are marked, and you can then make it so that all the ballots can be published afterwards, any voter can verify that their vote was counted toward the correct candidate, anyone can verify that the totals for each candidate match the vote, a voter cannot prove to a coercer that they voted the way the coercer wanted, and any voter can do a check before voting to try to catch shenanigans with being given tampered with ballots, all without requiring any changes to the Scantron counting machines so that there is very little addition cost for all of these protections--and for voters that don't care about verifying that their vote was correctly counted it works just like plain Scantron voting--fill in the bubbles next to the candidates you want to vote for.
Unfortunately such systems assume that all of the parties in the election are working in good faith towards finding out the true result. They don't deal with the threat model of one (or both) major parties deciding to deliberately cast doubt on the outcome of an election by lying about or losing one of the secret keys needed to check the results.
Even if all the parties behave correctly, it's still not clear that such a system is really solving the underlying problem. If someone claims there were thousands of fake votes sent in by dead people, are you really going to reassure the public by saying "Don't worry, we've re-calculated the modulo-n equations using the cryptographic key's bitstream acting as a stream cipher"? That's just asking for the backfire effect to kick in.
As a coercer, I'd expect the voter to provide me with their verification data before the results are released. Then, I can verify that they voted like I told them to
I think the "verification data" is a string of characters that the voter can read off the ballot and either commit to memory or note down on a piece of paper they bring with them.
Importantly, though, there are as many strings printed on the ballot as there are candidates, so there is nothing stopping the coercee from noting down the string that corresponds to the vote they were told to cast, without actually casting it that way.
I'm not sure how this still gives rise to the claimed properties of the system, but the inventors did at least take the coercion problem seriously, from what I remember.
The UK uses hand-counted paper ballots and often has multiple elections on the same day. You just have a separate ballot paper for each election.
It's not unusual to have votes for some combination of Member of Parliament, Regional Parliament, City Council, Local Mayor and Police Commissioner all on the same day. Members of the European Parliament too, until recently.
It really doesn't take that long. Polls close at 10pm and first results can come out around midnight. Depending on how close the result is, the winner is often known around 6am the next day and the new Prime Minister can be in office by the afternoon.
My only issue with a paper-only drop box is there's no redundancy. I would think with having poll watchers from multiple affiliations and multiple shifts per day to ensure you have many eyes on the box it wouldn't be a concern. But, if someone or some group managed to figure out a way to "stuff the box," you'd have no proof it happened.
I really like the system we have in DFW now. We have a global voter roll so you can vote in any location in your county. You submit your vote on a machine, which keeps a local machine-level tally and prints out a paper ballot. You verify the contents of the paper ballot, then drop it into a vote counting box, which scans, tallies, and displays your vote for you to confirm. If at any time anything looks wrong, you notify a poll worker to resolve it. At the end of each day, they verify the counts on the machines and ballot box match, then the ballot counter/box is locked along with the memory cards of each individual machine, so you have day-by-day results.
When the election ends, the ballot boxes are delivered to a central county counting system where they are put into another large-scale counting machine to verify that the counts there match the local counter/box. If at any point there's too many discrepancies, they'll do hand counts of the paper ballots. They can also unlock the voting machine memory cards if necessary. All of this process is done under the supervision of poll watchers.
In theory, you get near instantaneous results as each voting location can simply total the ballot box results and report them. You also have 4 separate systems (voting machine, local counter/ballot box, central counter, paper backups) that would need to be compromised to successfully tamper with the results.
I'm sure it wouldn't make a conspiracy theorist satisfied, but to me, it's a system that balances speed and convenience with the simplicity and security(?) of a paper ballot, without unnecessarily obfuscating the process behind electronic-only voting.
The uniparty does not want secure, fast, accurate election. Election manipulation is the game... Neither side of the uniparty want to admit that though and believe "their side" is the pure and virtuous side, where as the "others" are evil vote stealers or suppressors
I’m struggling to identify what is a uniparty here. I fee that the two parties in the United States have multiple separate issues and behaviors that are mutually incompatible enough to call two different political organizations. For example, when the republicans were in power, very few social programs were passed/rolled out in the 4 years they were in power for. The Democrats in comparison have passed a significant amount of legislation in just 8 months, including new social programs like the child tax credit.
Similarly, the removal and reinstatement of protection for Dreamers also seems to be one of those issues the parties broadly are incompatible about.
If you would like to educate me, I would welcome it! Maybe my understanding of a party is wrong, or my understanding of policies are wrong. I’m not really into politics so I don’t know much.
>>I fee that the two parties in the United States have multiple separate issues
I suspect that is largely because the issues you care about happen to align with one single party. You primary seem to focus on what government can provide in way of social programs. Do you believe that is the sole role of government or even a proper role of government? To provide things for people?
If so it is not surprising you believe there is differences between the parties, because on the issue of social program there does seem to be (even though that is only surface level) a difference, democrats love to give out lots of free money to people they believe will continue to vote for them.
I am sure my opinions on those programs you will disagree with.
The problem here is that I do not believe those programs are put into place to help anyone, they are just another form of control. The uniparty wants control, they get that via fear, money, and division.
The apparent divide on "social programs" is an example of how the uniparty convinces people they are separate, when in reality they are both authoritarian driven by the desire to control people, not help them.
Edit:
BTW, Follow the money for your democrats... Look at the actual spending bills, look at where the Trillions of Dollars is going. Hint it is not the poor... sure a Few billion is for the headlines, but most of it is plain old corporate welfare just like Republicans do....
Individual candidates have differing policies, but their overall platform is cut from the same cloth - benefiting their corporate sponsors. The main backdrop of agreement is massive money printing to prop up ever growing market bubbles, to the detriment of individuals' finances. The main differentiation comes in how they spin the fallout from corporate welfare - the Democrats want to use some printed money for individual welfare, whereas the Republicans market fake austerity.
Having said that, individual candidates do differ and the Republican party is going down a dark path dressed up as libertarianism that almost made me reflexively downvote "uniparty" above.
They may be referring to the fact that the two parties will often join forces to protect the status quo. Where you see support for things like ranked choice voting, or easier ballot access for third parties, you see less support from the established party leaders because the status quo is their best case scenario. It's all about democracy as long as you have the majority.
While in actual votes the parties may differ, in principle I often fail to see any clear difference in philosophy. Someone running against the incumbent will slam them for abuse of executive orders and support for the Patriot Act. Then they'll get in office and sign a renewal of the Patriot Act and issue more executive orders than their predecessor. In that way I see them as a uniparty on many issues.
In other ways Republicans are just anti-Democrats and Democrats are just anti-Republicans. They seem to use the same arguments on different issues depending on what happens to suit them or what politician they're defending. I've seen Republicans slam Biden for his failure in Afghanistan and failing to get Afghan nationals that helped the US military evacuated. But watch them do a 180 as soon as any of those Afghans arrive here. Which party believes you have absolute autonomy over your own medical decisions and that doctors need to treat you according to your own wishes? Well it depends on the treatment we're discussing. It doesn't depend on any consistent principle.
Call it a uniparty or not - I just don't trust either to be sincere about any democratic principles anymore.
I like Tom but I think he's wrong to dismiss vote machine + paper receipt as an "expensive pencil". You get the best of both worlds with this option. The benefits of the voting machine give voters more screen real estate to view the candidates for a single race, more chances to correct their vote, and even the option to randomize candidate placement. You also get faster vote tally by doing it electronically. In addition if you produce a paper receipt you now have a physical backup to verify individual machines or precincts as a whole. You could craft policy to automatically do audits on say 30% of the machines before actually releasing the tally, with the option to do a full audit if needed.
respectfully, that article simply repeats variations of scenarios tom brings up in his video;)
pick any part of the process in that article and ask "how do you know that the black box is trustworthy?" , in the context of assuming that some nation states have a vested interest in messing with the process...
Unfortunately that article is weak on the actual security mechanisms. Each step adds a layer of security. To affect the results of the election you need to compromise multiple of them.
If a single breach to a ceremony involving the equipment is enough to invalidate it’s use completely, doesn’t sound like the machines are designed with enough layers of security? Couldn’t they repeat that step and reset that leaked password?
Consider it like a supply chain breach: If you discover that your supply chain has been possibly tampered with by QAnon-associated conspiracy bloggers who deliberately lied to circumvent background
check requirements and who also disabled the security cameras that week, you replace the equipment to be safe while you investigate.
> Griswold also said that one week before the breach, Peters ordered her staff to turn off the video surveillance system that monitors the voting machines and that it was only recently turned back on.
Precautions for supply chain breaches aren’t unique to voting machines. If you discover supply chain tampering for anything security-sensitive, you replace the gear. This goes for everything from people’s laptops to network equipment.
The full article has more details. This wasn’t just a simple leak. There’s some strange corruption involved at that office.
Note the story isn't "insecurities suspected in voting systems", its "systems exposed for inspection" ... Why would a voting system not be totally open and inspect-able by any citizen of the jurisdiction using it, and/or anyone else? What've they got to hide?
Your implication is that whoever has the administrator passwords can tamper with the machine to affect the results. And that someone, who is not the general public, should have access to the passwords. How is that better? So certain chosen individuals an have the power to tamper with the machines, but no one else? Isn't that the exact problem that is concerning people?
Machines that cannot be completely publicly inspected shouldn't be used.
>And that someone, who is not the general public, should have access to the passwords. How is that better?
I'm not in favor of electronic voting either. There was a clear thing covered in this inspection that needs to be hidden. Whether that makes for a good election system is a separate matter.
This past election cycle politicized what should have otherwise been treated as a national security threat in unauthorized access to voting systems.
Notice i use the word "systems" to include the human element as well as all the other components that go into making what we have today far from an acceptable system of voting in the most powerful individual on the planet.
Given the audits and investigations of past elections, and that up until the summer of 2020 most democratic leadership were saying the election would be fraudulent, why aren’t we allowing republicans to audit to their heart’s content? What could it possibly hurt to make it completely open and accountable, for whatever they feel was sketchy? Surely national harmony is worth a Stacy Abrams style audit?
I don't care which ones they claim. If they want to dig into an election, then let them dig. If they find something, then they've done us all a favor. If they find nothing, then they've also done us a favor.
But it is shady AF for democrat leadership to claim the election was going to be stolen in summer 2020, then today we have republicans claiming all their investigations into election irregularities are being blocked at every level, and every tiny step being fought in court.
No way Trump won, but it would be nice for Republicans to be able to know that for a fact.
There's no number of audits they'll accept. Where they're currently "auditing" there have already been multiple audits already completed. The whole thing is a joke, it's endless by design for fundraising and that's it.
> But it is shady AF for democrat leadership to claim the election was going to be stolen in summer 2020
I think it was Trump who claimed the election was going to be stolen in the summer of 2020, not the Democrats. Here is what I found on "Democrat" claims:
And a bunch of other articles like that. Basically, Democrats argue that voting is too hard, while Republicans argue that voting is too easy. These positions were pretty consistent during the 2020 election.
To be fair to the Democrats, though they rarely deserve it, Trump did attempt to overturn the election and has actively worked to create doubt about the results. Sure they made claims, but their claims have been proven correct as time has passed.
It looks like the safer way to vote is avoiding technology, which I find a bit counterintuitive even though many countries rely on paper and people counting, I've even done it once (forced by law). I don't know how wrong I might be in this, but it looks to me like it systems are vulnerable by nature and hence the only secure voting system seems to be a system that avoids relying entirely on IT systems.
The technical problem is solvable, but the security and transparency (to the public) are harder to get, specially the security aspect since blockchain technology could potentially help dealing with transparency.
Breaches are acceptable and their detection proves the security system works. Undetected breaches would indicate a complete failure of the security.
Problems are to be expected, as long as the system can detect and deal with the breach, democracy is protected, albeit at greater cost in this instance.
> Peters was among those who have been spreading baseless conspiracies about the election, but despite being accused of helping leak official election data to a QAnon promoter, she still appears to have a large support base in Mesa County. The Daily Sentinel reported Wednesday that “a large group of Mesa County residents asked the county commissioners to condemn Griswold for her investigation and to stand behind Peters, saying the clerk is a hero for trying to uncover cracks in the state’s election system.” And this Saturday, supporters will hold a “patriot rally” for Peters.
One of those contradictions I am at a loss to explain is that the same people who seem to be freaking out about vaccine card fraud completely deny that voting fraud is widespread.
If a lone clerk can compromise the machines, should we really be using them? Do we know and trust everyone who had (legitimate or otherwise) access to these machines, including the manufacturer?
And what benefit do they offer over a hand count, to justify so much risk?
Just because the Republican's allegations about fraud were without merit, does not mean electronic voting is a good idea.
> Peters survived an effort to recall her from office over the ballots and other issues, including allegations that she failed to maintain adequate staffing in the election division.
I might be tempted to say that the voters of Mesa County deserve having their freedoms stolen away. A vital part of democracy is holding transgressors accountable, and the voters of Mesa County have failed their responsibility.
>I might be tempted to say that the voters of Mesa County deserve having their freedoms stolen away. A vital part of democracy is holding transgressors accountable, and the voters of Mesa County have failed their responsibility.
I mean, if she really was deliberately messing with the counting somehow, the result of the vote doesn't necessarily reflect what the voters actually voted for?
Unreal. Because voting is secure the conspiracy theorist decided to create a conspiracy and potential security threat by releasing passwords online for the system and allowing people in to the back door. How pathetic. You were that hard up for a conspiracy? They should vet these people more and allow less individual access. I’ve seen some systems where 2 or more people of opposite political parties have to open the facilities at the same time. Maybe try that?
Yes, Colorado voting is secure, and yes, a conspiracy theorist, who happens to be Mesa County's Clerk and Recorder, is completely to blame for the security breech. What you're leaving out is that because the election didn't turn out the way the Clerk wanted, she's muddying the waters and making further fair elections far more difficult.
That’s not how opsec works. It shouldn’t matter who the agent is, if it happened it is also a vulnerability of the system. It should withstand tampering by any sufficiently motivated party.
It is like saying “yes, my website was hacked, but it was by an evil person” or “it was through social engineering.” Don’t care, it was hacked, can’t happen on such a critical system.
> It shouldn’t matter who the agent is, if it happened it is also a vulnerability of the system. It should withstand tampering by any sufficiently motivated party.
That's exactly opposite of what infosec experts say, and opposes experience as well. I mean, someone, probably Israel and NSA, got Stuxnet into an airgapped Iranian nuclear facility. Don't try to argue that perfection is necessary - it isn't Security is an economic good, with a price, and a value. When value exceeds price, implement the security. Otherwise, live with it.
> Don't try to argue that perfection is necessary - it isn't Security is an economic good, with a price, and a value. When value exceeds price, implement the security. Otherwise, live with it.
Turns out not everything is operating under market dynamics; unless you’re willing to put a price tag on election integrity, which is a public good. Especially in comparison to existing alternative implementations.
Perfection is a strawman, you are not even arguing for elasticity depending on the attack vector, you’re arguing for a backdoor selective to the identity of the intruder.
On the flipside - this was caught, an investigation has opened, the public was notified and mitigating steps were taken to ensure election security. IMO this is what it looks like when the system is functioning well.
I had no opinion before now, but clearly these machines are unusable anywhere.