Very detailed Lemmy post I wrote about this fuckery and more
Local news article containing the quote about the voter registrar
On Homer Plessey Way, board member Daniel Milojevic stood outside the Bywater polling place in the Press Street Gallery suggesting people try the two Jefferson Parish locations.
He said the local registrar of voters gave the district only 300 ballots per location and told them they could expect about 20 people.
“We had to confirm the number of ballots weeks ago,” he said, before it was clear how high the turnout would be. Milojevic conceded that planning had clearly missed the mark.
As one astute gentleman asked while defending Reddit, and accusing me of spreading misinformation:
If hardly anybody knew, how did turnout exceed expectations within 2 hours?
Because the “expectation” provided by the registrar was literally 20 voters per location (60 voters in total) for the entire fucking city.
Electronic voting is not safe, print and cut more paper!
Yes, I’m sure no one has ever tampered with paper ballots. Right.
Much easier to protect and verify than any electronic system
Except they have a much higher rate of lost or miscounted ballots.
But the two methods can be used together to create an improved system: electronic ballots with a printed ‘receipt’. My state uses this method. Before submitting your ballot, it displays the paper receipt and asks you to confirm your choices. If it’s incorrect or you want to change it, you can reject the ballot and it is immediately voided in front of you. If it’s fine, you press a button and it submits both the digital and paper copies of your ballot.
Election monitors can then validate the calculated results against the paper receipts.
If you really wanted to be security minded, you could go a step further - have the ballot printing machines keep a per-machine count of ballots they’ve done and print a ballot with human readable votes and a barcode detailing the same. Have a second machine scan those ballots and drop them into a locked box. None of them are connected to a network or have an accessible open port anywhere on them. There is however a locked access panel on the back of each machine where an SD card is inserted. As ballots are printed and scanned each machine’s SD card records what happens. The two types of machines are made by different manufacturers and validated by a third party.
At close of polls, all the machines are asked to report their results. If there is a discrepancy between what the ballot printers report and what the ballot scanners report, it’s time for a manual recount of that polling location. Then the SD cards are pulled from all the machines and shipped to the relevant election board to check the contents against the reports. Also manual recount 5% of polling locations (minimum one) selected at random. If discrepancies show up in more than a 1% of polling locations, manual recount the entire election. For all these manual recounts, the human readable portion of the paper ballot is the final authority.
So you still need to count all the paper votes, and hope they didn’t use disappearing ink or any other bullshit
Yes, you also need to hope they’re not building android replicas of all the voters, too.
What they’re supposed to start doing here (or at least they were when the last governor left office, not sure if they still will do it now that democracy is crumbling) is paper and then scan every ballot so it can also be included in recounts.
As of now with most elections in LA, it’s electronic only and votes don’t get included in recounts unless they’re mail in.
It’s not paper ballots I’m pissed about, (but like I said, it also seems like that could open up the door to more BS given what happened in the recount) it’s the fact that anyone would pretend 900 ballots would be enough for the entire city, and that they had no backup plan for when they weren’t.
In NY we have these amazing devices, where they can adhere a chemical to blank ballots before voters mark them to be scanned.
It’s a fairly obscure tech, kind of like an additive manufacturing rig that, instead of adding one plane at a time to build a 3D physical thing from the bottom up, uses small rows of line segments to create a two-dimensional image. These “printers” used to be widespread, but still do have enough niche uses that the government was able to acquire some fairly easily.
It’s also going to make that lawsuit in New Paltz very interesting.
Multiple checks and balances are required for paper, too.
And electronic voting goes against the principles of a fair and free election.
One of the principles of such an election is that a layman can understand the process to verify the legitimacy of the election. The average citizens needs to be able to understand the election process.
Electronic voting either allows the state to track who voted for what and/or allows people to vote multiple times, or it is not possible for a layman to verify the legitimacy of the election.
Electronic voting are just plain anti democratic.
Edit: I am ignoring here the simple fact that closed source code is unverifiable and any voting machine running with e.g. windows would return unverifiable results. So I am ignoring the issues of the software stack of this machines, which we shouldn’t.
Paper Elections are dead easy and safe to perform
There is a reason nearly no one other real democratic country uses stupid voting machines, but undemocratic shitholes like Russia love electronic voting and machines
It’s not checks that are the issue, but the scalability of the offensive and the inevitable opaqueness of countermeasures.
Surely there is a cryptographic way to count votes where someone can check that the results are correct but not how individuals voted, right?
Now you have to trust the software used to do this, the algorithm itself, and that there was no tampering before the data got stored. Which is something truly verifiable by a very tiny subset of population and even then with full cooperation from authorities. This is the opaqueness of countermeasures.
Vote counting is not a mathematical problem, but a sociological one. Any „always correct machine” is useless if people can’t reasonably trust it.
Paper ballots don’t scale - you can’t stuff ballots without someone being present - and are designed exactly in the problem space vote counting itself occupies. As an additional evidence in their favor, autocratic regimes and corrupt politicians are way too eager to switch to electronic voting.
That’s the whole point of crypto though, you publish the mathematically verifiable results, and everyone becomes a vote counter. Instead of trusting a small group of people to do it right, you can verify the counts yourself in a trustless system.
The algorithm isn’t a black box like you’re saying, it’s fully auditable and decentralized so any fuckery is immediately visible.
Now maybe I’m wrong and a mathematically verifiable algorithm can’t exist, but to my knowledge that’s never been shown to be the case.
Edit: turns out there are MANY such systems, and they are mathematically verifiable, and used in actual use cases today. The only thing stopping it is lack of political will, and arguably, the fact that even people without computers have the right to vote.
You do not have to trust the software. You could do that math for yourself if you really cared.
You’re thinking about the voting problem wrong, specifically not including all of the requirements
Their point is that even in this system, there is both a small and finite number of people who are skilled enough/qualified enough to perform that audit. I’m not sure I’ve got the math to be able to validate a blockchain transaction by hand without referring to a (potentially tainted) source repo. There’s a world where blockchain voting can solve this problem, but the competing requirements make it the less-optimal solution compared with paper voting.
Specifically, there are 3 potentially competing requirements for a secure voting system in a functioning democracy:
Blockchains, potentially, optimize the voting problem for #1 while introducing explicit exposure in #s 2 and 3, while paper ballots optimize for 2 first, then 3.
Woah woah woah, I said nothing about blockchain. That would almost certainly be the wrong, overly complex solution. The systems that exist for cryptographic voting do hit ALL your points while having the additional benefit of being perfectly auditable.
Cryptography is a much larger field than blockchain, and people use it for trusted communication every day.
I’m sure that exists, yes. But you can’t give the voting key to individual voters, because that can be bought. So you’re using the same black-box voting machines with all the same attack vectors (or even worse if they’re connected to the internet).
The only way to make voting machines safe is to have them print out the ballot, but at that point they’re just very expensive pencils.