Some Tennessee voters say they touched one candidate’s name on a voting machine but saw a different name selected. State election officials say unintended touches can cause that to happen.
Electronic voting is extremely scary to me because it is a black box that collects and counts the votes.
It would be trivial to display everything properly, but record a different result in the background, or simply at the end change a number of votes to make a faked result seem belivable.
Note however that I have no proof of that happening and I am not claiming that any voting machine is actually doing this. I am simply explaining what I believe is a possible danger of using computerized voting.
That is why there is usually a printed paper ballot that goes along with it. That allows you to verify your vote was cast properly, and allows for recounts and audits if the electronic count is questioned.
The printed ballot shouldn’t be tied to you. It prints out of the machine when you vote. You check that it is accurate, then drop it in a box. Secrecy is maintained, an auditabke paper trail exists, and as long as chain of custody for the ballots is maintained it should remain accurate.
Though with so many organizations being coopted by fascists, and independent election observers are being denied, there is a lot of room for fuckery.
Yeah because we know after the votes are picked up, there* definitely won’t be any paper ballots missing or wrongly counted. You people are in la la land.
Where I vote the paper ballot doesn’t have identifying info and is in your hand for like 10 seconds between the voting machine and the ballot box. Someone would have to be in the polling place accosting me to check how I voted, which would be an issue no matter how the ballot got generated.
The machine allows a digital recording that can be tabulated faster than physically counting the paper ballots.
The paper ballots should still be the official votes and counts, but the machine means faster preliminary results.
Digital-only voting is an issue because there is no backup paper trail, and could easily be compromised without any visible indication.
There is no reason for the voting machine to know a name or display anything identifying. You should be verified separately before getting close to a machine to vote. It should be as dumb as possible. Only tabulating your selections and printing the result for you to verify then drop into the official box.
I’m reasonably sure that the “hanging chads” was only a problem for counting votes for candidates from one of the two parties.
I’ve heard a legend that in a Scottish parliament election, which claims that a ballot is required only to show “clear preference” that a person drew dicks on all but one candidate, over which was written “not a dick”. The vote was counted as it showed clear preference.
Here in Sweden you take a ballot from the party you want to vote for, you mark any specific representative if you want, you put the ballot in an envelope, seal it, walk to the election official desk and cast your vote:
Eh. The entire state of Oregon gets by just fine without absolute ballot secrecy. And any other state that largely or to a significant degree exercises no-excuse vote-by-mail. Basically everyone in Oregon votes by mail. There are in-person voting booths at each county election office for the few oddballs that want to vote in person, but almost everyone votes by mail. It’s October 22. My ballot is already in. I’ve already voted. I filled out my ballot in my kitchen.
There was nothing physically preventing someone from forcing me to fill out my ballot the way they want to. There would be nothing physically preventing my employer from saying, “fill out your ballot the way you want in front of me, sign it, and then give it to be to turn in. If your refuse or cancel your ballot later, you’re fired.”
Yet that doesn’t happen. Why? Because we made it a serious fucking crime to do that. If I’m reading Oregon law right (I’m no lawyer), coercion of a vote that way would be a class C felony punishable for up to five years in prison and a $125,000 fine. And I’m less sure on this part, but I imagine that would apply to every single employee you coerced this way. So you’re risking a felony for ever single vote your coerce. That’s a huge risk for a single vote. It’s just not worth it. Some real morons might try it, but no one with two brain cells to rub together is going to give it a try. Plus any federal penalties.
apply to every single employee you coerced this way.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually considered the risk that an employer could force people to vote a certain way. I’m far more concerned about people living in abusive relationships.
we made it a serious fucking crime to do that.
People living in abusive relationship are already victims of serious crimes every day. Yet those crimes often go unreported for years, because the fear and control is so strong. I see no reason to believe that someone who is already controlling their partner with physical violence would balk at forcing them to fill out a vote a certain way before mailing it for them.
And yet it doesn’t happen. Could an abusive spouse do this? Sure. But again, it’s a huge risk for not a lot of gain. It’s one extra vote in exchange for a felony. It’s just not a serious problem the way domestic violence in general is.
You have to balance competing interests in law. Mail voting makes voting much more accessible, cheaper, and more resilient to manipulation such as closing poll locations in targeted precincts. And stretching election day over a few weeks gives people a chance to more easily correct errors that pop up, and makes the voter rolls more resilient to political ratfucking.
That huge increase in accessibility does come with a slightly increased risk of vote coercisiom, but it’s more than worth it.
We should be concerned about any sort of coercive control. Yes, children, elders, elders, and other vulnerable populations may need to be prevented from skipping proper nutrition, hydration, hygiene, and shelter, force and coercive control need delicate handling, where practical and possible. For instance, while proper nutrition is a noble goal and the sweeteners, oils and other questionable ingredients in a nutrition beverage may give us pause, that’s still preferable to ng tubes or force feeding.
Even just the information that the media gets to share with us illustrates pretty clearly that this administration and entire political movement behind it is a mix of violent idiots and slightly more self aware mustache-twirling villains who delight in taunting and torturing their victims once they are confident they’ve won.
And it’s not just sadistic sickness, it’s also a strategy. If the evening news shows government officials knowingly doing illegal and reprehensible things on a regular basis and nothing happens to them, while also reminding us that the police state is in full effect for everybody else, they think they are sending a message to regular folks that they cannot be touched and you’d best just keep your head down and not get any funny ideas. It’s literally just the Death Star “fear will keep them in line” strategy.
But at least the retort about a tighter grip meaning more systems/groups slip through their fingers is also accurate.
Fascism is not a good long term plan because it is rooted in selfish, short term goals of the few.
Evil’s most redeeming quality is that sooner or later, in will inevitably turn inwards against itself. We already see this happening quite often and lots of cracks are showing.
I’m not an electioneering expert or anything, but I’ve often thought that one way to get the best of both worlds would be to generate a unique one-way hash of a voter’s vote choices and essentially a private key (not 4). The hash could be publicly displayed to verify the final counts without revealing anything about the person behind the votes. The list of hashes for a candidate could be counted by everyone and anyone could verify that their hashes were listed under the correct candidates.
To me, this reads as a software bug.
It seems too obvious to be deliberate.
Electronic voting is extremely scary to me because it is a black box that collects and counts the votes.
It would be trivial to display everything properly, but record a different result in the background, or simply at the end change a number of votes to make a faked result seem belivable.
Note however that I have no proof of that happening and I am not claiming that any voting machine is actually doing this. I am simply explaining what I believe is a possible danger of using computerized voting.
That is why there is usually a printed paper ballot that goes along with it. That allows you to verify your vote was cast properly, and allows for recounts and audits if the electronic count is questioned.
That is a good first step, but removes one critical function of an election, secrecy.
You need voter secrecy to avoid voting coercion by a third party, that only works if they can find out what you actually voted for.
The printed ballot shouldn’t be tied to you. It prints out of the machine when you vote. You check that it is accurate, then drop it in a box. Secrecy is maintained, an auditabke paper trail exists, and as long as chain of custody for the ballots is maintained it should remain accurate.
Though with so many organizations being coopted by fascists, and independent election observers are being denied, there is a lot of room for fuckery.
Unless people lie about the ballot. Or they are thrown out. I’m sure there’s a digital version of hanging chads.
Bitflips
There is! It’s a joker in the hit indie game Balatro.
Yeah because we know after the votes are picked up, there* definitely won’t be any paper ballots missing or wrongly counted. You people are in la la land.
Where I vote the paper ballot doesn’t have identifying info and is in your hand for like 10 seconds between the voting machine and the ballot box. Someone would have to be in the polling place accosting me to check how I voted, which would be an issue no matter how the ballot got generated.
Ok, so the point of the machine is to generate a ballot?
Seems like it would be easier to just skip the machine…
The machine allows a digital recording that can be tabulated faster than physically counting the paper ballots.
The paper ballots should still be the official votes and counts, but the machine means faster preliminary results.
Digital-only voting is an issue because there is no backup paper trail, and could easily be compromised without any visible indication.
There is no reason for the voting machine to know a name or display anything identifying. You should be verified separately before getting close to a machine to vote. It should be as dumb as possible. Only tabulating your selections and printing the result for you to verify then drop into the official box.
Nah, you do both. A fast electronic count then a slow paper count. That way you get the advantages of both systems.
Then you get back to the old way of punching holes in a paper ballot and well… Have you ever heard of a “hanging chad”? That shit has issues too.
I’m reasonably sure that the “hanging chads” was only a problem for counting votes for candidates from one of the two parties.
I’ve heard a legend that in a Scottish parliament election, which claims that a ballot is required only to show “clear preference” that a person drew dicks on all but one candidate, over which was written “not a dick”. The vote was counted as it showed clear preference.
The point is, people determined on a particular outcome will find novel ways of ensuring that outcome.
Exactly.
Also the tribalism is so strong that the ends (our team winning) justifies the means.
There are other types of paper ballots.
Here in Sweden you take a ballot from the party you want to vote for, you mark any specific representative if you want, you put the ballot in an envelope, seal it, walk to the election official desk and cast your vote:
Eh. The entire state of Oregon gets by just fine without absolute ballot secrecy. And any other state that largely or to a significant degree exercises no-excuse vote-by-mail. Basically everyone in Oregon votes by mail. There are in-person voting booths at each county election office for the few oddballs that want to vote in person, but almost everyone votes by mail. It’s October 22. My ballot is already in. I’ve already voted. I filled out my ballot in my kitchen.
There was nothing physically preventing someone from forcing me to fill out my ballot the way they want to. There would be nothing physically preventing my employer from saying, “fill out your ballot the way you want in front of me, sign it, and then give it to be to turn in. If your refuse or cancel your ballot later, you’re fired.”
Yet that doesn’t happen. Why? Because we made it a serious fucking crime to do that. If I’m reading Oregon law right (I’m no lawyer), coercion of a vote that way would be a class C felony punishable for up to five years in prison and a $125,000 fine. And I’m less sure on this part, but I imagine that would apply to every single employee you coerced this way. So you’re risking a felony for ever single vote your coerce. That’s a huge risk for a single vote. It’s just not worth it. Some real morons might try it, but no one with two brain cells to rub together is going to give it a try. Plus any federal penalties.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually considered the risk that an employer could force people to vote a certain way. I’m far more concerned about people living in abusive relationships.
People living in abusive relationship are already victims of serious crimes every day. Yet those crimes often go unreported for years, because the fear and control is so strong. I see no reason to believe that someone who is already controlling their partner with physical violence would balk at forcing them to fill out a vote a certain way before mailing it for them.
And yet it doesn’t happen. Could an abusive spouse do this? Sure. But again, it’s a huge risk for not a lot of gain. It’s one extra vote in exchange for a felony. It’s just not a serious problem the way domestic violence in general is.
You have to balance competing interests in law. Mail voting makes voting much more accessible, cheaper, and more resilient to manipulation such as closing poll locations in targeted precincts. And stretching election day over a few weeks gives people a chance to more easily correct errors that pop up, and makes the voter rolls more resilient to political ratfucking.
That huge increase in accessibility does come with a slightly increased risk of vote coercisiom, but it’s more than worth it.
We should be concerned about any sort of coercive control. Yes, children, elders, elders, and other vulnerable populations may need to be prevented from skipping proper nutrition, hydration, hygiene, and shelter, force and coercive control need delicate handling, where practical and possible. For instance, while proper nutrition is a noble goal and the sweeteners, oils and other questionable ingredients in a nutrition beverage may give us pause, that’s still preferable to ng tubes or force feeding.
I’mma stop you right there.
Even just the information that the media gets to share with us illustrates pretty clearly that this administration and entire political movement behind it is a mix of violent idiots and slightly more self aware mustache-twirling villains who delight in taunting and torturing their victims once they are confident they’ve won.
And it’s not just sadistic sickness, it’s also a strategy. If the evening news shows government officials knowingly doing illegal and reprehensible things on a regular basis and nothing happens to them, while also reminding us that the police state is in full effect for everybody else, they think they are sending a message to regular folks that they cannot be touched and you’d best just keep your head down and not get any funny ideas. It’s literally just the Death Star “fear will keep them in line” strategy.
But at least the retort about a tighter grip meaning more systems/groups slip through their fingers is also accurate.
Fascism is not a good long term plan because it is rooted in selfish, short term goals of the few.
Evil’s most redeeming quality is that sooner or later, in will inevitably turn inwards against itself. We already see this happening quite often and lots of cracks are showing.
We need to press that advantage.
I’m not an electioneering expert or anything, but I’ve often thought that one way to get the best of both worlds would be to generate a unique one-way hash of a voter’s vote choices and essentially a private key (not 4). The hash could be publicly displayed to verify the final counts without revealing anything about the person behind the votes. The list of hashes for a candidate could be counted by everyone and anyone could verify that their hashes were listed under the correct candidates.
Then there is still the potential for an abusive partner or parent to get your hash and verify what you voted for.
An election is actually very complex to run while maintaining anonymity, security and transparency at the same time.
Not only that, it makes selling your vote actually feasible, since you have an easy way to prove who you voted for.
TBF, it’s legal to take a picture of your ballot now, so you can sell your vote in other ways.
No way to confirm the ballot you took a picture of is the one that went in the box though.
I don’t know how you’d come to this conclusion living in the world we live in today.
I don’t think they care about being obvious anymore. They know no one will do anything about it.
Fair point, by making it obvious you also demonstrate your power.
Never underestimate the incompetence of the right