patrick.net

Interestingly, this little debate that curious2 and I are having boils down to a philosophical question. Which is more trustworthy, man or machine?

I think I understand what is going on in Curious2's mind because this is exactly the kind of subject that I'm always thinking about. However, I could be wrong about he believes so I apologize ahead of time if that's the case. But I usually can do a pretty good job of expressing the opposition's position even better then they can. So I will attempt that here, and if I get it wrong, please correct me.

Cursious2, like most people, fall into the camp that man is more trustworthy because man can understand man but cannot fully understand or know machine, or at least most people can't and only a few really intelligent experts can understand machines in sufficient detail.

I fall into the camp that machine is more trustworthy than man because machines can be made transparent -- I would never trust an opaque machine -- whereas man cannot. Also, I find it ridiculous that anyone would trust man given man's history.

The argument in favor of man revolves around human behavior being intuitively understood by everyone, being well-known having changed little since the Stone Age, and it being difficult for any group of men to fool all other men for long periods of time. In contrast, machines being so much more advanced and alien to most people, can fool just about everyone just about all the time and without limits on how long they can continue to fool people.

The argument in favor of machine is that transparent machines, and systems, can be examined by anyone and if only one person finds a flaw than the flaw can be demonstrated unequivocally, fixed, and verified. Crowd-sourcing to the entire world is more than sufficient to do this as even if only the tiniest portion of the people are both willing and capable of finding a flaw and even if 99% of those people fail, the flaw will still be exposed and fixed. Flaws simply cannot continue to exist in transparent systems. This is why all mathematical proofs widely accepted for even a few years are never later demonstrated to be wrong. You just don't hear that we were wrong about the square root of two being irrational and that it really equals 10/7.

Of course, just because machines can be trustworthy does not mean they all are. I'm looking at you, Starscream. The trustworthiness of a machine is often determine by the trustworthiness of the people creating the machines, although transparency does eliminate this problem. Still, in order to set up a trustworthy system, such as an electronic voting system, the people working on the problem must have good intentions even if the system is transparent. Otherwise, they will fail to build a trustworthy system and their project will ultimately collapse.

Dan8267 says

Cursious2, like most people, fall into the camp that man is more trustworthy because man can understand man but cannot fully understand or know machine, or at least most people can't and only a few really intelligent experts can understand machines in sufficient detail.

I appreciate truly your comments, and am still processing the salted hash education. I reply briefly here to say that most of all I appreciate honesty.

I feel some concern that the Democrats choose to extend nationwide the effect of the Republicans' proprietary Diebold/PES machines. It reminds me of Obamneycare, where the Democrats chose to impose HeritageFoundationCare. I feel sometimes that when Republicans have an incredibly disastrous deal in mind, they get gullible Demcocrats to enact it.

Humans have a longer history than machines made by humans. Conspiracies among humans tend not to last long, and we have a long history of containing the mischief that humans can cause. For this reason, I do tend to prefer mechanisms that humans can inspect without recourse to machines.

That preference is not intended to disparage machines or theories. Rather, it favors empirical observation. Theory must yield to data.

"Assume your adversary is capable of one trillion guesses per second."

I cannot find at the moment, but I remember, an interview in which Phil Zimmerman (inventor of PGP) said the best you can hope for is that hacking you would be difficult, and would require human effort and the allocation of scarce or at least limited resources. I have yet to see corroboration that any electronic system can be made impenetrable. To the contrary, I see over and over again that vulnerabilities may remain, and that even the availablilty of many eyes to look at something doesn't mean they have actually looked at it, or seen all.

So, yes, I do come back to the old ways, the human ways, though I recognize tech may surpass them. Whether we are there yet, I leave to others.

We don't need to change anything about voting. There is no fraud,gerrymandering or hanging chads.

HEY YOU says

We don't need to change anything about voting. There is no fraud,gerrymandering or hanging chads.

What did the Democrats change about it when they had power from 2009-2011? What legislation have the Republicans sent to the President since then?

curious2 says

I feel some concern that the Democrats choose to extend nationwide the effect of the Republicans' proprietary Diebold/PES machines.

The Diebold machines are clearly bad and should not be trusted. Actually, there should be no trust of any machine, person, or system. Transparency, not trust, is the only way to fight corruption and mistakes.

However, a bad, even malicious, implementation of a system does not mean that all possible implementations must be bad.

curious2 says

"Assume your adversary is capable of one trillion guesses per second."

Design the system so that the first wrong guess triggers an alarm. Ten wrong guesses triggers a big alarm.

curious2 says

I remember, an interview in which Phil Zimmerman (inventor of PGP) said the best you can hope for is that hacking you would be difficult, and would require human effort and the allocation of scarce or at least limited resources.

This is one school of thought. However, I strongly disagree with it. Those in this camp use their gut feelings and historical precedence to conclude that since all previous systems have flaws, all possible systems must have flaws. This is a non-sequitur. The 20th and 21st century have shown "new things under the sun" every single day.

There is no law of logic and no law of nature that says a logical system must contain flaws. On the contrary, flawless mathematical systems are frequent created and are considered the norm.

There is an old saying in Information Technology. No security through obscurity. This saying means that a transparent system can be made secured, but one with secrets cannot. The reason for this is that every flaw in a transparent system can be found and fix, whereas mistakes and maliciousness in opaque systems cannot.

If one accepts that any given mistake can be fixed without introducing another mistake, which is a reasonable assumption consistent with both all known laws of logic and all empirical evidence, then eventually transparent systems tend to perfection. The use of electronics and distributed computing enhances this ability.

As long as a paper trail does not compromise the system, say by revealing people's votes, then I have objections to there being one. At best and at worst it's redundant. However, there should be no reliance of a paper trail, and by that I mean physical paper, to ensure security, transparency, and accountability. The electronic system itself should guarantee these things itself regardless of whether or not the paper trail exists.

Although there is a tendency to believe that all systems are inherently flawed, there has never been a single example of a problem in any IT system that logically or physically cannot be solved. Yes, there are hard problems, but so far no unsolvable problems. And quite frankly, the problems with electronic voting systems aren't hard ones. Of course, the system must be completely transparent because no human being can be trusted. But the great thing about transparent systems is that they require absolutely no trust whatsoever.

"Hackers Elect Futurama's Bender to the Washington DC School Board"

#FeelTheBender, coming soon to a Presidency near you.

Time to bump this thread. Now that people are talking about Russia allegedly hacking American election systems, suddenly government and commercial press are praising the "clunky" old paper ballots that cannot easily be hacked online. Notice how they didn't care about that when they assumed the hacking would be domestic, e.g. by Diebold/PES or the former colleagues of Edward Snowden. Back then, Democrats were busily enacting NPVIC, and someone was paying shills (e.g. "otto") to copy and paste talking points in favor of it, thus making nationwide elections easier to hack. Oops. Be careful what you wish for. The states that enacted paperless ballots could easily be hacked, with no proof either way, and if NPVIC were in effect, they could swing the whole election. Now, suddenly, people are beginning to realize that the paperless electronic systems are more vulnerable, and (by extension) they might realize that NPVIC as currently written is potentially disastrous.

The recounts have alerted Senator Bernie Sanders to the necessity of paper ballots: "And I wouldn’t have said this a few years ago, but I will say it tonight. I was just researching this. You know, in Canada, they still do their voting with paper ballots. And maybe it takes an extra hour or two to get the results out to the media, but they manage to survive. And I kind of think we should go back to paper ballots, lock them up." Read the whole interview if you have time, and his new book. He talks about how the commercial media froze out coverage of his primary campaign events, and the systematic establishment efforts to block insurgent campaigns.

In particular, with regard to this thread, I hope idealistic Democrats will recognize the necessity of accountability, including verifiable paper ballots, prior to enacting NPVIC. Idealistic Democrats tend to have more hope than sense, more theory than practice. Paperless ballots enable the automation of election theft, with no recounts and no accountability. As noted in this thread, it's usually the Republican establishment that imposes these proprietary paperless ballots. Misguided Democrats are now taking up the cause, just as Obamacare imposed Romneycare nationwide. By replacing the state firewalls of the Electoral College, NPVIC would impose each state's potentially hacked paperless results nationwide. Cynical partisan establishments have exploited idealistic naivete too many times already.

If you want to replace the Electoral College with direct election, then enact legislation requiring each state to assign its electoral votes to the winner of that state's popular vote. If you want to replace statewide voting with nationwide voting, first make sure you have nationwide standards for voting, including paper ballots. Don't naively hand over control of elections to party establishments with no accountability.

NPR: "CIA Finds Russian Hackers Tried To Help Trump's Election"

Whether that finding is true or false, Democrats should reconsider the NPVIC. In recent years, Democrats have denied (bizarrely) that election fraud or rigging occurs, or can even occur. This year, Democrats said even the accusation would be "unpatriotic." Democrats have been enacting NPVIC, which would subjugate the human voters' paper ballots in blue jurisdictions to the easily hacked, paperless, proprietary electronic ballots in mostly red jurisdictions. NPVIC contains NO PROTECTION AGAINST HACKING OR OTHER FRAUD. If the "Honorable" Katherine Harris were to certify a billion Florida votes for "Jeb!", then NPVIC would commit California's electoral votes to follow. That would be even more idiotic and self-defeating than Obamneycare proved to be. Yet again, Republicans initiate a dangerously bad idea (HeritageFoundationCare, Diebold/PES proprietary paperless ballots), and credulous Democrats enact it. You can't save people from themselves, but you can try to warn them.

"An attempted hack into Georgia's voter registration database was traced back to the Department of Homeland Security, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

A third-party security firm working for the state detected the unsuccessful breach and linked it to an IP address associated with DHS, the report said. Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp reportedly sent a letter to Homeland Security asking the department to confirm whether an attempt was made."

"An employee with DHS was using licensing databases on the Secretary of State's website to verify an individual's background, a Homeland Security official told Kemp in an e-mail last week.

Federal officials told Kemp that they believe the employee's computer was incorrectly set up so that a legitimate visit to the website inadvertently set off alarms. Kemp, however, believes further investigation is needed."

If Democrats continue enacting NPVIC, or if Republicans begin enacting it, then anyone will be able to steal an election by hacking some of the easily hacked paperless voting machines that control a quarter of all votes nationwide. It is conceivable that more than one set of hackers might hack different machines in the same election. The end result would be: boldest hackers win.

#Bender2020

curious2 says

attribution rather than plagiarize

I thought of everything before anyone else. Anything that anyone thinks,writes or says is plagiarizing me.
Everything posted on patnet must start with: HEY YOU says:

curious2 says

attribution rather than plagiarize

I thought of everything before anyone else. Anything that anyone thinks,writes or says is plagiarizing me.
Everything posted on patnet must start with: HEY YOU says:

curious2 says

What did the Democrats change about it when they had power from 2009-2011? What legislation have the Republicans sent to the President since then?

We shouldn't expect much from RETARDS! Disappointment SUX!

""Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept.
***
Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions.
***
Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards.
***
Although the document does not directly identify the company in question, it contains references to a product made by VR Systems, a Florida-based vendor of electronic voting services and equipment whose products are used in eight states."

Will Democrats please now repeal the potentially disastrous NPVIC, before somebody hacks into paperless ballot machines and steals an election? They seem to be obsessed with Russian hackers, so this should get Democrats' attention. Will state Democrats please safeguard our elections better than they safeguard the DNC server?

curious2 says

What did the Democrats change about it when they had power from 2009-2011? What legislation have the Republicans sent to the President since then?

Two do nothing Parties.

The E.C. is not the problem,brainwashed ,gullible voters will continue to vote D/R.
Stupid might be forever. The status quo has worked so well,so far.
FMTT!

"Americans have reason to be concerned about the integrity of Georgia’s election system—and the state’s puzzling lack of interest in addressing its vulnerabilities. “The security weaknesses recently exposed would be a welcome mat for bad actors.”"

And yet, NPVIC contains no provision to guard against hacking or other fraud. Instead, NPVIC would strip away the firewall of the Electoral College, subjugating human voters in blue states to easily hacked machines controlled by red states. Cui bono?

Democrats want to:

- Destroy the electoral college
- Do away with voter ID laws
- Allow illegals to vote

How does any of this help the country?

Once we get voter ID's on a national level, all of this will be pointless since maybe only 3-4 states will go blue anyway.

"Several Ohio websites, including that of Gov. John Kasich, were hacked Sunday with a message that supported the Islamic State and opposed President Trump."

Will Democrats please repeal NPVIC, or at least amend it to require paper ballots and safeguard against hacking? If they continue enacting NPVIC as written, we could see the easily hacked paperless machines in Ohio and elsewhere hacked by ISIL or anyone else. I suspect it's possible that some in the Deep State might have supported NPVIC as a way to "manage" elections, perhaps not realizing that other hackers have skills too, including Russian hackers who are among the best in the world.

zzyzzx says

Once we get voter ID's on a national level, all of this will be pointless since maybe only 3-4 states will go blue anyway.

Only if your voter ID prevents citizens from legally voting. Otherwise it is a right-wing pipe dream to prevent democrats from being voted into office by passing ID laws. Hell, done right, more people would vote.

Of course, what we should do is make voting power proportional to the number of people being represented. Then the right would have zero power on the national level.

"We have significant vulnerabilities in our voting machines, our voter rolls and registration process, and the vote tabulation systems after the polls close. In January, DHS designated our voting systems as critical national infrastructure, but so far that has been entirely for show. In the United States, we don’t have a single integrated election. We have 50-plus individual elections, each with its own rules and its own regulatory authorities. Federal standards that mandate voter-verified paper ballots and post-election auditing would go a long way to secure our voting system. These attacks demonstrate that we need to secure the voter rolls, as well."

curious2 says

Some opponents have pointed out a risk of fraud, but supporters seem to dismiss or at least underestimate that risk.

A risk of fraud is not what we have to worry about.

Since the acrimonious debate around NAFTA, where Clinton assured, swore and attested that more US jobs would be created, and against Perot, who started large technology firms, said that there would be a dramatic loss of jobs.

Since we now know that this is a greater loss of jobs, and that the "Giant Sucking Sound of job loss" occurred this is where we need the electoral college. Why?? Because a great deal of the manufacturing was outside of city centers (save for Detroit, Fremont,...).

If the electoral college goes, then the city dwellers near the coast decide the election, and the representation of the minority of manufacturers (

curious2 says

Some opponents have pointed out a risk of fraud, but supporters seem to dismiss or at least underestimate that risk.

A risk of fraud is not what we have to worry about.

Since the acrimonious debate around NAFTA, where Clinton assured, swore and attested that more US jobs would be created, and against Perot, who started large technology firms, said that there would be a dramatic loss of jobs.

Since we now know that this is a greater loss of jobs, and that the "Giant Sucking Sound of job loss" occurred this is where we need the electoral college. Why?? Because a great deal of the manufacturing was outside of city centers (save for Detroit, Fremont,...).

If the electoral college goes, then the city dwellers near the coast decide the election, and the representation of the minority of manufacturers (~ 9% of the workforce) is ended.

Bill Clinton should have met with Dept of Labor and industry leaders in 1999 and asked "How is NAFTA doing?" It would have been the right thing to do rather than ignore the whole sale loss of jobs.

IRONY: If Bill Clinton would have had a critical look at NAFTA, suggested improvements to stop US job loss ( or Bush or Obama), the wife of said Lawyer might have been elected.

""Connecticut OKs Bill Pledging Electoral Votes To National Popular-Vote Winner...The bill adopts an interstate compact that's officially called "The Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote." All of the states that have so far committed to the pact are also states whose electoral votes went to Clinton in 2016.

Democrats have led the recent push to change the way the Electoral College works."

Note that the NPVIC itself has not changed. There remains no protection against fraud, including hacking, no matter how obvious. The easily hacked, proprietary, paperless ballot machines in Ohio could literally award a trillion votes to the CEO of Diebold (or now PES), and Connecticut voters would have no say in the matter. It is practically an invitation to any skilled hacker, including state actors, including CIA/NSA, to hack American Presidential elections and control the Presidency.

The "National Popular Vote organization" does not disclose its donors on its website, although that information might be available somewhere. For example, the About page says, "Scott Drexel is the Managing Director of NMA Partners. A longtime advisor to some of the country's most active Democratic donors, activists, and business leaders, he serves on finance committees for several national Democratic committees, and has been active in the campaigns of numerous presidential, gubernatorial, U.S. Senate, and U.S. House candidates." I wonder who those "most active Democratic donors" might be, and how much they have paid into this misguided effort.

WarrenTheApe says

2) This whole exercise is just another example of why the suffix '-tard' is in the word Libtard. Why? Because it is yet another instance where the Left never really thinks things through. In this case, when the popular vote goes to a Republican...all those Bluetard states EC votes will go with him/her/xir. I can't wait for the voters of those states to experience this and riot in the streets over their own mass-stupidity. Truly. And with their luck, the first time that happens will be in 2020...with the re-election of one Donald Trump! :)

.

This is how Trump is going to beat Reagan's reelection electoral landslide.

"The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them."

Gosh, I wonder why Democrats in blue jurisdictions would want to subordinate their fellow human voters to machines in red jurisdictions.

I predicted in November 2016 that Trump would win California in 2020. Maybe this is how it comes to pass? I’ve been astonishingly accurate lately, so I can’t doubt myself!

"In 2016, I bought two voting machines online for less than $100 apiece. I didn't even have to search the dark web. I found them on eBay.
***
Within hours, I was able to change the candidates' names to be that of anyone I wanted. When the machine printed out the official record for the votes that were cast, it showed that the candidate's name I invented had received the most votes on that particular machine.
***
[In 2018], I bought two more machines to see if security had improved. To my dismay, I discovered that the newer model machines—those that were used in the 2016 election—are running Windows CE and have USB ports, along with other components, that make them even easier to exploit than the older ones. Our voting machines, billed as “next generation,” and still in use today, are worse than they were before—dispersed, disorganized, and susceptible to manipulation.
***
But while state and local election systems have been conducting risk assessments, we’ve also seen an 11-year-old successfully hacking a simulated voting website at DefCon, for fun.
***
By using a $15 palm-sized device, my team was able to exploit a smart chip card, allowing us to vote multiple times.
***
Since these machines are for sale online, individuals, precincts, or adversaries could buy them, modify them, and put them back online for sale.
***
But there’s an opportunity here to develop nationwide policies and security protocols that would govern how voting machines are secured. This could be accomplished with input from multiple sectors, in a process similar to the development of the NIST framework—now widely recognized as one of the most comprehensive cybersecurity frameworks in use."

Oddly, the author fails to point out the two most obvious methods to address this problem.
1) Require paper ballots. You can have a touchscreen machine print a ballot, but the voter must inspect it and, if accurate, feed it into a second machine that counts and stores the paper ballots. If the voter detects an error, that ballot gets cancelled visibly and the voter tries again. At the end of the day, the counts should match: the number of ballots printed by the printing machine, minus the number of ballots visibly cancelled, should equal the number of votes counted by the counting machine. If the numbers do not match, you can recount using the paper ballots. Otherwise, with a paperless system, you have no way to audit or recount: you have only what the easily hacked machine says, and no way to know if that is accurate.
2) Repeal NPVIC, or at least amend it, to require safeguards including paper ballots. By enacting NPVIC as written, Democrats are subordinating human voters to proprietary, easily hacked, and unaccountable machines controlled mostly by Republicans. It amazes me how Democrats can identify a problem and then propose only ways to worsen it. It makes me wonder whom are they really working for, and why. What would persuade a governor who is a Democrat to sign legislation subordinating human voters in his own state to easily hacked machines controlled by Republicans in another state? It reminds me of the "#Resistance" that seems to come at least partly from the CIA, which also invested in Palantir. If the goal is to automate election hacking, so that a deep state agency or similar actor can control the outcome of elections, then NPVIC as written would enable that.

Democrats complain that people in other countries, e.g. Russia, are skilled at hacking American computers including government systems. China and North Korea have also shown prowess. Yet, Democrats neither repeal nor amend NPVIC. They say they want the "popular vote" to determine the election result, by circumventing the electoral college, but that is not what they are doing. They are instead enacting legislation that would enable easily hacked machines to determine the election result. Why? Cui bono? What are they really trying to accomplish?

Can you imagine the Leftist tears when Donald Trump wins the popular vote in 2020 and California has to cast its electoral votes to him?