patrick.net

All of the support for the National Popular Vote bill has not come from blue states.

In the 41 red, blue, and purple states surveyed, overall support has been in the 67-81% range - in rural states, in small states, in Southern and border states, in big states, and in other states polled.

Supporters include former Senator Fred Thompson (R–TN), Governor Jim Edgar (R–IL), Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R–GA)

More than 2,610 state legislators (in 50 states) have sponsored and/or cast recorded votes in favor of the National Popular Vote bill.

The National Popular Vote bill has passed 34 state legislative chambers in 23 rural, small, medium, large, Democratic, Republican and purple states with 261 electoral votes, including one house in Arizona (11), Arkansas (6), Maine (4), Michigan (16), Nevada (6), New Mexico (5), North Carolina (15), and Oklahoma (7), and both houses in Colorado (9).

The closest popular-vote election count over the last 130+ years of American history (in 1960), had a nationwide margin of more than 100,000 popular votes. The closest electoral-vote election in American history (in 2000) was determined by 537 votes, all in one state, when there was a lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide.

For a national popular vote election to be as easy to switch as 2000, it would have to be two hundred times closer than the 1960 election--and, in popular-vote terms, forty times closer than 2000 itself.

Which system offers vote suppressors or fraudulent voters a better shot at success for a smaller effort?

Since 2006, the bill has been introduced in legislatures in all 50 states. The text of the Compact is virtually the same in every state. Each state's bill(s) are easy to find. Wikipedia lists each https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

We do and would vote state by state. Each state manages its own election and is prepared to conduct a recount.

The National Popular Vote compact is patterned directly after existing federal law and requires each state to treat as "conclusive" each other state's "final determination" of its vote for President. No state has any power to examine or judge the presidential election returns of any other state now or under the National Popular Vote compact.

The current presidential election system makes a repeat of 2000 more likely. All you need is a thin and contested margin in a single state with enough electoral votes to make a difference. It's much less likely that the national vote will be close enough that voting irregularities in a single area will swing enough net votes to make a difference. If we'd had National Popular Vote in 2000, a recount in Florida would not have been an issue.

The implication that recounts will be likely and messy with National Popular Vote is distracting.

No recount, much less a nationwide recount, would have been warranted in any of the nation’s 57 presidential elections if the outcome had been based on the nationwide count.
The state-by-state winner-take-all system is not a firewall, but instead causes unnecessary fires.
“It’s an arsonist itching to burn down the whole neighborhood by torching a single house.” Hertzberg

The 2000 presidential election was an artificial crisis created because of Bush's lead of 537 popular votes in Florida. Gore's nationwide lead was 537,179 popular votes (1,000 times larger). Given the miniscule number of votes that are changed by a typical statewide recount (averaging only 274 votes); no one would have requested a recount or disputed the results in 2000 if the national popular vote had controlled the outcome. Indeed, no one (except perhaps almanac writers and trivia buffs) would have cared that one of the candidates happened to have a 537-vote margin in Florida.

Recounts are far more likely in the current system of state by-state winner-take-all methods.

The possibility of recounts should not even be a consideration in debating the merits of a national popular vote. No one has ever suggested that the possibility of a recount constitutes a valid reason why state governors or U.S. Senators, for example, should not be elected by a popular vote.

The question of recounts comes to mind in connection with presidential elections only because the current system creates artificial crises and unnecessary disputes.

Given that there is a recount only once in about 160 statewide elections, and given there is a presidential election once every four years, one would expect a recount about once in 640 years with the National Popular Vote. The actual probability of a close national election would be even less than that because recounts are less likely with larger pools of votes.

The average change in the margin of victory as a result of a statewide recount was a mere 296 votes in a 10-year study of 2,884 elections.

The common nationwide date for meeting of the Electoral College has been set by federal law as the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. With both the current system and the National Popular Vote, all counting, recounting, and judicial proceedings must be conducted so as to reach a "final determination" prior to the meeting of the Electoral College. In particular, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that the states are expected to make their "final determination" six days before the Electoral College meets.

If Ohio or Georgia declare that either of those states cast 10 trillion votes for the Republican nominee, OBVIOUSLY that would not be accepted as legitimate by anyone.

The 2000 presidential election was determined by a mere 537 popular votes in Florida.

otto says

Which system offers vote suppressors or fraudulent voters a better shot at success for a smaller effort?

The paperless system, obviously.

otto says

If Ohio or Georgia declare that either of those states cast 10 trillion votes for the Republican nominee, OBVIOUSLY that would not be accepted as legitimate by anyone.

And yet, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has no mechanism for other states to challenge or recount it, even though it would OBVIOUSLY not be legitimate. There is also no mechanism to challenge fraud or error on a more likely scale, e.g. a million paperless votes for Democrats getting reassigned to Republicans in a state that has at least 5 million total. Georgia and Ohio each have 10 million people, and in a Presidential election each can produce at least 5 million votes. Florida can also (notoriously) produce 6 million votes in a Presidential election; why do you want the votes of California subjugated to the "Honorable" Katherine Harris, former GW Bush Campaign Chair and Florida Secretary of State?

otto says

All of the support for the National Popular Vote bill has not come from blue states.

Let me rephrase: all of the actual enactments have come from blue jurisdictions, i.e. blue states and DC. As with Obamneycare, Republicans kept their fingerprints off the enactment, letting gullible Democrats insist on doing their dirty work for them.

"Under federal law an objection to a state’s Electoral votes may be made to the President of the Senate during Congress’s counting of Electoral votes in January. The objection must be made in writing and signed by at least one Senator and one member of the House of Representatives. Both the Senate and the House of Representatives debate the objection separately. Debate is limited to two hours. After the debate, both the Senate and the House of Representatives rejoin and both must agree to reject the votes.

In January 2005, Ohio’s 20 Electoral votes were challenged. After debate, the Senate and the House failed to agree to reject the votes. Ohio’s 20 Electoral votes for President Bush and Vice President Cheney were counted."

https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/print_friendly.html?page=faq_content.html&title=U.%20S.%20Electoral%20College%3A%20Frequently%20Asked%20Questions#contestvotes

Under the current system, the electoral votes from all 50 states are comingled and simply added together, irrespective of the fact that the electoral-vote outcome from each state was affected by differences in state policies, including voter registration, ex-felon voting, hours of voting, amount and nature of advance voting, and voter identification requirements.

The 2000 Certificate of Ascertainment from the state of Florida reported 2,912,790 popular votes for George W. Bush and 2,912,253 popular vote for Al Gore, and also reported 25 electoral votes for George W. Bush and 0 electoral votes for Al Gore. Because of a mere 537 vote statewide win, the 25–0 division of the electoral votes from Florida determined the outcome of the national election.

Neither the current system nor the National Popular Vote compact permits any state to get involved in judging the election returns of other states. Federal law (the "safe harbor" provision in section 5 of title 3 of the United States Code) specifies that a state's "final determination" of its presidential election returns is "conclusive"(if done in a timely manner and in accordance with laws that existed prior to Election Day). National Popular Vote is based on the same legal mechanisms and standards that have governed presidential elections since 1880.

The National Popular Vote compact is patterned directly after existing federal law and requires each state to treat as "conclusive" each other state's "final determination" of its vote for President. No state has any power to examine or judge the presidential election returns of any other state under the National Popular Vote compact.

otto says

After the debate, both the Senate and the House of Representatives rejoin and both must agree to reject the votes.

You are aware that Republicans control both the Senate and the House, yes?

otto says

Under the current system....

If you are going to quote talking points, as you did, you should at least link for attribution rather than plagiarize. A Google search found your talking points on various websites, including a Tea Party site and the aptly named "straight dope."

I wonder what to call someone who wants Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan to decide whether California voters should be subjugated to Republican machines in Georgia and Ohio. I suppose "Tea Partier" or "dope" are the two most likely answers.

curious2 says

After the 2000 election debacle, why would Democrats "reform" the system by making their own voters even more vulnerable?

Because they are disingenuous political hacks, that attacks politics like it's a Blue team against the Red team foot ball bowl game.

Talk about vulnerable . . .
Again, you are ignoring that with the current system we have lived through 537 votes in one state determining a presidential election, despite Gore's lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide, without requiring any over the top conspiracy of states fraudulently reporting millions of voters.

The precariousness of the current state-by-state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes is highlighted by the fact that a shift of a few thousand voters in one or two states would have elected the second-place candidate in 4 of the 15 presidential elections since World War II. Near misses are now frequently common. There have been 7 consecutive non-landslide presidential elections (1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012).
A shift of 60,000 voters in Ohio in 2004 would have defeated President Bush despite his nationwide lead of over 3 million votes.
In 2012, a shift of 214,733 popular votes in four states would have elected Mitt Romney, despite President Obama’s nationwide lead of 4,966,945 votes.

In the 2012 presidential election, 1.3 million votes decided the winner in the ten states with the closest margins of victory.

The indefensible reality is that more than 99% of presidential campaign attention (ad spending and visits) was invested on voters in just the only ten competitive states in 2012.
Two-thirds (176 of 253) of the general-election campaign events, and a similar fraction of campaign expenditures, were in just four states (Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Iowa).
38 states had no campaign events, and miniscule or no spending for TV ads.

There are only expected to be 7 remaining swing states in 2016 - Florida (29 electoral votes), Ohio (18), Virginia (13), Colorado (9), Nevada (6), Iowa (6) and New Hampshire (4)

The predictability of the winner of the state you live in determines how much, if at all, your vote matters.

Issues of importance to non-battleground states are of so little interest to presidential candidates that they don’t even bother to poll them.

Over 87% of both Romney and Obama campaign offices were in just the then 12 swing states. The few campaign offices in the 38 remaining states were for fund-raising, volunteer phone calls, and arranging travel to battleground states.

Policies important to the citizens of non-battleground states are not as highly prioritized as policies important to ‘battleground’ states when it comes to governing.

“Battleground” states receive 7% more federal grants than “spectator” states, twice as many presidential disaster declarations, more Superfund enforcement exemptions, and more No Child Left Behind law exemptions.

Ugh - again you've copied and pasted talking points without even bothering to link whom you're parroting/plagiarizing. I had already read the talking points. I posted this thread because the talking points don't add up.

otto says

Again, you are ignoring that with the current system we have lived through 537 votes in one state determining a presidential election, despite Gore's lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide, without requiring any over the top conspiracy of states fraudulently reporting millions of voters.

I am certainly not ignoring what happened in Florida in 2000. Democrats ignored it when they took power in 2009. Why do you suppose that is? They had enough votes to enact practically anything, and yet they failed to enact electoral reform. They could have funded reliable paper ballot machines for every precinct nationwide to ensure every vote would be counted reliably, but they chose not to do that. The system was working perfectly from the POV of their corporate sponsors, no change required. The "change" you hope for now would have enabled Republicans to achieve the same result as in 2000 even more easily, using paperless ballots. As with Obamneycare, Democrats propose "reforms" to worsen the problem.

Tenpoundbass says

Because they are disingenuous political hacks, that attacks politics like it's a Blue team against the Red team foot ball bowl game.

Michael Moore made the same point, and it seems entirely correct.

I find it interesting that nobody has even tried to defend this NPVIC except "otto," who had never commented on PatNet before, but who had copied and pasted many of the same talking points elsewhere on the WWW (for example, here and here). I am guessing that "otto" is paid to search "NPVIC" on Google and elsewhere every day, and plaster pre-authorized talking points anywhere it's mentioned. Who is paying the shills for this legislation, and cui bono?

"Georgia -- where Republicans scored spectacular upset victories in the 2002 midterm elections -- relies exclusively on Diebold machines... Bev Harris, who is writing a book on voting machines, found Diebold software -- which the company refuses to make available for public inspection, on the grounds that it's proprietary -- on an unprotected server, where anyone could download it. (The software was in a folder titled ''rob-Georgia.zip.'') The server was used by employees of Diebold Election Systems to update software on its machines. This in itself was an incredible breach of security, offering someone who wanted to hack into the machines both the information and the opportunity to do so.

An analysis of Diebold software by researchers at Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities found it both unreliable and subject to abuse. A later report commissioned by the state of Maryland apparently reached similar conclusions."

"Nearly one in four voters in [2010 used] e-voting systems with no paper records"

Why did Democrats in 2009-2011 fail to address the risk of these paperless machines, despite having power to enact legislation and fund paper ballot machines? Why would Democrats in California want their votes subjugated to unaccountable machines in Georgia, which is controlled by Republicans? And who is paying "otto" and other astroturf shills to require this result?

curious2 says

After the 2000 election debacle, why would Democrats "reform" the system by making their own voters even more vulnerable?

Liberals would fuck their own mothers in the ass and slit her thoat if they thought it would vote against someone.

Maybe Donald Trump should buy Dominion, so he will own the machines and software that count the votes. That might get the Democrats to agree that paper ballots are necessary, but it's too late now for Democrats to enact anything, after throwing away the House in 2010.

@Dan8267, when I posted this thread about the NPVIC and paperless electronic ballots, I was particularly hoping you might comment. In the OP, I linked to another thread with video in which a programmer testifies from personal experience manipulating paperless electronic ballot machines.

I am genuinely curious why Democrats would want to subjugate their human voters in "blue" states to Republican machines in "red" states. I am also curious why Democrats advocate the types of voting that are most easily and reliably bought and sold: absentee voting and remote voting, where canvassers can go door to door buying and selling votes.

It seems to me that both major parties are developing systems that would make buying and selling elections easier and more reliable. I hesitate to say so, because it sounds possibly too much like a conspiracy theory, but I wonder if it results from a process more like Noam Chomsky described in Manufacturing Consent. Each major partisan faction seems, for its own reasons, to be programming consent, ultimately automating consent, with the likely effect that the establishments within both parties would have the power to enforce the narrowing of choices within pre-approved parameters (e.g. Clinton v Bush) by eliminating awkward insurgencies (e.g., Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump). Each side loves its own lies, but hates the lies of the other side, so I get mainly Dislikes for pointing out that both sides are doing similar things.

In the long run, as both major factions promote more easily bought elections, I feel some concern that elections may come down to who is more brazen. The NPVIC contains literally no protection against one side claiming 10 trillion votes. Astroturf shill "otto" said that would be obviously illegitimate, but the NPVIC provides no real safeguard against it, even though it would have been easy to include some protection. More to the point, paperless electronic ballots can reportedly switch decisive numbers of votes from one candidate to another without anybody seeing it or being able to prove it, and so contests could come down to how many votes are the most brazen willing to buy and sell.

curious2 says

@Dan8267, when I posted this thread about the NPVIC and paperless electronic ballots, I was particularly hoping you might comment.

I haven't followed NPVIC enough to comment on it. However, in general, I prefer better systems than winner take all elections including representational voting and instant runoffs.

As for electronic voting, paperless or not, it all depends on the design, the transparency, the implementation, and the ability to verify. There is no technological reason why paperless electronic voting cannot be made far more secure than paper-voting or electronic voting with a literal paper trail. However, I would not trust any system that isn't completely transparent, and this includes not having any trade secrets in the machines, and isn't auditable. The intentions and the implementation matter greatly.

So although Diebold voting machines are completely untrustworthy, a properly implementing voting system would be far more tamper-resistant. There are a few difficult problems like ensuring verification of votes without compromising anonymity, but these problems are solvable as long as the hardware and software are open.

However, voting machines are one places where I think we absolutely should not use PCs, i.e. 80x86 processors, because the virtualization support in them allow for root kits to modify memory in ways that cannot be detected. And remember, modern MACs are PCs. We'd have to use a processor that does not support virtualization, at least not in any way like Intel does.

I'd even go as far as putting low-yield explosives or EMPs inside the voting machines so that any tampering attempt would render the machine a brick at the hardware level and would be easily detected.

Put simply, I'm for electronic voting if people like me implement it. Then neither side would be able to rig elections, prevent legitimate votes, or change the results. However, I would not trust the government at all in implementing the system, nor would I trust any system that I cannot inspect. Transparency, not trust, in all things.

What we need is a National Proportional Representation Interstate Compact (NPRIC). NPVIC is fine for presidential elections, but it does nothing to fix what ails the congressional election system.

justme says

What we need is a National Proportional Representation Interstate Compact (NPRIC). NPVIC is fine for presidential elections, but it does nothing to fix what ails the congressional election system.

1. Get rid of the Senate altogether. Replace it with nothing. Put all power in the House.
2. The ten most popular political parties can each run a single candidates in each state after their primaries. That's 10 representatives for each state. A total of 500 representatives nationally.
3. Everyone ranks the 10 candidates from best to worse.
4. Every candidates wins a voting power equal to the following. For each voter, add (rank * 0.1) where rank = 10 for a first place vote and 1 for a last place vote. The sum is the amount of voting power, some decimal between 0 and the number of voters in his state.

For example,
Adam, Bob, and Clark are running in a state with three voters who vote like this.

Voter 1: Adam (first choice), Bob, Clark
Voter 2: Adam, Clark, Bob
Voter 3: Bob, Clark, Adam

Adam's voting power is 1.0 + 1.0 + 0.8 or 2.8.
Clark's voting power is 0.8 + 0.9 + 0.9 or 2.6.
Bob's voting power is 0.8 + 0.9 + 0.9 or 2.6.

Every time Adam votes, he's representing 2.8 people and Clark and Bob are representing 2.6 people. People are represented by each representative, but in decreasing amounts as they go away from their preferences.

No need for Congressional districts.

Not voting has an impact. It removes voting power from candidates and thus acts as a vote of no confidence.

Every vote counts as every vote contributes to the power distribution of representatives in Congress.

The rights of individual citizens, not the state, is what matters. You aren't rewarded or penalized for where you live.

One of the things I like about electronic voting -- IF it is done right -- is that it allows for voting systems that simply cannot be carried out by hand like the system I describe in my prior post.

Dan8267 says

The ten most popular political parties can each run a single candidates in each state after their primaries. That's 10 representatives for each state.

Same for California and Rhode Island? I suppose RI has at least 10 people, but California has a somewhat broader field, and certainly more voters.

curious2 says

Same for California and Rhode Island?

Same number of representatives, but not the same voting power. A state like CA would have representatives with much higher voting power than those from Rhode Island as each representative's voting power is a function of the number of his voters and his rank for each voter. In other words, representatives represent people, not states.

Oh, by the way, in addition to voting no confidence for anyone by not voting at all, each voter can decide only to rank some of the candidates. For example, a voter could vote first for the Green Party, then the People's Party, then the Democrats, and then stop ranking the candidates. The Tea Party, the Libertarian Party, and the Republican Party would get zero voting power from that voter. So each voter can decide not to let some of the representatives get any power from him.

Dan, I appreciate your technical insights.

If Constitutional architecture interests you, I strongly recommend reading Empire of Debt or The New Empire of Debt. The two editions are 90% the same, and either costs $4 with shipping if you buy used books (as I do). Both editions made me laugh out loud, literally. Either edition explains brilliantly how certain changes during the "Progressive" era have wrought consequences that were unintended by most people, and directly contrary to the promises made.

That brings me back to this thread. I imagine "otto" the shill is probably a self-styled "progressive" who might even call himself "liberal," working at a "technology job" searching for NPVIC every day on various search engines, and copying and pasting pre-authorized talking points wherever NPVIC is mentioned. (S)he/it did not explain, and probably cannot explain, why (s)he/it wants the human voters of California subjugated to the proprietary Diebold software and hardware, with no transparency, no audit trail, no paper records, and no technical specifications regarding hardware and software. I say "otto" probably cannot explain those things because "otto" lacks the depth of critical thinking to understand your comment and apply it to the NPVIC. Some PR agency offered a "new media" "social networking" "tech job" that didn't require any programming skills, and "otto" took it in order get paid and "work in tech" without learning anything that would require rigorous logic. For all we know, "otto" might be an AI bot, and no human made voluntarily any defense of NPVIC.

curious2 says

wants the human voters of California subjugated to the proprietary Diebold software and hardware, with no transparency, no audit trail, no paper records, and no technical specifications regarding hardware and software

Yes, clearly the Diebold machines are completely unacceptable. First off, there should be no trade secrets in any voting machine. The mere presence of secret mechanisms invalidates a machine's use in voting. I say it should be considered a violation of the 5th Amendment to use any "magic box" as evidence including the use of RADAR guns that are not inspectable by the full public. An error in the hardware or software could result in a false reading, and ever person given a ticket has the right to examine and challenge the evidence and the right to call upon anyone and everyone in the world for help doing so. Thus both the hardware and the software must be fully inspectable by the defense. Voting machines should also meet this requirement and for even greater reason.

I don't think that paper is the right way to go for auditing. Paper gives people who know nothing about technology a false sense of security simply because they are biased to trust paper more than electronics. Paper is actually easier to fake, harder to check, has fewer independent lines of verification, and takes a hell of a lot more time and effort to check than electronic records. As such, all paper solutions involve taking extremely small samples (less than 1%) and hoping they are representative of the whole. With electronic auditing one can constantly check every transaction. If done right, nothing slips through the cracks.

Of course, one has to take engineering seriously and devote the resources necessary to do electronic voting right. Our culture does not respect engineering and wants to treat engineers as cheap, unskilled labor. Whenever engineers are treated like this, people hire cheap and bad engineers and they get bad results. This is exactly why the ACA website was a national embarrassment that did not work when it was first released.

Engineering is hard, and those that do it well are very valuable people. We should encourage engineering by providing career security, good pay, and social respect for engineers.

Dan8267 says

I don't think that paper is the right way to go for auditing. Paper gives people who know nothing about technology a false sense of security simply because they are biased to trust paper more than electronics. Paper is actually easier to fake, harder to check, has fewer independent lines of verification, and takes a hell of a lot more time and effort to check than electronic records. As such, all paper solutions involve taking extremely small samples (less than 1%) and hoping they are representative of the whole.

Dan, I Liked your comment and agreed with most of it, but disagreed with some parts, including this part.

Auditing is a profession, like engineering. Paper is a tool, like a mouse or trackball or keyboard. In my opinion, paper can help make auditing more robust. Consider the following system:
1) Voter goes to polling place;
2) Voter uses touchscreen Machine A to vote;
3) Machine A prints a clearly marked paper ballot, like currency, using multiple colors and watermarks to foil counterfeiting or spoliation;
4) Voter inspects paper ballot to verify it says what Voter intended;
4a) In case of error, voter rejects ballot and reinserts it to Machine A for automatic voiding and count adjustment, then returns to step 2;
4b) If the ballot is correct, voter brings it to Machine B for counting and secure storage;
5) Machine B reads and counts each ballot. At the end of the day, Machine B's count should match Machine A's count. In case of discrepancies, the paper ballots can be counted.

In this way, you have a process that is both secure and seen to be secure. Each campaign can have human inspectors watch the process. "To avoid evil, avoid the appearance of evil." Ordinary citizens can see for themselves that the machine count matches the paper count.

Following the 2000 election debacle, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a manual recount of all 6 million votes; SCOTUS ordered that count to stop midway. Later, a consortium of newspapers counted all the ballots as the Florida Supreme Court had ordered. The newspapers found that Al Gore had got more votes in Florida than GW Bush. They found also, however, that the partial recounts Al Gore had requested would have left GW Bush the winner. Further, due to the different ballots used by different counties, there was a significant risk of overvoting (or possibly spoliation), undervoting, or misvoting. IOW, Al Gore bungled, and 5 Republicans on SCOTUS resolved the ambiguities by awarding the Presidency to their own party and prohibiting Florida from doing a full count. If there had been uniform paper ballots across the state, with dual electronic counts in each polling place, they could have completed a recount by uniform standards.

Without paper, the audit becomes more difficult. You must rely on experts, there can be different copies of databases, one or more copies might become corrupted, and everything comes down to which expert you believe. Sad to say, each major party can hire experts to speak the party line.

With paper, you have physical evidence and a chain of custody. Any conspiracy requires more participants, any of whom might talk. For that reason, most jurisdictions require paper.

I find it very suspicious that some jurisdictions (mainly Republican) have chosen to dispense with paper, and I find it even more suspicious that other jurisdictions (mainly Democrat) have decided to subjugate their human voters to the Republican Diebold proprietary paperless machines. And, I remain dismayed that Democrats failed to address this issue when they could, in 2009-11, but I see a possible explanation in the difficulties that Sanders voters reported recently in Arizona: both major party establishments want to centralize power, and prevent actual voters from electing insurgents. I find corroboration for that suspicion in the fact that many Democrats and partisan mouthpieces continue to condemn Ralph Nader (of all people) for Gore's "loss" in Florida, when in fact Gore didn't lose among voters in Florida, Gore bungled his campaign and then lost among Republicans in SCOTUS.

As with Obamneycare, the system operates as designed, and the only questions involve allocating blame/credit/patronage.

curious2 says

1) Voter goes to polling place;

2) Voter uses touchscreen Machine A to vote;

3) Machine A prints a clearly marked paper ballot, like a receipt;

4) Voter inspects paper ballot to verify it says what Voter intended;

4a) In case of error, voter rejects ballot and reinserts it to Machine A for automatic voiding and count adjustment, then returns to step 2;

4b) If the ballot is correct, voter brings it to Machine B for counting and secure storage;

5) Machine B reads and counts each ballot. At the end of the day, Machine B's count should match Machine A's count. In case of discrepancies, the paper ballots can be counted.

Several flaws. First, if there is an error as stated in 4a, there is no reason to believe that the same or another error will not occur when reinserting a receipt. Second, errors are easy to avoid. A voting system has to be able to withstand deliberate and sophisticated attack. A compromised machine can print a receipt that differs from the vote it records while still displaying on the screen what the voter expects.

A third and very important flaw is that the paper receipt reveals the voter's decision and thus can be used to punish voters and force them to vote according to someone else's will. No paper trail that undermines voter's anonymous ballet is acceptable.

There are ways to provide checks without revealing who voted for what, but such checks must be electronic, not paper.

For example, a voting system can use a distributed counting system so that if one machine is compromised it is detected. Such a system would require simultaneously compromising all the voting machines in the entire nation, a much, much harder problem and one that you cannot test beforehand. This makes it very risky to even attempt hacking the system.

curious2 says

Without paper, the audit becomes more difficult. You must rely on experts, there can be different copies of databases, one or more copies might become corrupted, and everything comes down to which expert you believe.

If the system is transparent, experts can check each other. That's the way peer-reviews work. And they do work. If any expert makes a mistake or tries deception in any way, he'll be caught and severely criticized. His reputation will be permanently destroyed. This is why scientists are very cautious about publishing results and check their work very carefully. It's pretty damn rare to hear about someone trying to game the system because the community knows what they did and reject them forever after.

In contrast, a paper trail covering 300 million or so voters can easily be manipulated. Remember the dangling chad problem? Remember the "lost box" of Ron Paul votes. Paper can be forged, burned, lost, altered, etc. And it's impossible to allow all 7 billion people in the world inspect a paper ballet. It's trivial to let all 7 billion people inspect electronic ballets.

curious2 says

With paper, you have physical evidence and a chain of custody.

With paper, you have physical evidence and a chain of custody that you cannot trust unless you trust all the people in the chain of custody and that no one outside that chain ever has access. These are very bad assumptions, especially if you are trying to fight a sophisticate and malevolent attack or prevent corruption in any system where billions of dollars are at stake.

In contrast, an electronic system can be made impenetrable. An electronic chain of custody can be truly secure. It's not a trivial problem, but we do it everyday with software that matters to us, particularly banking software. We're willing to spend the time and money to make sure our financial accounts aren't compromised. So we know we're capable of writing secure systems when we truly want to.

An electronic chain of custody can be inspected and verified by everyone in the world. No trust is required if the code and hardware are transparent. There are mathematics that can be applied to electronic accounting that simply cannot be applied to paper and manual processes. For example, I can digitally sign any document to prevent tampering and repudiation. This is not plausible with any analog solution.

I don't have a problem with a paper trail if the following conditions are met.
1. The paper trail cannot compromise voter privacy as doing so allows coercion of votes.
2. The system cannot in any way, shape, or form rely on the paper trail. Security must be guaranteed by the system itself, and any attack must be detectable without the paper trail. At most, the paper trail is just a bonus.
3. The system must still work if the paper trail fails for any reason. For example, a voting machine runs out of paper and can't print receipts. The votes cast using it must still count.

curious2 says

I find it even more suspicious that other jurisdictions (mainly Democrat) have decided to subjugate their human voters to the Republican Diebold proprietary paperless machines.

The Diebold machines should be banned. They clearly do not do anything correct and are antithetical to all the principles of honest and transparent elections. But the Diebold machines do not in any way represent what is possible to do with technology.

Thanks Dan, you make many valid points as usual, but I'd like to respond to these few where I think you might possibly have overlooked some things.

Dan8267 says

First, if there is an error as stated in 4a, there is no reason to believe that the same or another error will not occur when reinserting a receipt.

The most likely cause of error is the voter made a mistake. Trying again tends to solve that problem, which is why pencils have erasers. If the machine makes an error, then the voter can report that to the human supervisors at the polling place.

Dan8267 says

A compromised machine can print a receipt that differs from the vote it records while still displaying on the screen what the voter expects.

That's the reason for printing the ballot/receipt and putting the actual voter between the two machines: you look at your ballot/receipt and see that it matches what you expected.

Moreover, because only Machine A can print, and Machine B can only scan, a hacker would need to corrupt both Company A and Company B in order to produce matching counts, and even then the box in Machine B would still have the paper ballots/receipts that had been received and inspected individually by the actual human voters.

Dan8267 says

A third and very important flaw is that the paper receipt reveals the voter's decision and thus can be used to punish voters and force them to vote according to someone else's will. No paper trail that undermines voter's anonymous ballet is acceptable.

Every process has potentially that flaw. There is no way to eliminate it. Every vote I have ever cast could potentially have been monitored at the time. I choose not to worry about it. You could conceivably wear gloves and a mask when casting your ballot, if you are concerned about that, along with a tinfoil hat. We rely on a process in which campaign representatives have an opportunity to inspect everything in advance, to reduce the risk of abuses, but you could conceivably install hidden cameras in the ceiling and walls. Most current systems involve a voter completing a ballot by hand and then feeding it into the equivalent of Machine B, except it is the only machine. A paperless touchscreen machine involves only Machine A, doing double duty as the sole counter, and you have to hope it doesn't have a hidden camera or other device to identify you with your vote. (Of course, if it doesn't even count your vote, then you don't really matter, so maybe no one will care anyway.) You could put Machines A&B in each voting booth, with a tent overhead, to minimize the risk of cameras, but you can never get that risk to zero no matter what you do. And please note the spelling of ballot: we are not requiring elderly invalids to dance here.

BTW, the most insecure methods from the POV of punishing or rewarding votes are absentee voting by mail and home voting via Internet. Canvassers and ward bosses can literally go door to door with hired goons offering carrots and sticks. Absentee and home Internet voting are advocated mainly by Democrats, especially Chicago Democrats but even other cities where "turnout" is valued more highly than anything else.

With Machine B storing the ballots/receipts inside the polling place, there is no way for hired goons to see how you voted, other than cameras. Even if you have been threatened by goons or bribed to vote a certain way and show a photo from your smartphone, you could print the requested ballot and then photograph it, then reject it back to Machine A and print another. You could repeat that process as many times as necessary, if you want to appease rival hired goons or sell your vote several times, but unless the goons have and watch a high resolution video of the whole voting process you would be the only one who knows which ballot you placed into Machine B.

Dan8267 says

Remember the dangling chad problem? Remember the "lost box" of Ron Paul votes. Paper can be forged, burned, lost, altered, etc.

Yes, I do remember those, and Democrats' failure to do anything about it in 2009-2011. That's why I suggest Machine A print a robust ballot like currency, and the voter inspects that, and then Machine B counts. At the end of the day, you should have two matching counts, and a corresponding box of ballots like currency.

Dan8267 says

In contrast, an electronic system can be made impenetrable.

LOL. Please tell that to Sony, Chase, healthcare.gov, the DoD, and everyone else who has tried to make an "impenetrable" electronic system. When they stop laughing, they will explain to you their efforts to achieve that result and why it has yet to be reliably achieved. The inventor of PGP said publicly that any system can be hacked, and your best hope is to foil automatic hacking such that hacking requires more human time and effort.

Dan8267 says

If any expert makes a mistake or tries deception in any way, he'll be caught and severely criticized. His reputation will be permanently destroyed. This is why scientists are very cautious about publishing results and check their work very carefully.

Please tell that to the "Honorable" Katherine Harris, who despite criticism got elected to Congress, and who will enjoy a generous pension greater than that of most engineers. Ditto the SEC head who got criticized for saying, essentially, some executives are too big to prosecute; he was allowed to retire into a $4 million/year job in the private sector. People can survive criticism, it isn't the deterrent it might once have been. Also, please note the high percentage of peer reviewed results that cannot be replicated, and a significant number of retractions.

Respectfully Dan, you put too much faith in technology and expert peer review.

Dan8267 says

3. The system must still work if the paper trail fails for any reason. For example, a voting machine runs out of paper and can't print receipts. The votes cast using it must still count.

If Machine A runs out of paper, it reports that to the human supervisors, and they supply more paper. There is no vote until there is paper. That's the point. You cast your vote by putting your paper ballot into Machine B.

curious2 says

The most likely cause of error is the voter made a mistake.

Confirm the vote visually before ending the voter session. Paper adds nothing except allowing other people to see how the person vote.

curious2 says

Moreover, because only Machine A can print, and Machine B can only scan, a hacker would need to corrupt both Company A and Company B in order to produce matching counts, and even then the box in Machine B would still have the paper ballots/receipts that had been received and inspected individually by the actual human voters.

Trusting human election officials is a bad idea. These are precisely the people who tossed out entire boxes of Ron Paul votes and discounted valid votes for Al Gore because they didn't want Gore to win.

Any support from corrupt election officials would invalidate the benefits of a paper trail. Such officials could mock the system with counterfeit machines that pretend to register the votes and then the officials can dumb the paper ballots. This would defeat you countermeasure you proposed above.

Counterplan

Every voting machine talks back to thousands of clearinghouse machines. A distributed database means that thousands of machines must be compromised for a hack to go undetected. Every voter can check online that their vote was registered. Voters can also go to any other polling station in the world after they voted to securely check that their vote matches what they cast. This eliminates the possibility of being forced to review your vote and thus being coerced to vote for a particular candidate.

Communication between voting machines and clearinghouses is done using both encryption and digital signatures thus eliminating the possibility of counterfeit voting machines.

Finally, the number of redundant copies of the vote is in the thousands, not just two.

curious2 says

Every process has potentially that flaw. There is no way to eliminate it.

Actually, there are ways to eliminate this possibility. Turns out that mathematics isn't just beautiful, it's useful.

Consider the problem of storing passwords. You don't want anyone to be able to crack your online banking password, right? What happens if some criminal gets the hard drive that contains the user table of your online bank? Does the criminal have your password? Not if your bank isn't completely incompetent.

If done right, when you pick a password, no one stores your password. This is why your bank cannot tell you what your password is. They don't know.

This might sound surprising to a person outside of software development, but it is actually the industry standard way of dealing with passwords. You might think a user table looks like this:

UserId, Username, Password, FirstName, LastName
1, bob26, fuzzyBunny123, Robert, Culp
2, bigBoobs69, iampretty, Alison, Smith

In reality it will look something like this
UserId, Username, PasswordHash, Salt, FirstName, LastName
1, bob26, fjks9832fFdsk, ldIsa43fskal, Robert, Culp
2, bigBoobs69, dUslk7sd6, sl889saloa, Alison, Smith

There is no way to go from the "password hash", "fjks9832fFdsk", to the actual password, "fuzzyBunny123".

So it might seem like you can't login to your bank account, but clearly you do. So what's going on?

You pick a password, say "abc". Yes, that's too short, but I want to keep this example short.

This password is appended or prepended with a "salt", a random bit of data. Typically the salt includes your user ID to make it unique -- more on that later.

So "abc" becomes "1ldIsa43fskalabc". This string is feed into a one-way hash algorithm which basically is a function that takes a large set of inputs and maps them to a small -- well, relatively small -- set of outputs. The reverse mapping is neither unique nor predictable, hence the term "one-way hash". An example of a bad, but simple one-way hash is

int Hash (String text)
{
int sum = 0;

foreach (char ch in text)
sum = (sum + Convert.toInt32(ch)) % someMaxValue;

return sum;
}

Forgive the lack of proper indentation, but PatNet doesn't really support code examples. Basically, this function just adds up all the character codes in the text and returns the sum.

A better, but still not best, example is

int Hash (String text)
{
int sum = 0;
PrimeGenerator primes = new PrimeGenerator();

foreach (char ch in text)
sum = (sum + primes.NextPrime() * Convert.toInt32(ch)) % somePrimeMaxValue;

return sum;
}

And there are more sophisticated variations.

The end result is that it is possible to authenticate a user against an unknown password. The only vulnerability is a brute-force hack like trying every possible password until you find a matching hashcode to the database. That's why we use separate salts for each password an why we add the userId to the salt to ensure it's unique. If two people have the password "I like boobies" then cracking one password with a brute force attack does not compromise the other password because their salts and thus their hashes are different.

The bottom line is that well-known mathematics actually makes a lot of things you think are impossible easy.

curious2 says

Dan8267 says

In contrast, an electronic system can be made impenetrable.

LOL. Please tell that to Sony, Chase, healthcare.gov, the DoD, and everyone else who has tried to make an "impenetrable" electronic system.

These agencies actually try to make penetrable systems with back doors they can exploit.

People are so used to crappy software written by amateurs that they erroneously believe that software must be flawed no matter what. This simply is not true. Software is flawed because either its creators want it to be flawed for some nefarious reason or because its creators don't care enough to make the software flawless.

Software is no different in principle than a mathematical proof. Software is pure logic. Logic most certainly can be flawless and that is typically the case in a mathematical proof. If the logic in the submitted proof contains any flaws, no matter how minor, the proof is considered invalid and not even called a proof at all. Yet, throughout your career as a student you were exposed to proof after proof in every single math class starting with ninth grade algebra.

There is no law of mathematics or logic that states that a non-trivial program must contain a flaw. In fact one can take any program and simply iteratively remove a random flaw from it and eventually you end up with a flawless program. This is because of two things. First, there can only be a finite number of flaws. Second, removing a flaw never necessitates adding another one.

Now you may wish to argue that although software can be flawless, human programmers can never create flawless software, but empirical evidence suggests otherwise. When people are financially motivated, when there's enough money on the table and getting it right means getting rich, software is very reliable if not flawless.

There are also ways to automate formal verification of software, if you can apply certain constraints. This is like feeding a proposed mathematical proof into a program which tells whether or not the proof is valid. There are even automatic mathematical theorem generators and provers.

Put simply, if we put the same level of effort into making flawless electronic voting systems as we put into online marketing and predicting consumer behavior and stock performance, then we most certainly can create extremely reliable and unhackable systems. It's all a question of having sufficient political will to pay good engineers to build such a system.

It is the nature of technology to get smaller, faster, cheaper, more capable, and more reliable. Counting votes is like the easiest thing for a computer to do. There are some challenges dealing with preventing and detecting malicious behavior, but these challenges are small compared to others that have already been met.

curious2 says

Also, please note the high percentage of peer reviewed results that cannot be replicated, and a significant number of retractions.

Any study that cannot be reproduced is not accepted. This is the cornerstone of the scientific method.

curious2 says

The inventor of PGP said publicly that any system can be hacked, and your best hope is to foil automatic hacking such that hacking requires more human time and effort.

There is a war that has been raging for over two thousand years, a war between code makers and code breakers. Everybody thought this war would go on forever without any winner. However, modern encryption has decisively demonstrated that the code maker is the winner. The amount of time it takes to break a code increases exponentially faster than the amount of time to generate more secure code. In other words, it takes me twice as long to make this code then it takes ten squared times as much time for you to break it. If I spend three times as much time or CPU power, it takes you ten cubed as much CPU power. Eventually it takes you longer than the heat death of the universe to break a code.

This divergence between code making and code breaking time is the defining characteristic of modern encryption and how what we call encryption today differs from obfuscation, what we call the so-called "encryption" of the past.

Flaws in security, and there are many, are almost always either deliberate attempts to compromise security or are human errors. Making a system transparent solves the first problem. Crowd sourcing the checking of transparent code solves the second.

If someone uses a paper trail for auditing, then I laugh at them while I compromise the system knowing that only a few technologically illiterate, and often elderly, election volunteers need to be fooled. If I have to compromise a system that the whole world can see, I shit my pants and don't even try. All it takes is a single individual among the seven plus billion on this planet to catch me. Even if 99.99999% of people are complete idiots, the odds are stacked heavily against me. Add to that the ability to permanently store the data accessible to everyone on the Internet, there's no way I'd be able to hide my attack.

curious2 says

Respectfully Dan, you put too much faith in technology and expert peer review.

It's not faith. It's fear.

The common man fears that technology cannot be sufficiently advance to solve our problems perfectly. The common man fears the limits of technology.

The wise man knows that technology can become sufficiently advanced to do anything physically possible. The wise man fears the lack of limits of technology.

Technology can already do a lot of things you think it cannot do.
- The Incredible Story Of How Target Exposed A Teen Girl's Pregnancy
- Browser Fingerprints: A Big Privacy Threat
- An Efficient User Verification System via Mouse Movements
Yes, that means identifying you as an individual by how you move your mouse.
- Computer-generated copy is already used in sports and business reporting – will machines soon master great storytelling?
- Virtual composer makes beautiful music—and stirs controversy
- How Facial Recognition Systems Work

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. By tracking a person's movement using their GPS coordinates reported by their cell phone, a person with access to such data could identify every acquaintance you have and every acquaintance everyone else has. You could graph all business, social, and political relationships. You could data mine these relationships alone to accurately determine
- who someone is going to vote for
- how likely a person is to be arrested
- how many sexual partners a person has
- the sexual orientation of a person
- the person's religion and how strongly religious they are
- almost all political and social beliefs held by the person
- who is most likely to die of cancer or some other disease
- the person's hobby's, interests, and likes
- where the person works and when, and thus what the person's income likely is
- add to that where they play, and you certainly can have an accurate and precise estimate of their wealth and income

And that's all just from location data. Imagine adding all the other data generated by people in their everyday lives.

The only argument against electronic voting machines should be that voting is inaccurate and unnecessary. If we leveraged the data-mining power demonstrated every day by online marketing companies, we could replace politicians with bots who get their instructions from all the people in real time. No need to vote. Simply live your life and the expert system will figure out what you want far better than you can. And it will be more accurate than even the most incorruptible and wisest human leader could ever be even in principle.

Oh course, technology is neither good nor evil except how we use it.

So no, I don't have faith in what technology can do. I have fear. And that fear makes me know the problem isn't what technology can't do. It's what we end up using it for if we aren't extremely careful.

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: