Congressional hearings today with various intelligence agencies.
Cotton might be on to something here:
That’s it! She colluded with Russia to make sure she lost. Brilliant.
We are lucky, but during the second Quebec referendum I worked as a PRIMO (person responsible for information and maintaining order) in a polling station, and there were plenty of shenanigan. I got to overhear the discussions of the people counting the votes. Each party has a representative and there’s a neutral person who’s appointed by the director of elections (who happened to be appointed by the government in power), and the Parti Quebecois representatives were trying to declare any slight imperfection in the marked vote as invalid and spoiled. They had obviously been given these instructions beforehand, as we were in a heavily federalist (anti-separation) riding. Things like half a tick, things like an X that went too far out of the lines, stuff like that. It got pretty heated, and almost violent. I actually had to call in the police at a certain point.
Ah, the well tested “I know you are, but what am I?” defense.
That’s an interesting story! I guess contentious stuff is always going to be contentious. A paper ballot has some uncertainty at the margins, but it seems so much harder to tamper with on a large scale. At least a heated argument about the placement of an X is something a regular person can follow, as opposed to “is the source code on this counting machine vulnerable to a novel attack vector”.
We had endless court cases with Sen Franken’s first election, where he unseated Norm “that lizard bastard” Coleman. And yeah, tons of ballots were challenged over what seemed like pretty frivolous stuff. Ultimately the process seemingly worked, not just in the sense that we didn’t re-elect that lizard bastard but in that I think at the end of the day everyone had a pretty high level of confidence that the outcome was just.
I voted electronically for the last election on the one electronic machine in the precinct because no one else would use it and I wasn’t going to argue with jumping the line. It printed out all my votes in a kind of wide cash register tape visible through a window beside the screen after every set of votes I made and prompted me to verify my votes visually. I think that system has a ton of promise.
I would accept that system if it also included random audits to ensure that the tape actually matches what the system reports.
And that the machine is verified as untampered with. Most of the older machines were running Windows NT 4 with an old access database. Who knows if they’ve been updated? The Georgia election yesterday reported using (at least) 10 year old voting machines from a company no longer in business. I’d hazard a guess that their security is woefully out of date.
Security through obscurity; “We would have hacked it, comrade, but none of us knew FORTRAN.”
And now we know why Trump cancelled the y2k readiness program ;)
I don’t know what’s so hard about using a “fill in the bubble” type optically-read system. Paper trail is built in, hard to hack etc.
I can only imagine most areas probably lack the funding to upgrade their ancient voting machines. Something you use a couple times every 4 years isn’t much of a priority.
Try at least 2x year (they are also used for State and local elections, and primaries) for what is a lynchpin of our democracy. Not even including special elections.
Twice a year. We have election twice every other year here in California unless there is some need for a special election.
So 4 times in in 4 years …that’s a couple times. :)
(Mind the autoplaying video that begins with racist DJT saying, “LEETLE HAVANAAAAAA!”.)
Lawyers seeking to unseal documents related to the criminal past of a former business partner of President Donald Trump said in federal court on Monday that the documents may contain evidence that Trump committed fraud.
The sealed documents are from a federal case against Felix Sater. Trump reportedly tapped Sater as a senior advisor for his real estate business in the 2000s even after Sater’s earlier role in a Mafia-linked stock scheme became public.
“A fellow named Donald Trump is now president, and he had a business associate named [Sater]. The public needs to know the length of their relationship and the nature of the relationship and what kind of person [Sater] is,” attorney Richard Lerner said in Brooklyn, New York, federal court Monday afternoon. “By allowing this regime of secrecy to continue, it’s facilitating what may have been fraud by President Trump.”
[…]
Another attorney trying to unseal the documents—which include the complaint, cooperation agreement and pre-sentencing report from Sater’s case—also tied the issue to Trump. “This case involves integrity issues of the highest level [based on] the relationship between the defendant in this case and the president of the United States,” said John Langford, who is representing investigative journalist Richard Behar.
[…]
Sater served a year in prison in 1993 for stabbing a man in the face with a broken glass. Five years later, he pleaded guilty to taking part in a $40 million Mafia stock fraud scheme and avoided prison by working as a confidential informant for the FBI, The Los Angeles Times reported. While he was still reportedly working for the feds, Sater spent years trying to line up deals for Trump’s real estate empire around the world beginning in 2003. Trump backed away from Sater when the latter’s criminal past became public in 2007. But about three years later, the real estate mogul started working with him again, according to the Associated Press.
Math, my friend. Math.
How much of the bubble do you need to fill in before it counts as a vote. 1% 25%, 75% 95%?
What about if there are two partially filled in bubbles, do you go with no vote or vote for the bigger portion that bubble is filled in. If the later how much more does one bubble need to be filled. The last thing really matter when you filled in the wrong bubble and try to erase it. It’s happened to me many times, and I’m generally don’t want to ask for a new ballot.
(Which I can say as poll worker/watcher spoiled ballots are a pain to deal with)
Optical card reader are really no different than hanging chads, just marginally more accurate.
Sure it is accuracy 99+% of the time but for this election, any thing less than 99.8% wasn’t good enough and Florida 2000 we are talking 99.99% accuracy
The idea that we can’t have digital voting systems is kind of nonsensical.
You realize, we do in fact have the ability to secure shit, right? I mean, the fact that poor systems exist doesn’t really mean that we can’t have secure ones.
Where’s literally ALL of your money? I’m guessing it’s not in a big bag with a dollar sign on it under your mattress, right? No, it’s in digital form, stored in a server somewhere. Just like 99% of every fucking thing you do.
Why shouldn’t voting be the same way? I mean, if hacking stuff were super easy, then hackers would already control literally the entire world. They’d have access to money whenever they wanted, they’d be able to manipulate all of our financial markets… they wouldn’t need to give a shit about votes, because they’d already rule the world.
And yet they don’t, because it is in fact possible to secure computers.
Ask the banks how much they spend for that level of security, then ask whether the government can fund that amongst all the other demands on taxpayer revenues.
I don’t disagree with you, but it is far easier said then done and would require a high level of sustained bipartisan investment.
I think the answer to this is definitely yes, given that the manpower involved in physical ballots is way more expensive.
The trick is that you need to actually do it at the national level. As it is, every locality has its own crap going on… so you are getting a ton of redundant expense, and at that level you don’t have a giant chunk of cash to solve the problem.
But if you took all that money and consolidated it, you could get a much more viable system, and it’d almost certainly save money.
I think that part of the problem is that any system is hard to check, because we specifically do not allow folks to have any record of who they voted for. You can’t actually go and check that your vote is for who you meant it to be for. This goes for paper ballots too. You can check that you voted, but that’s it.
I understand the reason for this… it prevents extortion. But it’s part of the issue, and it’s regardless of whether ballots are electronic.