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posted by janrinok on Wednesday January 03 2018, @11:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the raise-your-hand dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

A bipartisan group of six senators has introduced legislation[pdf] that would take a huge step toward securing elections in the United States. Called the Secure Elections Act, the bill aims to eliminate insecure paperless voting machines from American elections while promoting routine audits that would dramatically reduce the danger of interference from foreign governments.

The legislation comes on the heels of the contentious 2016 election. Post-election investigation hasn't turned up any evidence that foreign governments actually altered any votes. However, we do know that Russians were probing American voting systems ahead of the 2016 election, laying groundwork for what could have become a direct attack on American democracy.

[...] The first objective is to get rid of paperless electronic voting machines. Computer scientists have been warning for more than a decade that these machines are vulnerable to hacking and can't be meaningfully audited. States have begun moving away from paperless systems, but budget constraints have forced some to continue relying on insecure paperless equipment. The Secure Elections Act would give states grants specifically earmarked for replacing these systems with more secure systems that use voter-verified paper ballots.

The legislation's second big idea is to encourage states to perform routine post-election audits based on modern statistical techniques. Many states today only conduct recounts in the event of very close election outcomes. And these recounts involve counting a fixed percentage of ballots. That often leads to either counting way too many ballots (wasting taxpayer money) or too few (failing to fully verify the election outcome).

The bill reads like a computer security expert's wish list.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/new-bill-could-finally-get-rid-of-paperless-voting-machines/


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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday January 05 2018, @12:21AM (1 child)

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday January 05 2018, @12:21AM (#618108)

    I'm guessing you're not the kind to run underinflated Firestones on your Pinto.

    Everything can fail. Voter rolls should be up to date. But people (especially at the top) shouldn't go around spreading FUD over any process if they can't show evidence that it's actually broken.
    Extremists and losers have been claiming that electoral systems are biased against them for decades. We can keep ignoring the shrill calls that were never substantiated, while addressing potential problem in a non-discriminatory way.

    I have to show an ID to vote in foreign elections. It makes sense, if it's not intentionally used to disenfranchise some categories of voters.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @01:08AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @01:08AM (#618139)

    Losers are more prone to spreading FUD. They aren't wrong. We do have a problem.

    It's really funny how the FUD spreaders changed suddenly on November 9th, 2016. The previous day, and for many months before, it was Trump. His haters would say "It's not rigged. You're just losing." The morning after the election, oh how the tune had changed. The other side got busy spreading FUD. Suddenly there were recount efforts in 3 or 4 states and all sorts of nonsense being pushed about Russian hacking.

    The expected loser, and the actual loser, both had an opportunity to claim something was wrong. There are enough holes in the system that a fraud claim is reasonable. That isn't OK. It isn't the claim that is improper, but the fact that making such a claim is reasonable.

    Mexico and India use voter ID to disenfranchise some categories of voters. It's OK, because those voters are not legally allowed to vote. For example, illegal aliens are not permitted to vote in Mexico and India. This isn't improper at all. Those countries have a poverty situation that is far worse than what we have here in the USA, so the USA has no excuse for not securing the vote.