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from the I-know-what-you-did-last-summer^W-election dept.
According to a paywalled (register for three free articles per month) article on Law.com, it is impossible to cast a secret vote using Georgia's electronic voting machines.
In a new motion for a preliminary injunction, attorneys for the Coalition for Good Governance and several plaintiff voters have asked a federal judge in Atlanta to sideline use of the state’s obsolete electronic voting machines after Oct. 1.
The plaintiffs claim that evidence obtained from state and county election officials revealed that a “unique identifier” is attached to each electronic vote cast on the 17-year-old machines. Those unique identifiers could enable “election insiders or malicious intruders” to connect each ballot to the voter who cast it, the motion contends.
The motion contends that state and county election officials have admitted that ballot image reports maintained in their electronic databases and memory cards—when combined with other election records—contain enough information to identify who cast every electronic vote in Georgia. If proven, the practice would violate state and federal constitutional provisions requiring that all voter ballots be secret.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @08:46PM (10 children)
Is someone looking to sell a new computer system to the elections department? 17 years is a long time for the government not to have been milked.
A "unique identifier"? Like machine id and current time? That would probably uniquely identify a voter. But you would expect there to be some serial log on a machine like this. The anonymity comes from the random distribution of voters among the machines and the futility of trying to remember who of hundreds of people was where at a certain time, the inaccessibility of those logs to the local elections workers, and the non-publishing of those logs to the public.
If I had my choice, I would prefer 3500 year old paper and stylus instead of a machine. But there aren't millions to be made there.
Disclosure: I am an elections official.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday June 25 2019, @09:38PM (1 child)
Does the machine itself somehow "know" who is casting the ballot on it ("Lawn is assigned to machine #3 and we had to clear Lawn / We set up Lawn to use machine #3 now"), or is it the election staff who assure that a given machine is only accessed by a screened voter and that this voter only uses one machine once? In my experience it is the latter and the entire system takes pains to *not* know who a given ballot belonged to. There are certainly records that I voted at my station on election day, which is how my registration is maintained from election to election and how my county selects me for jury duty.
As long as there are enough volunteers and the system is designed to be transparent and allow both parties to monitor for fraud, electronic voting systems still seem like solutions in search of a problem.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @10:30PM
In my case, a voter comes in and authenticates himself. Two tokens are separated from his file entry. One is a receipt that the elector has been at the polls. The other is an admission ticket to the voting machine. This prevents people from voting multiple times.
The voter is brought to an open machine, the token is deposited into a slot on the side. That way you can identify which voter used which machine, but not at what time. The polling location staff know when, but they can't read the logs. The counting staff know when someone voted for whom, but don't know who did so. This information is generally not published, so no interested observer (we are free and open to be observed) can watch for his employee and then later read the log to find out whom he voted for.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Tuesday June 25 2019, @10:26PM (4 children)
In Georgia, you are handed a small yellow smartcard. Yeah, in theory they might hypothetically be able to match up some time stamps and figure folks out -maybe- -in off year- -at low ebb- -during a runoff- -with great effort- but this is an overblown fear when frankly what the bad guys want to do is manipulate votes, they don't much care how some rando voted directly.
I'm much more interested in making the system auditable and secure from manipulation, so if they improve that it's a good thing. I don't trust human beings in our emotionally vested highly polarized environment the least little bit. Ballot manipulation has become a sport and we need to crush it.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday June 26 2019, @12:59AM (3 children)
This statement disqualifies your application for the League of Brilliant Evil Minds.
Go pester Soylentnews, you're not fit even as a minion
Mwa-ha-ha-ha.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Wednesday June 26 2019, @02:13AM (2 children)
It's rando isn't it? Too colloquial?
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday June 26 2019, @02:50AM (1 child)
From your lowly position, I see why you might assume it is.
But actually there's no rando: either we are interested in a person or we aren't.
Because a Brilliant Evil Mind lets nothing to the chance, even our "No, mister Bond, I expect you to die" is planned in advance.
Mwa-ha-ha-ha.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26 2019, @03:02AM
You're home, go drunk.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @10:40PM
How about your vote cast in stone tablets? At the very least, your vote will go down with a thump.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday June 25 2019, @10:53PM (1 child)
I don't consider it too prohibitive to be done. Sure, it would take work to correlate, but if you were intent on, say, arresting a bunch of people that voted for the "wrong" candidate with a possession felony (why possession? because the cop can bring the contraband to "find") that would conveniently prevent them from voting again and intimidate others from voting that way, I have no doubts some political hacks would consider it.
Here's the process, in case you hadn't figured it out:
1. There's always a poll book that records who arrived and when.
2. There's also a record book of who was handed which cartridge, and/or which machine was allocated at what time.
3. There's an electronic record of what the votes were for each cartridge.
The end result is that with a bit of OCR and a couple of table joins, you'd get to put the pieces together accurately enough to do some real intimidation. And remember, the value of doing this is in the millions.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by http on Wednesday June 26 2019, @12:08AM
The value of doing this is probably better measured in political power than dollars.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.