Bruce Schneier, along with Ryan Shandler and Anthony J. DeMattee, has published a a blog post on the role that confidence has in elections and, specifically, the role that electronic voting systems have had in undermining that trust.
This technological leap has made voting more accessible and efficient, and sometimes more secure. But these new systems are also more complex. And that complexity plays into the hands of those looking to undermine democracy.
In recent years, authoritarian regimes have refined a chillingly effective strategy to chip away at Americans’ faith in democracy by relentlessly sowing doubt about the tools U.S. states use to conduct elections. It’s a sustained campaign to fracture civic faith and make Americans believe that democracy is rigged, especially when their side loses.
Previously:
(2022) A Scientist's Quest for an Accessible, Unhackable Voting Machine
(2020) U.S. Offers Reward of $10M for Info Leading to Discovery of Election Meddling
(2020) HBO's 'Kill Chain' Documentary Highlights Flaws in US Election Machines
(2019) Researchers Assembled Over 100 Voting Machines. Hackers Broke Into Every Single One.
(2019) DARPA's $10 Million Voting Machine Couldn't be Hacked at DefCon (for the Wrong Reasons)
(2019) Top Voting Machine Maker Reverses Position on Election Security, Promises Paper Ballots
(2019) Amid Worries About Election Security, Microsoft Unveils Voting Machine Software
(2018) I Bought Used Voting Machines on eBay for $100 Apiece. What I Found Was Alarming
(2018) Def Con 26 Voting Village Sees an 11-Year-Old Crack a Voting Machine
and many more ...
Related Stories
Another item from Def Con 26, which ended the other day, an 11-year-old was easily able to change tallies on real electronic voting equipment within minutes. These machines are designed not to leave any evidence when tampering happens so it was useful that there were many witnesses present for her demo.
Election hackers [sic] have spent years trying to bring attention to flaws in election equipment. But with the world finally watching at DEFCON, the world's largest hacker conference, they have a new struggle: pointing out flaws without causing the public to doubt that their vote will count.
This weekend saw the 26th annual DEFCON gathering. It was the second time the convention had featured a Voting Village, where organizers set up decommissioned election equipment and watch hackers [sic] find creative and alarming ways to break in. Last year, conference attendees found new vulnerabilities for all five voting machines and a single e-poll book of registered voters over the course of the weekend, catching the attention of both senators introducing legislation and the general public. This year's Voting Village was bigger in every way, with equipment ranging from voting machines to tabulators to smart card readers, all currently in use in the US.
In a room set aside for kid hackers [sic], an 11-year-old girl hacked a replica of the Florida secretary of state's website within 10 minutes — and changed the results.
Earlier on SN:
Georgia Defends Voting System Despite 243-Percent Turnout in One Precinct
South Carolina's 13k Electronic Voting Machines Vulnerable, Unreliable
Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States
I Bought Used Voting Machines on eBay for $100 Apiece. What I Found Was Alarming
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.
Surely, I thought, these machines would have strict guidelines for lifecycle control like other sensitive equipment, like medical devices. I was wrong. I was able to purchase a pair of direct-recording electronic voting machines and have them delivered to my home in just a few days. I did this again just a few months ago. Alarmingly, they are still available to buy online.
If getting voting machines delivered to my door was shockingly easy, getting inside them proved to be simpler still. The tamper-proof screws didn't work, all the computing equipment was still intact, and the hard drives had not been wiped. The information I found on the drives, including candidates, precincts, and the number of votes cast on the machine, were not encrypted. Worse, the "Property Of" government labels were still attached, meaning someone had sold government property filled with voter information and location data online, at a low cost, with no consequences. It would be the equivalent of buying a surplus police car with the logos still on it.
[...] I reverse-engineered the machines to understand how they could be manipulated. After removing the internal hard drive, I was able to access the file structure and operating system. Since the machines were not wiped after they were used in the 2012 presidential election, I got a great deal of insight into how the machines store the votes that were cast on them. 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.
This year, 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.
Submitted via IRC for ErnestTBass
From checking in at a polling place on a tablet to registering to vote by smartphone to using an electronic voting machine to cast a ballot, computers have become an increasingly common part of voting in America.
But the underlying technology behind some of those processes is often a black box. Private companies, not state or local governments, develop and maintain most of the software and hardware that keep democracy chugging along. That has kept journalists, academics and even lawmakers from speaking with certainty about election security.
In an effort to improve confidence in elections, Microsoft announced Monday that it is releasing an open-source software development kit called ElectionGuard that will use encryption techniques to let voters know when their vote is counted. It will also allow election officials and third parties to verify election results to make sure there was no interference with the results.
"It's very much like the cybersecurity version of a tamper-proof bottle," said Tom Burt, Microsoft's vice president of customer security and trust, in an interview with NPR. "Tamper-proof bottles don't prevent any hack of the contents of the bottle, but it makes it makes it harder, and it definitely reveals when the tampering has occurred."
Developed with the computer science company Galois, the kit will be available free of charge for election technology vendors to incorporate into their voting systems.
Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
Voting machine maker ES&S has said it “will no longer sell” paperless voting machines as the primary device for casting ballots in a jurisdiction.
ES&S chief executive Tom Burt confirmed the news in an op-ed.
TechCrunch understands the decision was made around the time that four senior Democratic lawmakers demanded to know why ES&S, and two other major voting machine makers, were still selling decade-old machines known to contain security flaws.
Burt’s op-ed said voting machines “must have physical paper records of votes” to prevent mistakes or tampering that could lead to improperly cast votes. Sen. Ron Wyden introduced a bill a year ago that would mandate voter-verified paper ballots for all election machines.
The chief executive also called on Congress to pass legislation mandating a stronger election machine testing program.
Burt’s remarks are a sharp turnaround from the company’s position just a year ago, in which the election systems maker drew ire from the security community for denouncing vulnerabilities found by hackers at the annual Defcon conference.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/09/voting-machine-maker-election-security/
Galois's prototype voting machine wasn't available for hackers to test.
For the majority of Defcon, hackers couldn't crack the $10 million secure voting machine prototypes that DARPA had set up at the Voting Village. But it wasn't because of the machine's security features that the team had been working on for four months. The reason: technical difficulties during the machines' setup.
Eager hackers couldn't find vulnerabilities in the DARPA-funded project during the security conference in Las Vegas because a bug in the machines didn't allow hackers to access their systems over the first two days. (DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.) Galois brought five machines, and each one had difficulties during the setup, said Joe Kiniry, a principal research scientist at the government contractor.
"They seemed to have had a myriad of different kinds of problems," the Voting Village's co-founder Harri Hursti said. "Unfortunately, when you're pushing the envelope on technology, these kinds of things happen."
It wasn't until the Voting Village opened on Sunday morning that hackers could finally get a chance to look for vulnerabilities on the machine. Kiniry said his team was able to solve the problem on three of them and was working to fix the last two before Defcon ended.
The Voting Village was started in 2017 for hackers to find vulnerabilities on machines that are used in current elections. At the last two Defcons, hackers found vulnerabilities within minutes because the machines were often outdated. The Village shines a necessary light on security flaws for voters as lawmakers seek to pass an election security bill in time for the 2020 presidential election.
Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
A cybersecurity exercise highlights both new and unaddressed vulnerabilities riddling US election systems.
A report issued Thursday by some of the country's leading election security experts found that voting machines used in dozens of state remain vulnerable to hacks and manipulations, warning that that without continued efforts to increase funding, upgrade technology, and adopt of voter-marked paper ballot systems, "we fear that the 2020 presidential elections will realize the worst fears only hinted at during the 2016 elections: insecure, attacked, and ultimately distrusted."
The 47-page report is the product of researchers who organized a shakedown of voting machines at the annual DefCon conference, one of world's biggest information security gatherings frequented by hackers, government officials, and industry workers. First incorporated into DefCon in 2017 with the aim of improving voting machine security, this year's version of the now-annual "Voting Machine Hacking Village" assembled over 100 machines and let hackers loose to find and exploit their vulnerabilities. While election officials have criticized the effort's utility as a testing ground, deriding it as a "pseudo environment," some have seen value in letting machines' flaws become more known and potentially lead to security improvements.
"Once again, Voting Village participants were able to find new ways, or replicate previously published methods, of compromising every one of the devices in the room," the authors wrote, pointing out that every piece of assembled equipment is certified for use in at least one US jurisdiction. The report's authors, some of whom have been involved with election machine security research going back more than a decade, noted that in most cases the participants tested voting equipment "they had no prior knowledge of or experience" in a "challenging setting " with less time and resources than attackers would be assumed to marshal.
The report urges election officials to use machines relying on voter-marked paper ballots and pair those with "statistically rigorous post-election audits" to verify the outcome of elections reflects the will of voters. The authors also warn that supply chain issues "continue to pose significant security risks," including cases where machines include hardware components of foreign origin, or where election administrators deploy foreign-based software, cloud, or other remote services. The report lands as officials in several states are working to upgrade election equipment, and as lawmakers in Washington, D.C. debate federal election security legislation and funding.
Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/09/defcon-2019-hacking-village/
HBO's 'Kill Chain' doc highlights the flaws in US election machines:
While COVID-19 might be putting just about everything else on hold, we're still marching towards a presidential election later this year. After the high-profile interference of 2016, election security and foreign meddling are still critical issues, but many states still aren't doing enough to ensure the integrity of the process. A documentary premiering tonight on HBO proves a sobering reminder of the fragility of America's voting infrastructure.
While the matter is of grave concern across the country, Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections delves into problems with some specific machines and issues in certain states. For instance, back in 2005, security researcher Harri Hursti (a key figure in the film) demonstrated a memory card exploit that could alter votes on an optical scan voting machine. Those Diebold machines are still in operation in 20 states and are slated for use in November, the filmmakers note.
Elsewhere, a judge banned Georgia from continuing to use the vulnerable systems it had in place for well over a decade. In the wake of the contentious 2018 gubernatorial election, officials had new machines in place for this month's presidential primary. While the replacements can print paper ballots, which are important for proper vote auditing, they're still very much vulnerable as they run on Windows 7 -- for which Microsoft recently ended support.
We also hear from an Indian hacker who says he was able to gain full access to Alaska's system, including live voting data, during the 2016 presidential election. He claims he'd have been able to remove a candidate from the ballot or change any vote, but decided not to for fear of triggering some kind of alarm.
U.S. Offers Reward of $10M for Info Leading to Discovery of Election Meddling:
The U.S. government is concerned about foreign interference in the 2020 election, so much so that it will offer a reward of up to $10 million for anyone providing information that could lead to tracking down potential cybercriminals aiming to sabotage the November vote.
The U.S. Department of State’s Rewards for Justice (RFJ) program, overseen by the Diplomatic Security Service, will pay for info that can identify or locate someone workingwith[sic] or for a foreign government “for the purpose of interfering with U.S. elections through certain illegal cyber activities,” according to a release posted on the department’s website.
The reward covers anyone seeking to interfere with an election at the federal, state or local level by violating or even aiding the violation of a U.S. law against computer fraud and abuse, according to the department.
“The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030, criminalizes unauthorized computer intrusions and other forms of fraud related to computers,” according to the release. “Among other offenses, the statute prohibits unauthorized accessing of computers to obtain information and transmit it to unauthorized recipients.”
The department is encouraging anyone with information on foreign interference in U.S. elections to contact them via their website or contact a U.S. Regional Security Officer at the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate.
[...] [Voting machine-maker Election Systems & Software ] ES&S said that its formally released policy applies to all digital assets owned and operated by ES&S – including corporate IT networks and public-facing websites.
No word on rewards for non-foreign interference.
After 19 years of work, Juan Gilbert says he has invented the most secure voting machine
In late 2020, a large box arrived at Juan Gilbert's office at the University of Florida. The computer science professor had been looking for this kind of product for months. Previous orders had yielded poor results. This time, though, he was optimistic.
Gilbert drove the package home. Inside was a transparent box, built by a French company and equipped with a 27-inch touchscreen. Almost immediately, Gilbert began modifying it. He put a printer inside and connected the device to Prime III, the voting system he has been building since the first term of the George W. Bush administration.
After 19 years of building, tinkering, and testing, he told Undark this spring, he had finally invented "the most secure voting technology ever created."
[...] By this point, Gilbert had published a video of his ballot-marking device, or BMD, in action, but he was unsure how the hacking community would respond. "There's a part of that community that's very confident in what they do," he said. "And if they hear how it works, they may run away from it."
[...] The latest version of the machine, which Gilbert and his students finalized this year, has all the parts of a normal voting machine: a touch screen for voters to make their selections and a printer to create a paper ballot that is then fed into a scanner.
The machine also has some more distinctive security features. The touchscreen is transparent, allowing voters to watch the machine print their ballot, in real-time, and notice any issues. The whole machine is also encased in fully transparent glass, making it difficult to insert, say, a malicious USB drive undetected. And the machine's operating system, software, printer connection, and ballot information are stored on a read-only Blu-ray Disc. Unlike a typical hard drive, which voting technology skeptics say could be manipulated to change a person's votes, the disc cannot be overwritten, modified, or changed in any way. "I have taken away that ability," said Gilbert. "You cannot change it."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03, @04:27AM (1 child)
Russia?
Isn't this the Russian tactic? Sow dissent from within, cause the people to fracture themselves, and then come in amongst the turmoil and ... do whatever they need to do?
Maybe if people would "simply not" (doubt their government, accuse the other side, knee-jerk react, etc etc etc etc), then we would survive this. Shyeah, that's gonna happen. Well, what corporations should I invest in for the next 20 years?? Palantir seems safe.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 03, @06:32PM
Russia?Statecraft.You do what you can to promote your power within your sphere of influence, including diminishing the power of others. The UK, US, Russia, now China are all fully global players. We all do it to each other.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday July 03, @05:37AM
Frankly, I am completely disinterested in American Democracy but overall situation with voting machines reminds me of Solar Lottery by Philip K. Dick, 1955. One of the best sci-fi books of its epoch.
So, if experts like Schneier seek what really causes fracture of societal trust, it's subconsciously this very culture base, not an external influence of some ghostly powers.
Mere existence of this book indicates the voting process mechanics was never trusted. Otherwise, the book would not be written at all.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03, @10:59AM (7 children)
Maybe not in the USA but in other countries pen/pencil + paper voting systems are better than opaque black boxes at convincing the losing side they lost.
And this is an important feature to reduce cases of civil disorder/war.
When your own observers AND third party observers at hundreds of polling stations observe that the transparent ballot boxes are empty at the start and remained unmoved and untampered with while votes from voters go into those transparent boxes, and the votes are later counted (and recounted) by third parties in full sight of the observers, it's pretty convincing that you've lost assuming the margins are big enough.
The real weakness for such systems is the postal votes. Or worse online votes.
Whereas proponents can say all sorts of stuff about fancy electronic voting systems but even if they work and are truly secure they require a higher level of IQ, trust and faith than the far simpler and open method I mentioned (which I believe is in use in many countries).
Of course maybe the issue in the USA is you can't find enough people who can reliably count past 10 in a timely manner so you need machines? 🤣
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday July 03, @01:01PM
Those are all things you do if you value accurately determining the will of the people more than making sure your guy wins.
US "democracy" has never been that way. So much so that when you call some people on it, they say "We're a republic, not a democracy".
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday July 03, @03:57PM (3 children)
Where I live, it is PEN on a paper ballot. You walk in to voting place. Stand in an orderly, well spaced line to the table where they issue you a ballot. They check:
Then you get your paper ballot and a pen, and they check a box to indicate you have been given a ballot to prevent going through the line again. You go to a private booth. Mark little ovals on ballot with your pen. Go over to voting worker at "the machine". The worker takes your ballot, runs it through the machine. You see it get scanned. You see your ballot drop through the machine into a box of ballots, and you see that the display acknowledges your vote was accepted without errors, and the new count of total ballots scanned so far. There are representatives from all interested parties and candidates who are simply observing to be sure nothing strange is going on.
The advantage of doing it this way:
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday July 03, @04:00PM
I should add: these counting machines are not internet connected. They are stand alone machines. They are designed to show as much of the process as possible behind plexiglass. You can be pretty confident that the ballot dropping through the scanning portion of the machine is the one you handed the worker as it "drops" through the scanner down into the box of ballots.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday July 03, @04:38PM
Our old machines work like that.
They're rolling out new e-voting machines, they use them for early voting at city hall. Unlike most of the evoting machines I've heard described, our e-voting process sounds reasonable.
Instead of ink on paper, you touch screen the PC and it prints out a ballot-receipt thing. You're supposed to double check your receipt and then stuff it in the ballot box for later hand counts.
The machine are staggeringly more expensive and I'm sure the software is less reliable than the "uni scantron" machines we have at the precincts.
I'm told all the money is saved by using receipt paper instead of custom printed paper ballots. "in theory" every aldermanic district "could" have a different ballot where I live, so printing those must be an expensive logistical nightmare so having the e-voting machine print one seems sensible.
The part I don't get, is why not just have a typewritten page on a photocopier or custom print each voters ballot using a laserprinter? Well I donno.
Where I live they came up with a pretty interesting, rarely discussed in the media solution for the corrupt online and postal voting; they changed the law to allow early voting to some crazy amount of time, like a month early. That gets rid of about 99% of the excuses for the highly corrupt systems like postal/online voting.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 03, @06:44PM
You just described how voting has happened in Florida for the last 30 years, at least. Except, sometimes it's a punch needle instead of a pen on paper, this is how you get hanging chads.
This, of course, varies from location to location, but in my direct personal experience I have not seen it ever get skewed. I have read many stories about how smaller towns do have trouble with election fraud because those representatives do more than observe, particularly when the opposing party's representatives backs are turned.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by number11 on Thursday July 03, @09:20PM
A problem, at least in the US, is that a typical election may have dozens of things to vote on. I suspect it's simpler in parliamentary systems where you just vote for a rep or two. I have seen ballots with over 70 items to vote on: president, senator, congress, state governor, senator, representative, mayor, city council, water commissioner, school board, district attorney, library board, amendments to city charter, etc. etc. As an election worker, I'd agree that this is wretched excess, but how to solve? Would one have 70 separate ballots? Let's say a typical urban polling place has about 10 election workers. 2K registered voters of whom half vote, that's 70K ballots to be counted. Tell people "you used to get to vote on this position, but not any longer"? Answer some of those questions by decree?
That's not even addressing the insatiable demands for instant results. If it takes a week to count all the ballots, will people be more confident in the results, or less? And back in the day when we did use (hand-counted) paper ballots, it's not like cheating was unknown. Ballot boxes could go missing and later reappear, counters could have unobtrusive ways to mark ballots to either change the choice or void the ballot. Hand-counted paper ballots do not equal honest results (seems like the Russian Federation uses them).
The only answer I can see is open source tech for the counting. But where's the money to be made? And even that doesn't guarantee there's no cheating.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday July 03, @10:24PM
The US uses a lot of different voting systems. Around here we use mail in ballots that use an optical scan system to quickly tabulate the votes and if necessary can be recounted and automated notifications of when the ballot is sent, received back and counted. And during election season there are web cams on 24/7 showing all the relevant rooms, if you so choose you can go online in the middle of the night and verify that there's nobody doing anything nefarious.
Some other areas use voting machines that are 100% electronic with no paper trail and no way of verifying that the votes were properly counted. I remember years ago that Diebold had patched only machines in Democratic districts without giving any indication as to what was going on or why and I don't know that anybody ever got to the bottom of what issue there was that would only impact voters in blue districts.
I do think that the best system is vote by mail the way that we do with optical scan technology and appropriate notifications to indicate how far the process has proceeded.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday July 03, @11:18AM (3 children)
1. The prize is very valuable: For a federal election, we're talking about control over $trillions. For many state elections, control over $billions. For the larger local elections, control over $millions. That makes it worth spending a lot of money to try to monkey with the results.
2. It's very hard to get caught, because of the rules around voting: You must ensure that any individual person's vote is 100% private and cannot be verified or known for certain by anybody else both at the time of voting and afterwords in order to prevent vote buying or coercion. You must ensure that each person who votes is someone permitted to vote in that district (and in the case of closed primaries, that political party's primary), and is who they say they are. The main case where
3. The USA insists on using proprietary and closed-source hardware and software for all of this, because capitalism. This means that voting machine code cannot be examined or tested or verified by the public. The closest thing we get to any testing and verification is sending it off to a private testing lab for approval, and we've had real evidence that the private testing labs (a) don't get the system that is actually used on Election Day, and (b) tends to rubber-stamp rather than perform real tests under something resembling real election conditions. They even have a loophole where they say "this change is tiny, we don't have to perform a full test again", when the fact is that the compiled code for if (vote.race_i_care_about == candidate_i_dont_like && randfloat(0, 1) > 0.9) { vote.race_i_care_about = candidate_i_want_to_win; } could easily swing an election and is probably around 10 bytes or less.
4. The USA insists on reporting results extremely quickly, for no other reason than because the news media like being able to spend election night breathlessly reporting and predicting results. So slower methods that ensure that each vote is given due care and attention are tossed out on the basis of "we couldn't do that, it would take too long".
5. The USA has a long history of candidates and parties cheating to win elections. Gerrymandering was invented in the 1700's. Party machines controlling city government became the norm no later than the mid-1800's. The late 1800's through the mid-1900's had racist terrorist groups employing violence to either prevent people from voting or actively murdering public officials who they thought shouldn't be allowed to win. And more recently, we've had things like Supreme Court justices actively intervening to prevent votes from being completely counted, because the election results as they currently stood favored a candidate they liked. There are a lot of people and institutions that are supposed to be preventing incorrect results that are in fact in favor of faulty results as long as they favor their chosen candidates.
One court case currently working its way through is one in which hundreds of people swear that they voted for a candidate in a precinct, and the number of votes recorded for that candidate in that precinct was 0. Which sure seems suspect to me, like somebody might have written that logic I described earlier but put a decimal point in the wrong place.
Most other democracies around the world use physical paper ballots and count the pieces of paper by hand in full view of representatives of all candidates or parties and the news media. The USA doesn't, and it's suspicious as heck.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday July 03, @04:50PM (2 children)
I think you're from outside the USA, thats fine. There are not that many federal voting laws, its mostly a state thing.
When I was a tiny gen-x baby my state had mechanical nightmare tabulating voting machines, but by the late 80s or early 90s we went full optical like a university scantron machine "fill in the bubble".
There's a big green light and a happy beeper and a big red light and a sad horn on each voting location's optical scanner machines. So essentially all the votes that are counted passed the optical scanner.
The night of the election about 15 minutes after the polls close they can announce most of the results. Most of it is formalism of reporting verbally numbers up the chain to the state level where they release to the legacy news media.
The ballots are kept in a box and "some large percentage" are hand counted and compared against the optical scanner result.
Voter registration records are public, which some people think is weird. You can see I voted in all the elections going back some time (but not who I voted for). I personally believe they intentionally never audit this so they can stuff ballot boxes.
Remember there's no national ID card and no requirement to register much of anything with the government; the previous owners of my house were registered to vote in my district for a long time after we moved into our house. I don't think it would be very difficult to mash an advertising list of "recently moved people" against the public list of registered voters to create a list of ballots to stuff in the box. I think our tools to count, in my state, anyway, are trustworthy, but the process is designed to be corrupt as described in this paragraph. Never fails to amaze me how the numbers change thru the night as ballots are "found", who was winning 15 minutes after the polls are closed is often pretty different than the supposedly more accurate final result...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday July 03, @09:26PM (1 child)
No, I'm in the USA. The reason I describe those behaviors as "the USA" is to emphasize that most of the rest of the world does not do things the way the USA does.
But also, much of what I put in the category of "the USA" isn't specific government requirements, but rather lots of decisions big and small about how elections are handled. Like the whole "we need to know on election night" thing isn't a law on any books, it's just media outlets trying to collect eyeballs by encouraging people to stay up late and listen to their analysts predict the results, and that's been going on now since the invention of radio so any time the results aren't known by 3 AM or so after the polls close a lot of people assume something is wrong. And the election officials know this, so they try to help the media get their results out quickly, and even the least crooked election officials tend to prioritize quick results over accurate results.
Also in the category of things the USA state governments normally do that people in other democracies would find completely insane: The person in charge of the state's elections is usually the secretary of state for that state, and that person is typically openly partisan and even can be part of the campaign organization for other candidates for office.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday July 05, @01:51PM
I guess I mostly agree with you although there's a HUGE variation across the country.
On one hand, I kind of like your state's style of putting one person in charge, because there's precisely one person to have "all eyes on them" to make them behave. My state has a large-ish commission that is bipartisan based on election results, meaning they aggressively oppose all 3rd parties and given its a large team there's too many to keep an eye on. Until a 3rd party candidate is guaranteed over 17% in an election, the state will officially do everything in its power to oppose the new 3rd party. Oligarchs gotta oligarch, I guess. Our state has too many crooks running the election to keep them honest, at least yours only has one to keep an eye on.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday July 03, @05:01PM
Demographic voting has replaced political voting, so there's no real reason to vote in an election anymore.
Many demographics only get to vote when they have (or don't have) kids. Some of the voting ratios are pretty wild.
There's really no point in having a political vote if you can replace it with a census. Hmm based solely on racial census data, who will be the mayor of Baltimore... why even bother with voting? The answer of course is voting is a technological tool to trick people into a false belief they have involvement in the process. You have no right to oppose the government because you voted; well, thats not really true, is it?
The other thing that gets weird is the impact of aggressive 3rd party polling before the election. Its a game of chance where both sides try to win 51% support and not a hair over because they might start to lose their own side. So if the candidates essentially converge...
Finally theres no point in voting because voters do not enforce campaign promises. For people who vote on strictly demographic lines, campaign promises don't matter at all, of course. But even the very few who get to make a decision, are subject to careful propaganda to avoid past promises vs results and focus solely on the new lies looking forward.
To some extent, voting makes no sense in a multicultural organization, given that most voters vote on strictly demographic lines; you can do an empire or oligarchy or gang/warlord control, that's about it.