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The Guardian has a story detailing the firing of Christopher Krebs, who served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa)
President Trump made the announcement on Twitter on Tuesday, saying Krebs "has been terminated" and that his recent statement defending the security of the election was "highly inaccurate".
CISA last week released a statement refuting claims of widespread voter fraud. "The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history," the statement read. "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."
Krebs, is a former Microsoft executive, and was appointed by President Trump after allegations of Russian interference with the 2016 election.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday November 19 2020, @07:13PM (7 children)
XKCD: Voting Software [xkcd.com]
Pencil & paper, counted manually by humans is best. I could be convinced certain types of pen and ink might be better than pencil.
Indubitably, fraud and mistakes occur. However, the issue is whether they are sufficient to change the result. As far as I can tell, for the Presidential election, that is not proven, and shows little prospect of being proven. As the Brexit campaigners say: You lost. Get over it.
The Republicans can take heart that there is another Presidential election in 4 years, unlike the Brexit referendum, and given the redistricting where the Republicans have an advantage, it will be difficult for the Democrats to prevail again. Spending that time assuring that voting software is taken out of the loop will remove possibilities of mistake and fraud. Providing more polling stations so that people are not pressured into mail-in voting will also help. There is a lot the Republicans can do to make the next election even more secure and suffer from fewer instances of fraud and mistakes.
Give up fighting lost battles.
(Score: 4, Touché) by DannyB on Thursday November 19 2020, @08:00PM (6 children)
Trump's claims of voter fraud could be proven if the silly Republican judges would quit requiring there to be actual evidence of fraud.
Would a Dyson sphere [soylentnews.org] actually work?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 20 2020, @01:50AM (5 children)
You can have perfect accountability or you can have perfect anonymity, you can't have both. We require anonymity, so we have no way whatsoever for a person to check if their vote was properly counted. If nobody can do that, the count is no more trustworthy than the people doing the counting. And they're the people who came out and said "I'd really like to be in charge of making sure other people's votes get recorded properly". In a nation that's astoundingly polarized and has lost all capacity for supporting the rule of law or even plain old fairness when it conflicts with their worldview.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday November 20 2020, @09:54AM (3 children)
You want to be careful making such absolute blanket statements. Perfect accountability or perfect anonymity? You sure those are mutually exclusive?
One way hashes can provide both. You generate a cryptographic hash of your vote, and so do election workers. The personal info that connects you to your vote should already be hashed, before it is attached to the ballot. If your vote has been altered, the hash won't match. It's basically the same principles used in password authentication that allows system administrators to manage the system and the system to verify (or reject) a login, all without exposing the users' passwords.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 22 2020, @01:40AM (2 children)
The key space is too small for hashes to be worth anything. You have less than 350 million possible values. It's the same reason we don't bother upgrading the hashing algorithm for IPv4 addresses here. A GPU could get you the hash for any person in the US in under a second.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday November 22 2020, @04:09AM (1 child)
> The key space is too small
That's what salt is for.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 22 2020, @03:01PM
Wouldn't help. Not even if every voter had their own salt. You don't need to build a rainbow table. If you have the salt you can compute all possible values of salt+value quicker than you can blink with that small a keyspace.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday November 20 2020, @02:50PM
I accept the idea that there could be pockets of corruption and fraud here and there. But not on a massive scale. Like faking the moon landings. And be able to keep it a secret. And have no actual evidence (so far). Speculation is fine. But there needs to be some proof before we overturn the election on the conjecture that there might be a few corrupt vote counters somewhere.
I would repeat that statement. Because it works both ways. Trust no one. That's why we have poll watchers at every voting place. And where votes are counted. The only complaint I've heard so far is that a few watchers somewhere were not located such that they could read the ballots as they were counted. Which is NOT their purpose.
I would rewind to four years ago. I was highly disappointed with the outcome. I naturally had suspicions that something crooked might have happened. But when plenty of people on both sides said everything was in order, I was able to accept the disappointing outcome. I didn't have to like the result. But I accepted it as reality. I didn't conjure up conspiracy theories.
Would a Dyson sphere [soylentnews.org] actually work?