An engineer tells us why we must end software-based voting
[Hat tip: commenter Barry Meislin.]
To tell you the truth, although I knew software was involved in voting in some states, until this election I had no idea how widespread its use had become.
Please read. Some excerpts:
Let me list just some of the ways one could engage in election cheating by fiddling with software:
— Change the voting ratio between two candidates by any fraction
— Display an entered vote correctly to the voter, then change the vote before tabulation
— Display a summary of votes to an election official, and change that total later
— Allow remote modification of vote totals via the internet or local WiFi
— Change votes or methods at a certain time of day, or at a later date, even after voting machine certification concludes, or before/during auditing
— Change votes in a random fashion on election day to make it appear to be a legitimate voting trend
— Change voting trends by precinct, or using historical voting statistics
— Update the software secretly with a new algorithm
— Provide intermediate vote tallies to remote actors who are gaming the election in other ways
— Make adjustments to the votes of one candidate and tracking adjustments to other candidates down ballot…Behind every dishonest voting machine is a pile of dishonest programmers who have no moral inhibitions against giving local and regional politicians the tools they need to steal elections. And these highly intelligent idiots don’t consider for a minute that those same tools could be used by the government against their side when they fall out of favor. Software geeks are pretty smart in many ways and quite stupid in many others. I don’t trust them with my future or my government. Should you?
A reader will retort that the voting machines should use open source code, so the good geeks can examine what’s happening behind the curtain. That won’t prevent bad geeks from modifying voting machine code on the day of the election, or even after, to change vote totals. Not every problem has a competent and honest solution in software.
Common sense tells us that the best voting system uses a mechanical method to mark a ballot in a clear way (such as pen and paper). This method allows the ballots to be securely archived in case of disputes. While hand-counting and protecting ballots can be labor-intensive, it’s possible to have high confidence in the outcome. With software-based voting systems, your vote is at the mercy of some group of geeks, perhaps in another country, who have no respect for your life or your vote.
Makes sense to me. But as I’ve written before, no changes will be made – except in red states – unless both parties are behind such changes, and I see no reason whatsoever that the Democrats would support that. They are not afraid of Republican fraud.
Some Canadians seem to be upset at the fact that Americans are now aware of the problems with Dominion (Canadian), while at the same time they are advertising the fact that Canadian elections are not susceptible to manipulation by software, nor can they be compromised by mass mail-in ballots, which are also deemed unacceptable in most European countries. What seems irrefutable is that our recent election shows clear evidence of numerical and statistical impossibilities, not to mention countless irregularities and anomalies.
Clearly any sort of digital only ballot system is a horrible idea. Ideally you want a physical ballot that can be fed into a digital tabulation machine, but the ballot itself is kept too. That way if there’s suspiscion of fraud in a close election at least you have a physical copy to check against the digital one. Sure, a two tier system could be defeated as well, but it’d be much more difficult for would be fraudsters.
Why not go back to the old mechanical voting machines? Pull your lever, etc. The votes are tallied mechanically, saving the hassle of hand counting. The votes are sent by paper/telephone to the state center.
I don’t recall the last time I used one. One potential problem with them is the issue of pulling the lever and then realizing you didn’t like your choice. One good thing about the electronic/scan vote is that at the end the voter is presented with the choices and given the opportunity to change them.
Anyone who has tried hand counting large numbers of objects can assure others that hand-counting is not free from error. Which is why I prefer some sort of mechanical device, of the old school before they were be modified by software, but with a paper backup.
this is part one, note it was a brennan center study at the atlantic council,
that we’ve seen involved in not only with burisma but crowdstrike,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trk_gJx5yH8&feature=emb_logo
This election will go down as one of the most corrupt in our time … according to some. It has already been shown that fraud is rampant but not “proven.” So not proven there is NO fraud.
There are a lot of losers in this election. Media, Pollsters, politicians … and in the end Trump also. It can be fixed but the people elected will not have the political will to do so. All involved know what it will take to fix this travesty.
Nothing will change. And that is the biggest loser … NO CHANGE!
now this guy, brian hancock, certified the latest batch of dominion machine, when he was at the eac till 2019
https://www.linkedin.com/checkpoint/challenge/verifyV2
he re-emerges at unisys voting solutions, in the conference call with krebs, who says there was no interference in the election, very convenient,
Here are the cert test docs. The parts dealing with security and source code review are rather thin.
https://www.eac.gov/voting-equipment/democracy-suite-55
Gringo:
When I was first voting I voted in NYC with that sort of machine. It was a long time ago, though 🙂 .
They were big and cumbersome (at least, they seemed that way to me at the time) and probably needed a lot of maintenance. I don’t really know. But looking back, they seem a lot better than what we have now.
I have a draft about voting in European countries. Suffice to say that no one has a crazy system like ours. However, I think many of them use computer systems for counting votes. I’ll have to check.
this is the hacker that has shown us the operating manual, and other elements,
https://twitter.com/codemonkeyz.com
I have been at the bottom rung of these voting business, for about 15 years, in south florida, the procedures that were allowed to pass muster, would never fly here,
Here in Omaha we have paper ballot read by optical scanner; just like the SAT test. That seems the most secure to me.
I’m not a fan of the mechanical machines, though I’ve never used one. In theory, with paper ballots marked by pen, and counted with optical scanners; you have a paper trail at the end. Then the problem becomes one of the chain of custody for those paper ballots, and any software used in the optical scanners. I think the latter is manageable though not trivial.
Here is a Philly election judge recently convicted of multiple counts of vote fraud using mechanical voting machines.
I thought I had read that this criminal was paid about $50K per fraud incident, but the slob only got paid between $300 and $5K per incident.
Tech enthusiast – everything in my house is wired up to my smartphone! I love technology!
Tech engineer – the newest piece of technology I own is a printer from 2000, and I keep a loaded gun nearby incase it makes a funny noise.
As someone with a background in software engineering, coding, and advising Fortune 100 companies in IT security and IT Risk management…
Every possibility listed in the post is valid, and possible, but I see a similar list of ways to commit fraud with paper ballots, or any other system. It’s not digital or manual that matters, vis a vis accuracy. It’s custody. The chain from the voter making her selection to the official tabulation.
The major obstacle is anonymous voting. As long as we want voter preferences to be anonymous* (and we do), there will always be some point where a voter’s ballot is detached from the voter. First, to make clear why anonymous voting presents the difficulty, let’s imagine there is non-anonymous voting and we have the current situations in Pennsylvania or Georgia or Nevada or… With non-anonymous voting all you’d have to do is say, “O.K. Pennsylvanians. At midnight on Tuesday, November 3rd we are going to put up a web page with every registered vote in Pennsylvania and the name and address of the voter. Go online and check your name. (Or, if you want to keep computers out of it, post the list at the local courthouse.) If the results you see are not what you wrote on your ballot, or the holes you punched on your ballot, or the icons you hit on the voting screen with your stylus; contact the election bureau.” Verification could be made by the actual voters and disputes rectified by conversations with the voters directly associated with the votes in dispute.
But since we have anonymous voting there has to be some point where the votes are detached from the voters. We can identify it is a valid voter walking into the polling booth, or signing into the on-line system, or using the phone app, or… And the voter can verify her vote is tallied when she is finished voting, but after that it is a blackbox; whether the ballots are paper or electrons in a database. If it’s electrons in a database all the things listed in this post are possible. If it’s paper a human can lie about the choices on the paper (we have testimony of this happening in this election), a human can alter the number of votes in the tally (we have testimony of this happening in this election), a human can hide ballots (we have testimony of this happening in this election), a human can produce stacks of additional ballots (we have testimony of this happening in this election).
With anonymous voting all we can really verify is the number of people who voted. But since it is not mandatory for everyone to vote for every race or issue on a ballot even that information is not useful.
*The reasons are likely obvious, but imagine if, after an election, some public official or officials can look at a database or paper ballots and see that Mary Jones at 123 Main Street voted for candidate X. We already see government employees dumping private IRS information. Snowden, Manning and Assange (regardless of what you think of them) dumped classified government information, including military information. We see what doxxing does now to public and private figures and their families.
Neo,
I can’t wait to see your post on European voting methods. Send it to Tucker Carlson, Powerline, Legal insurrection and any other place that will get the info out to the public. The Dems want us to emulate the EU, UN and their bureaucracies and socialist governments, but they want to do American elections their way. Their hypocracy needs to be pointed out.
Here’s the problem. No election can possibly be secure if a significant number of people involved are willing to cheat. Full stop.
And the impression I get is that a significant number of people involved in the system are willing to cheat. There’s not much we can do about that, but eliminating digital voting is a given.
Just like with the Internet of Things, electronic voting is something where there is a very strong inverse correlation between supporting it and technical knowledge. The more people know about these kinds of systems, the less they will want to accept electronic voting machines. That says a lot.
Rufus T. Firefly:
Voting fraud is always possible. Where there’s a will there’s a way. But certain methods of voting make it easy. We want to make it as difficult as possible.
Rufus T. Firefly:
Apparently, secret ballots only were instituted in the US in the late 1800s. I didn’t know that till recently (maybe I’ll do a post on it).
Nonapod….”Ideally you want a physical ballot that can be fed into a digital tabulation machine, but the ballot itself is kept too. That way if there’s suspiscion of fraud in a close election at least you have a physical copy to check against the digital one.”
There are systems like that…we used to have one here. But some of the recent ones, apparently, encode all of the choices into a bar code and print that at the top of the page…and it is the bar code that is counted. Voter can see if the individual choices printed on the page based on his selections are correct (though most won’t check), but he can’t read and compare the bar code.
I’m a software engineer of pushing 40 years’ experience, and I’m actually somewhat more sanguine about the future of election software. But the operative word certainly is “future.”
We have extremely sophisticated cryptographic technology that makes differential privacy possible, so for example votes can be tabulated without revealing who voted for whom. We have the underpinnings, in a combination of “threshold cryptography” and “information flow types,” to construct systems like Civitas, which “allows voters to vote securely from the remote client of their choice, while provably providing universal verifiability, voter verifiability, anonymity, and coercion resistance.”
The technology to solve the problems exists. That’s not to say further evolution is unnecessary. But I do want to emphasize that “all voting software can be subverted” is false. There’s more to discuss, of course, such as “don’t run om Windows or Linux,” and run on something like seL4 instead. But again, the fact that this can be done underscores that the problem is not technical. It’s sociopolitical: there’s no blood running in the streets because we have such an asinine voting “system.”
Paul Snively:
The biggest problem as I see it is that only one party wants to make voting more secure. Therefore I doubt it will happen even if the technology is available.
https://xkcd.com/2030/
neo,
I knew that about secret ballots and I’m very glad we made the change. It’s more than coincidence the timeframe (late 1800s) coincides with the timeframe of the Civil War and reconstruction.
Regarding making voting fraud difficult; as Tuvea wrote, I too lived in Illinois. Grew up in Cook County. You could dye people’s fingers purple, like in Iraq and the machine politicians would still get whatever result they want. If you’ve got a mafia like political structure with leaders very willing to harm anyone (snitches get stitches) who doesn’t toe the line, the medium doesn’t matter. Paper, electronic, dyed fingers…
More in the next comment…
Why do we need anonymous voting? if the goal is to prevent persecution based on our voting choices then laws should be made to outlawed persecution over political views. Most of us have our party affiliations printed on our ids whom we voted is open secret for most people since it can be guessed with very high accuracy based on our ethnicity education religion and other basic background info, why do we still need anonymous voting in a supposed equal and law and order society? It has no benefit besides making fraud super easy. Are you even sure your vote was given to the candidate you chose, there is not even ways to check, maybe all of our votes went to Biden but we will never know since anonymous voting makes authenticating completely impossible
neo: The biggest problem as I see it is that only one party wants to make voting more secure. Therefore I doubt it will happen even if the technology is available.
When I said it hasn’t happened because there’s no blood running in the streets over it, I wasn’t being hyperbolic.
}}} Software geeks are pretty smart in many ways and quite stupid in many others. I don’t trust them with my future or my government. Should you?
Nahhh. This isn’t a “software geek” thing, it’s a “liberal” thing.
Some geeks — esp. the youngest generation in general — are liberal idiots.
Historically, they are much more libertarian, which is why you don’t hear of much, if any, success in efforts to unionize them.
When you’re a competent programmer, you are, in a very minor sense, a god. You create and define small but distinct little worlds, day in and day out (mind you, these are minor enough to prevent too much ego, and the capacity of the real world to kick you in the ass and remind you you aren’t that GOOD of a god keeps the ego under control for most). This is, pretty much, what a god does, among other things.
What kind of god would want to be part of a union? 😀
Today’s programmers are both less independent and less effectively taught, and they’ve all grown up with the idiotic potModern Liberal schooling, so it’s a lot more common for millenial programmers to be liberal parrots, like everyone else in the millennial generation…
TBH, I have this strong suspension we’re on the cusp of the French Revolution. Liberals really really imagine they Have All The Answers, when, really, they don’t have even a clue.
Whether the Republic will re-assert itself is an interesting question, or will we see the beginning of Empire?
Either way, I assert that “Millennial” and “Millennialist” are going to become curse words equivalent to “Nazi” and “Fascist”.
*sigh*
Electronic or paper or mail-in are not the issues. As I wrote earlier; the custody of the ballot from voter to tabulation is the issue. If you want that to be as accurate as possible here is what you do (again, method of voting does not matter).
We’ll take paper as an example, but this same method is easily transferable to electronic. It’s basically the same thing that we do with credit card transactions. You “tokenize” the relevant data between the transaction and the tally. When you buy something online or in a store with a credit card the actual number never gets to the vendor. A middle party verifies that the card is valid and sends a randomized token to the vendor to tie to the transaction.
Rufus T. Firefly goes to his polling place in Freedonia. His photo ID and address are verified by election staff of both parties (you can add a third, independent of the two parties if you like).
He is given a random ballot with a random barcode and a peel off replica of the barcode. He and the election worker both verify the barcodes match.
He goes to a private booth and votes.
He places his completed ballot upside down with any marks out of physical view into a scantron machine supervised by two election workers from both parties. Before it is submitted Rufus peels off the removable barcode and hangs onto it.
Election officials record that Rufus T. Firefly of 123 Main Street has voted. Anyone else who comes in later and claims to be Rufus T. Firefly of 123 Main Street will not be allowed to vote.
Election officials add that completed ballot to the number of valid ballots received from verified, registered voters. This count is very important! It is not a count of candidates selected, or issues approved or declined. It is a count indicating one registered voter walked into the polling place and voted. That is a number (like a checksum in IT or foot in Accounting) that can be used to ensure random ballots are not “found” nor “lost.”
Rufus can then choose to throw his barcode away, take it along with him, or immediately go to another room where he can scan the barcode. If he does that, a screen will show him the choices from the ballot that matches that barcode. If he sees something he doesn’t like, he notifies an election official and the ballot matching that barcode is destroyed once he produces the physical, peel off barcode (no one has seen what is on the ballot, but him) and he votes again. Whether he has a dispute with the ballot, or not, he can choose to take the peel off barcode along for future reference, or destroy it, whichever he prefers.
Now we have an anonymous way to tie voters to their ballots.
We also have a certified count of physical voters who voted.
That’s as good as you can get if we want to remain anonymous (and we do).
Stan,
xkcd is a genius! The rare combination of human who’s left brain is as large as his right.
miguel cervantes on November 19, 2020 at 4:27 pm said:
I have been at the bottom rung of these voting business, for about 15 years, in south florida, the procedures that were allowed to pass muster, would never fly here,
My mother worked for the Palm Beach offices in 2000 and 2004 (as well as earlier). She complained repeatedly about strange, odd, and inappropriate ballot handling and other unacceptable things she observed that “weren’t right”, but no one ever did anything.
Dave,
You have much, much more faith in humanity and the legal system than I.
I have never registered for any party, nor voted in any primary for exactly this reason. When it comes to politics I want to remain anonymous. Very anonymous. History is rife with heads on pikes or in nooses when politics gets personal.
The irregularities abound.
Dr. SHIVA LIVE MIT PhD Analysis of Michigan Votes Reveals Unfortunate Truth of U S Voting Systems
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRJCB6U-H4E
This BS was so @#$$#% rigged it’s not even funny.
}}} Election officials record that Rufus T. Firefly of 123 Main Street has voted. Anyone else who comes in later and claims to be Rufus T. Firefly of 123 Main Street will not be allowed to vote.
You need a provision for dealing with the possibility that the first RTF is the bad actor, not the second, but yes.
Rufus T. Firefly:
Most older people, like me, have been well aware of Cook County’s voter fraud for a long time. I know about NYC, too, back in Tammany days. I don’t think either place needs to do it anymore, though – do they? – because they’ve become so solidly blue that there’s no need.
Anonymous voting makes it unprofitable to bribe or threaten a voter. If a person trying to buy or extort votes can’t know how the people they pay or threaten really voted, they can’t know if their money or threats had any effect.
That’s why the US went to secret ballots in the late 19th century. The urban political machines had people whose job was, literally, to get voters to the polls and make sure they voted for the machine’s candidates, watching them fill out their ballots. Secret ballots broke that practice. Keeping how specific people voted secret from the state was never the point.
And, of course, just one of the problems with mailing ballots is that it subverts the secret ballot. In jurisdictions that vote by mail, you can bribe or threaten voters to surrender their ballots to you, or mark them as you direct, and no pollworker can tell it’s happening. Or you can mark ballots sent to the mentally incompetent – a variation only possible with mailing ballots. That’s what “ballot harvesting” is.
OBloodyHell,
Unlike most things involving technology, you are correct that coding has gone backwards. Huge storage capacities and lightning fast processers, all at absurdly low cost and size, make elegant solutions invisible. When I was coding back in the day when RAM and ROM cost real money I took immense pride in the cleverness of my code. Now 10,000 lines compile and run as fast as 10, so who needs ingenuity in software design? How many programmers today can even do binary math, or debug hexadecimal? Or know who Charles Babbage or George Boole where, or what they did?
Din Surber has a terrific roundup of recent Dem voting “improvements”.
https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2020/11/election-reform-is-trap.html
Michael Brazier,
I have verified reports from people involved with the system in some Wards in Cook County that (in the 70s and 80s, at least) people still did watch voters and make sure they made the right choices and/or checked the ballots in front of the voter prior to the voter pulling the lever or dropping it in the scantron, even HANDING VOTERS PRE-FILLED BALLOTS when they entered the polling place.
I agree with you that mail-in ties ballots to addressed envelopes, which can be used nefariously.
}}} With anonymous voting all we can really verify is the number of people who voted. But since it is not mandatory for everyone to vote for every race or issue on a ballot even that information is not useful.
Actually, no, Rufus, you’re missing an obvious option, and that would be some form of digital “one way” encryption, e.g., public key.
If the information was encoded using PK tech, then you could send an original to a voter-chosen site (e-mail, whatever), which the voter could check at any point using their private key. The ballots, as tallied, would then be pushed up for public access, and only the holder of the private key would be able to verify it.
It’s not going to mean even a lot of checks, but, the more concern there was over ballot manipulation, the easier it would be to run spot checks.
An observer “company” could solicit people to provide their unencrypted copy of their vote to them for validation — it could be checked by the company using the public key to match the existing tallied encrypted copies, and a statistical analysis could point to concerns suggesting further investigation is needed, to the point of a complete re-tally, if desired.
Yes, auditing would require a relaxation of anonymity, but this could easily be voluntary at least to the point where analysis would suggest far more open verification is needed, as well as point to likely/suspect culprits by noting who had access.
if the democrats want to persecute you for voting for trump, do you think they need the proof of a ballot with your name on it to come after you? they will just throw everyone they presumed (based on race, county you living in, religion…) to have voted for trump into the gulag. if you live in a society you can get persecuted for something as trivial as whom you voted for you think you would be safe just because of your name is not on the ballot? anonymous voting accomplishes nothing but making it a lot easier for malicious politicians to come into power and stay in power through voter fraud
When I was first voting I voted in NYC with that sort of machine. It was a long time ago, though
I think the lever machines disappeared around 2009. I do miss them.
It would be good for all elections in the future if the States decided to Not Certify this one, and throw it to the House.
That might make the Dems be willing to accept honest, paper ballots – no “mail-in”. (Tho quite possibly not.)
With the courts claiming that the violation of the rules means there is a possibility of fraud. Thus the statistics that indicate fraud should get stronger weight. Those claiming “only legal” votes are there, can’t prove that all the votes are legal.
What is the burden of proof requirement? It’s less than “beyond reasonable doubt”. Is it “the preponderance of evidence”? Or something else – or unspecified and thus up to the judge to decide on the case at hand.
Tom Grey: “It would be good for all elections in the future if the States decided to Not Certify this one, and throw it to the House. That might make the Dems be willing to accept honest, paper ballots”
If the only outcome of the The Trump Challenge is to build an audience for simpler, more honest elections it will have been well worth the trouble it caused to the body politic
Dave on November 19, 2020 at 7:07 pm said:
If the democrats want to persecute you for voting for trump, do you think they need the proof of a ballot with your name on it to come after you?
You are completely correct about that. Some upper management person at Facebook or Alphabet can push a button and get a list of all “TheNewNeo.com” comments with a full name, address, SSN, and birthdate attached to every comment. (I’m guessing about the SSN and BD part.) The technology or a portion of it is called Centra at Facebook.
But Dave is wrong about anonymous or confidential balloting being useless. It prevents bribed or extorted votes. Or at least most of it. Mail-in ballots enable bribed and extorted votes.
Speaking of bribed votes: The reason we got the 17th amendment in 1913 and lost the original mechanism for selecting senators by votes of the state legislatures, is because it was shown that state congressperson votes were being bribed. I believe Missouri was a prominent example of the bribery.
The original selection mechanism was supposed to ensure that federalism would endure. That is, states would retain their independence from the Feds. That check and balance of the Constitution is gone now. Ironically, some or much of the election fraud that we are worrying about now was perhaps enabled by Federalism. Should we nationalize voting standards?
“they will just throw everyone they presumed (based on race, county you living in, religion…) to have voted for trump into the gulag.” Dave
If the democrat leadership starts proscecuting Americans for voting for Trump or even just serving in his Administration, they will quickly reach a tipping point in which our differences will be settled by ‘other’ means. The thugs they send to arrest Americans will run into ambushes and targeting of them away from work. Its not only the Taliban and ISIS who know how to make IEDs…
Democrats trying to throw 75-80 Million Americans into gulags is a formula for self-destruction.
The whole thing hinges on the chain of custody, as has been mentioned here. Thumb drives full of votes going from one machine to another is the biggest red flag there can be, and it keeps being a thing of note in this election.
A few First Principles need to be reinstated: No ballot-handling or vote-counting without effective full-time bipartisan observers present and engaged; Any polling place hi-jinks or pressuring-with-implied-violence on election workers gets response from armed Federal Marshals with no jurisdictional limitations and with large armed posses standing by for backup. Law & Order, but first, Order. That would solve 95% of all the problems we currently have. We already know where the Marshals are needed for the next election, don’t we? The petit Boss Tweeds wouldn’t like it one bit, but nobody else would care.
Tommy Jay, I was reading about gerrymandering and about the 17th amendment the other day, and it occurred to me that maybe we should combine popular voting for senators with state legislative selection of senate candidates, or vise versa?
1) The voters select 4 senate candidates for each senate position and the legislature picks one of them; or 2) (and possibly preferred?) the legislature picks 4 candidates who reflect the interests of the state level government and the people vote to elect one of them to the senate, thus providing some “people” level control over otherwise potentially corrupted candidates.
It might also be possible in these cases/ options that bribing would be more difficult or at least much more expensive, so reduced. As I look at them I can’t quite decide if either option is better than the other. Anyone have better/ alternative suggestions?
theoretically anonymous voting prevents bribery by denying ways for bribee to provide proof to briber that he has voted in the way requested. Mail in ballots pretty much completely destroyed that mechanism of bribery prevention. Bribee can fill out the ballot in front of the briber now. with mail in ballots confidential voting has absolutely no benefit besides making voter fraud very easy to do.
They believe that any conservative at any level is always Adolf Hitler. So every means of defeating them, physically or in the cyber space makes them heroes.
OBloodyHell,
Regarding your comment at 6:57, in my comment I wrote:
Your encrypted key is the electronic version of my paper and peel off barcode. The process is the same. I intentionally used paper in my example because the physical, tangible nature of the process makes it more obvious to those who are non technical, but you are correct, encrypted keys would be the analog in digital voting.
I did leave out two things, though. The custody of the blank ballots is very important. The boxes and barcode numbers have to be tightly controlled in a similar way that most businesses control company check paper stock. Also, the verified ballot tally would also contain votes for each candidate or issue on a ballot, so if we later see huge leaps in ballots just voting for one or a few things (like the number of Biden only ballots we see in this election, with no down races selected), we would know if that is valid, or not.
Dave on November 19, 2020 at 11:04 pm: I agree completely.
R2L on November 19, 2020 at 10:16 pm: Any changes would require another amendment. That little detail aside, your ideas are not bad. Number 2) sounds best to me.
In my fantasy world, I imagine that we could deal with bribed judges and legislators by simply asking them if they have been bribed; while hooked up to a 99%+ accurate lie detector. [Magneto EncephaloGraph (MEG) technology now exists that can peer into the brain.] Then a “high-priesthood” would be needed to administer exams and report accurately. Like the FBI perhaps (joke).
TommyJay
In my fantasy world, I imagine that we could deal with bribed judges and legislators by simply asking them if they have been bribed; while hooked up to a 99%+ accurate lie detector.
Like you said, fantasy world. DuckDuckGo: lie detector accuracy rate.
https://theamericanreport.org/2020/11/19/release-the-kraken-hammer-scorecard-whistleblower-montgomery-gave-sworn-testimony-to-fbi-and-doj-about-scorecard-dominion-smartmatic-in-2015/?
We need not be concerned with how we vote, rather it’s how the votes are tabulated. I believe that just as in the case of black voting in the south the DOJ should decend on those jurisdictions that are historically run by city/state Democrat political machines like Philly, Detroit, Chicago, DC et al …. and take control of their voting process. Mandate the process of calculating the vote with human observers, closer than 30 feet. Video feeds of each table where counts are taking place. Let the Dems audit the Republican votes and Repubs audit the Dem votes cast, then let them gather together to defend their positions as to what challenged votes can in fact be counted.
Here is a link to a 1984 paper by by Ken Thompson. He was one of the most influential people in how modern computing was established.
The paper is entitled “Reflections on Trusting Trust.” https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
It is not totally technical although I may not be a good judge of that.
It shows that if you didn’t write everything including the software that translates your higher level code into lower level code you only know that it does what you want not what else it may do.
Honestly, it says if you didn’t make the chips yourself you don’t know what it might be doing.
Martin,
You are correct. That is why, if we want to stay with anonymous voting (and we do), the system has to have a way for a voter to verify his or her vote after tabulation, like the method I outlined, or the method OlBloodyHell mentioned with encrypted keys. And then the tabulations have to be monitored and audited in real time by members of both parties and independents who have no way to trace them back to unique voters. This eliminates the mysterious boxes of ballots showing up, or mysterious USB drives appearing at 2am.
Frankly, I was impressed by the (new) voting procedure in my state. Yeah, it’s on computer, but there is a printout that is actually readable by a human and the voter puts said printout into a lockbox. So, the best of computerized voting and *with* the hardcopy to check against. Not on offer in many places, I gather.
” according to some. It has already been shown that fraud is rampant but not “proven.” So not proven there is NO fraud.” – jack
In line with the usual practice of Democrats, this is the same as claiming that Hillary Clinton was clearly not using a private server for official State emails because she was never indicted.
You will notice, however, that, after Mueller’s report fizzled, they continued to claim that Trump was GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY.
And he had the benefit of not only no indictments, but no proof.
Because he was innocent; but that’s irrelevant to Democrats.