This Could Be Microsoft's Most Important Product in 2020. If it Works (cnet.com) 142
Alfred Ng, writing for CNET: Building 83 doesn't stand out on Microsoft's massive Redmond, Washington, headquarters. But last week, the nameless structure hosted what might be the software giant's most important product of 2020. Tucked away in the corner of a meeting room, a sign reading "ElectionGuard" identifies a touchscreen that asks people to cast their votes. An Xbox adaptive controller is connected to it, as are an all-white printer and a white ballot box for paper votes. If you didn't look carefully, you might have mistaken all that for an array of office supplies. ElectionGuard is open-source voting-machine software that Microsoft announced in May 2019. In Microsoft's demo, voters make their choices by touchscreen before printing out two copies. A voter is supposed to double-check one copy before placing it into a ballot box to be counted by election workers. The other is a backup record with a QR code the voter can use to check that the vote was counted after polls close. With ElectionGuard, Microsoft isn't setting out to create an unhackable vote -- no one thinks that's possible -- but rather a vote in which hacks would be quickly noticed.
The product demo was far quieter than the typical big tech launch. No flashy lights or hordes of company employees cheering their own product, like Microsoft's dual screen phone, its highly anticipated dual-screen laptop or its new Xbox Series X. And yet, if everything goes right, ElectionGuard could have an impact that lasts well beyond the flashy products in Microsoft's pipeline. ElectionGuard addresses what has become a crucial concern in US democracy: the integrity of the vote. The software is designed to establish end-to-end verification for voting machines. A voter can check whether his or her vote was counted. If a hacker had managed to alter a vote, it would be immediately obvious because encryption attached to the vote wouldn't have changed. The open-source software has been available since last September. But Microsoft gets its first real-world test on Tuesday, when ElectionGuard is used in a local vote in Fulton, Wisconsin.
The product demo was far quieter than the typical big tech launch. No flashy lights or hordes of company employees cheering their own product, like Microsoft's dual screen phone, its highly anticipated dual-screen laptop or its new Xbox Series X. And yet, if everything goes right, ElectionGuard could have an impact that lasts well beyond the flashy products in Microsoft's pipeline. ElectionGuard addresses what has become a crucial concern in US democracy: the integrity of the vote. The software is designed to establish end-to-end verification for voting machines. A voter can check whether his or her vote was counted. If a hacker had managed to alter a vote, it would be immediately obvious because encryption attached to the vote wouldn't have changed. The open-source software has been available since last September. But Microsoft gets its first real-world test on Tuesday, when ElectionGuard is used in a local vote in Fulton, Wisconsin.
Not a bad job... (Score:1)
...for the much maligned M$.
Re: Not a bad job... (Score:2)
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You should have used XTree Gold.
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This could lead to pressure how people vote and open the door for paying for votes.
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It probably doesn't store the selections made, just the ballot identifier/number.
Re: Not a bad job... (Score:5, Informative)
It probably doesn't store the selections made, just the ballot identifier/number.
It actually does. You just cannot decrypt it. But because of homomorphic encryption you can actually compute the totals. Only, there's a small catch: The total will also be encrypted :-)
But when someone trusted with the private key decrypts the totals, you can verity that encrypting the totals using the public key yields the same ciphertext as your computed, encrypted totals.
If no one can decrypt the vote, they cannot be sure that they actually bought your vote. They can only be sure that you *voted*, not who/what you voted for.
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There was a time when votes were so un-secret that supporters of candidate A would stand on one side of the street and supporters of B would stand on the other. Votes were tallied by someone looking down from a raised platform to count the tops of heads - aka "polls".
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...for the much maligned M$.
Wondering if they were saying the same thing about certain caucus apps prior to actually using them.
The vendor may not carry a name like "Shadow, Inc.", but integrity and validity remain to be seen. As with everything politics, we should still follow the money. Are they also accepting "donations" directly from the candidates running? If so, I'm guessing ElectionGuard will soon be a Bloomberg product...
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As TFA mentioned... the app used in the caucus was a case of "testing in production"; doing that is obviously a very dumb thing to do. Pretty sure that MSFT has been smart enough to test the crap out of their current product before putting it to use in a (way the hell smaller and far more realistic) test case of a small Wisconsin town's election.
Seriously - the two are not only apples(MSFT) vs. oranges(Shadow), but more like apples vs. ebola-laced-plutonium-inserted-anally-with-force.
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As TFA mentioned... the app used in the caucus was a case of "testing in production"; doing that is obviously a very dumb thing to do...
And you assume that "very dumb thing" wasn't by design. This isn't the first time a voting app has been "relied" on. In Iowa.
Ironically enough, it was Microsoft who created the voting app at the center of the 2016 caucus clusterfuck.
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We will see, and Microsoft is notorious for screwing up [engadget.com] the simplest of things [datacenterknowledge.com] over and over again [microsoft.com].
But on the plus side, is fairly well known how to add electronic assists to attendance voting now. It really is "electronic assists" and not "electronic voting" because paper remains a central feature of it. It's more about augmenting the paper with electronics to make some things easier - like voting if you can't see and counting the votes. And adding new features like allowing
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Microsoft is a big place, and has a lot of people working for it, so its understandable that much of its products are written by complete idiots.
but at the same time, they have some really clever and good people working for them, and I hope that its these guys who have been tasked with the voting software, and not the fresh-out-of-college interns who fancied a cool project to work on.
Its available as open source [github.com], so technically you and I both could check it out, I doubt we'd be able to verify it, but I thin
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...for the much maligned M$.
LOL.. Assuming they didn't do this for tracking reasons, so they can figure out how you voted and target advertising accordingly.... Somehow, I don't feel all that safe letting M$ have that kind of access.
Sounds about right (Score:1)
MS truly is the perfect company for this. They basically wrote the book on transparency and how to avoid it.
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How are they going to avoid transparency when this is open source?
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They basically wrote the book on transparency and how to avoid it.
How are they going to avoid transparency when this is open source?
Aren't you listening? They wrote the book! What more proof do you need?
The other is a backup record with a QR code... (Score:3)
The other is a backup record with a QR code the voter can use to check that the vote was counted after polls close
So, does that mean you can leave and take it with you, and then your employer can nicely ask for your QR code to verify you voted "successfully" -- if you know what I mean?
If you don't: let's make sure that you supported the company vote suggestion. If you did, Hurrah! If not, a bad review might soon be in your future. Say in about 30 minutes.
Making sure that "your vote is in there somewhere" is great. Also making sure that "it's for your candidate" is great as well, except when you're forced to reveal it to someone else. I don't see how they can do the candidate verification AND also keep someone else from viewing it as well.
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Re:The other is a backup record with a QR code... (Score:5, Informative)
Umm... just don't give your QR code to anyone? If you don't want people to take it, just keep it secret, like you do with your social security number or childhood pics. I doubt your employer would be able to do much more than today - ask you who you voted for, and potentially face legal action...
Nice to see everyone's reading the article as ever<\sarcasm>. This is specifically addressed. The whole point is that, in the case of intimidation, you don't have a choice about who you give your QR code to. In this particular case the problem has been addressed, according to the article, by using "Homomorphic encryption" which "allows for counting votes while they remain secret". This means that whether you hand over your QR code or not is irrelevant. The real question is whether the encryption works, which it probably does well enough. In which case the grandparents valid concerns are addressed in this system.
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The whole point is that, in the case of intimidation
The whole point is that people who bring this up are scared the Nazis will come rape them in their sleep. People and even corporations can't engage in wide enough scale intimidation for this to have an outcome on elections, and the kind of dodgy deals that could intimidate you now that you have a QR code can just as easily intimidate you without it (if X doesn't win, I'm going to do Y to you, I don't care how you voted).
You have so many problems. Worrying about intimidation is not at all one of them.
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Nice to see everyone's reading the article as ever. This is specifically addressed.
Nope, I'm afraid I didn't read the actual article. Had to soon leave but wanted to make sure the question got asked.
And I remember reading maybe 12 years ago some cryptoguy had worked out a scheme to let you verify your vote (it's positively in there) but still hide WHO you voted for. I wondered then why it never caught on; I wonder now if MS rebuilt the wheel or improved upon it.
You have so many problems. Worrying about intimidation is not at all one of them.
Not my problem at all. But for a small sleazy business (say local organized crime) for a local/city-wide issue, I could see
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One option could be to offer the ability to print a decoy receipt, effectively letting you fill out a non-counting ballot and have a receipt that will act like it was counted.
Of course, if someone is lazy, they would just roll with the coercion rather than go through the effort of filling out two ballots. This is why the simplest answer has been to forbid any sort of record taking in the voting areas.
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This also has a handy picture of the QR page that also shows your votes.
I believe it says that the QR code only shows that 1) you voted, and 2) that your vote was verified as counted by the elections board. It said nothing about showing who you voted for with that QR code.
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I believe it says that the QR code only shows that 1) you voted, and 2) that your vote was verified as counted by the elections board. It said nothing about showing who you voted for with that QR code.
It absolutely holds the information about who you voted for. Only, it's encrypted, so you cannot read it.
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Why would it have to?
I vote for A, B or C and my vote registered as vote Z.
My QR code interrogates the system to ask "Was vote Z included in the count?" The system replies, "Yes, here's the evidence."
At no point is my choice of A, B or C part of that conversation.
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See now this is exactly what I love about Slashdot. Dozens of skilled, experienced Microsoft engineers labor for months, maybe even years, to create an open-source voting system. xaosflux scans the FA summary for 10 seconds and thinks "Aha! I found the gaping hole in the system that literally NOBODY else saw!"
Sigh. If only we could harness the collective brainpower of /. users for good.
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The article itself has a picture of the page with the QR code, that page also include what your actual votes are. Now in practice they may not show that - but the only source for this has it plain as day.
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"just keep it secret, like you do with your social security number"
Oh, you mean the very thing you're required to give an employer to report tax purposes?
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If your boss asks to see it, call the police. Done. If you are really worried about it, drop your receipt in the destruction bin at the polling station.
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(which happens 100% of the time)
That seems to be nearly 100% more than most studies claim happen in practice, but it is a concern nonetheless.
If your boss asks to see it, call the police. Done.
Your job will be forfeit and you will have no evidence that the boss really asked for this and so prosecution will probably not be able to proceed. Same goes for organized crime. Generally speaking many people can exert more dire consequences for your non-compliance than you can realistically threaten in return. This is why secrecy of the vote has been imperative and that it is in fact illegal to t
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If your boss asks to see it, call the police. Done.
Your job will be forfeit and you will have no evidence that the boss really asked for this and so prosecution will probably not be able to proceed.
Won't matter - your state's Bureau of Labor will likely fine the employer so damned hard (and enforce it via seizure if necessary) that you'll likely not have to look for another job for at least 1-2 years off the proceeds, if not longer. I suspect that your boss' management will be on their knees at your door begging you to come back, and said boss (unless he's the proprietor) will likely end up blackballed.
Seriously - the State of Oregon's BOLI (Bureau of Labor and Industry) fined a bakery $150k just for
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The only way to stop vote fraud is for a person to see how their vote was counted after it was counted.
That's insufficient, as the article points out. Merely being able to detect fraud (or error) doesn't help if you can't actually correct it. What good is it to have an election whose result you have proven to be wrong, but no way to determine what the correct result is? You've destroyed any public confidence in the results (whether fictitious or not -- and fictitious confidence is actually better for democracy than no confidence) and have no recourse other than to run the election again -- most likely wit
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What good is it to have an election whose result you have proven to be wrong, but no way to determine what the correct result is?
What good is it to be able to use DNA to exclude a suspect when you can't get a match from it? Sometimes proving there is a problem, and proving where the problem had to occur will help it be known, or otherwise exclude efforts in areas not affected.
If a printout matches the ballot, and the ballot says the voter voted for Nixon, when he claims he cast his vote for Humphrey, then the problem was that the voter either is mistaken, or the ballot machine recorded the vote wrong and the voter didn't notice.
Bu
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I would suspect that the QR code has a ballot sequence number, but not how you voted included in it for just that reason. It's not a secret ballot otherwise. (This the one big problem I have with Oregon's vote-by-mail system; an abusive spouse can force a vote.)
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Actually, it *should* have your vote included, just asymmetrically encrypted using a homomorphic encryption scheme.
That way the votes can be tallied *without* revealing the individual vote. The vote tally will then be encrypted the same way, because homomorphic encryption.
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That's an interesting idea, and I appreciate the theory, but I'm concerned that it might break down. Consider that an attacker might have hundreds of ballots with known plaintext, and with the homomorphic property, I question whether you could fully mask the vote value of another ballot by including additional data such as the voter's name, polling machine, time stamp, etc.
And even if all that works, there's the question of voters trusting the system. If voters don't trust it, then it doesn't matter how p
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(This the one big problem I have with Oregon's vote-by-mail system; an abusive spouse can force a vote.)
"Go into the polling booth, take a photo of your filled out ballot. And then text it to me. I'll follow you out and make sure you put it in the box."
If they are willing to violate the law to threaten harm and abuse a spouse... what's to stop them from breaking the smaller law of taking a photo of your ballot?
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They've banned taking photos of your ballot for just that reason. There were stories of people upset that they couldn't take a photo of themselves voting for the the first female President back in 2016.
Of course, we've always had this issue with absentee voting, so no system is perfect.
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and then your employer can nicely ask for your QR code to verify you voted "successfully" -- if you know what I mean?
You don't have legal protections against someone asking this? Are you that afraid of your own shadows that your big concern is that if you take a QR code with you your employer may ask to see it? Have you no protections at all? Land of the free to bend over when asked to test the latest anal sex toy from your employer?
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You clearly are comfortable enough to not have to worry about that issue, but that doesn't make it non-existent. A person barely scraping by with little mobility or job opportunities may not feel comfortable risking their livelihood of their word against their employers (or union leader, criminal, etc).
Being legally right doesn't keep the heat on and kids fed.
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but that doesn't make it non-existent.
No but it makes it irrelevant. The number of people in such a position combined with the number of people who would actively risk facing such incredible legal action won't sway an election.
Gun control is not the answer to gun violence. Err sorry wrong narrative. The solution to intimidation is not to remove the ability to intimidate, but rather to punish those who attempt to do so.
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"Vote for $CANDIDATE or I will shoot your wife and children in the face. Talk to the police and I will shoot your wife and children in the face. Late to the polls? I'll shoot your wife and children in the face."
If candidate X doesn't win I'll shoot your wife and children in the face. Done. No need to verify who you actually voted for. Somehow your contrived example includes someone who will only intimidate you if you are actually able to verify that you did exactly as they requested. That's providing quite a lot of moral highground to the would be intimidator isn't it? Speaking of shooting people, since your solution is to remove the tools by which they commit the crime why not just take everyone's guns away? Or i
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The second one does hold as much fear, if they don't know who you voted for and are doing this on mass they have to kill every on they threatened. This to me very unlikely to be carried out. In the case of a mob boss would probably require him to kill all his subordinates if candidate X loses, not a very smart move.
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If candidate X doesn't win I'll shoot your wife and children in the face. Done. No need to verify who you actually voted for.
Your strawman is ridiculous. You cannot walk up to a random person an coerce them into changing the results of an election, though you CAN coerce them into changing THEIR vote.
Somehow your contrived example includes someone who will only intimidate you if you are actually able to verify that you did exactly as they requested.
No, of course you can be threatened regardless of the ability to verify. You can still vote however you want, though, and no one will be the wiser.
Speaking of shooting people, since your solution is to remove the tools by which they commit the crime why not just take everyone's guns away?
Impressive non-sequitur.
No, because homomorphic encryption (Score:4, Interesting)
> So, does that mean you can leave and take it with you, and then your employer can nicely ask for your QR code to verify you voted "successfully" -- if you know what I mean?
No. Your vote is asymmetrically encrypted. The QR code can be used to check that you actually *voted* and that the vote was *counted*. It does not reveal what you voted.
The homomorphic encryption system means that the votes can be tallied while fully encrypted, without revealing the individual votes. The cumulative totals are just similarly encrypted, with the same key, actually. The holder of the private key can then decrypt the totals, revealing the election result at aggregate level.
If you wanted to, you could run the homomorphic tallying on your own computer. The vote lists are supposed to be public. Anyone (with sufficiently powerful computer) can do the tallying and arrive at the same encrypted totals. You just cannot decrypt them without the private key. But when the election totals are published, *you* can *encrypt* the published totals using the *public key* and check the encrypted totals ciphertext is the same as your computed, encrypted totals.
At least, that's how I understand the theory...
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That ship sailed years ago, when in the name of inclusiveness it became standard that anybody who wanted an absentee ballot could get one by just asking with no reason given.
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So, does that mean you can leave and take it with you, and then your employer can nicely ask for your QR code to verify you voted "successfully" -- if you know what I mean?
Indeed. (Putting aside the legality of your employer asking for that). Your employer (or anyone else) can use the QR code to verify that you *voted*. But the *vote* is still encrypted, so he cannot tell for *who/what* you voted.
Because of homomorphic encryption, anyone can tally the vote. Only, the tally will be encrypted, so you cannot use it straight away.
But someone with the private key corresponding to the public key used to encrypt the vote, can decrypt the tally and publish it.
If you want to verify t
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What is far more frightening is the big data correlation being done and the sharing of that data. Even in states like Washington that don't have party registration, your employer could ea
Ballot Stuffing? (Score:1)
I can see this being useful to detect if a foreign agent has changed a vote, or stopped a vote from counting.
What about votes that are made on behalf of dead people, or people who didn't know they voted, or just plain made up? If they don't know to check the qr code (for those living beings who just didn't vote), there is no real check.
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The times it made the news, they later found out John Smith signed on line 12, as a dead John Smith, when he should have signed on line 13, which was him, a live John Smith. It is always a minor error in documentation that has no effect on the election. The other "major scandal" was a dead person who voted. She died after voting, but before the report on dead voters, so she was counted as a dead voter, when she voted while alive. The fake scandals are invented to pretend ballot s
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Also of issue is that someone will complain about one single issue when I mention 10, so why should I spend months painstakingly researching a post, only to have 90% if it ignored anyway, and the last 10% dismissed as fake news for being true. I note you didn't even specify a fact you think is false.
Re:Ballot Stuffing? (Score:5, Informative)
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Small to the point of irrelevancy. There will always be election fraud to some degree. Don't fall into a slipper slope fallacy.
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Small to the point of irrelevancy. There will always be election fraud to some degree. Don't fall into a slipper slope fallacy.
Slippery slope isn't a fallacy, it's a real thing that is observed all over the world in many different contexts from sex and drugs to politics. Calling it a fallacy doesn't make it so.
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There has never been a large scale endeavor involving humans that ever went perfectly, including a national election.
Other than the (in)famous Republican operative in NC, evidence of any significant voter fraud is conspicuously missing.
While those few hundred apparently fraudulent votes are interesting, we are talking about ballpark 0.01% votes being suspect in Chicago over the course of a decade, and even most of those we think are probably innocent mistakes. I am very interested in evidence of voter frau
So then what (Score:3)
So lets say you notice your vote is incorrect, then what?
Can you easily invalidate or change the vote? If so, pathway to hacking the vote en masse.
If not, does the system even matter?
Paper votes people, paper votes... and strong voter ID so you can be sure of who is voting.
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So lets say you notice your vote is incorrect, then what?
Can you easily invalidate or change the vote? If so, pathway to hacking the vote en masse.
If not, does the system even matter?
Paper votes people, paper votes... and strong voter ID so you can be sure of who is voting.
I think the basic idea is, yes, you should be able to easily change the vote.
Indeed, to trust the voting system, you should be able to produce as many votes as you want, submit only *one* of them and have the rest of them (destructively) decrypted.
This addresses the problem of how you can trust that the encrypted cipher is actually the vote you ordered. If you produce 200 "votes", pick a random one to actually submit and check that the 199 others actually decrypts to your vote.
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There is actually a pretty cool numberphile video of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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You want to require an ID to vote? Well, every citizen has the right to vote, and poll taxes are illegal, and voting is not restricted to the offices of the DMV, so I presume that you'll be issuing free IDs at every polling place in addition to collecting votes, right?
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Though given the necessity of having a photo ID in order to participate in most aspects of our society, I find it unlikely that a significant number of people do not have them AND intend (or are eligible) to vote. The argument that having to travel to the DMV to get a photo ID is too great a burden is as absurd as the arg
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Sixteen states with Photo ID laws [ballotpedia.org], thirteen states with any sort of free photo ID program. That's ignoring the states that require a photo ID only for first time voting or first time mail-in voting, none of which have free photo ID programs.
It's "too late" but provisional ballots are available is self-contradictory. How many
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The problem is that Photo ID laws don't meet those requirements [washingtonpost.com].
I wonder why that is...
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You keep ignoring the other half of the requirements and then asking what's the problem... the laws don't meet those requirements. The secondary documents required can't be fee-bearing while claiming that the process is free. Requiring travel to one or two places per county, while having >10x more polling places for voting, doesn't make the e
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Given a free and easy way to get the IDs to everyone who's eligible, there is no problem with requiring ID to vote. Do you have an example of a system that has such a way that's being decried?
Over engineered (Score:3)
The solution is simple:
In person voting on paper only.
Ballots only checked by machines, no hand counting.
Id check of every voter.
Put election day on Saturday or national holiday.
Stop counting 24 hrs after polls close, do not accept mysteriously found ballots days later.
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The solution is simple:
In person voting on paper only. Ballots only checked by machines, no hand counting. Id check of every voter. Put election day on Saturday or national holiday. Stop counting 24 hrs after polls close, do not accept mysteriously found ballots days later.
But then, how are we supposed to cheat?
Now we're going to have to sue to prevent these injustices you're attempting to propagate.
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You just have to be quicker to get the fake ballots into the count.... You need to plan ahead.
Re:Over engineered (Score:4, Insightful)
The solution is simple:
In person voting on paper only.
Ballots only checked by machines, no hand counting.
Id check of every voter.
Put election day on Saturday or national holiday.
Stop counting 24 hrs after polls close, do not accept mysteriously found ballots days later.
BUNK!
* In person ...
This discriminates against major groups, on both sides. The elderly, overseas troops, etc.
* Ballots checked by machine ...
Unless the machine kicks, then a human needs to look at it. If the ballot is "written" by a machine, the number of these will be really low.
* Id check every voter.
I have a "constitutional right" as a citizen to vote. I can be homeless, and I can still vote. In person voter impersonation is so close to non-existent, that this is a ruse.
* Put election day ...
Good idea. My state now has 11 days of in-person voting. The nation needs to learn from California.
* Stop counting ...
The "accurate count" is much more important than a "quick count". Count all of the ballots even if it takes time. Orange County California on election night 2018 was mostly R for US congress. After all the votes were counted, it is 100% D. No fraud. No close races. A good republican registrar of voters. Real people vote. To say that you should not count them is "abhorrent". Technology can make this go "faster", but "accuracy" is more important than speed.
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I have a "constitutional right" as a citizen to vote.
Prove you're a citizen.
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This was validated by the county ROV when I registered. In that the number of non-eligible voters is so staggeringly small (in my county: 1.6M+ active registered voters, improper votes proven: a handful, and these are not impersenations).
So the reasonable requirement is that the country prove that I am not eligible. You are asking the 99.99%+ of eligible voters to prove their innocence.
The most common form of "voter fraud" in California is "rich folks" that want to vote at both their residence, and at the
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The most common form of "voter fraud" in California is "rich folks" that want to vote at both their residence, and at their vacation homes.
Had two cases of that in my county, both Democrats who "wanted to be sure" Trump didn't carry California. It's hard to fix stupid.
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Nice dodge! Of course, with no ID, no one knows if you are a *citizen*.
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I would further add that we need to serialize ballots and retain a map between who voted and their serialized ballot. ALL ballots would be *required* to be returned by precinct election judges, voted or blank, and accounted for. Lost or destroyed ballots will have to be listed and only ballots issued to the precinct will be accepted before any votes from that precinct will be counted. The precinct judges retain custody of the ballots until they are verified and all unused and voted ballots are returned. So
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Since Californians passed the "Voters Choice Act" there is no need for this MS system. Paper ballots arrive by mail, you fill them out, sign the envelope and they're mailed back to the county registrar. The county checks your signature to verify eligibility and scans the ballots under the watchful eyes of election observers. Done. You can go on to the county or CA Secretary of State website to verify your ballot was received. On election day random recounts of paper ballots verify the machine totals. There
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Yes, there are no real people who do not drink or smoke. All those fake Mormons and fake Muslims claiming that their religion prohibits it. As if.
You want to require an ID to vote? Well, every citizen has the right to vote, and poll taxes are illegal, and voting is not restricted to the offices of the DMV, so I presume that you'll be issuing free IDs at every polling place in addition
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If you're an adult and don't have a form of government identification then you have failed as a member of society. Are voter registration cards not an ID?
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o...k... that's certainly a fact-free conclusion that does not at all resemble a tautology.
They are not [usa.gov]. For one, they lack the photo [votetexas.gov] that your ilk keep demanding.
Microsoft Elections 2020 (Score:2)
My State Got It Right The FIrst Time (Score:2)
My State (or at least my County), which hardly ever gets "Tech" right, seems to have accidentally gotten the Electronic Voting thing about as "right" as could be.
In addition to Absentee Ballots and "Provisional Ballots", which are counted 10 days after the Election, the "In Person" Voting Process goes as follows:
When you show up to the Voting location (mine is in a nearby Fire Station), you report to a table where a pair of Precinct Volunteers find your name on a printout, verify your ID against the printou
It's Microsoft, I'm guessing it works like this: (Score:2)
Microsoft isn't setting out to create an unhackable vote ... but rather a vote in which hacks would be quickly noticed.
ElectionGuard Clippy: It looks like your vote was hacked, would you like help selecting a Republican?
This assumes the voter is not the fraud (Score:2)
It's great to have vote integrity between the voting booth and the recording server. However this does nothing to address the voter being the source of fraud. It's pointless to have a verifiable vote if the voter was not eligible to vote in the first place.
We've already seen the dead vote, as well as people who had moved, or those who were otherwise ineligible.
If you want to deploy something like this it is essential that it be coupled with a Voter ID system and a verifiable means of insuring the voter is
One vote per voter not verified (Score:2)
Voter self-authenticates the ballot voted onscreen matches the ballot printed.
Voter self-validates that the vote on the authenticated ballot matches the vote chosen onscreen
Microsoft verifies that the ballot submitted votes were included in the vote tally
BUT no where does the process insure one man one vote.
SO it would not catch one man two votes at differing locations or different times even.
This is well and good... (Score:2)
I think having physical paper copies is an excellent step, so is a user having the ability to verify their vote has been counted, and so is having it open source. I can't help but think that since we've been discussing electronic voting, we've been trying to trivialize a complex process. No I'm not insinuating counting votes is a complex thing at all, but the logistics of it all.
Why do we want electronic voting? Best thing I can figure is real time updates when voting is taking place, or reducing man pow
Super idea, but ... (Score:2)
Keep it simple ... (Score:2)
As I wrote before, we don't need newfangled technology solutions for something that has worked for generations.
Nearly all Computerized Voting is flawed, because it cannot meet the following criteria, which have to all be satisfied together:
- Anonymity: a ballot cannot be traced to an individual, so there is no pressure or reprisal
- Auditability: ballots can be recounted with witnesses from various candidates/parties. Software on the other hand can be modified by one corrupt programmer or installer for a bri
*sigh* (Score:2)
Gotta love America, making things more complicated (Score:3)
Counting votes doesn't need to be complicated. Plenty of democracies around the world do this quickly and easily with something called... pen and paper, and you have scrutineers from the various parties in place to observe the counting to make sure nothing untoward is happening. Easy.
Only the USA seems to have made a mountain out of a mole hill when it comes to voting. It's hard to fathom.
Re: (Score:3)
You do realize that the software in question is open source, yes?
Re: (Score:2)
Lol, there are no remaining questions, because the important one has been answered already:
Can thousands of voting locations manage to install a bunch of printers, make sure they all work, trouble-shoot them effectively when they don't, and deal with jams, toner out, running out of paper, etc.?
And the answer is no.
Can thousands of voting locations get stacks of pre-printed ballots in and boxes of pens to mark on them? Generally yes.
Paper spam makes USPS money, be glad of it. (Score:2)
Junk mail postage is a money maker for USPS, reducing pressure to raise prices.
Electronic spam is pure garbage.
Re:Verifying Votes is Very Dangerous (Score:4, Informative)
This Numberphile video actually explains it pretty well, without MS marketing spin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The point is: You can verify that your vote counted, because you can find your encrypted vote on a public list.
When the tally of said list is published, you and everyone else (who accepts the math behind it) can verify that the tally is actually the vote total of the list.
You just cannot get the individual votes.
Re:Verifying Votes is Very Dangerous (Score:4)