Microsoft Teams Up With Voting Machine Maker To Let Voters Track Ballots (bloomberg.com) 108
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Hart InterCivic Inc., one of the largest voting machine makers in the U.S., will incorporate Microsoft's vote-tracking system into its in-person machines, adding a layer of security that may help reduce heightened attacks on the legitimacy of U.S. election results. The program will allow people to confirm their votes were counted after they're cast. The partnership makes Hart the first manufacturer in the U.S. to allow local voting jurisdictions to incorporate ballot-tracking software into machines, the companies said Thursday in a joint statement. The program will let voters track their choices and offer security experts using Hart's system the opportunity to independently audit results using Microsoft's ElectionGuard software.
The technology would not change the process for voters. In most cases, voters would still fill out their ballots the same way they did in November 2020, either using a touchscreen or by hand-marking a ballot. Once they submit their ballots, voters will receive a piece of paper with a verification or QR code, which they can input into their local election jurisdiction's website to track their ballot through the tabulation process. The process is done without revealing the content of the voter's ballot while maintaining the privacy and secrecy of their selections, according to the statement. The system will also allow third-parties, including political parties or news organizations, to write their own programs to confirm election tallies.
The technology would not change the process for voters. In most cases, voters would still fill out their ballots the same way they did in November 2020, either using a touchscreen or by hand-marking a ballot. Once they submit their ballots, voters will receive a piece of paper with a verification or QR code, which they can input into their local election jurisdiction's website to track their ballot through the tabulation process. The process is done without revealing the content of the voter's ballot while maintaining the privacy and secrecy of their selections, according to the statement. The system will also allow third-parties, including political parties or news organizations, to write their own programs to confirm election tallies.
Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
The company that just had the embarrassing SolarWinds hack? Why do we trust them to run software on voting machines?
Can't wait for MS Vote 2024 that votes for you based on your browser history.
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Don't worry... "without revealing the content" (Score:3)
This is ridiculous. Pretending that you can validate your voting choice "without revealing the content of the voter's ballot" doen't validate your voting at all.
Yes, I know that evidence of a voting choice allows votes to be sold... but this is theater pretending that no other vulnerabilities exist.
The only way is for the voter to see and verify a punched card with their voting choice - but no identifying info - before going into a general hopper for machine counting. Security only involves the hoppers. The
Re: Microsoft? (Score:3)
What could possibly go wrong?
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I fail to see how ballots can be counted using any method that keeps the vote secret. No matter how you do it, if you place a vote and can't reconcile each vote to the person that made it, in SOME way the method can be gamed or controlled by those in power in ways that cannot be traced. Examples using the current system of paper ballots counted by machine. There is no TRUE way to verify the machine count. Someone pwned the machine software? Ok.. count the ballots, then it's possible ballots were added or re
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This at least allows each voter to verify that their vote was counted as they marked it. So that's a step in the right direction.
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The real question is who else can verify that the vote was counted.
Never mind that you won't know for sure just how your vote was counted anyway.
If the bad guys really want to fuck up an election, all they have to do is tell you that your vote was counted as a vote for whoever you voted for, while really counting it for whoever the bad guys want to win the election....
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There are many sophisticated ways to cheat. But they all require sophistication.
An unsophisticated way to cheat is to take a box of ballots from an opponent-leaning precinct and toss it in the trash.
This at least makes low-tech ballot dumping harder.
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Most of the cheating happens long before election day. Gerrymandering, taking away polling stations, making the queues excessively long and preventing people helping those waiting in line. Requiring ID that your opponent's supporters are unlikely to have.
Most of the cheating is done openly and brazenly.
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This at least allows each voter to verify that their vote was counted as they marked it. So that's a step in the right direction.
No. It allows each voter to verify that their vote was recorded as marked. It does nothing to indicate if the vote was counted correctly.
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How do you know the system counted it as you marked it, or... if it isn't just telling you that is was counted as you marked it? Any computer system without physical ballots is open to fraud.
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What happens if the vote was counted and then the vote verifying software screws up? Peoples votes are counted and they're left believing they didn't get counted.
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There's no perfect system, but physical ballots, always kept within sight of poll watchers of all parties, is about as good as it gets.
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I am betting you are not good at math. There are a ton of ways to check ballots, all of which check for fraud, all without revealing the vote.
Here is one example. You take your ballot to a voting machine. It displays the current total for each canidate before you vote. Then you feed the ballot in. It updates, and prints 2 copies of your receipt, listing the time, ID number for your machine, and total AFTER you have voted.
You keep one copy of the receipt. The other copy, along with your ballot is pla
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I require my workers to vote together and show me their receipts.
By looking at the totals it gives me a good idea of who they voted for.
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Benford's law does not work for elections.
I split the voters up into area of about equal population lets say 10000 each
In a two party system I would expect the votes counts to be somewhere around the 4or 5 for the first digit. I would not expect to see many 1s.
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You could give everyone a receipt with a cryptographic hash on it, that can later be collected and verified. Another nice feature is that the voter can verify their vote was correctly counted via a website by entering the hash.
One possible issue is coercion, i.e. someone could demand to see your receipt to check you voted the way they wanted you to. That could be mitigated by not showing which way you voted, only that your vote was counted.
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That is why there are things like multiple poll workers, poll watchers, chains of custody, etc. Nothing's perfect, but if we had a multi-party politics, it would be fairly hard to game the system.
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Clippy will be glad to fact check your politicians' claims for you.
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Please direct me to the company that will 100% guarantee security.
*Universe achieves Entropy*
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So pick the company with a terrible record?
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And whose founder was involved in many 5g and chip implant conspiracies. I'm not saying he's guilty, only that this plan is a recipe for really bad PR.
If MS were smart, they wouldn't touch any politics-related projects. Nadella, run!
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There's no company or government I would trust. A good system is one where it doesn't require my trust, or at least I can confidently delegate the trust to poll watchers who know what is going on.
Cool solution for some people. (Score:2)
And what product are we supposed to buy to read this QRcode? Not everyone has a smartphone. There's still plenty of folks using the flipphone.
Do we all have Internet access in the USA now?
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Solar Winds was the one with the compromised code. Microsoft discovered it.
Re:Microsoft? (Score:4, Informative)
You have as much proof as Trump's entire team of lawyers did: none. You know that, right? When Trump's lawyers went before judges, including some Trump hand-picked himself, the judges asked, "Do you have any proof of election fraud?" And the lawyers, knowing that lying to a judge gets you disbarred, ALL answered "Nope! No evidence whatsoever!" and then the judge dismissed the case. Every time.
Not one time did any of Trump's lawyers actually claim, in front of a judge, that there was ANY election fraud. Yeah. Let that sink in.
The only people practicing election fraud are republicans, and of course they are projecting their crimes onto democrats. That's what GOP stands for: gaslight, obstruct, project.
But you know that. I'm convinced that republican voters are all in on this. You all know, but you don't care. Because you despise democracy, and love nothing more than your own unearned power and privilege.
Re: Microsoft? (Score:1, Insightful)
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So that's why Democrats are pushing so hard for vote harvesting? It's much easier to knock on someone's door and tell them if they don't vote for X right now, then Y will be elected and they're a "racist". They want to be able to fear monger for votes on the spot rather than run on issues that motivate people to actually go out and vote for something that means something to them. Progressives are less than 10% of the population and many progressive policies that are being pushed by Democrats actually pol
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That never happened. The judges through out the cases on various technicalities... lack of standing, that it was too early ( in the case of some pre-election cases) or too late (for the post election cases ), lack of jurisdiction, every excuse under the sun EXCEPT looking at the evidence.
Re: Microsoft? (Score:2)
Surely in that case we should be seeing new cases with the proper evidence in front of judges now right?
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Weird how these fucking numb-nuts keep ranting about "the judges never saw the evidence" but they don't, themselves, cite this apparently very credible and important evidence in their posts.
I read around the gun-nut forums, being one, and those retards just keep saying shit like "No way Biden won", "I don't know any Biden voters", and "A Potato won the election, no way!" as their hard-hitting evidence of voter fraud. Then they sprinkle in words whose very existence they imagine to be "proof" of fraud, words
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No, because there is no remedy at this point. Courts won't take cases for which there is no possible remedy. Even if we found unequivocal evidence the election was stolen at this point, there is no legal mechanism to reverse it. Once the electoral college has voted, that's it.
Re: Microsoft? (Score:3)
That cannot be true for every possible case and there are clearly more than one remedy than overturning the election. Release of information, change of regulation or declaration of a law or practice unconstitutional. If the evidence is there a lawyer can find a case to use it in.
Evidence the presidential fraud to such a degree is the greatest political story in a century, who's sitting on this information?
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That's why a lot of states are putting through new legislation, and Arizona is doing an election audit. The reality is, whilst there is quite a lot of evidence, the system was designed to destroy evidence. Once the envelope is separated from the ballot for example, you can't unscramble the egg of putting them back together to check stuff. And there are a lot of statistically impossible things that happened, but trying to explain to someone from statistical math why this can't be right, isn't as compelling a
Re: Microsoft? (Score:3)
Okay but where is this statistical evidence? Who cares what the public finds compelling it's a court that matters. If the evidence available does not stand up to any scrutiny in front of a judge should we be making voting legislation from it? If it's that clear where is it? If you can't piece anything together why have audits at all? Where is evidence of this assumption you cannot verify election integrity after the fact?
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And yet, said evidence could be used to sway the majority of the public who think you are all traitors. But it never appears. Odd.
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Wrong again, bud. The judges asked the lawyers if they had any evidence, and the lawyers said no.
If you hadn't Gerrymandered the shit out of our electoral map, you Republicans wouldn't even be in power. You only have the power you do because you cheat.
Oh, you're trying to use my own argument as a comeback? If I wanted my own come back, I'd ask your mom.
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You are arguing with a literal, clinical moron who thinks Bill Gates still runs Microsoft and that's the fucking very least of his misapprehensions.
Sometimes we tend to see fairly coherent words spelled correctly and put into well formed sentences and make the assumption that the person writing it must have at least average intelligence. The problem is that there are various mental defects, often emotional in nature, that can turn a measured 105 IQ into an effective 90 IQ.
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You think the AC is another 10110110101/OMBad sock puppet? That guy is pretty dumb...
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If you hadn't Gerrymandered the shit out of our electoral map, you Republicans wouldn't even be in power. You only have the power you do because you cheat.
The Senate (which cannot be Gerrymandered) is equally balanced now and was Republican-controlled previously.
I am not disagreeing with you, but Gerrymandering doesn't explain everything.
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Every state, no matter how small, gets two senators. That gives a similar effect as gerrymandering because rural voters, who make up the majority in some states, skew conservative.
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These were civil cases. So many of those thrown out had heard "evidence" in discovery.
It will happen (Score:1)
Re: Not good enough (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Not good enough (Score:2)
If nothing else it will happen when you start tracking your ballot.
Re: Not good enough (Score:4, Interesting)
The article states explicitly that they intend to track the fact that your ballot was counted, and not the content of the ballot. Everyone who has a clue about voting understands the strict necessity of public disclosure of how many valid ballots were cast and fully understands the even stricter necessity for secrecy of the selections on the ballots.
Once they submit their ballots, voters will receive a piece of paper with a verification or QR code, which they can input into their local election jurisdiction's website to track their ballot through the tabulation process. The process is done without revealing the content of the voter's ballot while maintaining the privacy and secrecy of their selections, according to the statement.
It's easy to describe, but expensive to implement properly: After an election, there should be two stacks of items, containing the same number of items:
1) voter authentication cards, each with the identity of a voter that can be validated and cannot be associated with a specific ballot
2) Ballots, each of which cannot be associated with a specific voter
These two sets of items must be treated as carefully as any other resource that has national security implications, such as strict chain of custody, publicly viewable and recorded tracing of every movement of every item.
We know from recent experience that people do not react well to being disenfranchised, or even the possibility that they may have been disenfranchised.
Re: Not good enough (Score:2)
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Until November 2020, I was OK with the idea of having machine-countable (always paper, always human-readable) ballots being scanned and counted during the day and reported reasonably quickly after polls close. Follow up with audits of randomly selected precincts or subdivisions. For close elections, hand recounts repeated in public and with all interested parties watching the entire process.
Beginning last November, I've decided the political environment has been rendered so toxic that the only way I see out
No recount equal original count (Score:2)
If recounting ballots always returns different numbers, then 'two stacks of items, containing the same number of items' will also never happen.
I'm always surprised that more people are not concerned that recounting ballots ends up with different numbers. The second count is no more reliable than the first. And really, there should be an automatic 3rd count to verify the differences in each count as negligibly smaller than the difference between winner and loser. Of course, that goes out the window with m
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There's always some questionable ballots. That X seems to be centred on candidate A to one counter, another disagrees and on the second count the vote is thrown out, or similar.
It's the close elections that get tricky, if someone wins by one vote, those spoiled ballots become important. Seems that about 20 years back this was a real problem in Florida.
I'm glad I live in a country with simple elections, usually I vote for one candidate, out of a list of a dozen or less, and it is hard to accidentally fuck up
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In a world where ballots are being converted to votes for Demcorats regardless of who you chose [wmur.com], you need to be able to verify WHO you voted for was properly accounted for.
A sleeve for your vaccine card coverts your votes to Democrats? Wow I'm really not up on my conspiracies.
Re:Not good enough (Score:4, Informative)
Well that's fucking nuts bud. Your conspiracies just keep getting dumber and dumber.
Let me just ask you, if there is all this proof, why did none of Trump's lawyers actually present any before a judge? Literally every time a judge asked a Trump lawyer "Do you have any proof of election fraud?" they all answered "Nope! None at all!"
Why is that?
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I did, it's all made up bullshit. Phlogiston makes more sense. Phrenology is more scientific.
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Loosing by ~8M votes is a wider margin than Bush won in 2000, and (Democrats) did not resort to whiny conspiracy theories.
And, Democrats settled for only ONE recount.
There were at least THREE verified recounts in 2020; and REAL Republicans acknowledged the count,
yet reTrumplicans continue to piss-and-moan because they cannot fathom actually loosing.
If these reTrumplicans cannot handle REAL democracy, then they need to move to
Oh puh-leeze (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft is picked to diddle with voting machine? Really? 30 years of bad code, countless bugs and exploits in their own products isn't enough history to rule those guys out?
Re: Oh puh-leeze (Score:3)
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Microsoft is picked to diddle with voting machine? Really? 30 years of bad code, countless bugs and exploits in their own products isn't enough history to rule those guys out?
What does business still run on?
You have your answer.
As for your other question, the answer is Yes. We're that fucking stupid.
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I can hear the orange guy now: "I toldja it was all rigged, votes were flipped and now we get the Blue States of Death making job killing rules. Bigly sad."
Blockchain Voting Systems (Score:3)
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Based on recent events in U.S. elections...
Recent events? We have been questioning election integrity for as long as humans have known how to lie.
...I hope we begin migrating to a blockchain based voting solution that is public, auditable, and can report results instantly.
Sounds great but I'm not sure what makes you assume ANY of that shit, is a priority for any elected representative.
If it were, we would have fixed this many elections ago. If the government can mandate who and who cannot build encryption hardware to secure classified communications, they sure as shit can figure out a way to secure a damn voting machine that has one fucking job.
They don't want to.
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Here in Canada, there is almost never any questioning the elections. One thing that helps is that they are simple. There's a Federal election where I vote for one representative, and there's a Provincial election on a different day where I vote for one representative.
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There's a difference between a secure machine, and a machine that is seen to be secure. It's fundamentally important for the democracy that the counting is SEEN to be secure, and nobody except a few dozen boffins knows what the heck goes on inside those machines.
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Which is why they use paper ballots. The voter must be able to see that their choices are reflected in a ballot that can be hand-counted publicly and in a way that during the count, as many witnesses as wish to observe, can watch and validate the process.
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There's a difference between a secure machine, and a machine that is seen to be secure. It's fundamentally important for the democracy that the counting is SEEN to be secure, and nobody except a few dozen boffins knows what the heck goes on inside those machines.
Perhaps it's more fundamentally important for those wanting to "preserve democracy" to understand they're not fooling anyone but themselves at this point. Children have been hacking these voting machines for years. Who is dumb enough to even believe these are "SEEN" to be secure? And hell, who cares how secure they are when the other 90% of the corruption seems to happen outside of that little black box anyway. Lot more to fix here than a simple voting machine. You couldn't even go back to paper ballot
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If we can't agree on people voting with ID, how the heck will you convince people they need to work with blockchain, with all the authentication that entails?
Given what we're seeing in Az (Score:5, Insightful)
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To be fair Jan 6th is the 3rd or 4th of these coups. They've just been happening at the state level so there hasn't been much press.
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What are you seeing in Az?
I'm aware that they have a forensic audit taking place, and I think that it's already identified breaches in the chain of custody, but it hasn't reported back yet so I wouldn't want to accuse the Secretary of State of breaking the law. Yet.
I did notice though that the legislature have had to act to prevent her interfering with an audit of the election she oversaw. That's not a good look.
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The "audit" they're conducting in Arizona is a breach in the chain of custody.
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Given the number of legal challenges raised to try and prevent the audit taking place I think it's pretty clear that the audit is legal and being done in full accordance with the law.
You may draw your own conclusions regarding the constant attempts to prevent it.
Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
The company single-handedly responsible for normalizing the idea that electronics can catch diseases, and for enabling terrorism to attack infrastructure is now moving to get involved in voting?
How about hell no?
We can track paper (Score:2)
We can't track invisible bits traveling light speed down a wire.
It's entirely bogus. We need to demand plain old paper ballots and end this stupid argument.
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Thank-you! exactly, this is the way to have security plus some counting automation. I think the
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The ballot pages have no human markings in the vote choice section, and the font and grammar are programmed in to the reader, so they can be machine read without error.
Oh for fuck's sake. That's not giving him 'both'. That's giving him the illusion of security while still leaving the entire process vulnerable to malicious interference or plain incompetence in the counting machines and recount processes.
For example https://news.yahoo.com/folded-... [yahoo.com]
How about: vote on a paper form. Count that paper form in a large hall with representatives of the candidates (and their parties) and independent observers present. Tally the counts by hand. Verify and check the tallies. Validate
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My words come across like I was responding to
they can be machine read without error.
I made nothing up. The only crap in my post was the part I quoted.
Say what? (Score:3)
Once they submit their ballots, voters will receive a piece of paper with a verification or QR code, which they can input into their local election jurisdiction's website to track their ballot through the tabulation process. The process is done without revealing the content of the voter's ballot while maintaining the privacy and secrecy of their selections
So if the process doesn't show who the vote was tabulated for, how does the voter know it wasn't stolen? It's fine to know that a vote was counted on your behalf, but won't voters want to see that it was actually received for the candidate they chose?
Which would probably open up another can of worms when people start claiming their vote was changed.
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You don't. This is by design.
The same process that could be used to confirm that your vote for Candidate D was logged could also be used by your abusive spouse/employer to produce proof that you voted for Candidate F, or else.
The way you help ensure the counting process itself isn't corrupt is by volunteering to work for your city/county elections.
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You don't. This is by design.
So what's the point then?
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The point is you have a physical ballot that if push comes to shove, ordinary people can count and verify under the watch of poll watchers from the major parties without any suggestion that a machine is cheating... and yet you can also count it by machine and get a fast result.
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windows auto updates on voteing day lead to long (Score:2)
windows auto updates on voteing day lead to long lines at the polling place.
voters at on point had to wait 30 min to 1 hour to cast there vote do the voteing system rebooting in the middle of the day.
I'm less concerned... (Score:2)
I'm less concerned about whether my vote is counted, than if all the dead people's votes are NOT counted.
Re:I'm less concerned... (Score:4, Informative)
Like this?
"Man arrested in wife's Murder now accused of voting for Trump in her name." https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-... [go.com] ..."
But maybe it was OK. "... adding that his wife 'was going to vote for Trump anyway,'
Hart InterCivic - Voting Machines You Can Trust (Score:2)
Or not.
"Texas has a long history of problems with Hart eSlate voting machines"
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10... [techcrunch.com]
"“We have heard from a number of people voting on Hart eSlate machines that when they voted straight ticket, it appeared to them that the machine had changed one or more of their selections to a candidate from a different party."
Hart is headquartered in ... Texas. You know - the state that likes to file lawsuits with the US Supreme Court telling other states how to run their elections: https [texastribune.org]
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If the other states didn't break the fucking law then they wouldn't need Texas to tell them not to.
The problem is the humans. (Score:2)
Good. Demonstratint election security is important (Score:3)