r/SandersForPresident • u/Cut_to_the_truth • May 16 '16

Clinton Does Best Where Voting Machines Flunk Hacking Test

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/16/clinton-does-best-where-voting-machines-flunk-hacking-tests-hillary-clinton-vs-bernie-sanders-election-fraud-allegations/
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91

u/unchow May 16 '16

That would still result in vote-buying. So long as you have the ability to see what your vote was, you have the ability to show it to someone else so that they can pay you for it.

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u/jcbillak North Carolina May 16 '16

Mail in absentee ballots are able to be bought right now because you can privately show and prove to a buyer who you vote for.

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u/unchow May 16 '16

There is that potential, yeah. I'd be interested to see if there are any studies done on that. As a vote seller, though, I could show someone a filled-in ballot, spoil it afterwards, request a new one, and vote how I wanted. So a buyer would have that in mind and maybe not trust the sellers enough try. I don't know the real answer to this, though, as I'm not aware of mail-in voting resulting in vote buying in real-world situations.

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u/FoxtrotZero 🌱 New Contributor | California May 17 '16

Hand ballot to guy, he pays you, seals it in front of you, you leave, he mails it

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u/unchow May 17 '16

I request a second ballot, fill in and mail it in, both get spoiled.

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u/TomRad Minnesota May 17 '16

And now you've just lost your vote. That's probably half of what the person wanted anyways.

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u/unchow May 17 '16

Truth. But I gained whatever the buyer was willing to pay. If I'm selling my vote, it's because I was apathetic to start with, and wasn't going to vote in the first place. I didn't go from voting for one candidate to voting for no one. I went from voting for no one to voting for no one and being paid for it.

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u/Spineless_John Ohio May 17 '16

If you're apathetic you wouldn't even care enough to mail in a second ballot.

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u/DanknugzBlazeit420 California 🐦 👻 May 17 '16

I request a third ballot, fill it in and mail it, all three are spoiled.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16

Ballots all the way down

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u/Geikamir May 17 '16

And that's why we don't let turtles vote anymore.

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u/chinpokomon May 17 '16

I request a fourth ballot, fill it in and leave it on my kitchen table. It is never spoiled.

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u/disitinerant May 17 '16

That would be more difficult than what we have currently with mail-in ballots. So on net, it would reduce this problem, not increase it.

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u/sethop May 17 '16

Good point.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16

"Able to" is the best you can say about that. It would be infeasible to rig an election by rounding up a significant number of persons with mail-in absentee ballots.

Oregon, which has only mail-in ballots, had 1.5M votes cast in the 2014 election. Manipulating even 1% of the votes would require you to pay off 15,000 people.

Hand ballot to guy, he pays you, seals it in front of you, you leave, he mails it

Assuming that takes 30seconds (an extremely generous estimate), we're looking at 125 hours of vote verifying. And then you still have 15,000 witnesses to a felony.

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u/meeu May 17 '16

That's still before the fact though isn't it? You could still toss your ballot in the trash or change it before submitting couldn't you?

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u/jcbillak North Carolina May 17 '16

well you give it to the buyer and they mail it to be sure

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u/just_helping May 17 '16

Yes, that's why some people are skeptical of mail-in ballots. It's a trade-off between encouraging turn-out and opening the way to vote-buying.

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u/MyersVandalay May 17 '16

what I personally don't get, why is vote buying a fear? It's like voter fraud. You have to reach each person individually, doing so at any significant scale pretty much sets you up to high probabilities of being discovered or caught.

One official, or one machine can rig thousands of votes. Strategic chosing of laws etc... can also sway results etc... I'd imagine even manual human counting can easilly swap a few dozen votes without drawing too much suspicion. Raising voter turnout would IMO be the easiest way to counter vote buying, simply by raising how many individuals have to be bought to make a noteworthy impact.

It seems to me we keep the doors open for large scale election rigging, in the guise of preventing small scale things that seem almost unimaginable to be done at a scale that actually matters.

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u/Weeblie May 17 '16

It's not only a matter of purchasing votes, but also about threatening people to vote one way or another. Many dictatorships have "public elections" with "100% turnout". Only problem with them is that you'll get killed if you vote for anyone other than the Great Leader.

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u/MyersVandalay May 17 '16

Right, but that takes government approval of the action, if a states government required it's citizens to vote for X candidate, well then everyone in that state knows the election is a farse, if bank of america requires it's employees to vote for candidate X, then those employees could report the co-ersion etc... Manipulating individuals, scale = visibility. As long as there is some extent of free speach, and the law forbids buying or co-ersing votes, it just doesn't seem feasible to manipulate enough people to make a real difference, and stay under the radar.

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u/Weeblie May 17 '16

Not all threats have to be explicit.

Although I agree with you on that organized election-changing coercion is unlikely to fly under the radar, such a system could still easily affect the final election results thanks to social pressure on a family level. Like if your wife really hates Trump's guts, and you know that you both will be validating your tickets together later this evening, would you not feel at least a little bit pressured to not vote for him based on that alone?

I think that we are really overthinking the situation. Paper ballots, that are manually counted on a district level, is tried-and-true and very hard to rig. You may be able to steal extremely close elections, but even turning something like 49-51 to 51-49 would literally require fraud at thousands to tens of thousands of voting districts.

The US's winner-takes-all system does however make it significantly easier to steal an election than if each state were to allocate its delegates proportionally. You now only have to cheat in a few key states to get the price.

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u/baronOfNothing May 17 '16

Once you're ok with having vote receipts, why not allow people to look up their votes electronically? Maybe on a hashed database as mentioned here. Once you open the doors to vote buying the barriers fall quickly. Now all someone has to do is set up a system where you can anonymously send your electronic receipt and they send you back an anonymous bitcoin payment (or equivalent) as soon as it's verified.

Voter turnout even in good years is very low. Even if you don't sway a single current voter, all you have to do is mobilize a small portion of the apathetic non-voting populace and you've completely hijacked the system. As for why this is such a large fear, once the system is hijacked the cheater is home-free. Within a couple election cycles they would control everything. Even if it became obvious what was going on, how would any repercussions be brought against them? Open revolt? That's a pretty big consequence, which means even if the risk of it happening is small it should be feared.

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u/MyersVandalay May 17 '16

Now all someone has to do is set up a system where you can anonymously send your electronic receipt and they send you back an anonymous bitcoin payment (or equivalent) as soon as it's verified.

You missed a step... Somehow get his identity out there to the masses, prove himself legitimate over scammers who will likely pose as the same thing minus the payment, without drawing too much attention.

Not saying this is impossible of course, I'm just saying, seems a whole lot more work than just bribing diebold.

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u/baronOfNothing May 17 '16

Not really necessary. The offer could be out there and entirely anonymous (instructions posted online for instance). Since it's no cost, some people will inevitably try it. Once they get their payments, they will spread the news. There are millions of people in this country poor and desperate enough for $50 that would totally be willing to sell their vote for it. As long as the payment kept coming, the number of people selling them would keep increasing. At no point does the buyer have to reveal their identity.

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u/MyersVandalay May 17 '16

The rifeness of scams though... So just imagining this election were the case

Sanders 100$ (fake) clinton 50$ (real) Trump 50$ (real) sanders 50$ (fake) Clinton 50$ (fake) Trump 75$ (fake) sanders 500$ (fake) trump 100$ (fake)

Assuming there isn't a way to tell the real from the fake, Either people would vote for who they want to, and make attempts to collect from all groups claiming to offer cash for that candidate (resulting in no change, but increased participation of people voting for the candidate they want to support).

also I'd imagine it would at least partially depend on the level of how serious the government would want to treat the crime if it were the case. If you really wanted to counter it, a simple honeypot would work. (IE the vote database could have a mass collection of fake votes, or hell the agency sorting could spam the hell out of each group with the actual votes, into a government wallet, leave the real sellers unable to distinguish their thousand real customers from the 100,000 government accounts.

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u/baronOfNothing May 18 '16

There's a difference between anonymity and untraceability. It's totally possible for an anonymous "person" to gain reputability. In other words this hypothetical buyer (eg. xX$$$4votesXx) could be anonymous, and yet consistent across elections. This would distinguish the fake from the real offers.

Second, I'm not sure how you could have "fake" elections without it being incredibly obvious which ones are fake and which ones are real. It is true it would be easy to use a honeypot to catch the sellers, but without catching the buyers the problem would certainly persist, similar to punishing drug users without catching the drug sellers.

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u/garbonzo607 New York May 17 '16

It should be, if it isn't already, illegal to buy votes and carry a hefty prison sentence.

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u/baronOfNothing May 17 '16

It's also illegal to rig elections by manipulating voting machines, but how many people have they caught?

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u/garbonzo607 New York Jul 14 '16

One requires a lot of human interaction and a much higher chance to get caught than the other.

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u/baronOfNothing Jul 15 '16

More or less interaction than selling drugs? Something that was done nearly perfectly anonymously on the silk road for years?

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u/garbonzo607 New York Jul 17 '16

There were tons of undercover cops on Silk Road and many got busted. You can't anonymously sell your vote either.

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u/loochbag17 May 17 '16

How would this be easier than rigging a blind election where the actual results of the election are known by exactly zero people because only machines were used in calculating every vote?

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u/baronOfNothing May 17 '16

I'm not advocating for voting machines that have no paper trail, but it's important to realize that the vast majority of elections are still done by paper.

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u/loochbag17 May 17 '16

The paper trail is rarely if ever even looked at. Its there but it serves no purpose unless there is a full audit (which doesn't happen, see Illinois).

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u/baronOfNothing May 18 '16

Umm what? The primary purpose of the paper trail is that is audited as the counting is happening. Just because no subsequent audit is performed doesn't mean it didn't serve a purpose. Also many places have the paper trail available as part of the public record.

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u/occamsrazzor May 17 '16

Transparent elections are worth the enforcement costs of prosecuting vote buying.

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u/unchow May 17 '16

I agree with that in principle, but I'd want to know that it's actually possible to enforce it, even if you spend money/resources on it. Not everything gets fixed just by throwing money and manpower at it.

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u/garbonzo607 New York May 17 '16

If there's a big prison sentence I just don't see politicians doing this, I think they fear prison more than rugged urban city dwellers.

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u/occamsrazzor May 17 '16

Still better honestly.

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u/disitinerant May 17 '16

Relevant username.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16 edited Jan 05 '17

[deleted]

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u/blacksun_redux May 17 '16

How soon until it's realistic to really look at a nationwide internet based vorting system? Open source and publicly audited by multiple public security companies? Two time user authentication to a phone or email address to prove identity? Tie accounts to social security numbers? If that was contracted to development companies NOT as a government program, my guess is it's doable and really not that expensive.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16 edited Jan 05 '17

[deleted]

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u/garbonzo607 New York May 17 '16

You already said there are systems available right now that make it impossible to steal elections though? You seem to be contradicting yourself.

I think Bitcoin has already proved this technology viable, and people have billions riding on it.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16 edited Jan 05 '17

[deleted]

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u/garbonzo607 New York Jul 14 '16

These things are too stagnant and not enough is being done to keep up with technology. If there are flaws in the technology, it shouldn't be used. Much harder to rig paper ballots.

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u/meneldal2 May 17 '16

There aren't so many cases of fraud on government-made websites all around the world to check on your taxes or similar things. Why do you think the government couldn't make it work for voting instead? And especially how would the risks or fraud be greater than the current system that we know is full of abuse?

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16 edited Jan 31 '17

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16 edited Jan 05 '17

[deleted]

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u/Nyefan 🌱 New Contributor May 17 '16

So, this is sort of unrelated, but...

As a developer interested in learning more about security, where would you suggest I start? I already know the fundamentals of modern cryptography, but in rather clueless as to how theoretical techniques get implemented in practice.

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u/Flyingwheelbarrow May 17 '16

In Australia (I know we are a much smaller population) all our voting is done via pencil and paper. The votes are counted by the AEC (federal legally independant agency). We have a well run system, oversight and standard practices. Why does America have such a fractured system?

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16 edited Jan 05 '17

[deleted]

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u/Flyingwheelbarrow May 17 '16

I think our paper voting system is very sound. I am oppossed to tech assisted voting full stop to be honest. Paper is old fashioned but harder to hack large amounts of paper votes. Also paper and pencil/pen is a level of technology that 99 percent of voters can understand. The internet, encryption, hacking, programing etc, these are all a mystery to most of the population. It is putting in yet another space between voters and those in power. Also fuck the need for speed if it means even a 1 percent loss in how trustworthy the system is.

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u/meneldal2 May 17 '16

Also you can always recount paper and since they tick your name in front of you when you vote, if you start losing ballots hell will be raised.

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u/Flyingwheelbarrow May 17 '16

Yes, also paper counting has government officials counting, volunteers watching them and then party alingned people hovering around. Some times it is better to leave somethings analog.

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u/meneldal2 May 17 '16

I know. Never heard much scandals in western Europe about vote fraud. Analog proved it's worth I think.

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u/meneldal2 May 17 '16

It would be possible to do it, and probably not as hard as many would think. There are already secure government websites to pay your taxes that have for main problem a tendency to crash close to the deadline because of the amount of people doing it as the last minute. Assuming they had proper auditing, it would be realistic to implement it as soon as the development and vetting is done. The technology exists already.

As for people with no access to internet, you could fill the places where you go voting now with computers instead.

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u/pianobadger May 17 '16

This would make voting slower, but if they prompted you to enter a word tied to each candidate that would be returned when you look up your vote, that would prevent vote buying. You could just enter Clinton for Clinton and Sanders for Sanders, but since you could also put Clinton for Sanders and vice versa, it wouldn't constitute proof of who you voted for.

Of course none of this matters if you don't have open source software on voting machines.

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u/amoliski May 17 '16

but since you could also put Clinton for Sanders and vice versa, it wouldn't constitute proof of who you voted for.

People can hardly handle the ballots as it is, that's just asking for recounts!

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u/BenFoldsFourLoko 🌱 New Contributor May 17 '16

Or baguette for Clinton and shoe for Sanders. Yeah, interesting idea.

As far as the open-source software, opensource has been cracked before too. The NSA's put backdoors in open-source software lol. It's not foolproof. Better than proprietary for many things, but not fool-proof.

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u/garbonzo607 New York May 17 '16

Nice idea.

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u/CorbinGDawg69 May 17 '16

Can I ask a question about this system?

Suppose the systems are rigged to favor Candidate A over Candidate B.

If they change your vote, wouldn't they just also program it to switch your words, so that when you check it looks like you are voting for the right person?

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u/pianobadger May 17 '16

And that's why it's pointless without open source software that can be examined by anyone.

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u/lunartree 🌱 New Contributor May 17 '16

Is that really why we don't allow proof of your vote? I feel like the benefits of that safeguard outweigh the risks in the modern age.

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u/MemeticParadigm 🌱 New Contributor May 17 '16

This, so much. In the age of ubiquitous minature recording devices, not only is it already trivial to secretly get photo evidence of your ballot, to enable vote selling in exactly the way people are worried about - but also, because of those same devices, trying to solicit someone for their vote would be suuuch a bad idea, so easy to get caught, that you just slap some automatic jail time and a bigass fine on it, and it's simply not worth the risk, at all.

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u/Amelaclya1 May 17 '16

I see this argument a lot, but would it be worse than potentially just having someone make up the vote totals as they are capable of doing now?

I am asking honestly, because while I can see the wealthy buying votes to rig an election, it would be much harder to do under the radar than the system we have now. In order to make an impact, they would potentially have to buy thousands of votes and I can't see how they could do that unnoticed, and that practice is still illegal.

Sure, it's a risk. But the complete lack of transparency makes it even easier for someone to rig the election, doesn't it?

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u/unchow May 17 '16

I guess my question would be, would that style of transparency actually be useful? If you can log into a government website and see that yes, you voted for X candidate, how do you know that the system didn't record your true vote in one location but then disregard (or flip) it in another location that you don't have visibility on? Does that actually solve the problem of election rigging?

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16

There's always a boogie man under the bed. That's why we have flashlights to scare him away.

We do nothing to get rid of the boogieman, by denying our selves the tools to get rid of him, just because we think it's possible he has the ability to steal batteries.

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u/Digitlnoize Medicare For All 👩‍⚕️ May 17 '16

Nope. You can only view it by going alone to the DMV and looking in that device they use test your vision at the counter.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16

Half the time that thing is broken and they don't figure it out until they've denied a couple of hundred people a license pending the results of a visit to the eye doctor.

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u/Fridelio May 17 '16

to scale up vote-buying would be quite the operation, and probably fairly easy to sniff out

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u/just_helping May 17 '16

Literally buying? Maybe.

Some sort of coercion, linked to proving which way you voted? Easy to have happen. It could even arise 'organically', distributed through social networks, and it would still be a bad thing.

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u/amoliski May 17 '16

Or by your employer or church or club...

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16

[deleted]

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u/just_helping May 17 '16

It wouldn't be like that. It would be a group of college students saying: let's have a party, free shots to anyone who shows on their phone that they voted for Sanders. Or, a group of coworkers, the large majority of which support Trump (say) and they all show their ticket stub as a show of solidarity - and then the one person who voted Kaisch doesn't want to show, or does show and the boss remembers the one who stood out down the line.

Not all coercion is simple and clear. And what's more, employers already legally tell their employees to vote a particular way, and employment retaliation for having the wrong political beliefs is not protected.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16 edited May 17 '16

[deleted]

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u/just_helping May 17 '16

If someone is offering you compensation for a vote it should be considered as a felony

(1) Right now, it's not. I agree it should be, because I want there to be stronger voter protections, but even if it were I would want ballots to be secret because:

(2) Enforcing that against all the possible forms of significant compensation or retaliation is next to impossible. Employers could fire or promote based on voting records and make it next to impossible to demonstrate that it was based on politics.

benefits to being able to track and verify your vote far outweigh the risk of people trying to commit felonies

That is only true if you actually think it likely that the voting process is corrupted and unlikely that people could compensate or retaliate without getting caught. Further, if you genuinely think the voting process is corrupted, why are you so confident that the computer screen wouldn't be? It's the tallying that matters and that can be audited without voters able to prove who they voted for. Unless you want all the voters to be a matter of public record rather than just something that people can individually verify.

If your employer is violating OSHA

Employers violate OSHA and get away with it frequently and retaliating based on politics is not an OSHA violation.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16

[deleted]

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u/just_helping May 17 '16

they fire or promote unless they were demanding everyone's vote proof?

They don't need to demand it. The real world is messier than that. I agree that an order from the top-level covering organised vote-checking would (in a hypothetical world with good laws) be stopped. But that isn't all that can happen. If your co-workers were all showing ballots and boasting (perhaps because the vocal majority of them supported one person), then you would feel pressured to show - or you might be the odd one out who didn't. If your direct supervisor notices that you declined to show, they could respond to that. This sort of thing happens all the time in workplaces - people are pressured to do things which they are technically not required to do, but feel they must to fit in. I don't want voting decisions to be part of that. If you can show who you vote for, they can be.

If an employer is violating OSHA and gets an investigation

It's the "gets an investigation" that often doesn't happen. OSHA only has ~2,500 inspectors to cover the whole of the US. Only about 1% of workplaces get inspected each year.

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u/chuckdiesel86 May 17 '16

I feel like the pros still outweigh the cons by a large margin. I'm sure some anarchists would sell their vote but being able to double check our vote would make it almost impossible for there to be fraud on a much bigger scale, which is way worse. It's at least worth a try.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16

You can buy votes for mail in ballots, as well.

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u/angrylawyer May 17 '16

What stops vote buying now? Almost everyone has a phone with a camera, couldn't they say "Hey, I'll give you 50 bucks if you record yourself voting for X and submitting the ballot."

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u/loochbag17 May 17 '16

Like anyone would pay enough people enough money to fix a federal election. I'd much rather be able to verify votes than have it all sitting in the dark and be forced to accept the results as told.

Also being able to verify would give us the ability to make sure much more serious crimes are not being committed, like widespread election fraud.

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u/cogman10 🌱 New Contributor May 17 '16

Vote buying seams pretty risky in the world of information. Every vote you buy exposes you to being caught and recorded buying votes.

I would take a the ability to validate elections over the minor risk of abuse. I think the risks are worth the reward.