I’m not positing a conspiracy theory that the vote that happened last November was hacked. Smarter people than me with better access to information have looked at this question and haven’t found evidence of it. But I do think that the people who have the capability to change election results are the people who knew before the rest of us how vulnerable our systems are to outside interference.
Hackers at at a competition in Las Vegas were able to successfully breach the software of U.S. voting machines in just 90 minutes on Friday, illuminating glaring security deficiencies in America’s election infrastructure.
Tech minds at the annual DEF CON in Las Vegas were given physical voting machines and remote access, with the instructions of gaining access to the software.
According to a Register report, within minutes, hackers exposed glaring physical and software vulnerabilities across multiple U.S. voting machine companies’ products.
Some devices were found to have physical ports that could be used to attach devices containing malicious software. Others had insecure Wi-Fi connections, or were running outdated software with security vulnerabilities like Windows XP.
The Register reported that the challenge was designed by Jake Braun, the Chief Executive Officer of Cambridge Global Advisors and Managing Director of Cambridge Global Capital.
“Without question, our voting systems are weak and susceptible. Thanks to the contributions of the hacker community today, we’ve uncovered even more about exactly how,” Braun said.
“The scary thing is we also know that our foreign adversaries — including Russia, North Korea, Iran — possess the capabilities to hack them too, in the process undermining principles of democracy and threatening our national security.”
I think we need to accomplish two things here. The first is that we need to make our voting systems secure. And the second is that we need to convince our people that our voting systems are secure. It’s very easy to see how someone could jump to the conclusion that it just isn’t possible for the polls to be off by so much and that the best evidence of tampering is the unexpected results. And maybe we need to get away from the presumption that the initial election results are correct and adopt the habit of having some kind of comprehensive sampling audit of the machines before we expect the “loser” to call and concede.
The purpose of this would be to satisfy that second requirement above that the people have confidence in the results. Of course, to accomplish this step, we simply can’t have machines that don’t provide any paper trail or way to test their ability to accurately tally the vote.
As things stand now, the only defenses against hackers are the deterrence provided by the fear of getting caught and the lack of centralized elections (especially on the statewide and presidential level) that make it hard to change the results without really widespread hacking efforts.
Yet, the decentralization defense can be exaggerated. A hack of the last presidential election would have needed to change the votes in only three states (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania) to be successful in changing the result, and the absolute numbers in each of those states were small enough that it could have been accomplished in each without access to all the polling places.
Again, I’m not saying that this happened, but it’s also hard to rule it out. And that’s probably the problem we can’t wish away. We have the election, the initial uncertified numbers come in, and before we know it someone has conceded while they’re still counting votes. It’s very hard to unring the bell of a concession, as Al Gore discovered to his lasting regret. Hillary Clinton’s popular vote margin grew for about a month after the election as more and more votes were counted, and there were some limited recounts in several states that resulted in modified numbers.
Since we’ve built in a long delay between election day and inauguration day, we should take advantage of it by building an audit of the election into the schedule. States that can’t certify their results up to a reasonable federal standard shouldn’t be allowed to cast votes in the Electoral College, which would pressure the states to put in better protections against hacking. Of course, the federal government should pay for any needed upgrades.
The way things stand, I can’t blame people for lacking confidence in the integrity of the result. In general, if a system is vulnerable to hacking, it will be hacked. The protections we have in place are clearly insufficient to give the people confidence, and that’s a dangerous situation for a system that relies on the consent of the governed.
Enough with the boondoggles. All we need are paper ballots, hand-counted in public at the polling place. There is no better way.
You have a million volunteers willing to count the votes fairly and correctly ballot by ballot?
Do you trust locking up 150 million paper ballots in 192,480 precincts for long enough to verify accurate counts over multiple days/weeks?
Or do you trust the aggregating of ballots from precincts into a single location in each of 3080 counties and counting the paper there? Do you know where Los Angeles County CA can count 5 million or so ballots; Cook County IL can count 2.5 million or so ballots; Harris County TX can count 1 million or so ballots? Those are not trivial numbers to count at one location.
These are not impossible standards, but even India still has issues with auditing paper ballots.
They work as an audit trail only when there are not a large number of discrepancies to investigate and audit. That assumption of mostly correct does not work well when their are lots of parties trying to rig the process in lots of locations.
The UK uses paper ballots, so it shouldn’t be impossible for us to do so as well.
Wouldn’t electro mechanical machines work?
What maintains the audit trail?
Not sure I understand your point, but here in Georgia there is NO paper audit trail;we use only 14 year old Diebold machines.No record other than computer of my vote and each person’s vote is not tabulated separately. Much prefer the optical scan system we had prior to 2002. Seems to me that the only secure way to vote is to insure that there is always a paper trail.
In Georgia, you haven’t had a check since 2002.
Now a paper audit trail does not have to (indeed should not) allow going back to determine who voted for whom. But should be able to determine unique individuals who voted corresponded to the total number of people who showed up and validated their registration. And that there were no extraneous machine adjustments besides taking on vote for a particular candidate column after another. Without even identifying which candidate that column corresponded to.
In my part of North Carolina, we mark paper cards that are then scanned into a tabulator. The paper cards can be audited against the tabulators.
Frank Kent’s 1923 book covers mechanical machines. One trick is to put slimy stuff on the lever for the candidate that you want to defeat. Enough people avoid touching it to swing the election. Counting is only one part of getting an accurate vote.
A paper trail to verify the vote is one way to handle it.
Slimy stuff? Geez around here there are always more than one person form each side here and generally more than that.
Kent was writing about organized urban machines. Still a fascinating book and still in print the last I checked.
Having been part of legal protection for over a decade, which means representing the Democratic Party at precincts and at canvassing centers and in boiler rooms, I would say this:
In over a decade of work at polls in Florida, I have never seen evidence either directly, or by a reliable second hand, that a count was subject to being hacked or otherwise improperly interfered with.
I HAVE seen wars over who gets to take a regular or provisional ballot.
Focusing on the count IS THE WRONG THING TO FOCUS ON.
Voter suppression takes place before the voter gets their ballot
Yeah! Do it like we do in Oregon: paper ballots mailed to registered voters, signatures verified by hand, follow up if the signatures don’t match. No break in the chain. You can drop your ballot off in the ballot box in front of every city hall or you can mail ’em in. Party’s representatives can be present to watch the verification/counting. process. No polling places, no wait at all, everyone including shut-ins can vote easily.
Pretty much hack-proof.
Same as Colorado. Scans of signatures are on record, and if the one on the ballot doesn’t match the scan, the voter is contacted.
Meh. The whole mailed ballot thing isn’t all that secure, unless there are built-in failsafes.
All it takes to change results is to know when ballots have been mailed out, and then drive-bys of certain neighborhoods to remove said ballots when on the return trip.
Question: is there some kind of feedback given to each voter to let them know that their ballot has been received, and that they do not need to come in to vote?
If so, is there a way to ensure that the ballot hasn’t been changed en route? A return letter saying you voted for X, Y, and Z?
If not, it doesn’t seem secure in any way to me, as not only can you just disappear ballots, “hacking” the vote, but you can physically change the ballots, doubling the potential “hacking” of the vote.
I do believe every US citizen over 18 should be automatically registered to vote and then sent a notification that they are eligible to vote, a sample ballot, and directions and instructions on how to vote and where their polling station is.
But voting through the mail just opens up all sorts of ratfucking that requires essentially zero skill or infrastructure. Hell, even removing a ballot, WITH the voter getting a letter saying they didn’t receive a ballot, inconveniences the voter in that they now have to go out of their way to correct the situation.
Well now you’ve gone into right winger territory. Yes, what you are talking about is possible, but to do it on a scale that actually changes an election would require a conspiracy of hundreds if not thousands of people. If such a thing can be pulled off, then the ballots didn’t mean anything anyway.
It’s also Oregon. People notice and say something very quickly when someone who’s not their regular postal worker messing around with the mail boxes. There are also a lot of mail boxes that require keys for the postal workers to get into to retrieve the mail in the first place. I.r.c.c., he ballots are also marked provisional if not returned in the provided untampered ballot envelope, the supply of said envelopes is controlled by Oregon.
All in in all, it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone could pull this off without being noticed. And of course it’s all felonies all the way down on both the state and federal level.
So yes, much like in person voter fraud, what you are talking about could happen, but the odds of getting caught are astronomically high. If we’ve reached the point where this kind of thing is changing the outcome of elections even in very close elections, we’ve got much bigger problems with our democracy than in person voter fraud or stealing mailed ballots.
Banks have more security around ATM transactions than exists around the voting process.
Well, if US voting were 24/7/365, the machines would equal the performance of ATMs — assuming the public wants to pay as much for the performance/security as it costs banks.
One vote is the equivalent of one ATM transaction. Instead of 365/24/7, is once every 2 or 4 years, times upwards of 120 million transactions, which is far fewer than electronic banking transactions. So no, the cost for security would not be equivalent to banking, but could be just as secure for far less.
Question is, does the public care enough about voting integrity and understand the impact of technology and skill expertise of potential bad actors to want to make systems secure. Many who understand the threat have called for a simple way to audit, e.g. there is a receipt or tracking of each vote that could be printed or downloaded to aid in a post vote audit. The public has been conditioned to apathy because those who either don’t understand the threat potential or who might benefit from it have falsely communicated that it is costly and not worth it. How much is our democratic process worth?
Based on my own experience, voting machine software and systems architecture are just not subjected to the same rigor in design as banking or other business systems. I have seen some of the earlier Diebold software designs, and as someone who has worked as a software engineer/application developer, the lack of security is downright shocking. Its not a hard sell to convince someone without sufficient knowledge that these systems are secure.
And its not so much because of cost but because of a difference in IT culture in government and approach when it comes to voting systems that we have this situation.
Don’t use computers. Period.
I saw this in 2004. Here are the reasons:
Optical scanners are really dumb. Easy to configure – press a button and you get the tape. No need to connect them to anything.
And you can audit the results.
No they don’t.
I have never seen a polling place with at least 5 poll workers.
I have seen automated ATM’s.
Fifty years ago, outside of certain jurisdictions people felt that the votes were fair enough in part because the margins were so lopsided in any one year but enough were swing from election to election that the assumption was that the process was not rigged.
Now the increasing lack of swing has begun to worry people.
But then, it is the close elections that have caused people to look more carefully at the overall process of US elections. The 2000 election seems to have been ruled as decided wrongly by the Supreme Court just because the GOP justices could and wanted to end it quickly. That was the result of a post-decision informal press audit of the results of the Florida votes before they were destroyed.
In 2004, the Ohio Secretary of State made sure that any auditable trail was quickly destroyed.
After 2000, the Congress’s Help America Vote Act ensured that digital voting machines with no audit trail were quickly rolled out. The first heads up from that was the surprise defeat of Georgia Senator Max Cleland. From then forward, there have been vote sceptics worried about voting machines and how easy it is to rig them locally. With the 2016 elections, that scepticism as spread to the idea that it is possible for remote rigging of the voting machines. Even as most election boards are now aware of this scepticism and have taken steps to prevent a riggged vote generally.
Any auditing needs to go back to Frank Kent’s 1923 book, The Great Game of Politics and start with how he describes the rigging of paper ballots and mechanical voting machines. The imagination of those who would cheat does not change much.
Then move on to the failure of digital machine manufacturers providing good audit trails for their machines. The vendors have the responsibility to provide independent and verifying computer security of their systems and auditability. If there are the means, almost all local election boards will work to demonstrate integrity.
But it is not just the vote that is now in question.
All of the other tricks Frank Kent identified (plus new ways of preventing straightforward elections) show have audit trails.
Registrations should not be eliminated by political use of the registation roles by a politicized Secretary of State or Board of Election. Doing this close to the election means that the actions of federal courts don’t necessarily restore justice in time.
Gerrymandering frequently before elections disrupts the activities of candidates for office.
The US media no longer has an informal responsibility for reporting only the truth. The political lies are so pervasive in “opinion” media that the truth is no longer discernable from outright lies. In addition, the Citizens United decision ensures that not even candidates who wind up benefiting have control over their winning positions. For those not like the geographic limits of their base, that is a feature instead of a bug. A time limit on the run-up period to an election and the open media period are a huge issue in auditing US elections.
The vote is decentralized because there are 192,480 precincts, each with precinct election judges who report the results by precinct through the county to the state and electoral college. As long as precincts are in-person voting locations, they will be decentralized. Auditing also needs to include equity in the ease of access to voting precincts and the infrastructure of polling places. In 2004 in Ohio, the difference between urban African-American access to resources and white suburban access to resources was manipulated by partisan boards of elections. The same was true with GOP boards of election in North Carolina after the 2012 results of the 2010 census and the state gerrymandering.
Auditing for the fairness of the process is much needed in the US. Other nations have example legislation that seems to work to dampen political manipulation of the election process and dependence on the direct political message itself. The accuracy of the count of votes voted is only one of the procedural factors of a fair election.
Having honest volunteers to take the time to act as election judges is key to ensuring voting accuracy. Too many people take these volunteer election judges for granted. Paid judges don’t necessarily mean judges committed to fairness in the election. Partisan judges alone don’t necessarily guarantee fair procedures. There was a time in which some people sought fairness of the process independently of the result of the process.
“Having honest volunteers to take the time to act as election judges is key to ensuring voting accuracy”
Thousands of lawyers in precincts all over America do this in every election. They are not paid, but they observe every part of this process.
The Democratic Party actually has made a good investment in this – which is sadly never discussed.
Indeed. Which is why all 3080 counties didn’t look like Palm Beach County in 2000. Or like some rural Ohio counties in 2004.
No doubt there is a similar investment on the GOP side that exceeds the tricks in some jurisdictions.
More good honest volunteers need to take this task on.
Oregon’s vote-by-mail system is nearly perfect, but that’s the thing it lacks: an audit.
I’ve been saying the same for years, and I wish the legislature would take it up.
Do the full count by machine, then hand re-count for a random selection of divisions for certain races. If the re-count falls within a particular margin of error then the vote is certified.
If the re-count falls outside that margin of error then you hand count the entire state.
Do the full count by machine, then hand re-count for a random selection of divisions for certain races. If the re-count falls within a particular margin of error then the vote is certified.
If the re-count falls outside that margin of error then you hand count the entire state.
Bingo. It’s not hard to do this. In fact, it’s dead simple, and very basic. Of course, it would require us to spend a few bucks on our elections systems, and government spending of any stripe is verboten in certain circles.
In the case of WI, at least, there was so much voter suppression of minority voters before the election that there is a distinct possibility that those prevented from voting for completely unjustified reasons might have prevented WI going to Trump since the margin was so small.
To the larger point, I also think that the GOP probably assumes that they will always be the beneficiary of any overseas hacking but this is very much not likely to be the case if Iran becomes a serious hacking threat. In addition, it may be in Putin’s interest going forward to just cause generalized chaos and lack of confidence in the US electoral system so that no party has an advantage. This needs to be made clear to the GOP because they still see real value in open cheating and fraud.
Wouldn’t that take a Constitutional amendment? That would put it pretty high up on the fantasy list.
You write:
As Tonto said to the Lone Ranger: “Who we, .01%!!!???
Who “we,” Booman?
Really.
Why hasn’t this been done already?
Just asking…
Maybe it’s because…the corporate-controlled Deep State does not want accurate ballots?
Why hasn’t the Electoral College been abolished?
Maybe it’s because…awwww, you know…
Or of course…
All of the things you recommend are common sense…as long as the aim is honest elections.
Why aren’t they all in place?
It defies logic….unless logic says that powerful forces do not want them to be in place.
Then it all starts to look sorta…
Logical.
Riiiiight…
AG
Even the corporate-controlled Deep State should be very interested in the consent of the governed. Otherwise things get messy very quickly. And that generally interferes with earning money.
I’m not so sure of that, SophieAmrain. “The consent of the governed” can be attained by constant, virtuoso media control, something that has recently been proven to be much more effective than armed force over the long run. It’s been done here at the highest levels for at least 50 years, and only recently has it started to fail.
Goethe’s idea above?
True.
At least it was when he wrote it.
But…now?
I’m not so sure.
It’s all in how the controllers balance the division. If they can keep it balanced and two-dimensional…like a seesaw…and keep it moving, they have a good shot at control by deception. Everybody gets their chance to think that they are “winning,” but the .01% really remains in control at all times.
It has only been a very recent development that such as system has become unbalanced, and that occurred as a result of the sheer greed of the controllers and the simultaneous rise of a (moderately) independent information system.
And…Trump is the result.
Will the system continue to roll, pitch and yaw until it crashes, like an out-of-balance aircraft
We shall see, soon enough.
Won’t we.
AG
“It’s all in how the controllers balance the division.”
You give the hidden powers too much credit. They, on balance, will not be more capable than the rest of us. In other words, conspiracies that go untold for 50 years, do not exist.
You really think that the JFK, RFK, MLK Jr., and Malcolm X assassinations were all just coincidences!!!??? As was Jack Ruby?
More than a little coincidental, to my mind.
More than a little.
You still believe the major media?
After all of these years of lying?
Please.
Wake the fuck up.
AG
Lol “deep state.”
“Why hasn’t the electoral college been abolished?”
Simple. The low population/former confederate states would never agree to give up the considerable power provided by the ec. We can dream tho.
I’d take the “deep state” threat more seriously had the “deep state” been able to do something “deep” like keep Donald Trump out of the White House.
The State of Washington has the same system as Oregon, vote by mail. I love it! Perhaps, a study should be done of both states with the possibility of putting it in place for 2020.
Colorado as well.
Not a fan – but that is based on me observing how absentee ballots are counted. I guess I need to learn more.
Booman this is a very sound idea grounded in common sense – therefore expect the GOP to fight it tooth and nail.*
* See background checks for guns and climate change as references.
I generally like your posts, Martin, but here I found myself nodding to every sentence. In Germany we have paper ballots after a brief stint with voting machines, and they get counted by lots of volunteers, every small precinct has several. That seems to be reasonably safe to me.
On final point, made by Michael McDonald, who is about as good as anyone on the use of different machines, and of voting rules in general.
The Hill article is clickbait. The machines in question were certified in 2015.
McDonald was kind of shocked it got the attention it did – because it is nonsense.
I meant DE-certified.
A receipt from the voting machine means nothing. A receipt from the ATM shows what you know you deposited or withdrew. A receipt from the gas pump shows your fillup. You can check it on your gas gauge.
We can make an machine with a screen and bells and whistles and buttons and flashing lights since we have to be modern. Pick your candidate and push the voting button. Continue until you reach the end of the ballot.
The machine then prints out a piece of letter sized paper with neatly printed names and offices and a nice square check box with a nice clear printed “X” in the box that does not overflow the outline of the checkbox. You cannot vote for too many candidates for an office. There are no erasures, smudges, cross-outs.
You then read this over to make sure it is correct. Then you feed it into the vote counting machine in front of the polling station. When you do that a counter up on the wall increments by one. This way everybody in the room can see that a vote has been cast and we also know the maximum number of votes possible for any candidate at that polling station.
The vote counting machine has a clear bin so that when the polls open you can see that it is empty and it has an incrementing counter on it, starting at zero in the morning which increments plus one for each ballot. This checks the counter on the wall.
When the polls close the vote counter that you fed your ballot into can be read and the results immediately reported. The display on the machine could light up with candidate names and total votes. In case of a problem or controversy the paper ballots are there and can be hand counted or even run through a second counting machine to check.
No more ballots from rural counties suddenly showing up at the last moment to swing an election. No more poorly filled in ballots. No machines without a paper trail. No hanging chads. No bad ballots that would need to be thrown out. No hacking the machine’s software because the results are immediately checkable.