
Georgia election server showed signs of tampering, expert says - smacktoward
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/georgia-election-server-showed-signs-tampering-expert-says-n1117441
======
ulkesh
I have been voting in GA since 2008 and there hasn't been a paper trail since
at least then. The voting systems they still use today were purchased and put
into service in, I believe, 2002. There is literally no reason not to also
have a paper trail.

I have no hard data, and this is from 2017/2018, but it is very sketchy when
the secretary of state, the office which oversees elections in GA, runs for
governor, doesn't resign ahead of time, doesn't allow any investigations into
the electronic voting systems, doesn't push forward any paper trail
requirements, and subsequently wins the election for governor. Everything Kemp
did and didn't do was suspect as it relates to elections.

I have zero faith in GA election results. And until the State moves off of
these electronic systems and/or installs a paper trail, and brings a sense of
integrity back into the election system, I will continue to feel the elections
in GA are without integrity and potentially illegitimate, no matter who wins
in any given election. This is outside of any political affiliation. This is
the core of our country not being properly governed and protected.

EDIT>> After some research, it looks as if GA is getting a paper trail after a
court order required the state to move off the previous electronic system. Now
it looks like they're installing BMDs which can be verified by the voter prior
to scanning to commit their vote. Of course, there are plenty of articles
relating to how hackable BMDs are as well.

~~~
smacktoward
_> There is literally no reason not to also have a paper trail._

There is _one_ reason, which is that if you give the voter a paper record
stating who they voted for, that voter can be shaken down upon leaving their
polling place by goons hired by one political machine or another demanding to
see that record. That sort of thing used to happen all the time back in the
heyday of machine politics, as the dominant machine would very much want to
know if you actually voted for their candidates or not -- particularly if
they'd paid you before election day to do so.

~~~
quickthrowman
Why would the voter remove the paper ballot or paper receipt from the polling
place?

The paper would be kept by poll workers so the electronic count can be
audited.

My state has paper ballots that are counted electronically. I feel this is a
good compromise and allows much easier vote total auditing.

~~~
dependenttypes
> My state has paper ballots that are counted electronically

This is really not much better.

~~~
toast0
Paper ballots counted electronically allows for a hand count. In case of close
elections (as measured by the electronics) a hand count is usually required.
You can (and some jurisdictions will) also do a hand count of some number of
ballots to confirm the electronic count is at least plausible.

Given the number of questions voters are voting on (at least in CA and WA,
there's usually 30-50 things to vote on), hand counting everything would be
immensely time consuming.

------
thepete2
I'm really glad Germany's supreme court (BVerfG) banned electronic voting
([0]) with the common sense reasoning that elections have to be understood by
everyone, not just computer experts.

[0] [https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2009/wahlcomputer-urteil-
bverf...](https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2009/wahlcomputer-urteil-bverfg)

~~~
na85
I wish Canada would adopt some of that common sense.

~~~
graeme
....we use paper ballots in Canada. What are you referring to?

~~~
na85
When I last voted (most recent federal election), my ballot was fed through an
electronic reader of some sort on its way into the ballot box, no doubt an
electronic vote counter.

~~~
graeme
Huh, interesting. I’m in Montreal and we dropped them into boxes through a
slot, same as before.

I wonder if you had a pilot? Afaik, elections canada runs things the same way
all around the country.

------
save_ferris
Deleted logs and a server wiped clean days after a lawsuit was filed by
election integrity activists, that is terrifying.

If we can’t agree on a bipartisan basis that this isn’t acceptable, what does
that mean for our future?

~~~
ianai
Means certain states like Georgia won’t be democratic. What the handful of
people in power say goes. Doesn’t matter what the voters actually try to vote.

~~~
creaghpatr
Good case for the electoral college, localize the corruption to the state-
level.

~~~
save_ferris
The electoral college is the sole reason 2 out of the last 3 presidents lost
the popular vote while winning the general election.

In no universe does the electoral college mitigate corruption on the federal
level. In fact, one could argue that it makes corruption worse, because a
candidate only has to win a few key states to tip the election, regardless of
the popular vote.

~~~
reaperducer
_it makes corruption worse, because a candidate only has to win a few key
states to tip the election, regardless of the popular vote._

The alternative is only counting the popular vote, which only serves to
disenfranchise the majority of states.

Without the electoral college, a candidate would only have to campaign in and
win three or four large states, and the rest of the nations and its concerns
can be ignored.

That concern is the whole reason we have the House/Senate system: So that
large states with lots of people in the House of Representatives don't run
amok. The Senate balances that out.

~~~
erichurkman
> The alternative is only counting the popular vote, which only serves to
> disenfranchise the majority of states.

The majority of red states are also the majority of the population, so this
doesn't check out. (Trump states ~180mm to Hillary's ~140mm.)

~~~
cmendel
This is false.

[https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results](https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results)

>Trump 46.4% votes 62,984,825

>Clinton 48.5% votes 65,853,5165

------
tvanantwerp
Electronic voting, in addition to security concerns, isn't even a user
experience improvement.

I remember working at a polling station as a teenager during the 2004
election. One elderly lady needed help understanding how the machines worked,
so I showed her how you tapped the buttons on the screen.

Well, this woman had lost a lot of fine motor control. After selecting her
choice for president, she went to hit the Next button. Her hand shook so badly
that she skipped about five screens worth of races.

I asked her if she's like my help going back to choose candidates for all of
the races she accidentally skipped. "No," she replied, "I got the important
one."

I'm thankful that this experience, and many others from working the polls,
eroded my faith in the system early on in life.

~~~
davinic
Not to mention the negative impact on parallelization! Hundreds of paper
ballot station can easily be setup in a room, but setting up an additional
voting machine requires a ton of other things (budgets, purchasing, techs,
etc).

------
wobbly_bush
A question to Americans, is there nothing a common citizen can do about it? In
India, in a similar situation anyone would be able to file a Public Interest
Litigation (PIL) with High Court (highest court at state level) or Supreme
Court (highest court at central/federal level). If any of the courts decided
to take up the PIL, they could ask any investigative body, including law
enforcement or ex-judges, for investigation.

~~~
ancarda
Try to make electronic voting illegal? Not sure how though - call your
representative, raise awareness, that sort of thing

~~~
kingkawn
Phone calls and visits to your representatives on all levels are taken very
seriously by their offices

------
bsanr2
Is there a term for the increased credulousness with which people sometimes
seem to approach increasingly, obviously problematic topics? The more blatant
the irregularities in this race, where a black woman had a serious chance of
becoming governor, the less seriously everyone (including her opponent, _who
oversaw the election in his official capacity_ ) took them.

I mention race because it is clearly a likely central motivation for
malfeasance in this case, an election for a state with a history of
disenfranchisement of its large black population.

------
bonyt
Here's the actual declaration from PACER, which has some interesting details:

[https://tmp.tonyb.xyz/lamb-decl-pacer.pdf](https://tmp.tonyb.xyz/lamb-decl-
pacer.pdf)

~~~
mzs
Could you please post this somewhere else too, site is blocked for me here.

~~~
bonyt
That's strange that my site is blocked, is it an overly broad rule, like "lol,
if it's not .com or .gov, it's not a website that upstanding gentlemen go to"?

Anyway, here's something:

[https://tonybox.net/tmp/lamb-decl-pacer.pdf](https://tonybox.net/tmp/lamb-
decl-pacer.pdf)

[https://moveything.com/tmp/lamb-decl-
pacer.pdf](https://moveything.com/tmp/lamb-decl-pacer.pdf)

~~~
mzs
Thank you very much, the message had no details, sorry, just that it was
blocked. I assume overly broad rule not liking xyz domain.

------
mnm1
I think it's safe to assume that any election that's done with software has
been hacked unless proven otherwise. Of course there was foul play. Election
fraud is currently a huge issue with a ton of players competing to be the ones
rigging elections. When a secure, proven technology like mailed paper ballots
exists, I question anyone who pushes computer solutions and immediately
suspect them of wanting to commit fraud or incredible stupidity and
incompetence. After all, if someone suggested to replace armored cars carrying
money with unarmored convertibles without a top, what other conclusion can one
draw?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Isn't that all speculation? I'm not aware of any verified election fraud, in
the US. It's like Halloween candy, which everybody knows isn't safe but there
are never any verified cases of a problem.

~~~
btilly
If you are not aware, then it is because you have not looked.

[https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud](https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud)

~~~
Frondo
The parent poster was referring to election fraud, not voter fraud. They're
different. Voter fraud is when someone casts a vote they should not have, e.g.
because they moved or they've cast multiple votes. Election fraud is when
election officials tamper with the election.

There are documented cases of both, but the Heritage website, documenting
about 1,200 over a period of at least 20 years (I didn't check every state,
but the earliest I saw was 2000) is an insignificant amount of voter fraud
over 20 years and hundreds of millions of votes cast. Even if they
underreported by a factor of 100, that's no threat to democracy.

~~~
btilly
Ah, election fraud like illegal voter suppression? Like
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File)?

Or how about tampering with ballots after they have been cast like
[http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/election-fraud-is-
rea...](http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/election-fraud-is-real-and-it-
involves-a-republican.html)?

(Of course if you go back a little ways in history, the most egregious was
probably Tammany Hall. Election fraud has a rather long history.)

------
lucas_membrane
This story seems to now invalidate the line that we have been hearing for
about 3 years now that says that no evidence of tampering with the 2016
national election has been found. Of course, they were careful to not say that
evidence of no tampering had been found, or even that anyone behind the no-
evidence assertion was sufficiently skilled to find and recognize tampering.
If no one can vouch for the correctness of the Georgia results now, what
evidence is there of no error in the national results; how many other states
might have had similarly overlooked anomalies?

------
anticensor
Because, electronic voting is still a bad idea:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs)

------
qntmfred
Highly recommend following election security writer Jenny Cohn for more on
this topic. GA is a highly egregious recent example, but the entire industry
is a mess and very few are paying attention.

[https://twitter.com/jennycohn1](https://twitter.com/jennycohn1)

~~~
mzs
Also Kim Zetter, she's been reporting on this with a greater level of
technical expertise and less activism for at least a dozen years. In fact she
was the one that scooped this last night
[https://twitter.com/KimZetter/status/1046429196182941696](https://twitter.com/KimZetter/status/1046429196182941696)

------
naiveprogrammer
The benefit of extra speed in ballot count does not completely offset the
risks of electronic voting. Not only the risks of massive tampering in
electronic ballots and servers, but also the lack of clarity on how the
process works under the hood for the median voter.

------
fredgrott
for USA folks, you can in each state request a paper ballot. visit your
State's voting details page at heir statename.gov site to find out how to
request one.

------
davidw
Oregon gets voting pretty right. Do it by mail, automatic registration, and of
course it's all paper.

There are some risks about not having the privacy of a voting booth, but in
general it seems to work pretty well.

~~~
fsh
Voting by mail is not at all secure. For example, a post-office worker could
easily skew the results by throwing away letters from a partisan district.

~~~
Frondo
Oregon has had vote by mail for at least 20 years and there is almost no
irregularity in the process, either for voters or election officials.

In the 2016 election, out of 2 million votes cast, they found something like
54 cases of voter fraud, mostly people voting after they'd moved out of their
district.

Election fraud in Oregon is equally rare -- the big one in 2016 was a
Republican volunteer in Clackamas County attempting to toss out a box of dem
voter ballots. I don't remember the specifics but I think they were caught
almost immediately.

The security thing is absolutely a red herring to discourage more states from
adopting vote-by-mail, pushed by anyone who benefits from low turnout, because
vote-by-mail significantly improves turnout without threatening election
security in any meaningful way.

~~~
fsh
This is such a non-sensical argument. Obviously nobody gets convicted for
voter fraud if the system cannot detect it.

~~~
Frondo
They do detect it and have found 50-some cases in the 2016 election alone.

It's not a problem.

------
mzs
two source articles and thread by original journalist on this - Shellshock
exploited (ha, remember that one?) and Drupalgeddon was left unpatched - this
is clown-car stuff

[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1218055746534817792.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1218055746534817792.html)

------
creaghpatr
*Security expert for the plaintiffs in the case

~~~
peteradio
And the only one outside of the FBI with access to images of the server and
the non-incriminating ability to comment.

------
dsr_
[https://xkcd.com/2030/](https://xkcd.com/2030/)

[Summary to remind you: "Don't trust voting software and don't listen to
anyone who tells you it's safe.]

------
dependenttypes
It is beyond me how naive implementations of electronic voting can be trusted
so easily by individuals.

------
kingkawn
$1 says that hack originated from within the state of Georgia, perhaps routed
through Russian servers and back, but domestic nonetheless

