> Konnech distributes and sells its proprietary PollChief software, which is an election worker management system that was utilized by the county in the last California election. The software assists with poll worker assignments, communications and payroll. PollChief requires that workers submit personal identifying information, which is retained by the Konnech.
I'm so very tired of proprietary software made by tiny little outfits being critical to elections.
in my previous/previous/previous career I was heavily involved with various states election systems (juicily enough starting in hanging chads Florida). The field is full of tiny little outfits AND huge consultancies (Accenture in my personal example) doing stuff. The quality varies tremendously from amazing to amazingly atrocious. When I did all this work the cloud was not yet a big thing so no servers were provisioned in anything other than well known data centers, but it's you get what you pay for. Since it's secretaries of state paying for some, and then tons of random counties paying for some others, these are not incredibly lucrative contracts, and it does attract just random small software firms.
I wonder what an ideal solution might look like. I kind of envision the Federal government funding a small organization overseeing an open source "election software" system, which would be run on some sort of well-defined stock hardware. The government would periodically pay for the hardware and software combination to be audited against a variety of attacks. The machines would produce standardized audit logs, published as openly as possible (someone smarter than me should figure out whether it's safe or good to publish the times or votes or the votes themselves. I'm leaning towards yes to both, but I'm concerned that you could figure out someone's vote if you knew the timestamps of the individual votes). Security researchers could purchase the hardware, install the software on it, and analyze it on their own. Then you'd do the same thing for the vote tabulators or whatever hardware and software exists asides from the voting machines themselves.
Then I think about what might look like a nice halfway point. Voting machine software is still written by companies, but we require that all software running on a voting machine be published and hermetically reproducible. They don't have to take pull requests, they still own it, but we should be able to open one up and be 100% sure that the software running on it is exactly what they've documented.
Were you aware that Konnech has an Australian subsidiary? It's right on their website. Doesn't mention specific clients there or total number of employees. I am a East Lansing local so I spent some time today on their website ;<).
Well you can tell that it isn't an Atlassian product, because you can know the results within a week. If they used an Atlassian product the total count page would return right around the same time the next election started.
make it a highly promoted position in the space force. we did this with AEGIS stuff and the navy, as well as SPAWAR and SCC software, and it was generally quite successful. release early and often, and always AGPL3. consider pull requests to be a civic minded thing and recognize courageous and hard working citizens who find security bugs and flaws in the code.
Paper really is the best hardware platform for voting. Scantron results are nice because they are fast, so people can find out results quickly, but they are also able to be verified against the physical record which is far more important.
I'm just tired of the rhetoric that 100% of such software is 100% unassailable and 100% utilized by 100% honest actors with 100% honest motives, 100% of the time, and anything else is a "conspiracy theory."
Nobody believes this: there's a reason why DEF CON has had a voting village for years.
What people believe is that, in spite of numerous flaws in voting software, the integrity of the vote is not seriously in question. And there are good reasons for believing this: physical backups, consistency with exit polling and, well, the fact that no party in this godforsaken country has been able to hold onto the presidency for more than 2 terms in nearly 30 years.
Oh, I agree that elections are not 100% unassailable. In fact, I strongly believe that they are being assailed. Mostly through voter suppression and disenfranchisement.
A good example of this is when the state tells you that you can vote, and then arrests you and charges you with voter fraud, because you actually can't. [1]
Or, alternatively, when the state bars you from voting until you pay all outstanding court fees and fines, but also refuses to tell you whether or not you actually owe any outstanding court fees or fines.
You can't have a free and fair election when you secretly disqualify people from voting, but refuse to tell them that until after they vote.
> A good example of this is when the state tells you that you can vote, and then arrests you and charges you with voter fraud, because you actually can't. [1]
I'm confused. How is this voter suppression? You agree the person in question had no right to vote, right? So no one's vote is being suppressed.
The only way the election is unfair in this case is if the vote was counted.
Moreover, I see no difference in this practice than how we prosecute people for tax fraud. Several times I call the IRS and they tell me one rule and then it turns out they adjust my tax later. Luckily mine is so simple they can do that but I imagine if it were more complicated they wouldn't and I would be liable.
> I'm confused. How is this voter suppression? You agree the person in question had no right to vote, right? So no one's vote is being suppressed.
Arguably, it could be said that if people who have every reason to think that they are allowed to vote can later be arrested and charged with voter fraud, then every voter unwilling to risk being arrested would be better off not voting to avoid finding out the hard way that despite assurances that they can vote they were guilty of fraud.
It's still a bit of a reach though because the article highlights two cases which seem pretty specific. I don't doubt Washington believed he was eligible to vote, but that belief was based on an assumption about the law and an election worker telling him his voter card was legitimate. I don't think that situation is going to apply to very many people including people with a criminal record.
The second case, where Stribling claims she was just randomly checking boxes on her voter registration form since she can't read or write is even less likely to be a problem for others. I think these cases are unfortunate, but very unlikely to have a chilling effect on other voters.
The article however does give a quote from a Florida senator which says “Some of the individuals did check with (supervisors of elections) and believed they could register,” and that's a bit more disturbing. I think anyone who contacts election officials to make sure they can vote would have every reason to expect that they can if that's what they are told, but it's hard to say what impact that might have without more information.
> The article however does give a quote from a Florida senator which says “Some of the individuals did check with (supervisors of elections) and believed they could register,” and that's a bit more disturbing. I think anyone who contacts election officials to make sure they can vote would have every reason to expect that they can if that's what they are told, but it's hard to say what impact that might have without more information.
For sure... this reeks of incompetence by these bureaucrats and they too ought to be reprimanded.
This is a kind of strawman fallacy. You're starting with an argument (of the form "this particular idea about election software is a conspiracy theory"), and then pretending that it was actually an argument for the maximal refutation of the original, which you then show to be "wrong". But that's not an argument in favor of the original contention!
No one serious argues that election management systems are bug free or that their operators can't possibly make mistakes. We're just saying that nothing has broken yet.
Can you point to a single person who has asserted even one prong of that supposed rhetoric? All anyone reasonable is saying, is if there's widespread or systemic wrongdoing, where's the evidence?
I am so frustrated that the discussion space is so often forced around this topic.
The claim is not that there was “widespread systemic” wrongdoing, the claim is that it would only take a very tiny amount of weight to push an election in direction that benefits the one doing the pushing.
That's sort of a specious point, though. In two party systems, elections are always close more or less by definition. If you want to show wrongdoing, you need to show actual wrongdoing and not just that it's possible. I'd argue that the fact that no single group/party/cabal/whatever has managed to disproportionately cheat stands are very good evidence that this is not, in fact, happening.
> the fact that no single group/party/cabal/whatever has managed to disproportionately cheat
there's at least one feature about elections in the US that makes detecting cheating pretty difficult. there's no good way for me to verify that my vote was recorded a specific way subsequent to casting it.
Which jurisdictions implement that feature? Prior to advent of modern cryptography it wasn't even possible (well, without giving up the secret ballot, which is how you get vote buying and coercion).
I am not aware of any precisely because of the concerns you raised with buying and coercion. I am not aware how modern cryptography allows this either, while preserving secret ballot. Please let me know if there are advancements that render my opinion incorrect. I just think it is a really interesting information-security problem that seems intractable. My personal opinion is paper ballots and in-person voting is probably the most effective pair of policies at preventing wide-spread voting fraud.
The point about cryptography was me being glib, but the math does exist. The relevant subfield is "homomorphic encryption" and I remember seeing a paper over the last few years (probably linked here on HN if I had to guess) claiming to have an election-relevant algorithm that was supposed to be workable in practice. I can't find it right now though.
I submit that a still bigger problem preventing people from actually talking to one another about this is the lack of evidence of an actual stolen election.
All that stuff is just junk, you realize. And you can tell because none of it makes sense! It's got a bunch of numbers and a long list of links to click on that makes you feel like there must be evience (which is the whole point), but when you actually drill down... there's nothing there. It's all argumentation of the form "Why would X be true if we know Y?", leading you to suspect that the "real" reason must be "Z" without saying it. That's not argument, it's a gish gallop. And it's fooled you.
I mean, just to make a point using the same logic[1]: if elections were this easy to cheat, then why aren't the cheaters winning all the time? Why do both sides share power at all? How does it not devolve into a single party illuminati running everything? I submit that it doesn't because elections aren't being stolen.
[1] But in favor of bland conservatism about "stuff works normally" and not a particular criminal conspiracy.
I mean.. the New York Times just defamed an organization for apparently telling the truth about American election data being held in China. So there's a few people who asserted that.
Much like cnn.com, the domain name is not a seal of quality.
In this case, every source that has told you there was no fraud in the 2020 election appears to be a mash of conspiracy Twitter accounts, fringe blogs, or links to itself. Ho hum.
Really unfortunate that these are disorganized and don't make clear statements as to what was improper. Two years on I would have hoped for more clarity from detractors.
Another poster in this discussion posted some links including this one https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/here-is-the-evidence but I didn't find it very satisfying because while it does mention a lot of problems with that site, it doesn't really address the specific evidence itself. I was hoping to see somebody break down the evidence found on hereistheevidence and explain what was so wrong with it. I mean, even heavily biased sources that have been caught spreading lies in the past can still post some truths right? A biased source is a reason for caution, not a reason to outright dismiss something!
So, not having that readily available, I thought I'd check some of the evidence myself. I started with
"143,835 votes in Georgia were in violation to state laws". That sure sounds pretty serious! That claim consists of nothing more than a link to https://thepostmillennial.com/trump-lawyer-lists-exhaustive-.... No evidence, but I guess they linked to it so I ignored the nagging voice saying "WTF is thepostmillennial.com?" and clicked that link so that I could take in all the glorious evidence I was promised! I'll save you a click though. There is no evidence there. It's just a blog post about how somebody else made a bunch of claims and a video of those claims being made. Not once in the text of that site does the number "143,835" even come up and nowhere is there any evidence available to review.
Okay, so there's zero evidence at that link, maybe it was just a bad example...
I next checked the entry for "300,000 Fake People Voted In Arizona Election" - Wow! So many fake people! How did I not hear about this?! The entry for that claim is also nothing more than another link. Okay, so no evidence of fake people, but surely that link must take me straight to it!
The link goes to
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/12/01/data_expe... and once again, I'll save you the click, it's still just a post about someone else's claims. There's zero evidence there.
Links to stories about people making claims without evidence is not evidence. If there's any evidence at all to be found on hereistheevidence.com, I didn't find it. I guess we need someone to create "hereistheevidenceonhereistheevidence.com"
I can't blame people for not taking the time to go over all of the evidence at hereistheevidence.com and verify it, because there is no evidence, which I guess we all should have known by now.
National security wise better to avoid the risk of nation wide vote hacking by having many separate systems. Yes it increases the likelihood of a successful hacking event, but it decreases expected damage.
If that was a concern, surely the only reasonable thing to do would be to move to a popular vote as soon as possible. As things stand, an entity that could reliably hack 2 or 3 states would have a better than even chance of controlling the election outcome.
that doesn't help at all, and in fact makes it worse - with a popular vote you can just hack one or two communities with very large populations (i.e. LA and NYC), and change or cast enough votes to cancel out about 30 other states in total.
You can't trivially shift huge numbers of votes without getting caught. To get away with it, you'd have to shift small numbers of votes in specific locations. But with a popular votes, small numbers of votes don't make a difference. Reliably shifting 1% of the vote in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, would throw an election one way or another under the current system. Switching 1% of the vote in Los Angeles and New York wouldn't reliably change anything with a popular vote system.
The most reliable way would be to do what some states used to do which is have the state legislatures vote instead of the individuals in the state. Dealing with a couple hundred (thousand?) people would be significantly more manageable than millions.
The electoral college can vote not in alignment to their district's popular vote (in many states)
> There is no Constitutional provision or Federal law that requires electors to vote according to the results of the popular vote in their States. Some States, however, require electors to cast their votes according to the popular vote.
Not sure what you are trying to say? Some states used to elect electors not by popular vote, but by a vote by their legislatures. If we want to ensure the legitimacy of a vote it seems easier to secure a system where only a few are voting instead of everybody. I am not positive, but I think the votes in the legislatures were public so there would be no issues with potential voting machine manipulation or anything of the sort.
If a private company can't do it, then what chance does the government have? I should also add, my comment about sarcasm should probably be taken into account.
I never quite understood the "feds screw everything up" meme. It’s like a large company where are some incredibly talented people (NIST, NASA, etc) as well as some people who are "vested and rested". Unlike most large companies, policy makers are appointed every few years by shareholder vote, except each shareholder has the same voting power as every other shareholder and most shareholders decline to exercise their governance privileges. There is wide disagreement between factions of shareholders on the most appropriate policies so progress can sometimes appear slow and fitful.
Some federal elections, like presidential elections are run by the states. With the current system, one doesn't vote directly for president, but instead who they would like their state (via the electoral college) to cast a vote for. As such they are state-run federal elections. Some people don't like this system. Not sure if this was where you were going with your comment. If not, my apologies.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. No elections are run by the Federal Government. They are all run by the states, per the US Constitution. The bills referenced above are "altering rules" as you put it, and that is a form of control.
How does your statement align with the Constitution's Article 1 Section 4 which seems to explicitly allow for congress to alter federal rules at the federal level?
"The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators."
> "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators
Congress can regulate elections for representatives, but they cannot run them. The president or the executive of the federal government cannot run elections. Only state executives (governors, secretaries of state) can run an election.
If those bills pass, elections would still be run by state and local governments. There would simply be additional restrictions on how they choose to run elections.
This particular role of the software doesn't sound particularly critical, in the sense that if it caught fire tomorrow, elections would still happen in the same way, maybe with more human labour involved on the planning side.
But sure, I agree that it's stupid to have every municipality and polity, down to the five mud farmers living in unincorporated East Mudsville, Nowhere figuring out how to do their elections in their own special way. Perhaps it would be good to look into how Elections Canada[1] does things?
[1] It has the unfortunate side effect of providing federal oversight over elections, which is not something that republicans seem to be interested in this year.
No this is false. Imagine if tomorrow all GOP poll workers were 'dismissed' due to a technical glitch and lo and behold a democrat one a formerly red district. Or vice versa.
This opens up the election to unnecessary allegations of fraud.
Unnecessary because of how simple this is to manage.
Then there would be procedures for redress and emergency injunctions that could be made, with enough time to do so.. The situation would have to be unfucked by hand. 'The computer said so' does not overturn election rules.
This kind of scheduling is not critical, because it happens early enough that you can actually correct mistakes with it without compromising the election.
That's the whole point of defense in depth. Compromising this layer does not actually break the system. Because any failures from it are both visible and redressable.
I'm so very tired of proprietary software made by tiny little outfits being critical to elections.