House moves toward eliminating agency tasked to prevent voting machine hacking | Hacker News Reader

House moves toward eliminating agency tasked to prevent voting machine hacking

thenation.com

21 pointsbrudgers11 comments

TFA says this bill "transfers the EAC’s authority to the Federal Election Commission". That seems reasonable; why have two separate agencies responsible for upholding election integrity?

The article makes it sound like the EAC is the only agency in charge of election infosec.

Normally, a move like this might not be a big deal, but given the current administration's refusal to acknowledge prior election interference despite the IC's unanimous claim of said interference, this seems worrying.

The bill text [1] appears to only transfer authority related to section 9(a) of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it looks like the FEC only regains the ability to coordinate voter registration regulations and processes--not regulating general election standards.

Huge grain of salt: I'm not well versed in reading legal documents and may be way off the mark.

[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/634/...

The FEC is responsible for enforcing campaign finance law.

The EAC is responsible for various activities relating to support of state administration of elections.

They both relate to elections in the same way that NOAA and the Navy both have missions that relate to the oceans.

We're approaching the point where the only thing politicians fear is a fair election.

Suggestion: use a read only medium, as has been used in vote-by-pencil system for ages, like: PAPER!

To make it easier to count, we can use machines to print votes on a piece of paper (something akin to a receipt-roll). These votes are printed when voter casts vote, and the machines shows the vote to the voter through a small hole in the machine (preventing the voter from seeing the preference of the previous voter).

Vote-rolls are distributed like ballots, and they are "sealed" in the machine before are sent back to the central counting places. OCR is used to read the votes from the rolls.

Machines can also keep track of votes digitally, for a quick count. The quick and slow count should match.

This way we can have quicker and cheaper voting, while not compromising (much) on security wrt to voting-by-pencil.

Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

If you prefer to read:

https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/6/3609506/voting-machine-el...

I think that electronic voting as the single source of truth is a bad idea, but electronic voting as a method of making the process more efficient is not a bad idea.

Voting machines should print off a receipt of your vote, which you can then confirm and seal in an envelope, like you would a paper vote, and put in a box of paper votes. The machines will also need to have a method for voters to correct an incorrect vote somehow.

If there are irregularities, or a recount is needed, the paper votes can be counted. There should also be an option for a normal paper vote, if the voter so choses, like how in an airport you can choose an Xray or a pat-down.

Upon saying that, I don't see what's wrong with paper votes. Elections don't happen very often, and paper voting scales perfectly fine with population.

You don't necessarily know if there are irregularities. Many elections are quite close anyway. Just count the paper by default, it's not that hard.

Ehh, maybe it's for the best. Such an agency is effectively a check on the power of the entire government, so I wouldn't expect it to be effective if the government is pulling the strings. And, its demise further weakens the illusion that our elections are legitimate and safe from hacking. Spur the people into taking the problem seriously.

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