Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

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Claims aren't evidence.

Some of these "stolen" elections took place under Republican state administrations, supervised by Republican appointed election officials. WTF are these people doing if tens of thousands of votes are sneaking through the system and they can't find any evidence of it, and say themselves the election was fair?

Trump did exactly the same thing in 2016, claiming massive vote fraud and that the election was being stolen from him. Not only did he provide no evidence, but his own Justice department and subsequent administration was unable to find any evidence. If he really though the electoral system was so badly flawed, he had control of the House and Senate to do something about it, so why no voting reforms? If he actually believed his claims why didn't do something about it?

The truth is he didn't do anything because there's nothing to be done. He and his people know perfectly well the electoral system is fair, that's why they haven't bothered to reform it. There would be no point. In fact it would simply make them responsible for the voting system and thus unable to claim fraud anymore. Instead he's simply using claims of fraud as a tool to incite his supporters and avoid the ignominy of being a "loser". Something he has said many times he cannot tolerate.

Both his words and his actions show very clearly this is a pre-meditated attempt to undermine democracy in America.

Can you please point to where I contradict any of that?

It's like telling your grandma to install security updates, and her coming back saying no one has broken into her computer so it must be secure (while gramps insists someone has).

The simple fact of the matter is our elections are NOT secure, and making them secure would be cheap, and easy.

We have absolutely no idea whether the vote counts in the US are authentic. That doesn't mean anyone stole this election. That certainly doesn't mean Democrats stole this election. But it does mean we should secure them.

Of course, physical security is a cheap and easy step. The harder part is gaming our media. If attackers can help direct where voters vote with $$$, that's a cheap attack too.

As a footnote, if I were an attacker, of any type, I wouldn't even bother with the November election. The easiest place to attack is primaries. Both 2020 and 2016, we had among the weakest candidates among the crop win.

We're going from a con artist to a senile mildly corrupt lifetime politician of limited accomplishment. UPGRADE! I'll expect we'll move from major corruption to minor corruption, without an attempted coup.

What I think we deserve, though, is a politician with intelligence, vision, and integrity.

That requires fixing systems, rather than GOP pointing to DNC, and vice-versa.

> The harder part is gaming our media. If attackers can help direct where voters vote with $$$, that's a cheap attack too.

Let’s be real that’s basically a part of politics. That’s not an issue with elections per se.

Plus it’s clearly easier to just use social media and targeted propaganda to manipulate voters.

I’m all for secure elections and improving that security.

But my understanding is that to date when people have taken a serious look they’ve found no meaningful evidence of fraud.

The real deal is if we got rid of the electoral college then the presidency wouldn’t come down to a few thousand votes in a few counties in a few states.

Gaming of the media is a title/position. Probably the easiest part of an attack-

> The real deal is if we got rid of the electoral college

I reckon the US system needs to self-reform if it wants to survive. All democracies change their electoral laws from time to time. The current system appears unsustainable: roughly two thirds of the electorate now feel fundamentally disenfranchised (one third thinks it's racist; the other that it's corrupt).

... and it's both racist and corrupt. I agree we need reform if we're to survive. Between BLM this spring, DC now, the fringe militant elements, we're seeing more and more violence.

I will mention that the split-down-the-middle thing isn't a property of electoral college. That's how you win in a democracy. If voters are distributed between 1 and 10 on some issue:

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10

I win by picking 5.5. Whatever you pick, you get a minority of voters. That's complicated by primaries. In the same system, if I want to be a ballot candidate, though, I can't do that. I want to pick 2.75 or 7.25 so the majority of my party votes for me.

Of course, things like charisma fit in a bit too, but for the most part, if one party runs a 2.74 candidate and the other a 7.24, the 7.24 has an advantage, and vice-versa for 2.76 and 7.76.

All that things like electoral college do is shift weights. Tight elections just means politicians have learned to play the game well.

A system where someone with 40% or 60% of the vote wins isn't fundamentally broken -- the underlying check-and-balance works. What is fundamentally broken are when incentive structures misalign.

> We have absolutely no idea whether the vote counts in the US are authentic.

Of course we do. Georgia did a full hand recount this election, finding no evidence of anything like what you're alleging. And many states do random-sample hand recounts every election. We didn't check every single vote, but "absolutely no idea" is way off the mark.

> finding no evidence of anything like what you're alleging

Indeed. A recount provides absolutely no evidence in either direction on what I'm alleging. Fortunately, if you'd like evidence, you can look for the auditable source code for my local voting machines on github. Didn't find any? There's your evidence of a transparency issue.

What many of these posts did provide evidence for are reading comprehension issues on web forums. But we knew that already.

>A recount provides absolutely no evidence in either direction on what I'm alleging.

Georgia electronic votes were all backed by voter verifiable auditable paper ballots. That's independent of whether the software is competent at arithmetic. A hand recount does, in fact, protect against fake totals.

Unfortunately, there are a handful of states that don't mandate paper backups. The solution for machines of that sort isn't open source—it's adding auditable paper.

It's really a waste of time. These people don't care if the election was fair, don't care that Republican appointed officials responsible for implementing the voting systems in Republican run states verified everything. They don't care how audit-able the votes were. They don't even care that Trump and the Republican leadership have no interest in vote reform despite repudiating the results of the vote.

It's simply a flat out repudiation of democracy.

I kind of do care that the election is fair, and I've kind of cared for decades that we've undermined that. I care about that a lot more than Georgie. Discounting me as "these people" is distinctly how we get to corruption.

"These people" also couldn't allege fraud in Georgia if we had fraud-proof systems. It's not rocket science. I wish we could point them to proof. We can't. We can point "these people" to pretty good evidence, but we wouldn't have this particular problem if we could point to hard proof.

We'd probably have a different problem, but it is what it is.

> "These people" also couldn't allege fraud in Georgia if we had fraud-proof systems. It's not rocket science.

What evidence do you have that they couldn't? Plenty of people would make claims of fraud, even in a "fraud-proof" election systems. What would that even look like, in theory, let alone in practice?

What specifically out our current system leaves it open to the widespread, multi-state fraud that is being claimed by the president and others?

... That we have touchscreen voting machines, without auditable source code, auditable hardware, or corporate transparency? That we have no real way to know they're at all running honest algorithms?

I mean, seriously. Look under the hood for five minutes.

https://xkcd.com/2030/

This stuff wasn't even controversial among most liberals pre-Trump.

How does any of that apply to the situation in Georgia? Sure, the things you mention would be nice incremental improvements to Georgia's system and states that do not have an auditable paper ballot trail are very problematic, we don't disagree there.

You imply that liberals have changed their position on this post-Trump, but I don't think you'll find these suggested improvements controversial to most liberals. But what do you mean by we can't point the people of Georgia to hard proof? I fail to see how addressing even all of the points you raise would suddenly convince the president and his supporters. The existing measures don't appear to have swayed them at all. So I don't think it's productive to pretend like this wouldn't be a problem if only we had some mythical "fraud-proof" system.

https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/historic_first_statew...

> Today, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced the results of the Risk Limiting Audit of Georgia’s presidential contest, which upheld and reaffirmed the original outcome produced by the machine tally of votes cast. Due to the tight margin of the race and the principles of risk-limiting audits, this audit was a full manual tally of all votes cast. The audit confirmed that the original machine count accurately portrayed the winner of the election.

> By law, Georgia was required to conduct a Risk Limiting Audit of a statewide race following the November elections.

> The differential of the audit results from the original machine counted results is well within the expected margin of human error that occurs when hand-counting ballots. A 2012 study by Rice University and Clemson University found that “hand counting of votes in postelection audit or recount procedures can result in error rates of up to 2 percent.” In Georgia’s recount, the highest error rate in any county recount was .73%. Most counties found no change in their finally tally. The majority of the remaining counties had changes of fewer than ten ballots.

Simply alleging something doesn't make it true, or likely or even plausible. It's just saying stuff, especially when you have no evidence and hence no reason for the stuff being said.

Well, I'd argue in all the places voter fraud is likely, we can't have evidence since we don't have transparency or records. That's not the same places as the Trump crowd is talking about right now, but touch screen voting with unauditable proprietary software? Come on. There's one private company which controls the election outcomes in several states. We have no way to know whether they're doing anything illicit and no way to know.

So I say again, why aren’t Trump and Republican law makers and state leaders doing anything about it? Why have they sat on their hands on this issue for four years, including a period when the Republicans controlled both houses and the Presidency? I think we all know the reason why.

>We have absolutely no idea whether the vote counts in the US are authentic.

We never have. The only way to know would be to personally verify the voter's driver's license, watch them vote and submit their ballot, count their ballot, and repeat for every single voter in the United States. Since this will never, ever happen, one could always make vague claims about authenticity. But without concrete evidence of fraud, it doesn't matter.

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