Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani
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cbc.ca
The core of defamation is (1) a false statement of purported fact that (2) causes damage (there are some exceptions to (2) that aren't relevant here). Most defamation cases you hear about fall apart on (1) - they target non-falsifiable statements of opinion, which can't be defamation because they don't purport to relate an objective fact. What makes Dominion's cases terrifying is that they are chock full of purported facts, all of which are batshit, and have so devastated Dominion's reputation, in a reputation-intensive business, that it had to hire private security to protect its employees from death threats.
What makes the case challenging for Dominion is that they will almost certainly be treated as a public figure for the purposes of the case. The standard for defamation of a public figure is higher than that of a normal person; we add a condition (3): actual malice or negligence, meaning Dominion must show that Giuliani either intended to destroy Dominion's reputation by spreading facts he knew to be false, or that he was at least negligent, acting with reckless disregard for the truth.
The problem is that it's not totally clear whether Giuliani believed any of his crazy-talk. It may actually be the case that Giuliani is just off his rocker. If he himself was sold by the (false) facts he received from others, he is a more difficult defamation target.
Here's attorney Akiva Cohen analyzing the case a bit:
The Covenant Kid was thrust into the media and when he sued for defamation, at least some judges accepted the claim that he was a public figure — even though he was suing over the very thing that thrust him into the national spotlight.
Obama was a public official, so the standards for public figures that aren’t public officials wouldn’t apply.
Dominion seems to be very clearly a “Limited Purpose Public Figure” in the domain in which the disputed statements apply.
Their lack of general celebrity is a good argument that they aren’t an “all purpose” public figure.
Well, it's not that strange, if you look at how frequently mere threats of defamation lawsuits are used to chill free speech.
But the defamer in this case is the President of the United States and his legal team. That sort of falls down.
I wouldn't call it unfortunate. If you don't want to be a public figure, one thing of which to steer clear is certainly the business of operating voting systems in the US presidential election. This is clearly public interest.
It needs to be clearly and forcefully demonstrated that knowingly and recklessly and maliciously lying to the public with the intention of causing harm to a company or individual like this carries heavy consequences.
I feel like this is the problem with the discourse right now. It's understandable why you're making that argument, because the media has been saying that for months now. Because in fact a large number of cases were dismissed (so it's not technically a lie), but it's only rhetorically effective if you don't look at the details.
So then we end up with this massive polarization because one side keeps relying on an argument that sounds very convincing to their base who never hear the counterargument, but will never convince the other side who have, and then there is never reconciliation. Or even a motive to find more convincing arguments that there wasn't fraud, because they're only talking to their base and not even trying to convince the other side.
So this is another example of the same thing. Rhetorically effective if you don't look at the details, so media stories everywhere, but not convincing to the other side.
And part of this is a problem specifically because they never really got to have a trial and do discovery and all of that. Because if you go through the whole process then it comes out one way or the other. But if the cases get dismissed on procedure then you have one side saying "all your cases were dismissed so shut up" and the other side saying they never actually got their day in court and nothing to ever reconcile them because both statements are true.
They specifically either did not make or withdrew fraud allegations in many cases. It's true that the PA case is the only one where Giuliani was stupid enough to repeatedly invoke fraud in arguments despite it not being in the allegations or evidence in that case, thereby getting questioned by the judge on that point, and thus being forced to admit his arguments on those points weren't germane to the actual lawsuit he was discussing (similar, though different in detail problems were endemic to the Trump/Kraken lawsuits, like broad claims of counting irregularities in lawsuits in one state being supported by detailed allegations specifying specific facilities in another state.)
> And part of this is a problem specifically because they never really got to have a trial and do discovery and all of that.
False. A number of the election cases went to trial (6 out of 54 tracked on Wikipedia reached a final verdict after trial, and 1 is listed as trial ongoing, though that may be out of date).
> But if the cases get dismissed on procedure then you have one side saying "all your cases were dismissed so shut up" and the other side saying they never actually got their day in court and nothing to ever reconcile them because both statements are true.
Well, procedure matters. Especially when you deliberately delay claims you believed you had simply to prevent the availability of simple remedies. If you have a problem with cases dismissed for gross procedural failings, take it up with the people who bungled the procedure in dozens of separate cases.
The general point being that they did make and did not withdraw fraud allegations in other cases.
> A number of the election cases went to trial (6 out of 54 tracked on Wikipedia reached a final verdict after trial, and 1 is listed as trial ongoing, though that may be out of date)
Which implies that the large majority of them didn't, doesn't it? It's not as if they were all fungible.
> Well, procedure matters.
Sure it does. But it has the result that it has. Nobody ever decides the merit of the claims dismissed on procedure.
So, here’s a challenge. Find one case where:
(1) Trump or his campaign alleges electoral fraud, and (2) The case (or specifically the fraud claim, if these are separate) was dismissed other than voluntarily by the plaintiff, and the grounds for that dismissal do not include any that require an evaluation of the merits of the case based on the allegations and proferred evidence. Notably, this means that you can’t include any case/claim dismissed for failure to state a claim, or that was dismissed voluntarily by Trump or his campaign.
The lower court seemed to indicate they were going to win on it before it was dismissed on procedure.
> disenfranchising 6 million voters who voted in good faith per their individual US Constitutional right would never be a sensical remedy for an error in procedure by officials.
The problem is that once the election has been conducted in violation of the law, that has already happened. The total you have is inaccurate and you don't actually know who won, so choosing anyone based on it is disenfranchising anybody who voted for someone else.
Now, I think at one point they were asking to just throw out all of the mail in ballots, which is ridiculous. Some kind of sensible remedy might have been to hold the election again or have the state legislature decide. But then when they started asking for that, people were calling it a coup attempt, as if voting for electors who then vote for President is perfectly democratic and reasonable, but voting for legislators who vote for electors who vote for President according to the constitutional procedure is some kind of seditious tyranny.
And what's the alternative? State officials can violate election procedures with impunity because there is no remedy? Surely you can see how that could be abused for partisan advantage by whoever is in control of the state government.
And don't ask for state legislators to pick the winner, either. Voters weren't voting for presidential electors when they voted for state legislators.
And don't say "you don't actually know who won". Yes, we do in fact know perfectly well who won. What you perhaps mean is "we don't know who would have won under what the rules should have been." Well, perhaps, but we know who won under what the rules were. You don't want that set of rules? Sue before the election. You had months.
A real cynic might think that they knew before and said nothing, just to keep open the grounds for a lawsuit in case they lost. Laches is a perfect response to that kind of game.
> The problem is that once the election has been conducted in violation of the law, that has already happened. The total you have is inaccurate and you don't actually know who won.
If votes are cast in good faith by citizens following the voting laws as they are communicated and there is no evidence either of material fraud or of a material number of voters being disenfranchised, then you very likely do have an accurate total, right? If the election is a violation of the law because it disenfranchised enough voters to make a material difference in the outcome, that would be a different matter, but that was never actually in question here. Even if all the mail-in votes that had been "cured" had been thrown out, Biden would have still won the state. This is why Trump's team asked to have all mail-in votes thrown out: a more reasonable restitution wouldn't have achieved the outcome they wanted, e.g., Trump being awarded the state's electoral college votes regardless of the popular vote tally.
(And, AnimalMuppet is also right: every state that changed election laws in 2020 changed them, by definition, before the election. Raising objections to those laws after the election because your guy didn't win -- and only in those states -- is, well, suspect.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-opinion-fede...
Not only him but also other Trump lawyers on separate occasions in Pennsylvania. See for example https://www.newsweek.com/trump-campaign-lawyer-tells-pa-judg...
There was a similar story in Arizona: https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-cries-election-fraud-in-c...
That PA case was a real shitshow, and actually involved several claims from several parties in the same case:
* Act 77 was PA-state unconstitutional (despite the PA Supreme Court refusing to agree), and that makes it federal unconstitutional.
* Relatedly, state courts enforcing changes to state law under state constitutions are (federal) unconstitutional modifications to election procedures, because only state legislatures can change election procedures [this was a really daft argument].
* Some counties didn't give their residents a chance to cure their ballots
* Observers weren't permitted to stand as closely as the Republicans wanted to the ballot counting tables
While the constitutionality of Act 77 would have been their strongest argument had they challenged it in state court, they didn't in the case in the question (because they already lost that case), and they combined it with several other cases to argue over every nitpick they could find in PA. If Giuliani seriously believed that the machine counts were wrong in PA, I suspect he would have tacked that on to the case, as they were already claiming everything else.
The media reported it like that because it was accurate. There's talk of sanctioning some of the lawyers for bringing some of the more frivolous lawsuits
There is no good faith counterargument based in facts, it's either conspiratorial nonsense, humungous misunderstandings or lies
Several judges punted on standing and laches but also said that even if they heard the case, it would not end up in the favor of the plaintiff because they were silly issues to bring up.
The GOP attorneys were basically arguing that the letter of the law says that only state legislatures have the right to do anything with regards to elections. They also asked the courts to grant state legislatures powers that they do not normally possess. These are complete nonsense and always has been. State legislatures don't actually do anything. They pass laws that direct how the rest of government operates, along with the limits of discretion those other branches have.
Everybody who paid ANY attention in this past election knows that their own states did these same things. Texas sent that lawsuit to the US Supreme Court. It was idiotic on standing issues alone, but also because they only challenged the actions of states that did not vote for Trump. Texas itself had an executive who changed the rules during the election. North Carolina also did this. They KNOW this.
But it's easier to believe that the election was stolen than it is to believe that the country chose someone who is the antithesis of the guy you supported, and so that's what they do.
If you knew months before the election that the rules were being changed, why not file a lawsuit then? Why wait until after the election, when you've got the deadline of the Electoral College vote, and your lawsuit is going to literally disenfranchise every voter in the state?
Laches isn't a punt. It's sanity in the face of insane lawsuits trying to game the court system.
And laches is, you didn't like the rules? Sue before the election; you had plenty of time. You wait until after? No, we're not going to let you hold the election hostage. Suing after looks like you didn't like the results you got under the rules, but you didn't have a problem with the rules going in. Why should the courts let you throw out everybody's vote because you didn't like the results? Why do you not think that is ridiculous?
"The record establishes that Wisconsin's selection of its 2020 Presidential Electors was conducted in the very manner established by the Wisconsin Legislature, by general ballot at the general election... plaintiff has not shown a significant departure from the Wisconsin Legislature's chosen election scheme ... This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits. In his reply brief, plaintiff 'asks that the Rule of law be followed.' It has been"
Try again, my dude. Just because you paid attention to one singular case doesn't mean that judges didn't rule on the merit of the case anywhere.
Second: I misread your comment as saying that it was ridiculous for the judges to not rule on the merits. I agree with you that the (alleged) merits of the cases were ridiculous.
Have you heard of Antrim County? Everybody on the right heard of it on November 5th. https://www.westernjournal.com/michigan-recount-confirms-tru...
This is "fact checked" by many left leaning websites to indicate it is false. But even the "fact checkers" admit that Trump actually won Antrim county. Their "fact check" ridicules that the 2nd recount, after the reversing of the dominion glitch that gave 3000 Trump votes to Biden, only netted Trump a few more votes after that. But the way the "fact check" articles are presented make the reader believe the whole thing is bullshit. It's not. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/1...
The issue is that their leaders are more than happy to just lie to them constantly, reality be damned. And they don’t know, or they don’t care that they’re being lied to.
Only Sidney Powell cases claimed issues with dominion. The Arizona case was tossed because the evidence was not reliable. Most of the 50+ lawsuits claimed procedural issues and not fraud. Claiming mail-in ballots violated the equal protection clause was brought up heavily even though they've been used for over a hundred years and the Giuliani voted by mail in 2020 election.
The supreme court case brought by other state AGs claimed PA violated their own state constitution. I still don't understand how an AG from another state can sue another state for issues pertaining their own constitution in federal court. Federal court doesn't have jurisdiction to rule if an act violates a states constitution.
I don’t believe that is true. As far as I know, there weren’t really any claims of voter fraud from Trump’s legal team.
[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor... - "Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statement he makes."
Dominion at the very least should be demanding they remove the word “news” from all their branding if this is to fly.
It’s the equivalent of /r/politics for boomers. A bunch of people getting riled up together about the “obvious stupidity” of “the other side”.
We can discuss the issue with a news network that argues in court "It's not news, it's just their opinion" while presenting it as news, without going 12 year old in it.
It's much like how a valid critique of Ballmer era Microsoft is immediately undermined by referring to them as Micro$oft or Microsucks etc.
I think what you're trying to say is that the argument about malice is easier because as an attorney of record on cases involving allegations against Dominion, he "should have been" in a better position to know the truth than a layperson repeating the same nonsense.
And likewise, it's near impossible to prove a negative.
If we followed your train of thought, we'd be demanding that Hillary Clinton prove she didn't harvest adenochrome from terrified paedophilia victims in a pizza restaurant.
Which is pretty ridiculous, right?
A skilled liar would never for a moment reveal that they did not truly believe what they were saying, not even in private correspondence. Even in typical, not overtly evil companies, the saying "write for the subpoena" is passed around as advice for would-be upfront communicators.
Still, if criminals never made mistakes the justice system would convict almost nobody of anything.
I feel like Giuliani got himself stuck between a rock and a hard place here by filing actual lawsuits.
At that point, he either had to (1) include his claims about Dominion (which were extremely relevant to his lawsuits) and open himself up to perjury or (2) leave his claims out, providing pretty damning evidence in a defamation suit that he didn't believe the evidence himself.
He went with (2) and he only has a tiny bit of wiggle room to prove that he believed the claims / "evidence" but they wouldn't be useful to include in his lawsuits.
Powell and Wood relied on donations for their work and Wood in particular is a multi-millionaire many times over for some of the corporate work he's done. I'm sure Rudy is rich, mostly from the speech circuit post 9/11, but he's not Lin Wood rich. He probably needs to work to maintain his lifestyle.
Giuliani deserves whatever is coming to him.
This seems to be a standard trope but I've never met anyone who fit it.
It also makes you wonder why he needs to bother.
That part seems bizarre. Surely he ought to still be culpable is he said false things with the intention to damage Dominion, even if he can convince the court that he believed the things he said. Unless, of course, you're talking about an insanity defense or a claim of provocation, but those a very different matter, and I highly doubt that's a viable route.
The same question came up with Trump's phone calls to the Georgia AG when the President was essentially threatening the AG to 'do something'. There is apparently a lot of materiality to the notion of how much the President actually believed the issue of fraud.
Which is an altogether amazing new line of defence: "If you believe the lie thoroughly, you're literally less culpable!"
It's entirely plausible that people 'get things wrong' in the real world.
But once you have a guy who will believe everything that's to his benefit, and claim that everything not to his credit is a lie ... well then you have a problem.
It's really, really worrisome how many intelligent people do not see quite obviously the game he is playing.
It's one thing for people who watch Judge Judy every day to maybe have difficulty with a lie so forcefully presented, but most people should know better.
It's also interesting how it's viewed from outside the bubble of the US where the ration of 'believers' is vastly lower, and yet, at the same time there are even die-hard cohorts of them outside the border as well.
There was a 'Stop The Steal' min-march in Montreal Canada of all places.
In any case I think it’s unlikely that Rudi will be claiming insanity.
You can’t kill someone because you think you are acting in self-defense. You have to actually be acting in self-defense. Moreover, pressuring officials to manufacture fake evidence, or act as if they had evidence they don’t have, surely ought to be illegal even if would have been possible to find real evidence.
We're talking about a different kind of crime.
The law states someone has to 'knowingly try to interfere etc' but the challenge is that you'd have to prove that Trump knew he lost.
If he truly believed he had won, well, then he'd just be trying to fix the election, not rig it, right?
The call was along the lines of how Mafia bosses talk, so that they don't implicate themselves.
Here are some details [1]
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-s-call-g...
I think they ought to adjust the laws here. Elected officials should maybe be able to provide evidence for review, but that's it.
But surely he was knowingly try to interfere even if he had in fact won.
That's not true at all. The bar is typically whether a reasonable person would believe that they are at risk of grave bodily harm. It obviously depends on the jury, but there have been a number of shootings where the shooter believed they were acting in self-defense, but were not, and they were ultimately acquitted.
I also doubt Trump is the end point.
So now their owners[1] need to figure out how to get whatever value they can. This isn't a "campaign", it's just a business effort. They've been transformed into something like an IP holding company, where the IP is the damage suffered by the original outfit. They'll sue everyone they can.
(They'll also probably manage to recoup some value by selling what's left of the company to someone else who then rebrands them and tries to sell back into the markets that have been poisoned. Something very similar happened with Diebold a decade ago, which was then sold to ES&S and thence to, yes, Dominion.)
[1] No idea how they're structured, but per wikipedia they're a private corporation.
So the issue isn't "electronic voting" vs. "paper ballots".
The fact that it takes as long as it does in the US and there is still a fear that it's not secure or that it's suspicious--no matter how wrong that fear may be--is a problem. And it's not a "dumb normies need more education about statistics" problem. It's a problem created by forcing a "solution" that is unnecessary (paper ballots, counted by hand work fine) and unnecessarily complicated.
If people dont understand that printed paper ballots cant be changed by an air gapped electronic system you wont gain their trust anyway.
Electronic voting is unnecessary and unnecessarily complicated. Your response to this is basically “they’re too dumb to to understand and so don’t matter anyway.”
"Your response to this is basically “they’re too dumb to to understand and so don’t matter anyway.”" No, my response is that a pure paper ballot system wont change a thing and would just shift the conspiracy theories to other parts of the system.
Even so, the entire idea that a group of hucksters can completely annihilate the reputation of a company based on absolute nonsense from a bunch of angry losers is a bit frightening.
Republicans have been claiming for years, completely
without merit, that Dominion has been involved in a
variety of vote-changing schemes
Your question implies that you feel that Dominion is somehow different from other companies doubted by democrats, and itself must never be doubted. Why is it different?
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-market-for-voting-mac... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en/Election_Systems_&_Software https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/chinese-parts-hidden-owners...
I also recall seeing liberal concern over Dominion in GA prior to the election. Regardless, it's a powerful industry with a justifiably large amount of public scrutiny, even if we don't always get the transparency we deserve. All of these systems should be public, open source, and verifiable with paper trails.
Everyone seems to agree that diversity is a good thing that leads to better overall outcomes, but then some of those people think that doesn't apply to diversity of ideas. Much of America's success can be attributed to being a melting pot of all types of people, and the mix of ideas they brought to the table. This recent trend of extreme censorship and "cancel culture" is bad for everyone long term, even if you agree with it in the short term.
Notice that Dominion, in their filing comes right out swinging for that very ball. They start out with multiple cases where Rudy publicly alleged fraud then in the related court proceedings, did not alleged the same fraud.
Dominion makes a pretty good case in their filing that Rudy knew his sources were not reliable and so he avoided making those same accusations in court. They also show multiple examples of Rudy publicly making these fraud claims on his show while selling products like cigars and cyber security services. "just use the code word 'rudy' to get 20% off your purchase."
The so-called "actual malice" standard doesn't require proof of intent to damage reputation. It only requires proof that the defendant said the defamatory statement "with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not". New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964). (This is important because Rudy probably didn't care one way or the other about Dominion's reputation; they were just collateral damage as far as he was concerned.)
Software systems can easily be hacked, and it isn't easy to inspect and tell. A vote is a one time, one sided transaction. It's not as easy to detect fraud in an election as it is with say, a double entry banking record.
I can already hear the politicians going on about how "being open source" lets "anyone put their own back door in! BE AFRAID!"
And that's impossible.
People who think open source is the solution to the voting challenge haven't given this problem much thought.
You claim that open source is NOT safer than closed source, what is your reasoning there? Security through obscurity?
When I learned that the US actually uses software in its elections, I was shocked. It’s unthinkable here in the UK.
From what I've read, there are some states/localities that have paper ballots they can check, including swing states like Georgia, where they did audit that exact thing.
But then there are other states that do not keep the paper trail, most of which went "red" according to an article I read but did not verify.
https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
"Currently only one state — Louisiana — keeps no paper trail of votes at all. Counties in eight states — Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas — use a hybrid system" where some, but not all votes will have a paper trail.
(from https://madison.com/on-paper-ballots-for-the-2020-election/a...)
[1]: https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
Not just in the UK. Most Western democracies consider the idea completely crazy because nothing can be properly audited once papers are removed.
It's easy to say that software can just be hacked, but just because its a possibility doesn't give you the right to invalidate an election.
The people putting forward voter ID laws usually do the opposite. They want to make obtaining an ID more difficult and make that ID a requirement to vote. If we just say "getting and ID should be easy" but don't actually make it easy, and then we increase voter ID requirements, we are disenfranchising voters.
Requiring id and then making it hard to get doesn't have a lot of merit if there aren't a bunch of people exploiting the lack of id checks.
If someone has registered and voted in the past and has an expired id, should they be excluded from voting if they don't renew in time? Even though registration is already a sufficient barrier to fraud?
The only way I can think of to actually do this is to have some trusted party go out and randomly sample voting machines (i.e. check the software on the disk matches the reproducible builds of the open source software, and decap the machine's CPU and other hardware to verify there's no bugs).
Anything else can be foiled by malicious software or hardware.
With the CDN, the user receives source code and they want to verify the source code is unchanged. Checking a hash of the data they received is sufficient.
For a voting machine, what's the analogue? If I walk up to a voting machine with an integrity key, how do I check that the source code it's running has a given hash or is signed with a given key?
If the voting machine itself shows the code or does the check, obviously a person who compromised the machine can fake that bit. If I have to remove the hdd and verify the data on it, and take apart the voting machine to verify there's no second hard drive... well, that seems like it's well out of reach of any voter verifying it.
Integrity keys, hashes, signatures, blockchains, etc can verify digital data, can verify the contents of data that servers serve... But they don't seem to solve the problem of "what code is this machine running", and that seems to be the important problem for voting machine code.
The UK system I think is a bit like that. When I go in my name is checked against a voting slip number (on paper) and then I vote on a bit of paper so someone could theoretically figure which way I voted but the odds of someone going through both paper lists is minimal.
After all, is there any evidence for voter fraud in Russia?
Dominion Voting Systems must prove that Rudy Giuliani was making up information to succeed in this court case. Unfortunately, defamation is surprisingly hard to win in the USA (which is why the US's Tabloid media can get so far with so many claims).
Dominion Voting Systems is not a public figure however, its a company. That... probably makes it easier to win this case.
Still, if Dominion's lawyers think that this case is worth pursuing (despite the difficulty of defamation / libel / slander), that doesn't bode well for Rudy.
> After all, is there any evidence for voter fraud in Russia?
The accusations of there being no voter fraud in the 2020 US election fraud aren't baseless: all the verification checks have passed, and for that to happen and fraud to have occurred would require a conspiracy of unbelievable scale and secrecy. Also, the claims that there is fraud are not just baseless, they're incoherent.
While Russia may make baseless claims their elections are fair, there's more than enough evidence to disbelieve them (like how they disqualify and murder their political opponents).
Edit: grammar.
So, I think the dissenters at least got the skepticism part right. The problem, of course, is that a healthy level of skepticism should only inform the investigation of facts, and then perhaps new legislation and oversight. Without the investigation, oversight or legislation... the skepticism is pointless.
For example, it's unfortunate that gaming machines in Las Vegas have more oversight and regulations than voting machines. That doesn't necessarily there is a problem with voting machines, but it does mean we could do more to ensure there isn't a problem with them now or in the future. Dominion has not done anything to lose my trust, but when it comes our elections, we should have proper oversight over these machines (no matter who makes them since there are multiple suppliers for voting machines).
Which is the tell that Trump didn’t believe his own claims of vote fraud. Bear in mind he pulled exactly the same stunt in 2016 claiming massive vote fraud but when he won never mentioned it again until 2020.
If he’d actually believed there was vote fraud or a chance of it, he would have done something about it. Investigations, hearings, technical audits, best practices and standards. Statistical analysis to identify issues (as against the analyses that do happen that show insignificant fraud). He had 4 years to sort this out. You’d think it would be one if his top priorities.
Of course none of that happened because the whole show is entirely performative. In fact doing anything about it would take his excuse away, because if he addressed vote security he couldn’t blame vote security issues on anyone else.
There was even a voter-fraud commission set up to investigate the claims. They quietly disbanded.
A class case of "we refuse to look for evidence, therefore there is no evidence"
Also why pick on Padilla, why not Jon Husted (Rep, Ohio). What about all the Republican lead states where massive fraud was supposed to have happened? Trump expended no political capital or effort whatsoever on doing anything meaningful about supposed voter fraud, and couldn't even persuade any Republican state administrations he had any credible evidence or reason for alleging it. He just gave up immediately at the first hurdle of being asked what he wanted to do and why. In fact he didn't even pursue this personally, he just delegated it to some flunkies and walked away from the issue until the next election.
How to explain this? It's almost as if he had no credible reason for making the claims and the whole thing was just for show.
So many "skeptics" are actually incredibly trusting patsies, they're just trusting con-men instead of mainstream discourse.
The biggest reason to doubt the "voter fraud" theories this time around is because of who is making the complaints, not because the voting companies (or the laws surrounding e-voting) are beyond reproach.
There needs to be a very high tolerance of criticism towards voting machines and the companies that make them. Ordinary standards of transparency are not enough, for example.
There is. It's called the 1st Amendment.
If the company is suing for defamation, that is also their right. Giuliani isn't some small fish being silenced by a defamation suit.
Well, there's also the fact that the folks advancing these theories are insisting that they're being "kept from gathering the evidence", when in reality much of what they're saying is contradicted by evidence.
For example, the instances cited in the lawsuit where Giuliani and others continued to insist that Dominion voting machines had changed the Georgia election outcome by flipping votes, even after the original results had been confirmed by a full hand recount.
Too many arguments boil down to people, and motives, not facts. It is a bad idea to put the short term desire to see a foe vanquished over the long term cost of bad laws and policy.
Laws are not perfect, and I'm not convinced we want the basis of democracy to be closed source voting machines, or that even if we do, the checks and balances as they stand are currently 100% correct.
Not the same kind of paper trail that exists when a voter fills out a paper ballot.
If I fill out a paper ballot, that ballot is independent evidence of the votes I intended to cast, because I filled it out directly, with no machine in the middle. So that paper ballot is a useful auditing mechanism for checking on machine-generated vote counts.
If I electronically cast votes on a machine, and the machine prints out a paper record of my ballot, unless I, the voter, leave some record that I inspected that piece of paper and agree that it reflects the votes I intended to cast, it's useless as an auditing mechanism. As far as I can tell, no such voter inspection record is made with electronic voting machines.
- get ID validated & ability to vote
- get an initialized smart card
- insert in polling machine, fill out stuff
- submit, get printout from printer
- scan printout into a machine
- return smart card
At the polling places I was at (we had a runoff), the staff + signage was emphasizing to check results on printout.
The printing and the scanning felt terribly wasteful but as it turned out, it became a precious way to audit. The bonus is that the printout is normalized, not some person's handwriting that could be subject to misinterpretation.
Were these Dominion voting machines?
Poll worker validates proper ID, get ballot code for your precinct, walk to voting system, poll worker enters the precinct, voter validates info on screen, voter votes on the touch screen, system prints out choices, walk to scanner system, vote gets scanned, scanner stores those ballots in it's tray in case need for audit.
How so? How many eligible voters don't already have government issued IDs?
The statistics I've seen for people who lack valid voter ID is somewhere in the region of 10-15%. Unsurprisingly, this tends to be concentrated among groups that tend to be more reliably Democratic than Republican (something like 25% of African Americans lack valid ID), which is why voter ID is often a dog whistle for disenfranchising certain voters.
As far as I know every state will issue a picture ID, similar to a driver's license but which doesn't confer driving privileges. to someone who doesn't drive.
If the argument is that people who can't drive will find it more difficult to make it to the office that gives out government issued IDs, the obvious solutions are (1) put more of those offices in places like inner cities, convenient to public transportation, and (2) have the political activists who spend so much time complaining about disenfranchisement do some actual work instead and provide people transportation to and from the offices.
> the state might not consider a tribal ID sufficient to vote
The solution to that is obvious too: either fix the state law or fix the tribal ID requirements so they meet existing state law.
When you're done, the machine prints a paper ballot and asks you to inspect it. You then click OK on the machine, take the ballot from your booth over to a separate counting machine, and deposit it there.
It's really quite pleasant, there is a strong audit trail, and the machines afford a wide variety of assistive options (large font, headphone jack for audio, different languages, etc)
Also I had the option to get a printed ballot and fill it out witih a pen if I wanted to.
What I'm not sure about is whether that is actually the way it is done for all electronic voting machines.
This is how it is done in many US jurisdictions as well (including all the ones I have voted in).
The reality is, there are always ballots that fall in a grey area. That's being exploited to sow doubt in the uncertainty of an entire election.
Hell, same thing happened during Brexit:
> The first stage will see all ballot papers - though not actual votes - counted, a process known as verification.
> Any ballots which are later rejected are included in these verified ballots.
I submit it COULD happen there, too. Votes being counted by local authorities, making judgement calls, and the plan being to announce the preliminary results if the election is "clear" that night.
Since there is only a single question there is tons of whitespace between options and you can't accidentally mark selections for one question in the space asking a different one.
I've never had to vote in a referendum like brexit, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn the ballot was more complex that the usual parliamentary election one. Looking at images of the brexit ballot it appears pretty similar to what I'm used to, but with far less white space between options.
I didn't say any such thing. Of course there are disputed and spoiled ballots, and these are resolved quickly by the volunteers and local observers from the parties taking part in the election. Unless the number of disputed ballots exceeds the difference it's not really a problem. Recounts happen, especially where there's only a few hundred votes in it.
Spoiled ballots (where the voters are actively protesting by scrawling "I hate them all!", or some other message across the paper) are tallied separately, but are otherwise ignored when calculating the election outcome.
There’s also the fact that the ballot is white text on black with a white circle to fill in. This design decision is ingenious in how it eliminates doubts about voting.
So I don't think the UK evidence shows what you claim it does. The smallest UK spoilt ballot error I can find is larger than the winning margins in many US places.
Finally, here's [4] one analysis of voting tech versus ballot spoilage rates that seems to reach similar conclusions of all the papers I scanned over. Hand edited paper is about the worst way to get valid ballots of any method in this study.
[1] https://www.votenone.org.uk/spoilt-ballot-results-2015.html
[2] https://www.votenone.org.uk/spoilt-ballot-results-2015.html
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/19/spoilt-ballots-pc...
[4] https://www.hamilton.edu/news/florida/Klinkner%20Analysis.pd...
Or maybe you didn't read the study....
On the Florida study. Perhaps I've misunderstood, but it read to me like the punchcard system was worst, followed by ballots scanned by a computer at the precinct, then "other", which is the two counties using other system that sound quite different to each other. It wasn't clear to me at all that they had any sort of rating of how many inadvertently spoiled ballots came from hand written, hand counted systems vs others. I'll readily admit that I'm not any kind of statistics expert though, so the study wasn't straightforward for me to follow.
In parliamentary systems, you elect people so they can vote on those matters for you.
Same in America too. Hence, representative democracy. It’s why we have Congress: to vote for us. The problem is that the citizens feel left out in certain issues, so instead of replacing the politician, they make propositions a thing. Boom! Now you have 5+ more things to vote for. Add in county and local governments, and it gets to be 20+ things long.
I was curious who makes the voting machines that are used here. It's apparently a company called ES&S:
"Election Systems and Software (ES&S) 11208 John Galt Blvd, Omaha NE"
Someone has a sense of humor, at least.
If the voter can easily see that the ballot reflects their choices, then it's not useless as an auditing mechanism. That's hyperbole.
Remember, if there is massive/systematic fraud going on, then every instance doesn't have to be caught to uncover it.
https://statescoop.com/georgia-buys-new-voting-machines-with...
That's a valid concern when you're dealing with a good-faith actor. But if voting machines are open-source (which I heartily support), they'll move on to baselessly discrediting something else to shape public perception. The problem isn't the technology per se. The problem is we're not dealing with a good-faith actor.
Voting is a system that needs to be simple, transparent, and auditable. The technical solutions are 0/3 and an example of “over engineering” leading to a poor quality solution.
Our current voting system is well below international standards — and it’s because of the technology.
Second, considering who we're dealing with, it fundamentally doesn't matter. They aren't actually arguing for more secure elections, they're looking for any reason to throw out the results because they lost. If systems were up to "international standards" (I don't know what those are, can you be more specific?) they'll just say they're "liberal commie standards that you can't trust, and we need American standards" or some nonsense like that.
By all means have more secure elections. Just know that it won't do anything in a scenario where the loser claims any result other than their victory is "rigged".
See the leaked memos from Diebold here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~matth/lists/
In the case of Georgia, a full recount (by hand) was done on the paper ballots.
Do you know where the Dominion validation process is clearly documented so it is easy to see whether it is easily subverted? I will bet the answer is no, and the software and hardware are all trade secrets and impossible for voters to verify :D. Sounds like a totally trustworthy system to me.
The verification process in Georgia involved physically counting all of the paper ballots. The Dominion machines were totally uninvolved in the hand-recount (and, unsurprisingly, the hand-recount found that the original machine tally was extremely accurate)
Again, I think it's pretty clear you don't understand what role the machines actually play in the voting process.
Your claim seems to be that the Georgia Secretary of State (a staunch Republican and Trump supporter) along with the governor managed to pull off a huge operation to secretly change the results of the election (which would have involved hundreds of people and require that none of them speak out). That's a really outlandish claim, and requires supporting evidence, of which you have none.
I would prefer not to believe the election was stolen. I wanted Trump out, and Biden seems a reasonable replacement. I also debunked a number of the fallacious statistical 'proofs' the election was stolen. Believe me I would like nothing better than to believe everything is fine. But especially Navarro's report makes me unable to dismiss the allegations off hand with a clean conscience. I've also looked into the PA court's reasons for dismissing Trump's lawsuit from back in Sept, and the reasoning is all based on technicalities and does not address the substance of the concern that the loosening of the rules has opened the door to major fraud. The fact all the coverage of the lawsuits is frivolous dismissal or even in some cases the courts rule in favor does nothing to set my mind at ease.
Are there other, more credible, sources that are influencing your thinking? There is zero evidence supporting the claim of widespread fraud. Unless you have some evidence of some kind, it really seems like you would prefer to believe there is some vast conspiracy and you are writing off all the evidence to the contrary.
When I look for articles explaining why the lawsuits are rejected en mass, every article I have found is very hand wavy, stating the judges are appointed by Trump so we should expect them to be unbiased. However, no one actually dogs into the opinions or takes the reason why the election seems highly suspicious seriously.
To pick out one specific piece of evidence, in PA they found 200k more votes than voters, which is more than enough to change the result for that state. The counts are all from state government databases.
http://www.repdiamond.com/News/18754/Latest-News/PA-Lawmaker...
Navarro has over 50 such claims linked in his report, totalling over 3M potentially fraudulent votes. Regardless of what you think of the man, the evidence itself I find hard to set aside, even though I am like you and would tend towards dismissing Navarro as a partisan hack. But when he has laid out the claimed evidence like this in detail I must at least give it a spot check and the spot checks hold up so far.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-afs:Content:9887147...
You claim that the "spot checks hold up", but the one example you chose to cite (presumably one of the ones you believe holds up) falls apart with just a tiny bit of research.
Incorrect. Voter rolls have information about who voted, and this information is public record. You can simply call up a random sample of recorded 2020 voters in Georgia and ask them to confirm that they voted in the election.
There is no way to undetectably insert additional fake paper ballots (“vote dumps”) unless you are alleging a vast conspiracy that removed the real paper ballots from storage after the election and replaced them with new fake ones, without any whistleblowers on the (Republican-run and Trump-supporting) elections staff speaking out.
UPDATE: I just checked the GA website, and all it gives me is voter IDs and whom they voted for. No way I can verify vote fraud did not occur from that information. No addresses or names.
You cannot simply add ballots to the election as the totals would then be incorrect. (There would be more votes than people recorded as voting)
What is “Vote Dumping”? Do you mean inserting fraudulent paper ballots into the stored ballots to be counted?
The election was recorded on physical paper ballots. Are you alleging a vast conspiracy of bipartisan election workers and Republican Secretary of State monitors to replace the legitimate physical ballots with fake ones?
All ballots were hand counted and the initial Dominion machine count was confirmed accurate, so the allegation would be a conspiracy where Dominion scanners inaccurately counted the original paper ballots, then the paper ballots were secretly replaced with fakes to match the inaccurate Dominion counts? And this would have had to been done state-wide without a single whistleblower. It’s a ridiculous conspiracy theory if you try to write it out.
No, its not.
Either a single actor with appropriate access or multiple independent actors not acting in coordination could effect the theft of an election without any conspiracy.
Conspiracy requires an agreement to work together; that might help with an election theft but it is not “by definition” necessary for election theft.
I would suggest that if you weren’t able to find this information using google, you should think about what that means for your research skills and the skills/knowledge of those who create and propagate the voter fraud lies. Some humility might be in order as to why experts don’t think there was fraud, but others who don’t understand how elections work do....
https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/voter_history_files
“ You will need a voter file in order to associate a voter with his or her voter history. The voter and history files both contain the voter registration number and can be linked on this field.
For more information on voter lists, please send an email to AJackson@sos.ga.gov with the subject “Voter List Files.””
https://www.11alive.com/article/news/verify/verify-can-your-...
“ So is it true your neighbors or friends can find out if you voted? 11Alive verified with the Secretary of State’s website that under Georgia law, “voter registration lists are available to the public and contain the following information: voter name, residential address, mailing address if different, race, gender, registration date, and last voting date.” The information is available by order for a fee on the Secretary of State’s Office website, though is not to be used for commercial purposes.”
However, I would still need a second list of valid addresses for each person to create a true validation.
Dominion acquired all of the material assets of Premier, which was a renamed Diebold, from ES&S due to an anti-trust lawsuit.
Now, ES&S has issues, but you're not going to hear anything about that. Because ES&S machines are used in places like Kentucky, South Carolina, and Florida.
And just because they purchased the assets doesn't mean they just used them without checking them.
We've already seen this happen–when YouTube started putting labels on all COVID-19-related content, deniers were unsatisfied by the sources presented because they have been indoctrinated to believe nothing mainstream can be trusted.
The correct answer is to prevent them from saying things.
They'll use any excuse to delude themselves that they're correct, because to admit otherwise is to admit that they were dumb enough to have been conned by a terrible conman. When they saw the morons attacking congress, they convinced themselves "people wearing helmets are Antifa, and all the attackers are Antifa plants...".
Voting machines didn’t steal the election. But they’re a terrible technology. - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/03/voting-mac...
And worst of all is ES&S' threats against folks who point out those legitimate flaws, e.g. SMART Elections, a journalism and advocacy group in NY.
ESS voting machine company sends threats https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2021/01/11/ess-voting-machine-...
What we need is evidence-based elections:
Evidence-Based Elections: Create a Meaningful Paper Trail, then Audit Andrew W. Appel* & Philip B. Stark* Georgetown Law Technology Review 2020 https://georgetownlawtechreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/...
And though we have improving evidence for correct tabulations in the recent elections, many states still aren't doing a good job providing evidence for ballot eligibility or chain-of-custody.
The best way to promote confidence in our democracy is to calmly stick to facts, not be swayed by politics, and work to make things better. For more on how we've done that in Colorado and elsewhere, see my page at http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/elections/corla/
You can see how they work in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9BDiO3JGTs
This is pretty much the gold standard: a paper trail that can be audited every step of the process.
Does the future of voting not belong to online remote voting, like almost everything else? You can even buy a house from your phone now. In the future, we will know the results of the election as soon as the online polls close.
The future is paperless.
"Antiquated" is a loaded word that smacks of ageism. Restaurants are antiquated, too. Do you never go out to eat?
Does the future of voting not belong to online remote voting, like almost everything else?
Are you trying to say that every other country votes paperless? Because that's simply not true.
You can even buy a house from your phone now
You have obviously never bought a house, and certainly not one from your phone. Just because there's an ad on YouTube doesn't make it true.
In the future, we will know the results of the election as soon as the online polls close.
Why is that necessary? What benefit does it provide?
The future is paperless.
People have been saying that for over a hundred years. Yet, here we are, still with a durable, recordable medium that does things that paperless methods can't.
The modern restaurants is kind of recent, right? It was invented around the same time as the bicycle.
I'm not. No one understands as well as technologists how often “novel technology” represents a regression from the tried and true, and how much the cry of “new” is used to sell defective crap.
> You can even buy a house from your phone now.
This is technically partially true in that a lot (not all) home purchase and finance paperwork can be done via electronically signed documents, and if you have a tolerance for extremely bad UI you can sign those on a phone. Typically, you’ll still need some wet signatures (notarized even) at the end of the process.
But that’s, even if it was completely accurate, a different problem domain than voting. (Both have concerns for assurance, but only one also has nonattribution as a critical goal.)
I actually do think that digital voting is theoretically possible, if done cautiously and in an open source manner. (it needs to be fully open source to be verifiable at all)
A remaining problem is that -in an election system- every voter needs to be able to check and perceive that the election was honest. That could still be a bit tricky in a society where not everyone is a programmer.
Another is that by going online you instantly open the attack surface up massively. Currently to steal an election you have to physically move a large number of people to a broad set of voting sites or send in a lot of forged mail votes. Those both require physically doing something in the US where an online system lets anyone in the world potentiall attack the system.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02613...
Hand counting remains the golden standard for voting.
What is for sure - with voting machines, there is less validation. Hand counting means - all ballots are counted always (by volunteers with all parties invited) - whereas voting machines means a spot-test (in some states), and only a full manual count is when a recount is demanded.
All this to say - I think Dominion did a thorough job - but this all only happened because the election was close. What about those where the election isn't "close"?
However, a losing candidate may request a recount after the election. In most states, if the margin is outside of a stated threshold, that candidate must pay for the recount. If there is a discrepancy between the two counts, then a hand recount is performed.
If an election isn't close, then the respective Secretary of State will audit (by hand) a random selection of precincts to verify vote totals match, but this is a security check and generally takes place weeks after the election.
Here's the conundrum - what constitutes what's "out of threshold"? If a voting machine, either by design or flaw, pushes a close vote outside the threshold - then that's a way to bypass the checks & balances and can be exploited by the unethical.
36 million votes were cast in France in the last election.
The U.S. is capable of counting 36 million votes by hand overnight as well, and most votes were once counted by hand in the U.S.
What constitutes what's "out of threshold"? If a voting machine, either by design or flaw, pushes a close vote outside the threshold - then that's a way to bypass the checks & balances and can be exploited by the unethical.
That paragraph is disingenuous. A vote that is outside the threshold for an automatic recount is not a close vote; the margin between candidates is thousands of votes (or more).
If a voting machine has a design flaw or other flaw, that would have been discovered during one of the several inspections and trial runs it was put through before being certified for use. Moreover, many states now require paper receipts of all ballots cast (as a result of Russian hacking of election machines in 2016), so if there is any suspicion of manipulated results, the human-legible ballot receipts can be tallied. States with these types of printed ballot receipts will audit the electronic tallies against hand-counts of the printed ballots on a random precinct-level basis.
It's a scalable method. Yes, the reconfirmation at the regional levels are important.
Your faith in machines is questionable. I leave you with this obligatory xkcd - it's still completely valid: https://xkcd.com/2030/
I don't trust the machines, but I do trust the people doing the counting, especially since the counting process is observed by both sides.
But hand-counting works because it's virtually impossible to coordinate fraud widespread enough to actually make a difference. Whereas, if your entire voting system is computerized and all the computers are linked together, causing widespread changes are much more possible.
Do let me temper that slightly :
Some states didn't or didn't fully have a paper trail quite yet https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
Also, be aware that Dominion voting systems actually acquired the old "Diebold Election Systems", who were not so secure a couple of years back. (though things may have changed by now, of course) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Election_Solutions
Since Trump won 7/8 of those states, a conspiracy theorist might suggest that Trump’s team successfully hacked the electronic machines in those states that have no paper trail.
However, there’s really very little reason to believe there was fraud in this election - but those republican states (and New Jersey) should replace their DREs without VVPAT by the next election so that they have a secure paper trail for auditing.
[0] https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
Had this election been entirely hand-counted, the same claims of fraud would have arisen. When a candidate declares in advance of an election that he can only lose if there is fraud, you can be sure he will act in bad faith if he loses.
Incredulity was all he needed to claim fraud - the numerous conspiracy theories explaining the fraud would inevitably surface after the fact. If it's not Dominion voting machines, it's dead voters, boxes of ballots showing up, and hand wavy claims of the opposition being in charge of the counting and abusing that role.
This here is another example, nobody did any voting security research, some Trump associates just made up the idea, and were able to easily spread that messages to millions of people, playing a large part in inciting an attempted coup. The maker of that device is now suing for damages, as they should, and your concern is free speech again.
It seems almost performative.
It's a debate we've had with secure messengers the benefit of having that many eyes on a piece of software outweighs the minor risk of a secret zero day.
The keys should be secure, but the design of algorithms and implementation of the system should not be.
If you hide away the source code, then only criminal actors and security agencies can evaluate security flaws. Open sourcing, at least, places legitimate security researchers on equal footing with these groups, so flaws can be disclosed publicly and rectified.
That being said, I think there are sufficient safeguards in the process that effectively mitigate any potential compromising of Dominion software. The software prints out the voters' ballot and the voter is given an opportunity to review the ballot before scanning it with a separate machine and it entering a locked box. This allows for a manual recount to guard against any possible shenanigans.
One additional step they could take, would be for the voter to verify their vote after scanning. This would ensure that they actually read the ballot. Though I could see that causing problems if the voter, for whatever reason, decided to repudiate their vote while travelling between the two machines.
It's funny how things change. Just five years ago, HN was awash in people shouting that paper ballots are not secure and everyone should switch to electronic. Now the conventional wisdom is the opposite. Much like the way that in the 90's, keeping a password on a Post-It note was considered not secure, and now it's the safest thing going.
Instead, time after time, we get shady software from shady people with disturbing political connections (I’m not talking the dominion thing either — this seems true for all voting software). The idea that crooked politicians hire crooked companies to wrire crooked software shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
Subscribing to this kind of "digital bad" dogma is lazy because you don't have to think for yourself.
But when people think elevator software is broken, they don't take the elevator. When (enough) people think voting software is broken, they topple governments and start civil wars.
And some people who disagree with you are still thinking for themselves. That "not thinking for yourself" is lazy argument.
1. Voters vote by marking ovals with a marker pen on paper ballots.
3. The paper ballots can be counted by the optical scan machines that are already widely used in many places.
4. The paper ballots can be hand counted.
5. All the ballots can be published, allowing anyone to independently verify the counts.
6. An individual voter if they choose to can make a note of short alphanumeric code that is revealed when they vote for a candidate, and using that note later can verify that their vote was included in the total and went to the correct candidate.
7. An individual voter cannot prove to a third party that they voted for a particular candidate.
Here is a paper on such a system: https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf
Wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
Here is a paper showing how it satisfies item #7: https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502
Almost all of the cryptographic mojo takes place when the ballots are printed, so no modifications are required to the scanners. You do have to use a special marker to mark the ballots.
Doing the cryptographic verification of all the votes would almost certainly be done by software, but as all the ballots are published and the system is completely open and documented, independent parties can easily do their own counts. The software is also fairly simple.
That's Dominion's statement. They're describing a pretty exceptional situation / distant from what I would think of as security research.
Obviously that's not a legally binding statement or anything but I think that at least illustrates what this situation is about.
This isn't a case of someone being mistaken or putting forth a good faith concern about security.
These accusations are based in nothing at all, disproven, and Giuliani and others just kept at it.
Researchers usually have actual evidence for concerns and so forth. And their motivations usually really is security.
This situation with Giuliani and actual security research seem completely disconnected.
https://www.youtube.com/c/RudyWGiuliani/videos
Of all the claims that stuck out to me is the suitcase video, since it time corresponds with a one sided spike of votes.
None of it matters, of course, because realpolitik, and the biggest sin of the viking cosplayers was believing that any of this evidence matters.
Ok but did you look?
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/politics/georgia-election-officia...
edit: rather than downvoting me, please engage with the question so others can learn.
I don't know if reporters were "sent home" as you are claiming, or if they "left" as described by this video when election employees were initially closing up for the night, but either way the monitors and media saw those ballots go into the boxes and Giuliani was still lying about where they came from.
>The ballots were on camera in the room the entire time, if reporters had been sent home they still wouldn't have appeared out of a mystery suitcase. They were sealed on camera, then unsealed on camera, and counted on camera. They have been counted and recounted and recounted.
Here are the sworn affidavits that state the observers were too far to monitor what was being done with the boxes when they were brought in during the day [0].
>I don't know if reporters were "sent home" as you are claiming, or if they "left" as described by this video when election employees were initially closing up for the night, but either way the monitors and media saw those ballots go into the boxes and Giuliani was still lying about where they came from.
Here are the sworn affidavits of two poll watchers that say they were sent home [1]. This corroborates what David Shafer says happened that night [2]. Also ABC news reported the same, their source was Regina Waller [3].
================
[0] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.284055...
[1] https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20420331-mitchell-h...
[2] https://twitter.com/DavidShafer/status/1325956840769859586?r...
[3] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pipe-bursts-atlanta-arena-ca...
What the state investigator says, and what those affidavits both appear to agree with, is
> Nobody told them to stay. Nobody told them to leave. Nobody gave them any advice on what they should do. And It was still open for them or the public to come back in to view at whatever time they wanted to, as long as they were still working.
I’m going to give more credence to the affidavits of the people who were directly involved over the wording from ABC.
One of them did return later and was allowed in, but arrived as the counting was complete.
It’s an unfortunate situation that everyone was told it was closing down and then the secretary of state’s office called to tell them to keep counting, but that doesn’t support Giuliano’s claims about rigging the election with suitcases of ballots from under a table.
It seems the reason they thought they were done counting is because a supervisor told the counters to go home, and said that they were done counting for the day.
Relevant part from the linked document (paragraph 8):
"Sometime after 10 o'clock p.m., the counting activity slowed. Shortly afterward, a younger lady with long braided but blond hair yelled out to all of them they should stop working and come back tomorrow (the next day, Wednesday November 4th) at 8:30 A.M.. Thereafter, all but 4 election employees left State Farm, leaving just the blond haired lady (who Michelle and I assumed was the supervisor), two older ladies and Regina Waller at the location. This lady had appeared through the night and Michelle and I believed her to be the supervisor."
I think that while it is possible the observers could have just stayed there until everyone left, it is likely that they believed what they were told -- that the counting would finish the next day.
At any rate, it is at best a bad look. I agree that it doesn't prove fraud or anything close. It does, however, look suspicious and IMHO warrants further investigation.
The only thing the statement adds is that they investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong. That is not the same thing as having observers. Even North Korea investigates its own elections and concludes that it does nothing wrong.
With the whole thing being on camera and knowing that no secret ballot suitcases were smuggled in, are we to believe that in the absence of observers they somehow rigged the counting machines to mis-scan these ballots, even though the hand recount for Fulton only differed from the initial count by 0.07%?
There's no need to believe the suitcases were smuggled in, although you yourself appear to have doubts in that direction. For example, they could be perfectly authentic ballots with some flawed provenance. A priori this seems the most plausible explanation.
> rather than simply having left.
Leaving a semi-public place such as an arena or an office building for the night has the result of not being permitted back in until the next public opening. Your arguments have turned to disingenuity and open trolling.
But the provenance is on camera. Those ballots were right there with the rest of them. What exactly is the “auditing” you think the observers would have done that the Republican secretary of state’s staffer didn’t do?
Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But then why is it called “SuitcaseGate”? Does “StandardContainerOfAbsenteeBallotsGate” not have the same deliberately made implication?
Beyond that, I don’t disagree that poll observers are important. But the ballots at this point had already been removed from both of their envelopes and stacked for scanning, while the observers were all present. If there was a flawed provenance to them, the observers observed it. At the point where those ballots were taken out of the box and scanned (again, all on camera) they’re nothing but pieces of paper with some bubbles filled in.
There’s no name. There’s no date. There’s no voter address. There’s no signature. Just ballots. Any questions of their provenance could only have been addressed earlier when they were taken out of their envelopes under the supervision of the election observers.
So with no observers present, they were pulled back out of the boxes and fed through the scanner. What did the observers need to observe that wasn’t captured on the surveillance tape? What part of this unobserved scanning process can’t be confirmed by a recount of the same ballots?
> Leaving a semi-public place such as an arena or an office building for the night has the result of not being permitted back in until the next public opening. Your arguments have turned to disingenuity and open trolling.
The Mitchell Harrison affidavit linked by another commenter specifically explains that he and Trevin McKoy came back that night and were escorted into the building. Counting had stopped before they arrived, but the point stands you’re bullshitting about it “having the result of not being permitted back in until the next public opening.”
Your whole argument boils down to "there's no need for observers because I trust the process". The whole point of observers is that it shouldn't be necessary to just trust the process. Right now what you and the media and HN are telling me, on pain of cancellation, is that 100% of the essentially self-selected people involved in the election are honest. That all of the dishonest people decided it was too much bother to do a day's work to influence the outcome of the election, because The Process is infallible. I guess I should be thankful that all the dishonest people didn't bother voting either, right?
When they arrived at the front door they were told counting had already been completed. Not sure whether you misread that or are suggesting the security person was lying about what was happening inside.
> They were told to leave because counting was complete,
They were told counting was complete, they were not told to leave, and they do not claim they were told to leave. But I can't blame them for making that assumption.
> then when they came back (due to a tip, not an invitation)
Agree with you here, when the secretary of state's office called and told them to resume counting, some effort should have been made to get the observers back in.
But the only work done was scanning of ballots that had already been cleared, and it was all on camera, and all of the work they did while unobserved can be directly confirmed by recounts. So even though this happened, I don't see how it's evidence that the election was rigged.
> they were delayed at the door until all activities they wished to observe had ceased.
Having arrived at the front door after counting was finished, the one guard at the door stayed at the door instead of leaving his post, and he radioed someone else. The second person escorted them in, where they confirmed that yes, counting had ceased as they were told.
Is there a couple minute window in there where you could say "the second person took too long and was stalling to cover something?" Sure, allow me to flex my creative writing muscles to concoct a reverse-heist in which this could actually matter and have affected the election:
1) The (democratic leaning) Fulton County election officials shut down counting for the night and allowed observers to leave.
2) Observers having been cleared, they colluded with the (republican) secretary of state's office to arrange a cover to resume scanning ballots.
3) They then used the unobserved counting session as an excuse to unseal the boxes under the table of verified but uncounted ballots.
4) Having these containers of ballots open, they hacked the security cameras to cover their activities.
5) The footage we've seen was actually recorded in a replica of the ballot counting room that they built in a warehouse last October, and the people seen counting ballots on it are all actors.
6) With the cameras hijacked and no observers present, they introduce and count fake ballots that did not actually come from the previously observed and sealed boxes.
7) Steal election!
I don't have the full quality video recording or the forensic knowledge to analyze it, but as conspiracy theories go I don't find my scenario particularly compelling.
> This isn't getting any better!
If you say so.
Ralph was in charge at State Farm Arena when those videos were filmed.
Edit: yes, I called him and we spoke back in December for about 30-45 minutes. I originally called about the barriers blocking observers during the recount and then asked about the suitcases as well.
I saw the obvious issue with this and called to ask why. His response was that "legally we're in compliance."
https://twitter.com/_HeatherWalker/status/132408570469203149...
Wherein people posted views from the other side of the glass claiming they were trying to count the votes in secret or something. Which was ironic, given all the news crews and observers on the other side of the glass documenting the same thing.
I agree that its BS to keep observers so far back that they cannot meaningfully observe the counting.
However, if anyone else is actually interested in an explanation of this incident from the people in charge of the election, check out this 60 Minutes clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUtmBrgIC9w
But you can also watch his commentary on the suitcase video here:
You can just sort of skim that. He made dozens of fact-specific allegations over the course of months (ie. not carefully phrased).
Not new. I've had paper voting receipts for at least 15 years. Probably longer.
Is this standard now, or on a state by state basis?
There are no voting machine standards. It varies by state, and in some states by county.
Some people see that as a flaw. I see the diversity of voting systems as a security plus. There was even an article in the newspaper shortly after the election stating that certain foreign governments looked into hacking America's voting systems, but it wasn't worth the effort because they were all constructed and implemented differently.
I know quite a few people that fully believe that voting is effectively a sham now.
Unfortunately this is because they want to believe lies. If they did a small amount of Googling or simply watched a mainstream news source, they’d find that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan all used auditable paper ballots or receipts.
7/8 states that use unverifiable electronic voting machines that don’t have a paper trail went for Trump (e.g. Louisiana). The other is New Jersey, which wasn’t even accused of fraud by Giuliani or Trump.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems
Hopefully they improved the security since then...
https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
1) A block function so we could cut the massively-upvoted, one-sided comments and get to the impartial or contrary information buried underneath them.
2) A "unfade" button to see the massively-downvoted comments.
I've generally found when threads take on this imbalanced and highly-polarised state, the stuff on the top isn't the cream.
The tone of "I see no reason.. limited value" seems a bit condescending to what appears to be a sizable portion of HN that values intelligent debate, and there can be no debate with only one viewpoint.
It appears you only care what a sizable portion of HN wants up to a point as they are the one's upvoting and downvoting the comments.
Agreed.
> It appears you only care what a sizable portion of HN wants up to a point as they are the one's upvoting and downvoting the comments.
Fair point, but in a flame war, HN runs a risk of having a one-sided discussion. Of course, some people believe that the losers in any particular forum should be silenced, because the majority view must be correct.
But to your point, if you can't convince someone of the value of your contribution then perhaps it just isn't valuable. Do you believe all opinions and expressions of those opinions are equally valuable and require equal advertisement?
I agree, and the oblique War Games reference is appreciated.
> Do you believe all opinions and expressions of those opinions are equally valuable and require equal advertisement?
(Who would believe such a thing? Well, I guess there was the FCC Fairness Doctrine, but fortunately that's gone.)
Of course not all opinions are equally valuable, but an echo chamber of people parroting the party line also has no value. In fact, that has negative value to me; I'd prefer a cacophony of divergent opinions to a single narrative.
I'd just like to see the top 10 or 20 comments instead of the top single comment.
.. that is, consensus, at least in that particular forum. But losers still shouldn't be silenced.
The only times I've ever been downvoted excessively, I've deserved it.
"The problem is that it's not totally clear whether Giuliani believed any of his crazy-talk. It may actually be the case that Giuliani is just off his rocker."
"I think it's nuts for a modern democracy to allow for anything but open source software being used to count paper ballots with chain-of-custody records, voter ID validation, biometric markings, and redacted ballots being published on the web for all to view and count independently."
"I hope whatever happens with these lawsuits it chills the baseless accusations of voter fraud used to undermine voter confidence in our democracy"
It's the definition of polarisation, entirely one-sided views, and each side demonstrably not thinking impartially. The first and third threads are largely echo-chambers with heavily-downvoted opposing views (which are often reasonable). All threads have some useful discussion, but its divisive opposite comes in seemingly combative/reactive waves that are stark in their coordination.
A community rooted in computer security (and AI) shouldn't be reliant on the naive idea that each anonymous online forum account represents one real person.
The suggestions made initially might go some way toward mitigating harm resultant from this reality of our current internet, which - thus far, almost exclusively for some specific political matters - HN seems to pointedly ignore.
It is starkly obvious to frequent visitors when comment threads deviate from this norm into highly-polarised, emotional and often baseless and yet miraculously-synchronised agenda. That this only occurs pertaining to particular topics, and reliably so, reveals to incumbent readership that those engaging in this activity, whilst possibly attempting to blend in, are actually standing naked in full view.
Indeed, in some cases this ineptitude suggests a low level of social awareness possibly consistent with that of a language model.
Regardless, tools to assist genuine readers in filtering such content and reversing its own filtering is a suitable mitigation, largely without negative side-effects.
For technical subjects. If you want a good conversation about politics, you should go where those experts are.
> yet miraculously-synchronised agenda.
Hey look, a conspiracy theory! As for highly-polarised, emotional and often baseless, you'll find that wherever politics are discussed from forums to the dinner table. There's no point in adding tools so people can create their own bubbles inside of off-topic discussions.
The stance that this is not worthwhile and that no measures should be employed to mitigate it is negligent at best.
True, but only if there's more than one thread on the page.
If @antirez is reading this, would love if you could provide any useful insights. FYI, I ask becuase of your background in research and development of "TCP Idle Scan" back in '98.
They are not arguing that it is impossible for such a system to ever be built, they're arguing that their system is not built that way. Voting machines are audited and have a chain of custody, it would be very difficult to argue that "someone could hack all the machines and install this capability" fits within the realm of possibility.
Dominion machines aren't on the internet. Dominion doesn't have centralized access to all of their machines.
Could they eg send out an army of technicians to every voting location and use some insane side-channel attack to physically read and flip bits from across the street? Sure. But by that logic it's also "not impossible" for you or I to launch the US nuclear arsenal.
I think saying that "it is technologically possible to see votes being counted in real-time or to flip them" is "technically correct" but obviously not actually correct in any reasonable sense.
So it's not just a LAN connection that would be isolated to the network in the voting place (what you'd expect).
They also reported sending out updates to the machines in some precincts after certification, just before the election: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/04/georgia-election-ma... (not sure of the current veracity of this but bookmarked it as it was interesting).
It's certainly technically possible (which of course it is, if you control the software and access to the machine, you can do what you want).
We had an election here yesterday. Each voter just filled in a pre-printed paper and dropped it into a box. COVID restrictions meant we had up to 10 minute queues depending on time of day, normally it's much faster. Each polling table is self-contained and had less than 1000 votes to count at the end of the day. They're just setup in school buildings on a Sunday when they'd otherwise be empty. Two hours after the election almost all of them had counted their votes, reported them centrally and that was available on a simple website anyone can see. There will be a central recount in a few days as a double check. It never finds any differences. Each of these polling tables is staffed with 5 or 6 people that double check what each of them is doing and makes it so there's a lot of people involved in the election further increasing the trust of the population in the process, because a not insignificant part of them take part. The scaling of the process is embarrassingly parallel so is workable for any size of country or election. I don't get why anyone would want to go through all the trouble of inventing these complex technology solutions to a non-problem that then create these huge attack vectors not only to actually do something nefarious but even more importantly to convince people that that has happened and rile up a mob.
https://securityboulevard.com/2019/09/voting-machines-still-...
Voting machines are by design undemocratic even if they act exactly as advertised. They allow centralization of vote counting, they are opaque mechanism and single point of failure which by themselves can cast doubt on the whole process.
The entire premise of democratic elections is that the government proves to the little citizen its supported by other citizens. A process which involves the government telling the little citizen the little citizen didn't provide evidence of widespread fraud isn't democratic, how can the little citizen hope to prove to the almighty government anything?
I'm sickened by the thought the same sham notion of elections can reach my country with the support of Facebook and Twitter.
I feel that open sourcing their code would definitely do the trick. It is kinda baffling that something as important as an election is ran on closed-source proprietary codebase.
Well now they'll have to do exactly that in a courtroom. I can't think of a better place for it.
Why would their code matter? Far more important than the code is the paper ballot audit trail their machines produce.
And that audit trail has been audited by multiple states, run by both Republicans and Democrats, after the election and found to be flawless. The machines counted properly. https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/historic_first_statew...
Biden got 7 million more votes than Trump in 2020. Democrats are perfectly happy to spend even more money to “prove” their wins are real (although it’s actually mostly solid Republican states that use insecure voting machines that don’t have a paper trail and should be forced to upgrade).
Thank you!!! There are tons of people who have spent their entire lives thinking about computer voting. Their recommendations are almost uniformly:
1. Dear god no.
2. If so, paper trail.
Looking at the source code when there's an auditable paper trail is a huge idiotic red herring. And, there is an auditable paper trail.
All right dstola: For the purposes of argument, I accuse you of being a thief who has embezzled millions of dollars from some company you've worked for. Instead of suing me for defamation for my lie, why don't you just prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you didn't steal anything? Maybe you could open source your bank account data, and all your movements to show that you couldn't have opened any secret accounts?
That's a ridiculous ask. The malicious accusation of embezzled is a lie that harmed you, and proving your innocence won't compensate you for the harm caused by that lie. These lawsuits are about the harm done to Dominion.
Also, no analysis of any kind would ever satisfy the people who believe the 2020 election was marred by vote fraud. That belief isn't based on evidence, and massive amounts of evidence to the contrary hasn't convinced those people. There's no reason to think one more report would make any difference.
Actually, maybe not open source, but otherwise that is exactly what would happen should I be suspect of being a thief. No reason why dominion cannot show their source code to professional investigators to get their name cleared right? If they are so vocal about being innocent, why not do it?
A prevailing opinion about apples doesn't apply to oranges.
Instead of thinking of them as "voting machines with a paper trail," think of them as "reliable, trustworthy paper ballots that are made clean and uniform using a machine."
The point is that the output is a paper ballot which can be (and often is) hand-counted for auditing and verification purposes. Paper ballots rule.
Suppose candidate X beats candidate Y by 20% according to the machine count. You can then pull a randomly selected subset of the paper ballots and count them. You only need to pick a fairly small subset to establish that the 20% machine count is accurate to within a margin of error much smaller than 20%.
This is called a risk-limiting audit.
If X beats Y by 10% according to the machine count, you need to include more paper ballots in your risk0limiting audit.
In general, the closer X and Y are, the more paper ballots need to be in your audit.
If it is close enough, like it was in Georgia, the risk limiting-audit turns into a full hand recount of all the paper ballots.
Most elections, though, aren't that close, and you only need to hand count a relatively small random sample of paper ballots to with very high probability verify that the correct candidate was declared the winner.
The lawsuit is about claims that are straight BS...
Probably as many as review their grocery store receipts, I'd guess. Which is to say, practically none.
But regardless of the above -- the design change to include printed ballots was a big improvement in security and voter confidence in the election.
The QR code could mis-match the printed ballot on say 5% of the ballots and nobody would notice a thing.
Need a recount? Ok, just run em through again, and they'll read the same (wrong) votes again, no problem.
Only a hand count of the paper ballots would catch the mis-match.
Did that actually happen? I don't know. But if the machines are truly reading a QR code, that seems a glaring flaw regardless.
Because according to what I saw presented in hearings, the reading machines actually read the QR code made by ballot-marking-device, not the human readable portion of the ballot.
If true, that seems an obvious design flaw (to be nice) right there.
Assuming this is true, it would be simple to modify the printing software such that the QR code vote is different from the human readable vote.
A recount, by running the paper ballots through the machine again, would come up with the same result as the first time.
The only way to catch it would be to hand-count the paper ballots and compare the results to the machine counted votes.
Really though, the QR code should be eliminated, so that the voter is able to personally verify what the machine will actually read.
So how are these voting machines complete bullshit exactly? What do you think the mechanism of attack is, and do you have any sources other than just your speculation?
And why on earth does a voting machine require OggVorbis?
https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/voting_system/files/...
I have a bridge to sell to anyone who thinks Dominion has actually audited any of these external dependencies.
Do you not remember how problematic the purely paper voting systems were? How many errors were made in the voting and the counts and how long it took to get the final results in close elections? Florida 2000 is a famous, widely-known example. The computers are clearly better.
Also, Florida 2000 is a strange example, considering the present drama. We've only gone from a simple controversy to a more complex one.
Per Bruce Schneier:
> If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems, and you don't understand the technology.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/19/us/elections/...
In Floyd county more than 2,000 votes switched sides out of roughly 40,000 votes. So it now has a real world demonstrated error rate of 0.5% which is not insignificant. For example, I would not trust a calculator with a 0.5% error to do my taxes. I wouldn't even us it on an exam.
> Floyd County officials discovered about 2,400 ballots that election workers neglected to rescan after a scanner failed and results could not be retrieved from memory cards. Officials attributed the error to “gross incompetence” on the part of the county’s elections director.
The prevailing opinion of election security professionals is that State election systems should be designed assuming the machines are insecure and the process should be tolerant to that fault.
That's why many states that use electronic voting or tabulation produce a voter verifiable paper trail. That means, when you're done voting the machine gives the voter a piece of paper that has their votes on it. The voter can check the paper to ensure it matches their votes, then deposits the paper record like a ballot.
State's can then use Risk Limiting Audits to verify a necessary amount of randomly sampled ballots to ensure that the electronic count matches the voter verifiable paper ballots.
So, if your concern is that the GA election was overturned by electronic tampering you would need to explain why the voter verifiable paper trail extremely closely matched the electronic tabulation.
This is a long-winded way of saying I agree with you. There are some states that use electronic voting or tabulation without a voter-verifiable paper trail and risk limiting audits. Fortunately, none of those states were "disputed" in this election. But those states should absolutely switch to these kinds of systems.
The identity of the voter is on the outer envelope which is separated from the ballot and destroyed after their signature is checked. An attacker could insert manufactured ballots to be tabulated after this process and there would be no way to know if they are legitimate or not - they’re anonymous now too so you can’t check with the voter and the voter can’t verify their vote.
You can recount the ballots all you want if this attack occurred, because the fake and real ballots would be indistinguishable and unauditable.
It's a criticism of the concept of anonymous ballots, not actually a criticism of mail in voting.
You can't say that without saying how large the sample is. Certainly, if the random sample size is "100% of all ballots" it would be enough.
Risk Limiting Audits take that into account. There's a rigorously backed formula for determining how big the sample size needs to be based on the margin of victory. The closer the election, the more ballots are included in the sample.
In fact, you're right that a _very_ narrow margin requires a random sample that ends up being very nearly or actually all votes.
Georgia is a perfect example of this. Georgia applied a Risk Limiting Audit to the Presidential Election. Because the margin was so close, the RLA required them to sample every single ballot cast. The first "complete hand recount" of Georgia was actually a Risk Limiting Audit.
Here is the GA SOS reporting out the results of that first statewide hand recount: https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/historic_first_statew...
As a made up example: maybe some precincts had scanners that worked 100% perfectly, and some had units that occasionally mis-scanned with a rhythm.
Georgia was the closest percentagewise in 2020. 4935487 votes were cast between Trump and Biden, and the difference was 11779 votes. However, even if Georgia went to Trump, Biden still wins, so you're forced to check states with even larger gaps.
However, even in Georgia, to claim the election should have gone the other way with 99% certainty, it is not hard to check wherever you want. This was done by many groups, for example here [1]. Of course, given the sheer idiocy of Trump followers and news support, they don't educate their supporters on any of this, because the facts destroy their claims.
Since voter records are public in pretty much every state (every one I've looked at over the past few elections let you download them), it's trivial for researchers to do this sampling. They do this every election, and that is how they make the statements they do about the extremely low rates of fraud - they did do the testing.
Trump and co did it too, and found nothing. They had the lists immediately, because they started publishing names they claimed were fraudulent, and in each case the media showed them wrong. So they were looking at the names.
And even with those names, and the ability to sample, they still didn't put forth any solid evidence. Sampling irregularities would have been enough to get more eyes looking. But they knew (just like Trump knew in 2016 with his Clinton 3M illegal votes charade that he eventually dropped) that this is a lie.
[1] https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/3rd_strike_against_vo...
That statement goes against everything I've read about voting in the U.S.A. However, I don't think I have actually read everything. What did you read? Is there a link that I can follow?
Did the US court system show massive fraud? No. Did they show fraud that wasn't massive but could still have changed the outcome of the election? No.
Were you cheated out of winning the election? A thousand times no.
It was never heard in court. I think that's what people are upset about. If they felt it had its day in court, they would feel differently. Instead, they have the media patting their heads explaining that "it's all fine." Fraud didn't have to be proven; it simply had to be shown to have been possible. The question is whether protections were breached that keep fraud from not being possible.
Listen, I'm a "Bernie Sanders" Progressive. I didn't vote because both candidates were too conservative for me. I don't really have a horse in this race.
That said, this clip shows that the US didn't take its electoral systems seriously. Georgia hasn't applied a security patch since 2012? Really? And you and the entire media are telling me that it wasn't possible when this clip is pretty clear that it wasn't just possible but fairly easy.
It reminds me of when a blockbuster film comes out and it's a stinker, but a lot of money was dropped on it. So there's an effort to make up the opening weekend by having the media sing its praises. "'Cats' is an amazing film!" But it doesn't work. Your strategy isn't working and won't work. The only way forward is to let it have its day in court.
You're right, that's what the courts are saying. I don't think most people are buying that, though. There's too much video evidence and testimony to dismiss every motion. Georgia, for example, is a mess. To say that it's fine is taking the result you want and working backwards. (Again, I'm a Bernie Sanders guy. I don't like either of them! :-)
It's like a clean room. You can't have video of people walking in with their outside clothes, without going through the processes and then say, "You have to prove that it contaminated the room." You don't; it's enough to show the process was tainted. There's enough evidence to show that with the existing video and hundreds of witnesses.
The clip I linked to shows that our electoral systems are a train wreck in many states, especially when compared to other countries. (Go watch it.) Now we're screwed. Tens of millions of Americans feel (pretty validly) cheated out of their vote and it has created a no-win situation.
I hate this topic. What are you working on? Any new insights? :-)
States and election officials of states run elections. They are given a lot of latitude in how they run elections, limited by state law and state constitution edits that are also controlled by state legislatures. State courts can only evaluate wrong doing based on those rules, laws, and such, if they are messed up, the courts can't fix them unilaterally.
> You can't have video of people walking in with their outside clothes, without going through the processes and then say, "You have to prove that it contaminated the room." You don't; it's enough to show the process was tainted.
That is not how law works in the USA or any country that I'm aware of. You have to prove that wrong doing occurred, not prove that wrong doing did not occur. The burden of proof is always on the accuser, not the defendant. Science works the same way (something is a theory if it can't be disproven, not if it can be proven that it can't be disproven).
State Constitution changes are often controlled by the people, ultimately, not the legislature, which has occasionally been used in Presidential election cases to argue that such State Constitutions cannot constrain regulation of state elections because they are not under the exclusive control of the legislature. The federal courts have, IIRC, consistently and emphatically rejected this logic, though.
I'm saying the wrong doing is invalidating the electoral process.
A crime is a crime regardless of whether it effects the outcome. It is fairly straightforward to prove that you stuffed a thousand ballets if you actually did that, we just have to show evidence of what you did! It is impossible to prove that you or someone else didn't stuff ballots, because it is logically a possible that it occurred. IE proving existence is something that is possible, proving non-existence is something that is impossible.
> I'm saying the wrong doing is invalidating the electoral process.
I'm saying that there is simply no evidence of wrong doing so the courts have nothing to act on. We haven't even made it to the "should the wrong doing invalidate the electoral process" yet.
This is substantively false. As well as the cases that did actually go to trial, many of the other cases heard the allegations and the descriptions offered of the evidence for them, viewed them in the light most favorable to the election challengers, and determined that they could not support the claims of any actual violation.
The only thing that didn’t happen in those cases, is the other side didn’t have the opportunity to find additional defects in the challenger’s evidence, but since the claims and evidence offered for them were inadequate to support any violation in the first place, that’s not really consequential.
But tribalism still rules, so lots of praise abounds about how well things went. Mostly because their opponent lost.
Frankly, we need publicly auditable records. For some reason we can request practically any non-classified data from the government... but not fine grained, anonymous voting data.
That nobody seems to think this is a problem is... well, not shocking. But when the party that Hacker News largely opposes wins in the future, I bet (hope) there will be calls to improve our infrastructure.
I think maybe that's psychological bias at play and not, say, actual affirmation that the system is resilient, let alone adequate. The number of downvotes I've gotten without a single reply is quite suggestive of this.
Seriously disappointed in this community of some of the most enlightened technical and scientific minds in the world, right now...
But these seem to record on each machine for a quick count the night of, but then also produce a paper ballot for an audit. Much better. It would be even better if the paper ballot was easy for the voter to quickly validate.
But as long as the machine is really just helping you mark a paper ballot, and it's the paper ballot that is "official" end the end, it seems much safer.
Hopefully you can see the problem with that...
The paper ballots can then be used for risk limiting hand audit afterwards to verify that the machine count was accurate, or in the case of a close race a full hand recount.
Such analyses are de rigueur in the development of software in regulated industries (medical devices, aviation, etc.)
Should the development of election systems software be regulated?
I wonder how they debugged the code then
Foreign agent hacker compromised machine stories are more interesting and shocking maybe.
Still, after the Georgia recount you'd think they would have dropped the machine claims but they kept at it.
Where did those stories originate in the first place though? And why? Maybe some of this will come to light during the lawsuits.
Powell and Giuliani's behavior and claims seemed pretty far out to me. Maybe they were misled, maybe they were just foolish and looking for a sensational story. Hope we find out.
Imagine how much we could cut out.
So my question is this: How much of those auditable trails have actually been audited, in what places, and in what numbers (I don't think spot checks will suffice to reassure people, the numbers need to be a statistically significant percentage in the most contested places), and, more importantly where are the results of these audits being published?
Even after the hand-count clearly confirmed that the machines had not switched any votes, Guiliani spread the same lie. This is actually documented in the suit.
Mind you, it is not that the vote-tally machines leave a paper audit trail. The vote-tally machines work by scanning the actual paper ballots.
Ah ty, this is what I was wondering, I figured the outrage was mostly posturing but still want to approach the issue outside of that drama. I mostly want to see where the audit results are published.
And FWIW, there are absolutely ZERO Fox News articles on either lawsuits, while every other news org covered it. I wonder why
BMO has something similar but it's $6,000. The rest (last time I checked) didn't really offer something like that.
I have some bars of precious metals, and contracts etc.
I'm sure I could avoid using one, for instance getting a fire safe. However since the bank offers it for free, why not use it?
Also, you have the option of offsite storage for any media backups. There is always the "Cloud" however sometimes it's nice to know your wedding photos are in a secure location.
Offsite storage of small, highly value items. Important documents especially (e.g.,.duplicate official copies of birth certificates and similar documents as offsite backup, because getting them from the source can be time consuming, and present chicken and egg problems.)
Diebold used to be the bête-noire of computer security people. Not particularly relevant but Dominion inherited Diebold with one of their acquisitions.
0. https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006...
I am saying it would be good to have much more confidence in the voting system than we have. From any political persuasion.
The voting machines may have vulnerabilities, but there is bipartisan consensus that it wouldn't be possible to change election results without raising an alarm.
For one thing, you couldn't predict which counties/states to tamper with ahead of time.
How would this be used against researchers or watchdogs in your opinion?
Researcher: "Your machines have USB ports exposed, can flash firmware, connected to the internet, don't produce an auditable paper trail, and I hacked into a machine personally. 100% secure is demonstrably false."
Voting Machine Company: "Well, a third party verified that it is 100% secure so we're going to sue you (and probably not win) but it will cost you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend, unless you cease and desist."
If any company comes out and says the product 100% secure, the tech community basically scoffs at them. It's not a good PR strategy for a company anyways. Now, relying on the reputation of another firm through audits is a totally normal way of doing business. This does not compete with researchers, and has by and large included researchers (stuff like Bug Bounty/Responsible Disclosure programs) as a good control. So any researcher looking for this stuff would likely have a protected way to disclose their findings.
Further, this is supported by another compliance body in the SEC via SOX. There has to be a protected whistleblower program for publicly traded companies. So, the ability to disclose security gaps is not neutered in any way by this court case, no matter how it plays out.
That is what makes them legitimate.
And folks, let's not act like this is the first time voting systems have been scrutinized.
They are forced to sue to prove they are not in the wrong, however that will spun as choosing sides and they could be kicked out when the contract ends. For the cult, this company and the service they provide is just another cog that should be controlled and they will try to get some enabler in there.
If this leads to voting machines being pulled then at least something good came out of it?