Hacker News Reader

Comment by yesdocs | Hacker News Reader

I hope whatever happens with these lawsuits it chills the baseless accusations of voter fraud used to undermine voter confidence in our democracy

View on HN

The problem is it - not the lawsuit itself, but the public perception of it - could come back to bite the other side. There have been plenty of good reasons to suspect electronic voting in the past, at least in the absence of verifiable paper backups and regular random sampling recounts of those paper ballots. Which is still a pretty rare practice, isn't it? In the absence of those standards, it's still reasonable to have suspicion even if you don't have evidence; the entire problem is that you're kept from gathering the evidence.

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.

Another one of these issues that get easier once you have 3 major parties competing nationwide.

More to the point - if there is actual voter fraud at some point it will need to announced, communicated and investigated. Electronic voting systems can be used to remove humans from the loop and that has real potential to undermine the election system.

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 needs to be a very high tolerance of criticism towards voting machines and the companies that make them.

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.

> the entire problem is that you're kept from gathering the evidence.

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.

> the fact that the folks advancing

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.

Well sure, if we're going to conflate arguments in good faith with arguments in bad faith, we won't really get anywhere... the point is that without doing manual recounts it's hard to gather evidence of possible flaws in an electronic count, and you can't always count on the recount happening. In contrast, Georgia's recount did happen, so they were able to gather evidence, and didn't find any... so yes, of course that's a different thing entirely.

But that's the thing about Dominion -- their machines do generate a paper trail, and this paper trail was audited. One of the big pushes to secure this election compared to previous ones was to use as many voting machines with auditable paper trails as possible.

> their machines do generate a paper trail

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.

Since I voted in Georgia on these machines, the process is the following:

- 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.

So you take the printout from one machine and insert it into another to be scanned? I agree that would satisfy auditability, since you can look at the printout and make sure it's correct.

Were these Dominion voting machines?

In Ohio, we used the same Dominion voting systems with the same process:

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.

I feel so disconnected from this process here in California - I haven't been asked for ID to vote ever. AFAIK, we're not allowed to verify ID here...

It's a good thing not doing it. ID verification disenfranchises way more people than fraudulent votes prevented.

I thought that ID was already basically required to be able to live a acceptable life in the US.

That isn't mutually exclusive with the idea a non-trivial number of people lack them.

> ID verification disenfranchises

How so? How many eligible voters don't already have government issued IDs?

The most common government-issued ID is a driver's license, to the point that it can sometimes be hard to get a government ID that isn't a driver's license. So anyone who can't drive has an uphill battle--predominantly blind people, as well as poor people who live in the inner city where car ownership is infeasibly expensive. Another commonish case is tribal reservations, where tribal documentation is usually sufficient, but the state might not consider a tribal ID sufficient to vote.

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.

I wonder why the interested parties don't just offer to pay for ID cards. Seems like this would solve both problems, but perhaps I'm missing something obvious.

> it can sometimes be hard to get a government ID that isn't a driver's license

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.

I don't know which company makes them, but the machines at my polling site in Washington DC are like this. You fill in your ballot on the machine, which has clear visual feedback as you go along and helps with procedural things like "pick up to 2".

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.

A very similar process in Tennessee. I'm not sure if the machine was made by Dominion, but I had a chance to review the printout before scanning. The printout appeared to pass through the scanner and into a locked container beneath, presumably for actual paper audits.

Conversely, hand filled out ballots are a mess, often illegible, the hanging chad fiasco, etc. With electronic voting, the voter can (should?) see on a screen exactly what they did, and the machine can make multiple exact copies in electronic and paper formats of that exact result. There is far less ambiguity in the physical record once this has been done.

I agree that if the electronic voting machine is just helping you print out an easily legible copy of your ballot, which you then verify for correctness and take to another machine to have it scanned for counting, that's a good thing, for the reasons you give. Not only does it help with auditability since the physical record is more standardized, it also probably reduces the error rate of automated counting.

What I'm not sure about is whether that is actually the way it is done for all electronic voting machines.

It is the way it is done for all Dominion voting machines, which replaced Diebold AccuVote machines (which did not leave a paper trail) in Georgia in 2019.

The UK has paper-only ballots and none of this stuff is a problem. (There are no "hanging chads" because ballots are marked by the voter with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper). The polls close at 10pm, the votes are counted overnight by volunteers, and the winner takes office the next morning. It always baffles me that the US system is so complicated.

> There are no "hanging chads" because ballots are marked by the voter with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper

This is how it is done in many US jurisdictions as well (including all the ones I have voted in).

You're telling me out of millions of ballots, none of the pen or pencil markings could be unclear?

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.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36044026

Canadian here, and yes, it's basically impossible to mark your ballot wrong for a commonwealth parliamentary election for the simple reason you only vote for a single thing: who should be member of parliament for your riding.

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.

> You're telling me out of millions of ballots, none of the pen or pencil markings could be unclear?

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.

It's definitely unnecessarily complicated, and the hanging chad problem simply stems from elections where making such a claim can win the whole election for your candidate.

There are not literal hanging chads but you can still have problems, such as marks in multiple boxes when only one choice is permitted, or marks outside the designated boxes.

I've participated as ballot counter in provincial elections (British Columbia) where an 'X' or check mark were valid ways to make a choice on a ballot. It was a very long time ago however my recollection was that the mark was to be on or in the box beside the candidate name. Ballots were excluded but they were exceedingly rare and always in consultation with supervisors. (completely missed the box)

I did it for municipal elections in Quebec (which follows the provincial rules) and the big important thing to note is that people voted for two things, mayor and councillor, and received two separate ballots on different papers.

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.

Here's the UK rules on spoilt ballots [1]. Here's [2] an article showing that such removed ballots sometimes get a larger share than a candidate, and that the rate is larger than the close state elections the US just had. Here's [3] some UK elections where 2.9% of all ballots were discarded because they were filled out wrong.

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...

All of those spoilt ballot examples are where the proportion of spoiled ballots is high because voters are protesting. They don’t combat the claim that inadvertently spoiled ballots are rare, nor that spoiled ballots open to the possibility of fraud.

So you're claiming that the Florida study doesn't measure spoilt ballots by technology, despite them specifically stating how they normalized for errors? You're basically calling them liars. Have a citation showing your evidence to make such a claim?

Or maybe you didn't read the study....

My apologies regarding the Florida study; I only intended to address the references you had to UK ballots, given the context of this thread.

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.

The trick is that American ballots bombard their voters with dozens of questions and dozens of options. Judges, ballot initiatives, various functionaries, etc, which makes hand counted paper ballots impractical.

In parliamentary systems, you elect people so they can vote on those matters for you.

> 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.

The solution to this (also one which is used in the UK) is to put these other votes on different pieces of paper. That way you can count the presidential election first and leave the local initiatives to a bit later, or however you'd prefer to prioritize the results.

Its kinda hard not to see how you voted at least around here. It is printed off in fairly large print on the paper ballot which is then taken to a separate machine to actually tally the votes. (No clue as to the brand used though. At a ~65% trump vote my vote was worthless anyways though so why pay attention to the machines.)

The electronic voting machines I use in Southern California actually print my selections on a piece of paper that I can look at under a little piece of plastic. I approve that it shows my votes accurately and then the paper slides away. Presumably kept with the machine so an audit could be done.

That doesn't seem much different than saying that a traditional hand-filled ballot doesn't leave a useful paper trail because there's no evidence that the voter placed the pen markings where they intended to place them. Which, in fact, is an argument that's been made before with hand-filled ballots.

In NY, you do fill out a paper ballot, it's scanned, done. I assume they keep the ballots in case they need to count them...

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"

https://www.essvote.com/

> John Galt Blvd

Someone has a sense of humor, at least.

It must be an accident/coincidence? It would worry me if it's not.

>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

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.

The adjudication process is where things get dicey though, if the machine seems a ballot unreadable it defers to the machine operator to tell it which candidate was selected, and this accuracy is a configurable threshold.

These machines create an auditable paper trail, replacing a system that did not in Georgia. The conspiracy theorists claimed that the electronic votes were modified in Venezuela. The validation of the paper ballots showed that this had not happened.

https://statescoop.com/georgia-buys-new-voting-machines-with...

https://apnews.com/article/5a76e11db8e64f7ca32197f2934a86df

> The problem is it - not the lawsuit itself, but the public perception of it - could come back to bite the other side.

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.

No, the problem is the technology as such:

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.

First off, like all the other comments have said already, the systems in question were auditable. They printed out a paper receipt and they verified those by a hand-count.

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".

Even if voting machine software is open source, there's no way to verify that's actually the code running on any given machine

Those things in the past helped push for paper receipts. In every contested state there were paper receipts this time. We should expand that to everywhere that uses electronic voting, but we don't have to lie about irregularities to do it.

Unfortunately, I think the numerous tangential and unsubstantiated comments in this very thread suggest that the strategy has been highly successful. While I imagine Dominion could win against Giuliani, he is only one person and this disinformation has been spread through many channels. I expect we will see it again.

Edit: grammar.

One of the things that makes this more complex is that we should be skeptical of any person, company or machine that handles election data and has the power to make any significant change to that data.

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).

> Without the investigation, oversight or legislation... the skepticism is pointless.

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.

Actually, there were claims made about massive voter fraud in the 2016 election: When Trump could not stomach the fact that he lost the popular vote, he claimed that more than 3 million ineligible voters had voted for Clinton and that he had in fact won the popular vote.

There was even a voter-fraud commission set up to investigate the claims. They quietly disbanded.

They were not able to acquire any data because Alex Padilla, now temporary Senator replacing Kamala Harris, refused to cooperate.

A class case of "we refuse to look for evidence, therefore there is no evidence"

One guy in one state asks for actual evidence such as an actual reason why fraud is being alleged and the entire investigation shrugs it's shoulders, says oh well we tried, and shuts itself down and quietly goes away? Really?

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.

That's what I said, he pulled exactly the same stunt in 2016 claiming massive vote fraud.

We should be even more skeptical of people who stand to benefit at distrust of the election outcome.

So many "skeptics" are actually incredibly trusting patsies, they're just trusting con-men instead of mainstream discourse.

Sure, and if Trump and his goons were actually worried about issues with Dominion machines they should have filed lawsuits in every county that used the machines... it doesn’t take a genius to realize Trump et al only filed ridiculously vague complaints where he lost the vote as an insane last-ditch effort to somehow overturn his overwhelming loss and/or rile up his supporters.

The best overview of this mess is from Cory Doctorow, who notes that while the claims of fraud in this election are garbage, the voting machines, and especially overused Ballot-marking devices (BMDs), are also hugely problematic.

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/

Why would you want to do that? Voter fraud happens regularly. Probably not to the extent that the election flips but I see no issue with asking fraud claims to be looked into. There 0 good excuse to completely ignore fraud claims. IF you really want confidence in our system all claims of abuse should be taken seriously. Tossing them out and acting like fraud never happens is every bit as ridiculous as claiming the election was rife with it. The only way to determine they're "baseless" is to actually investigate them.

Shutting people up is going to do the opposite. We need to debunk their claims piece by piece to convince the people that are somehow convinced by the evidence

You'd be surprised how few people are interested in evidence these days. More often than not, your Reuters/AP source will be shoved aside in favor of some page along the lines of reallycoolnews.blogspot.com.

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.

Most people don't actually believe things or care if they're consistent (and rightly so.) They just say stuff to hear themselves talk.

The correct answer is to prevent them from saying things.

It'd be like trying to talk to a 9/11-truther or a flat-earther, they'll have a refutation ready for all of your evidence, or they'll convince themselves your cited sources are part of the conspiracy..

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 are inherently not trustworthy.

Won’t baseless accusations of no voter fraud undermine the confidence even more?

After all, is there any evidence for voter fraud in Russia?

This is not what is happening. Time and time again the repeated phrase is there is no evidence of _widespread_ voter fraud.

Or "sufficient voter fraud that would change the outcome of an election".

Yeah, there's a tiny smattering of cases (the most memorable ones to me being Republican voters trying to counter supposed fraud with some fraud of their own) that get caught but nowhere near enough to impact elections. Much more prevalent though is intentional voter disenfranchisement keeping people from voting and gerrymandering.

Presumably, the issue is baseless accusations in general. It doesn't matter what side a baseless claim happens: its bad either way.

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.

A company can be a public figure.

> Won’t baseless accusations of no voter fraud undermine the confidence even more?

> 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).

Ironically, a previous version of this company known as Diebold was used in the 2004 election, and Democrats claimed the electronic voting machines were used to commit voter fraud. Apparently, one could open up the vote ledger in MS Access and modify the votes without any kind of audit trail or password. Hopefully after the multiple rebrandings Dominion has gotten its security under better control :D

See the leaked memos from Diebold here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~matth/lists/

You clearly lack a fundamental understanding of the issues involved here... The voting process used by the Dominion machines involves a physical paper trail that is verified by the voter. Random sampling is done routinely comparing the electronically tabulated results against the paper audit log.

In the case of Georgia, a full recount (by hand) was done on the paper ballots.

Seems trivial to 'randomly' sample a select subset of the votes. And that does nothing to guard against vote dumps. Non existent voters cannot validate their votes.

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.

It is not "Dominion's" process, it is the local board of election's process. All Dominion supplies are fancy printers and optical scanners.

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.

Perhaps what you say is correct, but I have no way to verify the vote records myself. All I can do is trust the vote counters, and at this point that is the very matter under dispute. Someone in the know really should do an in depth write-up of why it is we can trust this election result. As it is the third Peter Navarro report appears very suspicious and it is hard to believe there is absolutely no reason to doubt the election results. On the contrary the election could very well have been the steal of the century.

This is very "conspiracy theory" type thinking you're engaging in... There is no evidence supporting any of the claims of fraud, any evidence that doesn't support your position is automatically dismissed as untrustworthy.

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.

Isn't a stolen election precisely a conspiracy?

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.

Peter Navarro is a _highly_ partisan source, and not someone you should assume to be arguing in good faith.

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.

I am looking at the lawsuits and articles linked from Navarro's report. The lawsuits sound pretty credible to me. When I read the court's reason for rejecting the lawsuit it sounds like the judge is looking for technical reasons to reject the lawsuit.

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.

Ok... but the 200k thing is easily debunked... The SURE system is not the official record of votes, the certified county results are. It is not unexpected that those wouldn't match (the counties were prioritizing getting the elections certified and hadn't yet published their results to SURE (which, again, isn't the official source of truth, and therefore wasn't a priority). Several large counties had not uploaded their data to SURE, as of the time of the press release you linked to.

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.

Very interesting. Do you know of a way I can confirm this discrepancy is resolved? I can find registered voter counts and votes tallied, but not votes cast counts.

> Seems trivial to 'randomly' sample a select subset of the votes. And that does nothing to guard against vote dumps. Non existent voters cannot validate their votes.

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.

Are the specific votes public record? If not, it is impossible to verify votes were recorded correctly. But the addresses being public record is interesting. If that information is public record then it would be easy for citizens to randomly verify enough records to ascertain whether enough votes were dumped to make a difference. If what you say is correct then I can try verifying it myself. Why has no one publicly done this? Would be an easy way to put the matter to rest.

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.

No, the specifics of how people vote is not publicly available. That is important, in order to prevent voter coercion.

How exactly is the possibility of vote dumping and vote flipping eliminated?

> How exactly is the possibility of vote dumping and vote flipping eliminated?

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.

An election theft is conspiracy by definition. The question is whether the conspiracy is feasible. But it is feasible if only a few counties or cities committed fraud. What makes conspiracy infeasible is widespread collusion without a mechanism of coordination and ensuring secrecy. Collusion in a few large municipalities does not seem obviously out of the question.

> An election theft is conspiracy by definition.

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.

Multiple conspiracies of one?

> 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.

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.”

Thanks, I will see if I can get ahold of the list.

However, I would still need a second list of valid addresses for each person to create a true validation.

Diebold is not a previous version of Dominion.

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.

Sure, but this exception proves the point. There are indeed electronic voting machines widely considered to be suspect. So the notion that electronic voting machines could potentially be used to commit fraud in this election is not out of the question.

You were specifically trying to cast doubt on Dominion. And now that your statement has been outed as false, you're moving the goalposts to "voting machines in general".

No, Dominion purchased these questionable voting machines, so they clearly possess questionable voting machines. So my major claim that Dominion possesses questionable voting machines is substantiated. In fact ES&S equipment is used by Georgia.

Dominion won the contract in Georgia.

And just because they purchased the assets doesn't mean they just used them without checking them.

Well, the question remains then. Definitely they are not beyond question. There is a traceable lineage of questionable machines leading right up to the region where vote fraud allegations through electronic vote machines. Enough that a decent look by a disinterested party is warranted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com