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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

> The primary reason they're a bad idea is they make widespread election fraud easy.

They make fraud easier. They do not make it easy. Lots of election data is public and analyzed by all sorts of people. Any big jump in turnout or shifts in the voting pattern of specific communities will be noticed and investigated even if it is just by hobbyist and journalists. Therefore the fraud would need to be incredibly widespread and only change the results subtly. Since elections are run at the local and state levels, at least in the US, it would need to be a huge operation in order to make enough small changes to accumulate to a result changing level of fraud.

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The 2020 presidential election was decided by as few as 45,050 votes with no more than 20,565 votes in any given state. The 2016 election was decided by 77,000. [1] Targeted manipulation, done well, would not be detectable given how close elections tend to run.

It's also noteworthy that if one has the technical capacity to change a vote, then you'd only need to edit half those numbers. Changing a vote from A to a vote for B is a net effect of +2 since A loses 1 and B gains 1.

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/18/how-2020-...

It is true that it is a lot easier to get away with fraud if you can time travel.

You can't just look at the numbers needed to change an election after the fact because whoever committed the fraud wouldn't have perfect knowledge on how much fraud to commit. The votes also can't just be dumped into a single machine, voting center, precinct, or even county because that shift in behavior would be noticed. Therefore this malicious actor would need to be able to add hundreds of thousands of votes state wide across several states in order to change things. Each state will have its own equipment and procedures and those can even vary within states. Once again, this would need to be a very widespread fraud that likely requires dozens of different attack vectors all executed in coordination. It is possible, but very difficult to pull off successfully.

It's not like the results all just come instantly. They come incrementally, and over unacceptably long periods of time. All you'd need to do is to look at which of the handful of competitive states you need to give yourself a little boost.

And the tech side's even easier. For instance those 3 states, making up the 45,050 vote margin from 2020, all had districts using the exact same hardware/software: Dominion.

>our elections are unacceptably slow

That is funny considering the primary benefit of electronic voting machines is speeding up the gathering of results. I'm not sure how you expect us to manually count 150 million ballots quicker without using any hackable electronics.

Otherwise, you are still falling into the same trap. You say we can just use "insider knowledge" to know where to commit the fraud, but that requires both insiders and the ability to actually execute the fraud in all those potentially close places. We are back to needing a widespread conspiracy that operates in several states and can attack in a variety of different ways.

>I'm not sure how you expect us to manually count 150 million ballots quicker without using any hackable electronics.

The solution to vote counting scales right along side the problem. You use more human counters. If it takes 2% of the population to count votes, then you just...keep using the same percentage, just more people.

I reiterate: There is no good faith reason to use electronic voting machines. It injects an ability to scale up election fraud, and that is all it does.

>If it takes 2% of the population to count votes, then you just...keep using the same percentage, just more people.

And if we build a team of 9 women, I bet they can produce a baby in a single month.

False analogy. You can split stacks of ballots to be counted and hand them to different people. I don't know why you're arguing so hard in favor of electronic voting when it's good for no one but voting machine companies and election thieves.

You don't actually need insider knowledge. Results trickle in, and you can adjust dynamically as needed. It's not especially hard at all, which is why this is so dangerous.

As for alternatives, the answer for a secure electronic system seems self evident. When you vote, you either choose or assigned a secret key. Your ballot and key are publicly posted. Suddenly you have a system where that is 100% confirmable at every single level. Observers can verify exactly the number of voters voted. Voters can verify their vote was counted and was for whom they chose.

The only downside is that you could also prove to another third party that you voted some way or another. Yet this feels largely academic. Coercion/bribing schemes are already illegal and at any meaningful scale they would collapse instantly because this would actually require your "widespread conspiracy." Add in a large "finders fee" for outing said conspiracies and the entire notion of them as a threat becomes silly.

>Results trickle in, and you can adjust dynamically as needed.

But you are still missing the point. You can't just act immediately. You need to lay the groundwork for acting. This group needs the ability to act in numerous states before they know which states to actually attack. That means even if they don't end up needing to change any votes in a given state, they still need the capability to change the votes. They can't just start the attack on election day. These systems have to already be compromised or at least have a confirmed way to compromise them. The hard work needs to be done before election day and any results are known.

>Coercion/bribing schemes are already illegal

And so is hacking a voting machine so I guess we don't have to worry about that either.

> at any meaningful scale they would collapse instantly because this would actually require your "widespread conspiracy."

But we aren't just worried about centralized conspiracies. A third party knowing how you vote creates new problems that we want to avoid. For example, now you have abusive partners demanding their significant other votes a certain way or an unethical boss demanding their employees vote for a specific candidate. The importance of individual ballots being secret goes beyond who wins the election.

>Add in a large "finders fee" for outing said conspiracies and the entire notion of them as a threat becomes silly.

Always smart to incentivize people to make stuff up for money. If this actually worked, why not just institute it for any election manipulation?

You are being actively disingenuous. In the case of the 2020 election all you would have needed is one single exploit against Dominion machines, which by nature of being the one conducting an election means you'll have near limited time/access to - including local access, and you're done. Before 2020 even outlets such as the NYTimes were raising warning flags about the extreme insecurity of these voting systems, including Dominion. [1]

The point about voter coercion being illegal is not that it will stop it, but that things like e.g. "an unethical boss demanding employees vote for a specific candidate [and then prove it]" is not just unethical, it's illegal. And a finder's fee means you not only get to give your boss the finger, and send him on to meet Bubba, but also get a nice 'golden parachute' on your way out.

This isn't the type of scenario where a government is paying money for guns, incentivizing people to print guns. This requires another individual committing a crime.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/the-myth-of-the-...

>But you are still missing the point. You can't just act immediately. You need to lay the groundwork for acting. This group needs the ability to act in numerous states before they know which states to actually attack.

You are the one missing the point.

This is exactly why people find allegations of 2am ballet dumps and the like highly suspect and worthy of looking into.

On some level it doesn't matter whether there's the possibility of fraud or not because the appearance of that possibility delegitimatizes the system and the system only works because people think it's legitimate.

How is this comment related to anything I have said? Saying it is difficult to get away with a crime is not the same thing as saying that accusations of that crime should not be investigated.

My point is that if the crime is difficult to get away with for the reasons you say it is then stuff like dragging the process out and injecting false ballets where and when you need them so you don't do "more" than you need to and risk blowing the cover of the system you've set up is the obvious way to go about it and people rightfully want it looked into when they see stuff that matches that patterns.

And it needs to actually be looked into even when frivolous because failing to do that has very bad optics

I don't think the 2-4 hours or whatever difference you think makes those 2am dumps not suspicious really has any impact on the difficulty of this task. Those 2am dumps still have to meet all the other criteria I outlined before like matching close enough to expected turnout and result numbers for those precincts.

To expand upon a peer comment, there are 4 broad outcomes in a democratic election:

1) fair, and the people think its fair

2) fair, but the people think its rigged

3) rigged, but the people think its fair

4) rigged, and the people think its rigged

In most people's minds, it's 1/2 and 3/4 are, more or less, the same. After all, all that really matters is what really happened. But in terms of a democracy, it's 1/3 and 2/4. The reason is that the whole point of a democracy is to help create a peaceful and stable system because people believe they can change their political future with a ballot instead of a pitchfork and torch.

But when that belief fades it doesn't really matter if faded because of reality or just perception. And when this happens, you lose the benefits of a democracy and the peace starts to disappear. There is literally nothing more important for the stability and security of a democracy than perception of its integrity. Elections that linger on for days with odd looking events abounds destroy this perception, regardless of whether or not everything is actually completely on the up and up.

Are you familiar with the phrase "even the appearance of impropriety"?

Societies run on faith. Anything that causes people to question the legitimacy of the system we use to transfer power gives others an opportunity to seize it (incrementally of course). Points where one could game the voting system are dangerous to us the same way having a bunch of bastard children is bad for a king.

But I'm glad we've mostly moved away from paperless voting machines. If you don't have that backup, you can be as suspicious as you want but there's nothing you can do about it.

And it's not like an attack is infeasible. According to a professor who specializes in this, testifying to Congress:

> “We’ve created attacks that can spread from machine to machine like a computer virus and silently change election outcomes."

https://alumni.umich.edu/michigan-alum/hacking-the-vote/

100%, voting machines should at the very least spit out a paper copy that the voter can verify and can be manually recounted if there are any questions about the electronic total. Once we meet that baseline, I don't think it makes sense to worry too much about the voting machines. Our election process is much more vulnerable to manipulation through some of the other means mentioned in this thread.

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