General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsScience academies urge paper ballots for all US elections (No Internet technology is safe)
No Internet technology is safe, secure or reliable for voting, find the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.Heidi Ledford NEWS 06 SEPTEMBER 2018
The report, released on 6 September, calls for all US elections to be conducted using such ballots by the 2020 presidential election. It comes after US intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government backed attempts to infiltrate the United Statess election infrastructure during the 2016 presidential election. The reports recommendations were developed by a committee whose members had experience ranging from computer science to officiating elections.
The future of voting is one in which a clear tension must be managed, wrote committee co-chairs Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University in New York City, and Michael McRobbie, president of Indiana University in Bloomington. We must prevent bad actors from corrupting our electoral process while delivering the means to provide suffrage to an electorate that is growing in size and complexity.
For now, that means eschewing voting systems connected to the Internet until robust guarantees of security and verifiability are in place, the committee concluded.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06611-x
CentralMass
(15,265 posts)Hermit-The-Prog
(33,328 posts)No electronic system can be made as secure and verifiable as paper ballots. The public can watch the paper without knowing who made the marks on it. Electrons are not so easy to see.
appalachiablue
(41,127 posts)TryLogic
(1,722 posts)hurry-and-get-the-results incoming tallies. Breathless excitement! Money and ratings first.
pazzyanne
(6,547 posts)MSM is calling elections far to early IMHO. Minnesota uses paper ballots with scanners, which seems to have worked well so far.
questionseverything
(9,651 posts)took 8 months for the recount
thankfully they do have decent re count laws but most places don't
hand marked hand counted paper ballots in full public view is the answer
pazzyanne
(6,547 posts)During the recount, the absentee ballots had some discrepancies found. After the recount, Al held a 225 vote lead. Norm Coleman contested the count and a 3 judge panel dismissed Coleman's Notice of Contest. Coleman then took the case to the Minnesota Supreme Court where his case was unanimously rejected on June 30th resulting in his being sworn in in July. The scanners really had nothing to do with what happened. You are right in that Minnesota has good election laws.
questionseverything
(9,651 posts)to do with it
but yes the recount laws made the dif ...Wisconsin has terrible election laws...the counties get to decide wether to hand count or machine count
http://www.wisconsinelectionintegrity.org/racinecountymiscounts
The highest error rate was in the City of Racines Ward 26, where election officials failed to count 6.1% of the votes, even during the recount. More than 1 in every 17 voters were disenfranchised in that ward. Detailed results are here, for each candidate and ward.
pazzyanne
(6,547 posts)During the hand recount it was discovered that there was a discrepancy in the counting of the absentee ballots. I don't get your connecting this to a scanner problem.
questionseverything
(9,651 posts)and while it worked out fine for minn
other states use scanners and it does not work out
http://www.wisconsinelectionintegrity.org/racinecountymiscounts
The highest error rate was in the City of Racines Ward 26, where election officials failed to count 6.1% of the votes, even during the recount. More than 1 in every 17 voters were disenfranchised in that ward. Detailed results are here, for each candidate and ward.
Wisconsin Elections Commission officials believe the voting machines failed to detect the votes because voters had marked ballots with types of ink that the machines could not detect. After other counties hand-counted the recount and discovered the high rates of missed votes, the WEC decertified the machines (prohibited their future use in Wisconsin) in late September.
County Clerk Wendy Christensen has not yet publicly explained why the county board of canvassers chose twice to certify the results as 'correct and true' without checking, despite the obviously suspicious number of missing votes.
"We needed the manual count to get the truth, said Village of Pleasant Prairie voter Liz Whitlock, who was among the recount observers who could see the voting machines missing votes.
sandensea
(21,624 posts)There's a big push to implement it by authoritarian regimes in the third world - but even there there's been a retreat as soon as cybersecurity experts are allowed to show their country's congress how easy it is to hack, identify individual voters' vote, and of course flip.
Great find. Thank you for posting!
iluvtennis
(19,850 posts)safeguard electronic voting machines and all of the electronic infrastructure for counting the votes, I want #PaperBallotsNow.
TryLogic
(1,722 posts)Mr.Bill
(24,282 posts)there will be no 2020 elections. In fact, I'm not even sure there will be 2018 elections.
shadowmayor
(1,325 posts)I've been waiting for the DNC to make this a national issue - making sure that every vote counts. This is a winning issue and I'm stunned it hasn't been addressed yet?
CaptainTruth
(6,588 posts)After the election I should be able to scan that barcode & verify the votes associated with it in the official government database that provides the official vote totals.
No personal info would be stored in that database, just barcodes & votes associated with them. Every voter would then be able to verify that their votes were recorded & reported as they cast them.
Yes security would need to be high & data would need to be encrypted. We can do these things.
I call the system Verified Voting, started working on the concept a few years ago.
erronis
(15,241 posts)We all know that even the magnetic stripes on the back of credit cards are now able to be changed.
Still, the level-of-effort to modify each voter's card/code would be huge. That's why internet malware is so bad - it's so easy to pick up lots of targets for almost no cost.
ancianita
(36,023 posts)phylny
(8,379 posts)In Virginia we have paper ballots that are scanned and tabulated by computer. The paper ballots are kept. Its not perfect, but better than what we had. There are random, required audits of various counties or areas. I wonder if this is one of the reasons why we are now a blue state.
questionseverything
(9,651 posts)the counting of votes
we the people shouldn't have to trust anything but our own eyes
OMGWTF
(3,951 posts)There's a paper trail, you can vote at your kitchen table, and this year, WA is even paying for the postage if you want to mail it in. I was a Democratic election observer for a couple of years at the Pierce County, WA Board of Elections and I have a high confidence that they work hard to ensure each vote is accurately counted.
Send a paper ballot to every person eligible to vote and watch our country change for the better.
alwaysinasnit
(5,065 posts)ehrnst
(32,640 posts)to the internet.
If they can delete voter registrations, they can prevent voters from voting, which is more effective than changing votes.
That is what worries me.
defacto7
(13,485 posts)questionseverything
(9,651 posts)as one of three states, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Green Party candidate Jill Stein had filed for "recounts" and forensic audits of voting systems, after the Clinton Campaign declined to heed the pleas for such an audit by computer scientists and voting systems experts who begged her campaign to do so. Stein's post-election effort was largely stymied by Team Trump and various statutes in each of those states. A statewide tally was allowed to move forward in Wisconsin, however only about half of the state's ballots were hand-counted, as municipalities were allowed to carry out their choice of either manual- or machine-tallied "recounts".
After finding an alarming number of uncounted ballots in Racine County precincts during last year's machine "recount" (see documentary filmmaker Lulu Friesdat's alarming coverage of election officials refusing to hand-tally clearly valid votes there during Stein's attempted "recount" the volunteers at WIE filed, and paid for, a public records request to examine the hand-marked paper ballots in a number of those wards.
Recently, they were allowed to review those ballots and, as they feared, many perfectly valid votes had gone uncounted by the optical-scan systems both during the original Election Night tally and the so-called "recount" in counties that used the same faulty computer scanners for the second count, after they had similarly mistallied ballots on Election Night.
I'm joined on today's show by longtime election integrity advocate and WIE's statewide coordinator KAREN McKIM to discuss the group's findings, revealing that the ballot scanning computers used in some 57 municipalities across the state had failed to tally anywhere from 2% to 6% of the ballots with valid Presidential votes in each of the Racine precincts they were allowed to examine a week or so ago. In other WI cities which chose to count by hand during Stein's "recount", McKim tells me, those same scanners had originally missed anywhere from 9% to 30% of valid Presidential votes! All of that in a state which Donald Trump is said to have won last year by less than 1%.
"They were ignored by the voting system entirely," says McKim, "and that's what made the miscount - or should have made the miscount obvious to the election officials even before they certified. You could look at those election results that the voting machines spit out on their face and you could see that hundreds of votes were just missing. If you compared the total number of ballots cast to the total number of presidential votes counted, you should have known --- they should have known --- that two percent of the voters didn't go to the polls so that they could cast a blank ballot. The miscounts were obvious at the time of the canvas, and the county officials did nothing about it."
Nearly a year after the election, in late September of this year, the state Election Commission finally decertified the 20-year old Optech Eagle computer tabulators, after finding that the systems fail to tally votes at all if the "wrong" type of ink is used to make selections by the voter. The same systems are still used, according to Verified Voting, in other states, such as Indiana, Massachusetts and Virginia, and may be used again in Wisconsin next year, as the state decertification allows municipalities to wait until after the November 2018 mid-term elections to replace them.
McKim, however, tells me that those faulty machines don't necessarily explain "the really widely varying error rates from precinct to precinct. ... Why the city of Racine machines were missing more votes than the suburban machines? I don't know. You'd really have to do a forensic investigation to figure that out." But, of course, Stein was not allowed such an investigation in any of the states where she sought them.
http://www.wisconsinelectionintegrity.org/racinecountymiscounts
5 out 0f 6 precincts showed hc un counted totals nearly twice trumps uncounted
yuiyoshida
(41,831 posts)should be used!
pangaia
(24,324 posts)defacto7
(13,485 posts)The question is, can we survive as a democracy until this change takes place.
ProudLib72
(17,984 posts)Science is the Devil's work! That's why we pulled out of the Paris Accord, because climate change is a hoax perpetrated by magicians...I mean "scientists".
It is truly astounding how we have turned our country over to the lowbrows. It's the inversion of Plato's Republic.
True Blue American
(17,984 posts)Get this, jon Husted filed law suits,even on election day trying to stop people from voting. The only year he sent out absentee requests to everyone was the year he lost a law suit.
This year he is running with DeWine, he is sending them out.
Yes sir ree, Jon,I am voting, for sure, against you!
LiberalLovinLug
(14,173 posts)Deafening silence as usual.
Raven123
(4,828 posts)Too easy to hack withou being discovered
colsohlibgal
(5,275 posts)Why there hasnt been more of a push by democrats for this astonishes me. Or a push to dump the out of date Electoral College.
The move to paper ballots makes so much sense.
Stuart G
(38,419 posts)Hit this link to see that August 11, post.......(what a brilliant fellow - my opinion only Yes, below is a real link from August 11, 2018, oh?..you don't believe.??ok..don't look)
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100210990251
iluvtennis
(19,850 posts)Cha
(297,154 posts)mess with our paper ballots.