Nate Silver commented (debunked, I would say) this issue on Twitter. It seems that the "abnormality" detected or does not make sense (Pennsylvania, Michigan) or disappears when controlling for race and educations levels (Wisconsin).
That's actually NOT for you to say. Rationalizing why it's not without doing the analysis yourself doesn't buy you that right, even if you read it somewhere and it sounds good.
I think "I would say" is meant as a stand-in for "in my opinion", which is entirely within their right.
It's easy to say you have to go a level deeper to get the truth, but at some level you have to accept the legitimacy of a source. If you don't trust Nate Silver, you can run the analysis yourself. You then have to choose whether to trust the source of the data. If you don't trust that, and you have the ability to to go the pre-aggregated data, you can go to that. Do you trust the people reporting that? At some point,it's not feasible to follow the chain of custody all the way back, so you have to make a call as to what level you are willing to go back before trusting the source.
If someone trusts the integrity and competency of Nate Silver, then they should be able to apply some level of assurance to his results based on that. If you don't trust Nate Silver's results because you doubt his integrity or competency, or even if you think it's just too important to trust to a single person, then speak to that, not to some simplistic and often impossible to satisfy ideal of determining everything yourself from pure sources.
On the other side of Nate Silver, you have J. Alex Halderman and Ron Rivest. I respect Nate Silver, but I think everyone can speak to the need to not trust a single person in this case.
Which would have been an entirely acceptable and valid reply to the original comment, while also providing some additional information (who is disagreeing) in context. :)
Reputation really isn't relevant here...the election is over, Clinton already delivered a concession without raising criticism herself...the bar here is incredibly high and their evidence seems mostly hypothetical. To satisfy the criticism suggested, you would have to re-run the election...it's just not happening
I don't think Nate's twitter post and associated language are the right way to have a conversation as serious as this one. The people making the claims are not just slinging "BS" to be "debunked", they are experts who have credibility to lose by making claims without evidence, and I think it's worth hearing more from them before writing them off.
Judging by this Twitter feed and Stata output, it looks that we are looking at a classic case of "correlation does not imply causality".
Clinton shift might be correlated with paper vs. electronic ballot but it looks like districts that opted for electronic ballot have different population groups compared to the ones with paper ballot. Once you control for that, e.g. race and college degree, paper/electronic ballot correlation disappears.
To be fair, data sample is rather small so small effects might be difficult to pick up.
But controlling for everything is almost impossible to be perfect: designated location vs county wide, income, race, education, Trump/Clinton modeled support.
You'd have to pull actual voting returns by individual for those voting locations and states, and then have a good vote file. Then you can start to control for those variables and I would bet almost everything I have that doing so would reduce any irregularity these scholars are using as an argument that the election was somehow hacked.
Why is electronic voting accepted? Proprietary software means the election results can never truly be trusted. Richard Stallman has written about this [1].
It's not just proprietary software that's problematic - until we have practical solutions for end-to-end verifiable voting, you can't guarantee that the software and hardware that has been audited and certified isn't being tampered with.
Voting is explicitly designed not to be end to end verifiable, because if the voter can verify that their vote was recorded correctly, so can someone who wants to buy it or coerce the voter.
We instead take extensive precautions with paper votes to physically protect the integrity of ballot boxes and the counting process explicitly to avoid having to have a system where votes can be verified, because there's been plenty of experience with what can happen if they can be.
The problem with most electronic voting is that it throws away this verification of integrity of the voting record.
In the video, Ron Rivest specifically addresses how to allow both an anonymous vote with (some) mutually exclusive end-to-end verification.
I completely agree that electronic voting is currently a terrible idea. The other talk I linked to by Andrew Appel strongly encourages using only paper votes and statistically verifying them by manually recounting a random sample of voting locations.
However, I'm willing to listen to Ron (the "R" in "RSA") Rivest's ideas about using encryption in voting. I think the idea needs more work, but it's interesting approach that does attempt to address both anonymity and verifiability.
It's worth noting that using encryption techniques makes the functioning of a voting system opaque to 99% of the population. In contrast, everyone can understand how voting using paper works.
It's no doubt possible to make digital voting systems with some awesome properties, but in the end, are the improvements they give worth this loss of understanding (which might come with a decreased trust in the system)?
> because there's been plenty of experience with what can happen if they can be.
Such as? Was there ever a time in the history of modern democracies where "vote receipts" were actually used and caused problems? I was under the impression that they've never been used out of preemptive fear.
Voting in the United Kingdom was public until 1872[0]. After the change to secret ballots, a lot more worker- and tenant- friendly representatives were elected in Britain and Ireland, and it is generally credited with enfranchising the Irish people.
Suppose you were told a random number between 1 and (number of vote options) when you are in the booth. Later, your choice plus that random number is published, then you (but no one else) can verify the result, because you can trivially tell them any other number that modifies the result to something you want.
Suppose there's a method for calculating a fake choice token from a true choice token. This means that applying it to a fake choice must also produce corresponding fake choice tokens, otherwise a fake choice could be identified in this way. And by induction, any number of applications of the function must also reach a matching choice.
(This isn't a complete proof, but chasing up the remaining loose ends makes me think such a system is impossible, or at very least extremely complicated, and almost certainly impractical for non-mathematicians.)
Say there are two vote options, 0 and 1. We use addition modulo 2, i.e. XOR.
I vote for candidate 0. The voting machine tells me the random number 1 (out of 0, 1). When the voting results are published, I can check that next to my name it has 0^1 = 1. When someone asks me what my random number is, I can either answer 0, to pretend I voted for 0(random number)^1(public list) = 1, or 1, to say that I voted for 1(random number)^1(public list) = 0.
I'm sure I'm missing something simple here, but couldn't we combine electronic voting with a physical print-out that the voter receives immediately, including their vote and a unique (but anonymous) identifier.
The voter checks this print-out is correct and submits it to an audit box as they leave the voting booth.
If it is incorrect, they file an immediate complaint, and the data is later corrected based on their unique vote identifier (this could be recorded in the audit box with a vote correction audit form for that identifier).
The physical audit counts can then be retained, and spot-verified against the electronic counts if/as needed.
This assumes (as I think we must) integrity of the voting officers and of chain of custody of the physical audit voting boxes.
As far as I know, there are people that have been advocating something very similar to this. It's not quite true that these people are being ignored completely, but on the other hand, this hasn't been done. I've never heard an actual objection to the idea. I think there's just a lack of enough people screaming loud enough. (Or maybe I'm the one who's missing something.)
The problem is that the computer becomes effectively an expensive pencil. You haven't gained a lot, but the cost increases a lot. Worse, there is a huge increase in complexity which means more opportunity for bugs and a larger attack surface.
> unique vote identifier
This is also a serious problem if it is possible for the voter's copy of the identifier to recover their vote after they have left the voting booth. That would enable vote buying or coercing votes.
edit:
Unfortunately I'm not familiar with the detail of how mail-in ballots are handled. I should research that.
> This is also a serious problem if it is possible for the voter's copy of the identifier to recover their vote after they have left the voting booth. That would enable vote buying or coercing votes.
How is this issue currently dealt with in places that allow mail in ballots?
In Washington state (King County), the mail-in ballots are placed inside a privacy "sleeve" that contains a signed statement on the outside that you autograph. If your signature matches the signature of your voter registration, the ballot is removed from the privacy sleeve and put into an anonymous pile. It is then processed by a scantron machine. You only get a confirmation that your vote was processed into the system and counted.
But none of that prevents a Alice from forcing Bob to mark his ballot in the prescribed way, with Alice then taking it to the mailbox herself.
Bob may choose to deliberately change his signature so the ballot is at least invalidated, but that still takes a vote away from his preferred candidate, and would rely on Alice not knowing what Bob's true signature looks like.
> How is this issue currently dealt with in places that allow mail in ballots?
Good question. The best answer I have been able to come up with is that those places are simply hoping that mail in ballots are too rare to make them a target. Increasing popularity relative to in person voting could challenge that, but with today's abundance of handheld cameras, in person voting stops being much safer.
That'd make sense but so would mandatory voting and not holding the bloody election on a Tuesday.
I was in and out of our last election in Australia in 5 minutes, and it occurred on a Saturday.
It'd be easier to simply count all the votes cast on a convenient day for most people than apply statistical modelling to look for anomalies in predictive data.
> I was in and out of our last election in Australia in 5 minutes
Yes, but then countless people who pass voter ID laws and close polling stations in certain areas would be out of things to do.
That and then American politicians would actually have to work a lot harder, as right now they just count on mobilising their base to vote more than the other person's.
I'd love for voting to be mandatory, but let's face it, American politicians love the system in its current form.
There are machines that show a physical printout to the voter but the voter does not receive the paper. It remains within the machine. I know this is the case at my polling place in Missouri. I filled out a paper ballot because two of the three electronic voting machines were malfunctioning/non-operational when I voted.
>Some DREs can be equipped with Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) printers that allow the voter to confirm their selections on an independent paper record before recording their votes into computer memory. This paper record is preserved and, depending on State election codes, made available in the event of an audit or recount.
-https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/voting-equipment/
Funny how the losing side also rapidly looked at evidence and statistical studies (Nate Cohn, Nate Silver) and then others that were initially concerned rapidly updated their views (Paul Krugman) - ... sorry were you trying to draw an equivalence?
I wonder if there's any difference between "the lizard people are trying to throw the election because George Soros" and "there are some things that don't make sense that bear further investigation".
Funny how Trump has a strategy of accusing people of doing the very thing he's busy doing. Think about all the places he does it. It's a great tactic.
I'll also add:
- I heard plenty of people in the Clinton camp who were concerned about a hacked vote before the election.
- There's more than one way a vote could be unfair. Historically, there has been very little of the kind that Republicans talk so much about (people voting twice, dead people voting, illegals voting, etc…). If there was a significant amount of it, I actually think most democrats would acknowledge it.
- Verifying the integrity of a massively important vote should be done regardless of which side wins. It doesn't have to be expensive to do it right. See also:
Edited to add: The main reason I would want an auditable vote system, and a verification afterward if we didn't have that, even if I were in the Clinton camp is to help shut up all the people who would complain about her victory being illegitimate. If you can shut that kind of talk down, then the whole country can move on knowing their choice was their choice.
Related to the last paragraph, and in advance excuse me for my lack of knowledge about US history, has the electoral college ever voted for another candidate?
Silly me, it's litterally in the introduction paragraph of the wikipedia page about "faithless electors", I just lacked the knowledge of those keywords.
I don't think so but there was an 1824 edge case with John Quincy Adams. He won neither the electoral college or popular vote but the Senate later decided to put him in office anyway. No word on what his rival thought about it!
Today I think there might be a fuss.
Also these are the fellows who didn't get the popular vote but got enough electoral college votes.
Not sure if you're joking, but of course we do know. His rival, Andrew Jackson, was livid. He accused Adams (with some justification, but nothing proven) of striking a "corrupt bargain" with the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay. (It was actually the House that decided, not the Senate). Jackson alledged that Clay secured Adams the presidency in exchange for being appointed Secretary of State. Riding the wave of outrage, Jackson formed his own party (which eventualy evolved into the modern Democratic Party) and handily defeated Adams four years later.
We can deal death out without bias such as physical strength or ability using weapons.
Two people enter two different boxes that contain a button each. Only one can leave because one of the boxes is a suicide box. They choose the box they enter to prevent systematic bias/corruption.
The purpose of this process isn't a boring version of The Hunger Games. It is to prevent the greater problem of civil conflict and ultimately save more lives.
It is a symbolic act, a ritual. There are actually many societies where a human or animal is blamed for a 'global' problem the tribe has, and then killed which removes the tension and the danger it created.
The most obvious example of this is Christianity. It involves a scapegoated individual being murdered in order for the tribe to reform itself, which although I am not a Christian, does seem to be a description of what happened.
The reverse process also occurs. When a leader like Arch Duke Ferdinand is assassinated, the event becomes a symbolic fulcrum through which human society demanded blood. Violence is like a chain reaction.
"On 14 September 1982, Bachir was addressing fellow Phalangists at their headquarters in Achrafieh for the last time as their leader and for the last time as commander of the Lebanese Forces. At 4:10 PM, a bomb was detonated at the headquarters, killing Bachir and 26 other Phalange politicians...
Habib Shartouni, a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and also a Maronite Christian, was later arrested for the assassination. His sister was living in the apartment above the room Bachir was in. He had visited her the previous day and planted the bomb in her apartment. The next day, he called her and told her to get out of the building. Once she was out, he detonated the bomb from a few miles away from the building. When he came back to check on his sister, he was immediately arrested. He later confessed to it, saying he had done this because “Bachir had sold the country to Israel.” A reporter was heard telling him "You didn't kill a man, you killed a country." He was imprisoned for 8 years, until Syrian troops took over Lebanon at the end of the war and freed him on 13 October 1990..."
In my model the reporter understands something very important.
Had Habib Shartouni been ritually (which is another way of saying 'publicly orchestrated') killed, the anger could have found a resting place at his grave.
What happened next is illustrated in the remarkable anime Israeli film "Waltz with Bashir".
"The Sabra and Shatila massacre was the killing of between 762 and 3,500 civilians, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites, by a militia close to the Kataeb Party, also called Phalange, a predominantly Christian Lebanese right-wing party in the Sabra neighborhood and the adjacent Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon.
The massacre was presented as retaliation for the assassination of newly elected Lebanese president Bachir Gemayel, the leader of the Lebanese Kataeb Party."
So that is my position. Human society can use ritual as a social 'hack' to prevent a high blood price.
One obvious example is in the present with the increasing tensions in Europe due to the migrant/refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. While I do not condone violence I also believe the act of ritually killing (I won't mention anybody or anything specifically to avoid being controversial) would prevent (what I believe to be) much more exaggerated violence later on.
This would have to be done officially by the State and in the full public eye.
This is a strange subject, but it is only what we see o...
Is there anything floating out there beyond the article in New York[1] and everyone reiterating it?
The stuff over at Election Law Blog[2] seems to be worth quoting here:
> Without public evidence on the record to examine it is hard to really evaluate this claim other than by looking at the credibility of the people involved. Halderman is very credible, and if he says there are anomalies that deserve investigation, they should be investigated. But the fact that this group has gone to Elias and Podesta, and so far the campaign has said nothing since learning of it last Thursday, should give you pause. Time has just about run out. Claiming a hacked or rigged election is about as explosive a claim as one could make—-especially coming after Trump made unsupported allegations of vote rigging throughout the election. If there’s a realistic chance of anything here that could be proven to affect the election outcome, you have to trust Clinton’s legal team to advance it (or have advanced it already).
> the campaign has said nothing since learning of it last Thursday, should give you pause
That's not surprising at all - anything less than an outright win fails to give Hillary anything positive & that ship has sailed.
If the real goal is effective governance for 4 years and not just "winning the race", then they might weigh the possible outcomes differently from an activist.
And there would be pressure from the current Whitehouse to just "move on, folks", which is unsurprising.
Well there is this and the retaliation over the email server she had running coupled with the fact she was caught lying in front of a Senate hearing on Benghazzi. I would say she did something smart for a change. I.e. facts vs. some wild claims... And with all the BS with past Florida elections coupled with Trump's claims of a rigged election, my bet is the ballot casting and voting machines are more protected now a days than days past.
We know that Russia was complicit in hacking the DNC and Podesta's emails and supplying the information to Wikileaks for the purposes of influencing the campaign. We also know of the close ties between the Russian and Trump teams i.e. Flynn, Manafort, Page. And we know that Trump favoured a reset with Russia which based on comments from Putin looks to be happening.
So why wouldn't Russia given (a) how bad the sanctions are, (b) the threat of NATO and (c) their desire to reclaim Baltic states do everything in their power to hack voting machines ?
And given this is state sponsored hacking what could possibly stop them ? Especially given that China managed to steal F-35 information despite surely some of the most stringent security controls around.
Well for one, "hacking" emails doesn't equal votes as far as I can tell and the link you provided doesn't talk about tampering with ballots or voting equipment. Where is the connection? This sounds like more conspiracy theory but I'm listening.
This election has basically been a breeding ground for conspiracy theories about vote rigging. The other main axes have been:
A viral claim that Trump won because 300,000 voters were turned away due to insufficient identification: http://www.snopes.com/300000-wisconsin-voters-turned-away-du... (Definitely not true. That was an estimate of the total number of people that might not have suitable ID under a law that was overturned. If I recall correctly, the estimate had some issues too. Also, Trump performed much better than expected amongst the demographic that was supposedly being turned away to win him the vote.)
A bizarre viral tweet asking people to contact the DoJ, together with a claim that more votes were counted for President than cast in one county in Wisconsin: http://www.snopes.com/audit-the-vote/ (Apparently the initial reports are just based on phoned-in results that are checked later, and someone misheard.)
A claim by Greg Palast that Crosscheck was used to rig the vote by purging the registrations of enough black voters in Michigan, Arizona and North Carolina to swing the vote. Not on Snopes, but the proposed mechanism wouldn't work - Michigan only purges voters on the list if they fail to reply to a posted notification and then don't vote in any elections between this one and January 2019, and the other states should have similar safeguards by federal law.
Couldn't Trump counter with much more serious claims of voting fraud that likely benefited Clinton? There is a paper from 2014 that demonstrates how votes by illegal immigrants have actually affected the outcomes of US elections: https://heartiste.wordpress.com/2016/11/17/study-illegal-ali...
If Clinton won the popular vote by 2,000,000+ votes and the election was tipped because of election machines being hacked in a handful of states, it's safe to say the same would be true if the result was not changed.
There would be some credence to the hacking claim if it was shown that the anomaly was concentrated in just three states. But what we have is overwhelming evidence of Trump over-performing a certain demographics in a much wider region [1], including the traditionally democratic-leaning north-east. Specific examples: though Clinton won Minnesota and New Hampshire, the margin was very thin. Though she was expected to lose Ohio and Iowa, the loss margin was way bigger than expected.
The are 320 million people in the US. Therefore there were many instances of violence against supporters of any candidate by supporters of any other candidate. But statistically the was almost no political violence of any kind.
What I mean is that even if only 0.0001% of the population commits an act of violence there will still be enough violence for the media to report about it non-stop.
But it's still valid to say that the violence is virtually non-existent, in the same way that you might say that coins don't land on their edges, even though they do 0.0001% of the time.
Also, looking at the news it seems like there was quite a bit of violence in South Africa in the run-up to the elections, so I don't think that's really a counterexample.
That article is using the word "Australia" to mean "a small political party in Australia." The party in question did not gain any seats in the recent Federal election.
Given the AEC's reticence to adopt electronic voting[0] I suspect it will be a long time before they consider using blockchain technology, if they ever do.
"The computer scientists believe they have found evidence that vote totals in the three states could have been manipulated or hacked"
then few lines later:
"Their group told Podesta and Elias that while they had not found any evidence of hacking, the pattern needs to be looked at by an independent review."
Great journalism, great scientific findings they probably used the same ML algorithm that predicted Clinton would get 80%
I guess that's an improvement on rioting. Hopefully folks are finding the tantrums from the Left enlightening, as we're getting to see their emotional reaction to having their power lust denied.
Sadly, it's been denied by electing Trump :( Win some, lose some, I guess.
From the guys that accused Trump of not accepting the result of elections(because they considered done in Hillary's favor), turns out they don't want to accept it either.
Of course electronic voting machines could be hacked, but it is way easier to hack it when you know the source code, like the NSA knows, and the company that makes it is American, than Russia. So I bet the hack will be in Hillary's favor instead of otherwise.
Incredibly ironic. Before the election, there were fears in the press that Trump would refuse to accept the Pennsylvania results and it'd be impossible to prove that the results were accurate: http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-pennsylvania-votin... (Because of course, the idea that the vote could be hacked was seen as a Trump conspiracy theory back then.)
One way of rationalizing this, courtesy of Joss Whedon, is that this was all a sneaky trick by Trump to get Democrats to debunk the possibility of vote hacking so that he and Russia could get away with doing it: https://twitter.com/joss/status/801205749955194880
I have been a Democrat my whole life. In my opinion rehashing the vote would be very bad for our country.
Something that disturbs me greatly is the reaction of the media to the election. My wife had MSNBC on for an hour last night. There was one Trump supporter on briefly and they were constantly interrupted. Otherwise it was all editorializing against Trump.
We have lost a free and impartial news media, and that bodes ill for our country.
The media literally did Trump though, because they were looking for profit (because he did make them a ton of money). I don't think you can ever call them free.
Democrats would do a better favor to the country in the next 4 years focusing in the problems that caused this (internal, bad politics, corruption) and let Trump do its job as President.
It's funny: the article says some CS folks think the election might have been hacked. Then it says well there is no evidence of hacking, but some stats indicate something may be off. In my worldview, when you want to base an article and conclusion on statistics, you should probably talk to some statisticians, not computer security experts.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/801220813890277376
That's actually NOT for you to say. Rationalizing why it's not without doing the analysis yourself doesn't buy you that right, even if you read it somewhere and it sounds good.
It's easy to say you have to go a level deeper to get the truth, but at some level you have to accept the legitimacy of a source. If you don't trust Nate Silver, you can run the analysis yourself. You then have to choose whether to trust the source of the data. If you don't trust that, and you have the ability to to go the pre-aggregated data, you can go to that. Do you trust the people reporting that? At some point,it's not feasible to follow the chain of custody all the way back, so you have to make a call as to what level you are willing to go back before trusting the source.
If someone trusts the integrity and competency of Nate Silver, then they should be able to apply some level of assurance to his results based on that. If you don't trust Nate Silver's results because you doubt his integrity or competency, or even if you think it's just too important to trust to a single person, then speak to that, not to some simplistic and often impossible to satisfy ideal of determining everything yourself from pure sources.
In the past he mentioned using excel with various addons, and these printouts look very, grid like.
Clinton shift might be correlated with paper vs. electronic ballot but it looks like districts that opted for electronic ballot have different population groups compared to the ones with paper ballot. Once you control for that, e.g. race and college degree, paper/electronic ballot correlation disappears.
To be fair, data sample is rather small so small effects might be difficult to pick up.
But controlling for everything is almost impossible to be perfect: designated location vs county wide, income, race, education, Trump/Clinton modeled support.
You'd have to pull actual voting returns by individual for those voting locations and states, and then have a good vote file. Then you can start to control for those variables and I would bet almost everything I have that doing so would reduce any irregularity these scholars are using as an argument that the election was somehow hacked.
Some big names tho.
[1] https://stallman.org/evoting.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abQCqIbBBeM
edit:
Also, Ron Rivest was recently on Numberphile, where he talked about using homomorphic encryption to enable end-to-end verifiable voting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRTvoZ3Rho
We instead take extensive precautions with paper votes to physically protect the integrity of ballot boxes and the counting process explicitly to avoid having to have a system where votes can be verified, because there's been plenty of experience with what can happen if they can be.
The problem with most electronic voting is that it throws away this verification of integrity of the voting record.
I completely agree that electronic voting is currently a terrible idea. The other talk I linked to by Andrew Appel strongly encourages using only paper votes and statistically verifying them by manually recounting a random sample of voting locations.
However, I'm willing to listen to Ron (the "R" in "RSA") Rivest's ideas about using encryption in voting. I think the idea needs more work, but it's interesting approach that does attempt to address both anonymity and verifiability.
It's no doubt possible to make digital voting systems with some awesome properties, but in the end, are the improvements they give worth this loss of understanding (which might come with a decreased trust in the system)?
Such as? Was there ever a time in the history of modern democracies where "vote receipts" were actually used and caused problems? I was under the impression that they've never been used out of preemptive fear.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Act_1872
Suppose there's a method for calculating a fake choice token from a true choice token. This means that applying it to a fake choice must also produce corresponding fake choice tokens, otherwise a fake choice could be identified in this way. And by induction, any number of applications of the function must also reach a matching choice.
(This isn't a complete proof, but chasing up the remaining loose ends makes me think such a system is impossible, or at very least extremely complicated, and almost certainly impractical for non-mathematicians.)
I vote for candidate 0. The voting machine tells me the random number 1 (out of 0, 1). When the voting results are published, I can check that next to my name it has 0^1 = 1. When someone asks me what my random number is, I can either answer 0, to pretend I voted for 0(random number)^1(public list) = 1, or 1, to say that I voted for 1(random number)^1(public list) = 0.
Or any variation of it.
The voter checks this print-out is correct and submits it to an audit box as they leave the voting booth.
If it is incorrect, they file an immediate complaint, and the data is later corrected based on their unique vote identifier (this could be recorded in the audit box with a vote correction audit form for that identifier).
The physical audit counts can then be retained, and spot-verified against the electronic counts if/as needed.
This assumes (as I think we must) integrity of the voting officers and of chain of custody of the physical audit voting boxes.
> unique vote identifier
This is also a serious problem if it is possible for the voter's copy of the identifier to recover their vote after they have left the voting booth. That would enable vote buying or coercing votes.
edit:
Unfortunately I'm not familiar with the detail of how mail-in ballots are handled. I should research that.
How is this issue currently dealt with in places that allow mail in ballots?
Bob may choose to deliberately change his signature so the ballot is at least invalidated, but that still takes a vote away from his preferred candidate, and would rely on Alice not knowing what Bob's true signature looks like.
Good question. The best answer I have been able to come up with is that those places are simply hoping that mail in ballots are too rare to make them a target. Increasing popularity relative to in person voting could challenge that, but with today's abundance of handheld cameras, in person voting stops being much safer.
I was in and out of our last election in Australia in 5 minutes, and it occurred on a Saturday.
It'd be easier to simply count all the votes cast on a convenient day for most people than apply statistical modelling to look for anomalies in predictive data.
> I was in and out of our last election in Australia in 5 minutes
Yes, but then countless people who pass voter ID laws and close polling stations in certain areas would be out of things to do.
That and then American politicians would actually have to work a lot harder, as right now they just count on mobilising their base to vote more than the other person's.
I'd love for voting to be mandatory, but let's face it, American politicians love the system in its current form.
You do gain a lot by going digital with the voting system as you can quickly count the votes.
But at the same time you can count on the integrity of the votes by keeping a physical backup with the paper votes, which can be checked if needed.
But what exactly is gained by that? The UK takes about a day, what are they losing?
>Some DREs can be equipped with Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) printers that allow the voter to confirm their selections on an independent paper record before recording their votes into computer memory. This paper record is preserved and, depending on State election codes, made available in the event of an audit or recount. -https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/voting-equipment/
Stallman is, as per usual, completely wrong about the power of free software.
I'll also add:
- I heard plenty of people in the Clinton camp who were concerned about a hacked vote before the election.
- There's more than one way a vote could be unfair. Historically, there has been very little of the kind that Republicans talk so much about (people voting twice, dead people voting, illegals voting, etc…). If there was a significant amount of it, I actually think most democrats would acknowledge it.
- Verifying the integrity of a massively important vote should be done regardless of which side wins. It doesn't have to be expensive to do it right. See also:
https://www.verifiedvoting.org
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/11/18/election-au...
Edited to add: The main reason I would want an auditable vote system, and a verification afterward if we didn't have that, even if I were in the Clinton camp is to help shut up all the people who would complain about her victory being illegitimate. If you can shut that kind of talk down, then the whole country can move on knowing their choice was their choice.
Today I think there might be a fuss.
Also these are the fellows who didn't get the popular vote but got enough electoral college votes.
1876, Rutherford B. Hayes
1888, Benjamin Harrison
2000, George W. Bush
2016, Donald J. Trump
Not sure if you're joking, but of course we do know. His rival, Andrew Jackson, was livid. He accused Adams (with some justification, but nothing proven) of striking a "corrupt bargain" with the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay. (It was actually the House that decided, not the Senate). Jackson alledged that Clay secured Adams the presidency in exchange for being appointed Secretary of State. Riding the wave of outrage, Jackson formed his own party (which eventualy evolved into the modern Democratic Party) and handily defeated Adams four years later.
Then I thought that really might make perfect sense.
- no dynasties. - civic minded selection. - outcome not in dispute. - cheaper than counting votes.
Maybe not literally with pistols but now I'm intrigued as to whether this has been tried before.
I don't think I know of any human societies (non fictional) which worked with this system...
Two people enter two different boxes that contain a button each. Only one can leave because one of the boxes is a suicide box. They choose the box they enter to prevent systematic bias/corruption.
The purpose of this process isn't a boring version of The Hunger Games. It is to prevent the greater problem of civil conflict and ultimately save more lives.
It is a symbolic act, a ritual. There are actually many societies where a human or animal is blamed for a 'global' problem the tribe has, and then killed which removes the tension and the danger it created.
The most obvious example of this is Christianity. It involves a scapegoated individual being murdered in order for the tribe to reform itself, which although I am not a Christian, does seem to be a description of what happened.
The reverse process also occurs. When a leader like Arch Duke Ferdinand is assassinated, the event becomes a symbolic fulcrum through which human society demanded blood. Violence is like a chain reaction.
Here is a modern example. Bachir of Lebanon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachir_Gemayel
"On 14 September 1982, Bachir was addressing fellow Phalangists at their headquarters in Achrafieh for the last time as their leader and for the last time as commander of the Lebanese Forces. At 4:10 PM, a bomb was detonated at the headquarters, killing Bachir and 26 other Phalange politicians...
Habib Shartouni, a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and also a Maronite Christian, was later arrested for the assassination. His sister was living in the apartment above the room Bachir was in. He had visited her the previous day and planted the bomb in her apartment. The next day, he called her and told her to get out of the building. Once she was out, he detonated the bomb from a few miles away from the building. When he came back to check on his sister, he was immediately arrested. He later confessed to it, saying he had done this because “Bachir had sold the country to Israel.” A reporter was heard telling him "You didn't kill a man, you killed a country." He was imprisoned for 8 years, until Syrian troops took over Lebanon at the end of the war and freed him on 13 October 1990..."
In my model the reporter understands something very important.
Had Habib Shartouni been ritually (which is another way of saying 'publicly orchestrated') killed, the anger could have found a resting place at his grave.
What happened next is illustrated in the remarkable anime Israeli film "Waltz with Bashir".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltz_with_Bashir
"The Sabra and Shatila massacre was the killing of between 762 and 3,500 civilians, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites, by a militia close to the Kataeb Party, also called Phalange, a predominantly Christian Lebanese right-wing party in the Sabra neighborhood and the adjacent Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon.
The massacre was presented as retaliation for the assassination of newly elected Lebanese president Bachir Gemayel, the leader of the Lebanese Kataeb Party."
So that is my position. Human society can use ritual as a social 'hack' to prevent a high blood price.
One obvious example is in the present with the increasing tensions in Europe due to the migrant/refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. While I do not condone violence I also believe the act of ritually killing (I won't mention anybody or anything specifically to avoid being controversial) would prevent (what I believe to be) much more exaggerated violence later on.
This would have to be done officially by the State and in the full public eye.
This is a strange subject, but it is only what we see o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
The stuff over at Election Law Blog[2] seems to be worth quoting here:
> Without public evidence on the record to examine it is hard to really evaluate this claim other than by looking at the credibility of the people involved. Halderman is very credible, and if he says there are anomalies that deserve investigation, they should be investigated. But the fact that this group has gone to Elias and Podesta, and so far the campaign has said nothing since learning of it last Thursday, should give you pause. Time has just about run out. Claiming a hacked or rigged election is about as explosive a claim as one could make—-especially coming after Trump made unsupported allegations of vote rigging throughout the election. If there’s a realistic chance of anything here that could be proven to affect the election outcome, you have to trust Clinton’s legal team to advance it (or have advanced it already).
[1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/activists-urge-... [2] http://electionlawblog.org/?p=89454
That's not surprising at all - anything less than an outright win fails to give Hillary anything positive & that ship has sailed.
If the real goal is effective governance for 4 years and not just "winning the race", then they might weigh the possible outcomes differently from an activist.
And there would be pressure from the current Whitehouse to just "move on, folks", which is unsurprising.
So why wouldn't Russia given (a) how bad the sanctions are, (b) the threat of NATO and (c) their desire to reclaim Baltic states do everything in their power to hack voting machines ?
And given this is state sponsored hacking what could possibly stop them ? Especially given that China managed to steal F-35 information despite surely some of the most stringent security controls around.
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-departme...
A viral claim that Trump won because 300,000 voters were turned away due to insufficient identification: http://www.snopes.com/300000-wisconsin-voters-turned-away-du... (Definitely not true. That was an estimate of the total number of people that might not have suitable ID under a law that was overturned. If I recall correctly, the estimate had some issues too. Also, Trump performed much better than expected amongst the demographic that was supposedly being turned away to win him the vote.)
A bizarre viral tweet asking people to contact the DoJ, together with a claim that more votes were counted for President than cast in one county in Wisconsin: http://www.snopes.com/audit-the-vote/ (Apparently the initial reports are just based on phoned-in results that are checked later, and someone misheard.)
A claim by Greg Palast that Crosscheck was used to rig the vote by purging the registrations of enough black voters in Michigan, Arizona and North Carolina to swing the vote. Not on Snopes, but the proposed mechanism wouldn't work - Michigan only purges voters on the list if they fail to reply to a posted notification and then don't vote in any elections between this one and January 2019, and the other states should have similar safeguards by federal law.
says who? No judge is going to put the result in question over an academic offering hearsay
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/elections/h...
These elections were anything but peaceful, going by the harassment of Trump supporters that I keep seeing on Reddit.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9Ierwcw4pQ
But it's still valid to say that the violence is virtually non-existent, in the same way that you might say that coins don't land on their edges, even though they do 0.0001% of the time.
Also, looking at the news it seems like there was quite a bit of violence in South Africa in the run-up to the elections, so I don't think that's really a counterexample.
Why on earth would you use that as evidence of anything?
But so far it's all psychological. The shooting hasn't started.
Australia is already using Ranked Voting and now this is taking shape:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/australia-to-make-blockchain-...
Given the AEC's reticence to adopt electronic voting[0] I suspect it will be a long time before they consider using blockchain technology, if they ever do.
[0] http://www.aec.gov.au/voting/report.htm
Tip from a brazillian: this would break your country.
then few lines later: "Their group told Podesta and Elias that while they had not found any evidence of hacking, the pattern needs to be looked at by an independent review."
Great journalism, great scientific findings they probably used the same ML algorithm that predicted Clinton would get 80%
Sadly, it's been denied by electing Trump :( Win some, lose some, I guess.
From the guys that accused Trump of not accepting the result of elections(because they considered done in Hillary's favor), turns out they don't want to accept it either.
Of course electronic voting machines could be hacked, but it is way easier to hack it when you know the source code, like the NSA knows, and the company that makes it is American, than Russia. So I bet the hack will be in Hillary's favor instead of otherwise.
One way of rationalizing this, courtesy of Joss Whedon, is that this was all a sneaky trick by Trump to get Democrats to debunk the possibility of vote hacking so that he and Russia could get away with doing it: https://twitter.com/joss/status/801205749955194880
Something that disturbs me greatly is the reaction of the media to the election. My wife had MSNBC on for an hour last night. There was one Trump supporter on briefly and they were constantly interrupted. Otherwise it was all editorializing against Trump.
We have lost a free and impartial news media, and that bodes ill for our country.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993153