Define "normal people". From what I remember of the emails that were obtained about this, the server was wiped as part of a post-compromise remediation plan by university IT security staff.
It is a significant deal. She wasn't alone in doing so (her predecessors had engaged in similar behavior to a degree as well). What's interesting is that the heat and light about it wasn't followed by any legislative/policy action of note. It's almost like they weren't trying to right a wrong, but to politically assassinate her.
The sitting president communicates on an unsecured iPhone. The WH staff is using alternate email systems and messaging to actively avoid leaving a trail.
Let me know your concern about that and I'm happy to continue this conversation. Otherwise, you're engaging in partisan politics here and that's not good for HN.
Means certain states like Georgia won’t be democratic. What the handful of people in power say goes. Doesn’t matter what the voters actually try to vote.
It partitions/firewalls the impact of the fraud to an individual state.
The voting power of Georgia residents may have been compromised here, but the voting power of the rest of the country was unaffected. In a popular voting system, that would not be the case (if the fraud increased reported voter turnout, seizing more voting power into the fraudulent election, for example).
That's one way to look at it and I certainly have some sympathy for/agreement with that point of view.
Another way to look at it is that each other state's Elector selection process is their business. The Constitution does not provide any assurances that other states will choose their Electors by any particular process, but instead specifically reserves that for each state's Legisature. A state would be within their rights to choose them winner-take-all, in proportion to the popular vote, or by a random draw from a Powerball machine and you and I would have no say over it (as non-residents).
>Another way to look at it is that each other state's Elector selection process is their business.
Similarly, the entire election is the business of every citizen. "Their business" has a direct impact on my life, so I should have some say in the matter.
>The Constitution does not provide any assurances that other states will choose their Electors by any particular process,
The Constitution sets up the electoral college. That doesn't make it a good system.
The electoral college is the sole reason 2 out of the last 3 presidents lost the popular vote while winning the general election.
In no universe does the electoral college mitigate corruption on the federal level. In fact, one could argue that it makes corruption worse, because a candidate only has to win a few key states to tip the election, regardless of the popular vote.
it makes corruption worse, because a candidate only has to win a few key states to tip the election, regardless of the popular vote.
The alternative is only counting the popular vote, which only serves to disenfranchise the majority of states.
Without the electoral college, a candidate would only have to campaign in and win three or four large states, and the rest of the nations and its concerns can be ignored.
That concern is the whole reason we have the House/Senate system: So that large states with lots of people in the House of Representatives don't run amok. The Senate balances that out.
More specifically, a state that 'cheats' can only impact their share of electoral votes, rather than bleed into the popular count of all states' electoral votes.
> Without the electoral college, a candidate would only have to campaign in and win three or four large states, and the rest of the nations and its concerns can be ignored.
But this system already exists via swing states. Voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida determine the election currently, just look at how much is spent on advertising in those states compared to non-swing states. Look at how often candidates visit Ohio vs Kentucky.
The idea that the electoral college equally franchises all Americans is purely a myth.
A popular vote "disenfranchises" any voting bloc that stands in opposition to a majority. Do you believe this strategy of ameliorating tyranny-of-the-majority scenarios by weighting votes generalizes to demographics other than place of residence? Can we give extra votes to all disadvantaged populations, or is there something unique about small-state folks?
Would incentivize just campaigning to get as many people to vote as possible in the highest density population centers, meanwhile most people don't even pay attention to politics and have no interest in it.
These people really should not be voting in the first place and a system which encourages vote harvesting even more than it already is encouraged is not a step in the right direction.
> The electoral college is the sole reason 2 out of the last 3 presidents lost the popular vote while winning the general election.
That's not exactly true though, because of the electoral college Republicans in California don't bother to vote, since their vote doesn't count.
If you didn't have an electoral college then the popular vote count would have been different.
You can't change the rules of the game after the fact and say "look we would have won", without also considering that people would have played differently with different rules.
You still haven't touched on what the post you're replying to is pointing out, which is that people behave differently when the rules change. A Californian Republican may as well not vote at all. If it went off national popular vote, then those Californian minority voters would still have a reason to make sure their vote was counted.
Regardless, it's a moot point, because according to the Constitution as written, those electors are supposed to only be accountable to themselves. The idea being the community electing the most level-headed and educated amongst them to make the decision everyone else would be okay with.
Most states don't respect that intent since the formation of the Party system, so really what we have now is little more than an abomination completely unintended by the Founders.
If there's upsetness about this, why are we not upset that the Libertarian party didn't get 3 people in the house of representatives, given that it won 0.7[1]% of the popular vote for house representatives; or that the Democrats should have 1.4 additional representatives if you ignore 3rd party candidates and look at just vote count between Democrats and Republicans.
Despite what the ballot may say, voters in the various states are voting for electors, not for president, and the votes can't be added together into a meaningful number.
You could certainly take the numbers, along with registered party affiliation and other demographic data, and historic data from more contested elections in the various precincts, and guess what the vote counts might be at various levels of turnout (including scenarios where more eligible but currently unregistered persons turn out to vote), and those guesses would likely make for a much more interesting discussion than just pointing out a number that seems like a statistical oddity.
> In fact, one could argue that it makes corruption worse, because a candidate only has to win a few key states to tip the election, regardless of the popular vote.
With the electoral college, we don't hold a popular vote.
This provides compartmentalization of corruption --- if election officials in some state cause an extra 10,000 votes to be counted for their preferred candidate, it may affect their state's selection of electors, but can't influence the results of other states. In a close election by popular vote, 10,000 votes could be very significant.
Additionally, the electoral college provides compartmentalization of natural disasters. If there's a blizzard in some state (or several), their voting turnout will likely be much lower, and there is no provision for makeup elections; however, we can assume that voters of different parties will have reasonably equal difficulty getting to the polls, so within the local area, the resulting ratios should be similar to results of a non-disrupted election. However, the disrupted states would cast many fewer votes, so other states would have more influence; if the state was highly in favor of one candidate, it could be a big swing.
I thought 2000 presidential election put an end to this kind of reasoning? The result of a national election, literally hanging on the chads of a few extremely poorly managed districts in Florida.
The original argument was that electoral college "localizes" statewide corruption. I pointed out it didn't. Whether a popular election is also susceptible to statewide corruption is a different matter - of course it is, but unlike electoral college, a corrupt state can never wield disproportionate power.
With the electoral college, a corrupt state can force its votes, and that can swing the election if the electoral count is close enough; if it's a large state, that's pretty likely, I suppose.
With a popular vote, a corrupt state (or precinct) can manufacture votes, and if they can plausibly manufacture enough votes in a close election, that can swing the election too.
"I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how."
It also means that dynamic of political polarization become more prevalent. Imagine being accountable to only one side of the electorate and how that shapes media and institutions. It will only make the divisive, angry rhetoric worse.
The US voting system of rules and procedures is full of practices which enforce this sort of extreme polarity. One person one vote makes it a two party choice through one person winning all of a persons vote-and thus unites all others through loss. One party take all makes all outside of that Rule united in opposition to the party in power. Etc etc
When you steal elections you're not accountable to any side, not even the people who you claim to share a party with. That's why it's especially dangerous -- even to the voters who think everything's fine because it benefited the party they support.
This is the reason the founders added the second amendment. If agents of the state behave in a tyrannical manner, the people have the right to shoot them.
The USA was founded by shooting people who worked for a tyrannical government, they were called redcoats! It would be the height of hypocrisy for the founders to turn around and declare this activity illegal.
You are, however, correct in the sense that the constitution does not "give you rights." Your rights exist a priori, the constitution merely enumerates a few of them.
Your understanding of the 2nd amendment as an individual right is because by a line of NRA propaganda that started somewhere in the 1970s, and is unfortunately now established jurisprudence. But historically your understanding is dead wrong.
In the post-Heller legal interpretation, the start of the 2nd amendment is fluff with no meaning or force. But the phrase, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," was central to the intent of the amendment in an era where every able bodied white man from 20-40 was expected to participate in an organized militia organized by local government and the state. The protected right to bear arms and what arms you were to bear belonged to the militias. And the militias included so many that they really were, "the People".
Your focus on this or that interpretation of this or that legal document is missing the forest for the trees. The second amendment did not yet exist during the time founders were merrily blasting away at tyrancial redcoats.
Are you claiming the founders had no right to rebel? The right of the people to free themselves from subjugation lives in the hearts of men, not on some scrap of mouldering parchment.
You are switching from the point I am arguing to the point that I am not. You are correct on our legal doctrine about the existence of rights before their enumeration in the Constitution. That doesn't affect my point.
Wait, so someone disagrees with you, therefore they're opinion is invalid because of NRA propaganda? At least give the person you're responding to the credit to make up their own damn mind.
Your reaction is a misinterpretation of what I said.
The fact that a statement has been used in propaganda has no bearing on whether or not it is correct. As the saying goes, "Ideas are not responsible for the people who hold them."
The statement was wrong because it is wrong, and I gave a citation written by professional historians demonstrating that fact.
That the statement is popular because of NRA propaganda is a separate issue. See https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/nra-guns-sec... for a reasonable explanation of the history behind why that claim is true. And for documentation of the fact that, until said propaganda, that claim was widely and rightly rejected.
I have no reason to doubt that he has made up his own mind based on information available to him. However I also have no doubt that if he lived in any era before the NRA propaganda took hold, he would not have come to that opinion. Because it is an opinion that basically nobody ever held.
I'm not quite sure I understand the context of militias around the time of the writing of the Constitution, but I don't see why a person would need the right to keep and bear arms if acting on behalf of a government organized militia --- if the intent was only to enable government organized militias, I would assume that power would have been enumerated to the states or reserved for the states.
The context of militias around the time of the writing of the Constitution was explained in the link that I provided. More on that in a second.
My key point was that there wasn't a right for a person...to keep and bear arms. There was a right for THE PEOPLE to do so as part of a militia. With two major points to be kept in mind. The first was that not all militias were government organized. The second was that this right was a protection from federal interference. For example Virginia didn't want Congress deciding to undermine how they ran their militia. Furthermore it is important to understand that the phrase "bear arms" at the time referred only to military service. Carrying your hunting rifle was not "bearing arms", and there are multiple court cases from that era affirming this understanding.
Now back to militias. It varied by state and time period. The brief goes into some detail. But for existence at the time of the Revolution Virginia had a state regulated militia. Pennsylvania couldn't by its Constitution, but many local areas had their own militias. (For example towns would to defend against Indian attacks.)
But in all cases, militias were set up so that the general citizenry would serve as an army in time of crisis for defense of the state or themselves. And this idea had a long history behind it.
I suggest you look up the definition of militia. Its not a military, police, national guard, or even reserve force that exists in the US today. Its not any organization either, considering the one common attribute of militias is disorganization.
Which is why after the justification you list, the enumeration is clear.
"the right of the _people_ to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
It doesn't actually say "arm's considered safe by the government", "people considered safe by the government", "people trained by the government" or anything else. Might be convenient for some if it did, but it doesn't. And given the history of private cannon/schooner/etc ownership it might surprise you to know that the laws in effect today are quite restrictive with respect to the historical understanding of the amendment. Which is why many consider the NFA banning machine guns and related laws to be unconstitutional, and lacking a serious challenge. Partially because the NRA mostly supported it.
Many of the cases the 1934 regulation stands upon are flimsy, obviously racist rulings against people without means.
So, I would be really careful making augments against it. And just so I'm clear, I consider both political sides to be more than willing to twist the meaning of the constitution to justify their goals. Same as the "Christians" that used the bible to justify slavery or to treat women as second class citizens.
I don't know why you think that I need to look up the definition of militia. But the link that I provided provides a rather lengthy explanation of what militias are and the different forms of militias that existed in the USA from colonial times until the passing of the 2nd amendment. It certainly is much more informative than "a military force that is raised from the civil population to supplement a regular army in an emergency".
Incidentally I failed to look up the actual law of the time. But the 1792 militia law included every "free able-bodied white male citizen" between the ages of 18 and 45. Which, in a world that only paid attention to white men, basically was "the people".
The subject of the 2nd Amendment has always been the People. The militia part of the statement cannot standalone as a substantive independent clause, therefore it is a qualifier of the primary independent clause, namely, that that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
The militia is not the one being granted an immunity to infringement of a right. It's a part of a supportive reason for the explicit grant of immunity to infringement to the right held by the People.
And if you don't think the Founders weren't writing that with the idea that what they wrote down wouldn't eventually turn itself into a tyranny that would need to be violently upset by the People, to whom was recognized in the Declaration of Independendence to hold the absolute right of revocation of consent to be governed, and the right to assemble and replace such form of government that successfully provides them service, relief and defense, then I think accusations of naivete or misunderstanding may need to be contemplated whilst staring into a mirror.
And even that brief brings into question motivations. Or particular bias for one interpretation or another.
Note this gem.
>The fact that references to the keeping of firearms are
so few and terse, or that the modern academic
controversy over the Second Amendment has been
forced to squeeze so much modern interpretive blood
from so few evidentiary turnips, is itself an indicator of
how minor a question this was at the time.
I reject this implication. Nobody takes the time to write down or make a big fuss about a settled question, and it was clear that, yes, many were worried about the details of how military might would be structured; but no one was seriously prepared to say "Golly gee, let's let the government decide whether or not I have the right to own a particular machine that makes me a political obstacle to whatever abuses they may want to perpetrate whilst in office."
Also, you have to take into account the fact that jurisprudence is constrained by the principle of least action, especially when dealing with high level fundamental rights.
Considering the outright rejection of British authority, and the adoption of firearm culture in the United States to the current day, I have great difficulty taking anyone who points at Heller seriously.
But hey, let's dig into some of these.
>This was “indeed, a
publick allowance under due restraints, of the
natural right of resistance and self-
preservation, when the sanctions of society
and laws are found insufficient to restrain the
violence of oppression.”
Note afterwards the copious backpedaling on the quote with extensive reference to every other potentially limiting part of the argument but no reference to "when the sanctions of society
and laws are found insufficient to restrain the
violence of oppression".
This being British, that isn't necessarily surprising. To an American, however, that last part is the far more important part.
Here's another tidbit.
>There is no direct equivalent in the American declarations to
the selective Protestant “subjects” invoked in the Bill of Rights of 1689...
I would hope not, given that it's always been a settled question that your religion in this country isn't something the government is allowed to infringe upon, and furthermore, arguments of "legislative Supremacy" disappear when you actually read the bill of rights in order, as the First Amendment reads,
>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The Second then read with the first as context,
>A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be i...
Basic English grammar disagrees. The subject of the 2nd Amendment has always been the People.
Basic English grammar is actually ambiguous. Does "the People" mean "the People as a group" or "each of the People"? In other words is it a communal right or an individual one?
Nobody takes the time to write down or make a big fuss about a settled question...
And the point is that the understanding of what a milita was, how it worked, and the fact that it was a system that had been in place for close to a thousand years. (Having been created by Alfred the Great for defense against the Vikings.)
There is no direct equivalent in the American declarations to the selective Protestant “subjects” invoked in the Bill of Rights of 1689...
I would hope not, given that it's always been a settled question that your religion in this country isn't something the government is allowed to infringe upon, and furthermore, arguments of "legislative Supremacy" disappear when you actually read the bill of rights in order, as the First Amendment reads,
No, it hasn't "always been settled". In fact 1689 was long before the USA existed, and while British colonies then allowed freedom of religion, all but Pennsylvania had official state churches with government support. And within living memory, many of the colonies had had restrictions on what religions were allowed. It was therefore by no means automatic that laws passed in the New World at that point would not follow the British precedent.
Furthermore the British had good reason to have that religious test. At the time Catholic doctrine supported the murder of excommunicated monarchs, they kept track of who they believed the rightful monarch of England was (never the one that the English believed to be their monarch), and the English believed in the truth of a variety of plots both real (Guy Fawkes) and imagined (the starting of the Fire of London) by Catholics bent on overthrowing the English monarchy.
Therefore allowing weapons for Catholics rather reasonably could lead to the destabilization of the government.
In fact, there is a pretty good circumstantial case to be made that the true (but unspoken) purpose of the amendment was to guarantee the slave states the ability to forcibly suppress slave rebellions.
Keep in mind that you're reading a filtered, minimalist snippet of a probably very long and complicated case, and that whatever you're presuming from the article probably isn't the whole picture.
From the security experts affidavit filed in Georgia court today:
15. On December 2, 2014, while the KSU server remained vulnerable, a new user named "shellshock" was created on the server. I have created the below timeline of activity related to the shellshock user after fusing logging data from multiple sources. The timeline may not be complete:
16. 12/2/2014 10:45 — the user mpears09 is modified using the Webmin console
12/2/2014 10:47 - shellshock user created using Webmin console
12/2/2014 10:49 - /home/shellshock/.bash histovy last modified
12/22014 11:02 - /home/shellshocWshellsh0ck file is deleted
12/2/2014 1106 - bash patched to version 4.2+dfsg-0.1+deb7u3 to prevent shellshock
12/2/2014 11:40 - shellshock user disabled using Webmin console
17. The file "bash history" is a kind of log that typically records all the commands a user executes. For this user, though, the file contained a single command to logout of the server. The single command to logout is suspicious since a file was created and deleted in the user's home directory, leading rne to believe the "bash history" has been modified. This indicates to rne that the "shellshock" user may have been hiding their activities.
Odd, I might have concluded that mpears09 logged into webmin, created the shellshock user via that interface, ran or implemented some variation of the shellshock patch script[1] manually as that user, and maybe cleaned up when he disabled it. The actions also might not have been executed in a way that would have been logged.
Whether maintenance of some aspect of the CES server was part of his role at KSU at the time or if records exist of someone asking him to do that (or, say, to patch drupalgeddon and he did a 2-for-1) is what I wonder.
Unfortunately many people can't even accept that voter ID cards, which are used throughout the developed (and developing) world are reasonable means for securing elections. I gave up hope for reasonable discussions with "the other side" about election security a few years ago.
In our current society, where the other side is the greatest evil imaginable, the lesser evil of accepting fraud to secure victory is seen as preferable to losing.
This is generally what the end of free society looks like.
A question to Americans, is there nothing a common citizen can do about it? In India, in a similar situation anyone would be able to file a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) with High Court (highest court at state level) or Supreme Court (highest court at central/federal level). If any of the courts decided to take up the PIL, they could ask any investigative body, including law enforcement or ex-judges, for investigation.
AFAIK, the aggrieved party would be the losing candidate. That candidate is typically a D who announces defeat hours after the vote. They don’t fight these court battles long term in an interest of public unity. Or, worse, don’t have the finances for the court battle. See the vote election lawsuits following the ‘16 vote in the states which flipped that election. That was the 3rd party candidate Jill Stein suing and running out of money.
Couldn't it also be a voter? I know that if my vote wasn't counted, or an election I voted in was hacked, it would be like me losing my right to vote. It removes my right to vote and have that vote count.
That's a good question, and I'm ashamed to say I don't know whether it's possible or not.
"Grassroots organizing", or bottom-up pressure on the government, is a thing in the US, but I don't know the mechanisms by which it acts, beyond getting people to sign petitions once in a while.
I suspect most other people in the US don't know the mechanisms either.
The answer is probably not. I am aware of have been a number of attempts at lawsuits against such state rules over a period of decades, and they have generally not gone very far.
You can hold out hope that there will some day be a ruling that changes this. But I am dubious.
To quote my brother on the USA vs China, "China is a nation of crooks ruled by honest men, while the USA is a nation of honest men ruled by crooks. It remains to be seen which is worse." This is one of the examples that I would cite for the US version of that.
I'm really glad Germany's supreme court (BVerfG) banned electronic voting ([0]) with the common sense reasoning that elections have to be understood by everyone, not just computer experts.
When I last voted (most recent federal election), my ballot was fed through an electronic reader of some sort on its way into the ballot box, no doubt an electronic vote counter.
Electronic voting is a great example of evolving mentality in herds on HN.
Five years ago HN was filled with people foaming at the mouth, "We should have all electronic voting! There's no reason not to!"
Today, the pendulum has swung the other way, and people are clamoring for paper ballots, my guess is because we've learned to no longer blindly trust technology.
Voting is one of the few fields where the HN mindset isn't automatically technology=better.
I was here 5 years ago, and IIRC most peeps have always been deeply skeptical and critical of electronic voting. If there was a push in that direction it would have been because of the "hanging chad" problem in Florida during the 2000 election fight between Gore and Bush 2. No doubt that's why so many states have gone electronic (and because it's a relatively rare chance to get an easy "state upgrading to better tech" win for officials).
Which is itself misleading - no living expert understands a computer system end to end, from silicon to microcode to code and compiler, not to mention the massive chain that went into making the code running on the machines.
That's all assuming the black box the expert is looking at is the same one he thinks he understands, and no chip- [1] or compiler-level [2] vulnerabilities were inserted, or the whole thing wasn't simply replaced with an identical-looking device.
Electronic voting, in addition to security concerns, isn't even a user experience improvement.
I remember working at a polling station as a teenager during the 2004 election. One elderly lady needed help understanding how the machines worked, so I showed her how you tapped the buttons on the screen.
Well, this woman had lost a lot of fine motor control. After selecting her choice for president, she went to hit the Next button. Her hand shook so badly that she skipped about five screens worth of races.
I asked her if she's like my help going back to choose candidates for all of the races she accidentally skipped. "No," she replied, "I got the important one."
I'm thankful that this experience, and many others from working the polls, eroded my faith in the system early on in life.
Not to mention the negative impact on parallelization! Hundreds of paper ballot station can easily be setup in a room, but setting up an additional voting machine requires a ton of other things (budgets, purchasing, techs, etc).
People do that all the time. Unfortunately, the higher up the office holder, the less they can affect your day-to-day life. It's the local elections that are most important.
That's strange that my site is blocked, is it an overly broad rule, like "lol, if it's not .com or .gov, it's not a website that upstanding gentlemen go to"?
I have been voting in GA since 2008 and there hasn't been a paper trail since at least then. The voting systems they still use today were purchased and put into service in, I believe, 2002. There is literally no reason not to also have a paper trail.
I have no hard data, and this is from 2017/2018, but it is very sketchy when the secretary of state, the office which oversees elections in GA, runs for governor, doesn't resign ahead of time, doesn't allow any investigations into the electronic voting systems, doesn't push forward any paper trail requirements, and subsequently wins the election for governor. Everything Kemp did and didn't do was suspect as it relates to elections.
I have zero faith in GA election results. And until the State moves off of these electronic systems and/or installs a paper trail, and brings a sense of integrity back into the election system, I will continue to feel the elections in GA are without integrity and potentially illegitimate, no matter who wins in any given election. This is outside of any political affiliation. This is the core of our country not being properly governed and protected.
EDIT>> After some research, it looks as if GA is getting a paper trail after a court order required the state to move off the previous electronic system. Now it looks like they're installing BMDs which can be verified by the voter prior to scanning to commit their vote. Of course, there are plenty of articles relating to how hackable BMDs are as well.
They’re a user experience improvement over things like butterfly ballots (where part of user experience is ability to understand who you’re casting a vote for.)
Of course, the right solution would be paper ballots that aren’t stupid.
Of course, the right solution would be paper ballots that aren’t stupid.
Much like computer interfaces, it doesn't matter how much you dumb down the experience, there will always been dumber people.
I know that sounds harsh, but part of my job is building web sites for low-education people. There's a ton of research into this problem, much of it very interesting, and some of it just downright amazing.
For example, I follow a recommendation to use "Go" instead of "Search" for search submission buttons because more than one study has shown that a remarkable number of people with low education and poor computer skills will just click the Search button without typing anything in the search box because they believe the computer will actually read their mind and know what they want to search for. I shit you not.
The next time you're looking at your logs and you see clicks on search buttons with no text entered in the search field, it may not be a bot. It may just be someone struggling to understand your web page.
The problem is that instructions are text. The sort of people who think the computer will magically know what they want are the kind who won't read or understand instructions.
Sure, you can't be successful with every user. If they refuse to type in search terms, I don't see how substituting "Go" for "Search" improves anything.
For the types of web sites I build (healthcare), I don't get to just ignore a certain group of people because they're inconvenient, or don't fit into my assumptions about how people should work or behave.
I don't see how substituting "Go" for "Search" improves anything.
The research shows it works. I'm going with the research, in large part because it involved actual testing on actual people and not just people in cubicles making presumptions.
> I don't see how substituting "Go" for "Search" improves anything.
You didn't see it in the studies you ran, or are you just thinking about through your perspective instead of that of the low-education, tech-illiterate users?
I'm not bringing up this specific instance for no reason—the 2000 election caused a lot of states to redo their voting systems in a relatively short amount of time, in order to make them understandable. In many (most?) cases, that meant moving to digital voting.
Something like a scantron ballot (which is digitally counted, but has a paper backup) is pretty darn good. Not perfect—some people will be confused—but if you put instructions at the the top with visual examples, it's pretty darn understandable.
A paper trail doesn't necessarily require paper ballets. Electronic voting machines can spit out a receipt to be reviewed by the voter in order to be counted in a potential audit while allowing the electronic tally to be used for initial results. With electronic machines with no paper trail, there is no way to recover from a failed or compromised machine.
> There is literally no reason not to also have a paper trail.
There is one reason, which is that if you give the voter a paper record stating who they voted for, that voter can be shaken down upon leaving their polling place by goons hired by one political machine or another demanding to see that record. That sort of thing used to happen all the time back in the heyday of machine politics, as the dominant machine would very much want to know if you actually voted for their candidates or not -- particularly if they'd paid you before election day to do so.
Paper ballots counted electronically allows for a hand count. In case of close elections (as measured by the electronics) a hand count is usually required. You can (and some jurisdictions will) also do a hand count of some number of ballots to confirm the electronic count is at least plausible.
Given the number of questions voters are voting on (at least in CA and WA, there's usually 30-50 things to vote on), hand counting everything would be immensely time consuming.
He's not referring to giving you a receipt, he's talking about voting machines that produce a paper print out that the voter quickly confirms at the polling place, then deposits in a ballot box. If the custody these paper ballots is managed carefully, they can later be used to verify any apparent funny business in the results of the electronic vote counting system.
A paper trail doesn't mean giving people a receipt saying who they voted for. It means recording votes both digitally and physically so if there's concern about one, the other can be checked.
If you're concerned about election integrity here in Georgia (and I think all voters in the state should be), you should consider supporting Fair Fight Action. They're the plaintiffs in several of the suits challenging these voting systems and overt voter suppression efforts by our state government. See https://fairfight.com/legal-action/
One party is banging the drums for voterID (and fairly often getting caught when they think only friends are around admitting it's about disenfranchising legitimate voters inclined to vote for the other party), the other party is banging the drums for integrity of election systems.
If they are like most BMDs they cannot be verified by the voter. They'll print out a paper with a barcode on it. In theory you could scan and decode the barcode but most voters won't know how to do that. In effect, the BMDs are not verifiable by the general voting public.
I read one of Jimmy Carter's memoir and one of the times he covers was when he was running for some office in Georgia - must have been in the late 60s/early 70s. Carter mentions some flagrant tampering then. GA elections have been rotten for a long time
I live in one of the wealthiest zipcodes in Georgia that tends to vote strongly Democrat.
The usual voting location was moved to the edge of the district to a building with limited parking despite a large Church being located next to the usual voting location.
Due to undersupplying voting machines the waits were 2hours +
Average wait in traditional Republican areas was under 15 minutes.
The GOP controls the Voting committee.
I have every reason to believe that was intentional.
for USA folks, you can in each state request a paper ballot. visit your State's voting details page at heir statename.gov site to find out how to request one.
Highly recommend following election security writer Jenny Cohn for more on this topic. GA is a highly egregious recent example, but the entire industry is a mess and very few are paying attention.
Also Kim Zetter, she's been reporting on this with a greater level of technical expertise and less activism for at least a dozen years. In fact she was the one that scooped this last night https://twitter.com/KimZetter/status/1046429196182941696
Is there a term for the increased credulousness with which people sometimes seem to approach increasingly, obviously problematic topics? The more blatant the irregularities in this race, where a black woman had a serious chance of becoming governor, the less seriously everyone (including her opponent, who oversaw the election in his official capacity) took them.
I mention race because it is clearly a likely central motivation for malfeasance in this case, an election for a state with a history of disenfranchisement of its large black population.
I think it's safe to assume that any election that's done with software has been hacked unless proven otherwise. Of course there was foul play. Election fraud is currently a huge issue with a ton of players competing to be the ones rigging elections. When a secure, proven technology like mailed paper ballots exists, I question anyone who pushes computer solutions and immediately suspect them of wanting to commit fraud or incredible stupidity and incompetence. After all, if someone suggested to replace armored cars carrying money with unarmored convertibles without a top, what other conclusion can one draw?
Isn't that all speculation? I'm not aware of any verified election fraud, in the US. It's like Halloween candy, which everybody knows isn't safe but there are never any verified cases of a problem.
The parent poster was referring to election fraud, not voter fraud. They're different. Voter fraud is when someone casts a vote they should not have, e.g. because they moved or they've cast multiple votes. Election fraud is when election officials tamper with the election.
There are documented cases of both, but the Heritage website, documenting about 1,200 over a period of at least 20 years (I didn't check every state, but the earliest I saw was 2000) is an insignificant amount of voter fraud over 20 years and hundreds of millions of votes cast. Even if they underreported by a factor of 100, that's no threat to democracy.
The benefit of extra speed in ballot count does not completely offset the risks of electronic voting. Not only the risks of massive tampering in electronic ballots and servers, but also the lack of clarity on how the process works under the hood for the median voter.
two source articles and thread by original journalist on this - Shellshock exploited (ha, remember that one?) and Drupalgeddon was left unpatched - this is clown-car stuff
Voting by mail is not at all secure. For example, a post-office worker could easily skew the results by throwing away letters from a partisan district.
Post offices are covered in security cameras. My branch has two by the stationary alone, ensuring every angle is monitored lest you steal a $0.10 mailer.
Ballots are mailed out 3 weeks before the election. If you didn't receive a ballot, you can ask for another. After you've mailed in your ballot, you can check online if it's been received. Again, if not, you can request another ballot.
In addition, most neighborhoods have drop off boxes where you can deposit your ballot, untouched by postal authorities.
This completely misses the point. In a well-designed paper ballot election the ballot never leaves the polling station which can be monitored by anyone during the entire process. This is simply not possible if you vote by mail. In the end you have to trust that the person who picks up the letters doesn't mess with them.
The thing is is that ballots aren't permanently stored at the polling location, they eventually need to be transported to a central location for auditing and storage.
In the past, polling places with lax security could "lose" an entire box of ballots. Nowadays, if a couple thousand ballots disappear from a certain zip code, the authorities would be on it pretty quickly.
In Washington state where I live and has email balloting, the central location is a secure county election facility that invites citizens to visit in person and through the internet to watch the counting process as it happens.
Oregon has had vote by mail for at least 20 years and there is almost no irregularity in the process, either for voters or election officials.
In the 2016 election, out of 2 million votes cast, they found something like 54 cases of voter fraud, mostly people voting after they'd moved out of their district.
Election fraud in Oregon is equally rare -- the big one in 2016 was a Republican volunteer in Clackamas County attempting to toss out a box of dem voter ballots. I don't remember the specifics but I think they were caught almost immediately.
The security thing is absolutely a red herring to discourage more states from adopting vote-by-mail, pushed by anyone who benefits from low turnout, because vote-by-mail significantly improves turnout without threatening election security in any meaningful way.
This story seems to now invalidate the line that we have been hearing for about 3 years now that says that no evidence of tampering with the 2016 national election has been found. Of course, they were careful to not say that evidence of no tampering had been found, or even that anyone behind the no-evidence assertion was sufficiently skilled to find and recognize tampering. If no one can vouch for the correctness of the Georgia results now, what evidence is there of no error in the national results; how many other states might have had similarly overlooked anomalies?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadIf we can’t agree on a bipartisan basis that this isn’t acceptable, what does that mean for our future?
Edit: actually, she did get in "trouble". That faux controversy helped sway the election against her.
The sitting president communicates on an unsecured iPhone. The WH staff is using alternate email systems and messaging to actively avoid leaving a trail.
Let me know your concern about that and I'm happy to continue this conversation. Otherwise, you're engaging in partisan politics here and that's not good for HN.
The voting power of Georgia residents may have been compromised here, but the voting power of the rest of the country was unaffected. In a popular voting system, that would not be the case (if the fraud increased reported voter turnout, seizing more voting power into the fraudulent election, for example).
Another way to look at it is that each other state's Elector selection process is their business. The Constitution does not provide any assurances that other states will choose their Electors by any particular process, but instead specifically reserves that for each state's Legisature. A state would be within their rights to choose them winner-take-all, in proportion to the popular vote, or by a random draw from a Powerball machine and you and I would have no say over it (as non-residents).
Similarly, the entire election is the business of every citizen. "Their business" has a direct impact on my life, so I should have some say in the matter.
>The Constitution does not provide any assurances that other states will choose their Electors by any particular process,
The Constitution sets up the electoral college. That doesn't make it a good system.
In no universe does the electoral college mitigate corruption on the federal level. In fact, one could argue that it makes corruption worse, because a candidate only has to win a few key states to tip the election, regardless of the popular vote.
The alternative is only counting the popular vote, which only serves to disenfranchise the majority of states.
Without the electoral college, a candidate would only have to campaign in and win three or four large states, and the rest of the nations and its concerns can be ignored.
That concern is the whole reason we have the House/Senate system: So that large states with lots of people in the House of Representatives don't run amok. The Senate balances that out.
The majority of red states are also the majority of the population, so this doesn't check out. (Trump states ~180mm to Hillary's ~140mm.)
https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results
>Trump 46.4% votes 62,984,825
>Clinton 48.5% votes 65,853,5165
But this system already exists via swing states. Voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida determine the election currently, just look at how much is spent on advertising in those states compared to non-swing states. Look at how often candidates visit Ohio vs Kentucky.
The idea that the electoral college equally franchises all Americans is purely a myth.
Would incentivize just campaigning to get as many people to vote as possible in the highest density population centers, meanwhile most people don't even pay attention to politics and have no interest in it.
These people really should not be voting in the first place and a system which encourages vote harvesting even more than it already is encouraged is not a step in the right direction.
Are you arguing that it’s bad when all Americans are encouraged to vote? That sounds like a functional democracy to me.
I agree with many of the Founders that the people often get in their own way, not thinking rationally and focusing only on the short term.
The will and petty desire of the mob needs to be balanced against what is really good for the nation in the long run.
That's not exactly true though, because of the electoral college Republicans in California don't bother to vote, since their vote doesn't count.
If you didn't have an electoral college then the popular vote count would have been different.
You can't change the rules of the game after the fact and say "look we would have won", without also considering that people would have played differently with different rules.
Regardless, it's a moot point, because according to the Constitution as written, those electors are supposed to only be accountable to themselves. The idea being the community electing the most level-headed and educated amongst them to make the decision everyone else would be okay with.
Most states don't respect that intent since the formation of the Party system, so really what we have now is little more than an abomination completely unintended by the Founders.
Despite what the ballot may say, voters in the various states are voting for electors, not for president, and the votes can't be added together into a meaningful number.
You could certainly take the numbers, along with registered party affiliation and other demographic data, and historic data from more contested elections in the various precincts, and guess what the vote counts might be at various levels of turnout (including scenarios where more eligible but currently unregistered persons turn out to vote), and those guesses would likely make for a much more interesting discussion than just pointing out a number that seems like a statistical oddity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_House_of_Re...
With the electoral college, we don't hold a popular vote.
This provides compartmentalization of corruption --- if election officials in some state cause an extra 10,000 votes to be counted for their preferred candidate, it may affect their state's selection of electors, but can't influence the results of other states. In a close election by popular vote, 10,000 votes could be very significant.
Additionally, the electoral college provides compartmentalization of natural disasters. If there's a blizzard in some state (or several), their voting turnout will likely be much lower, and there is no provision for makeup elections; however, we can assume that voters of different parties will have reasonably equal difficulty getting to the polls, so within the local area, the resulting ratios should be similar to results of a non-disrupted election. However, the disrupted states would cast many fewer votes, so other states would have more influence; if the state was highly in favor of one candidate, it could be a big swing.
With a popular vote, a corrupt state (or precinct) can manufacture votes, and if they can plausibly manufacture enough votes in a close election, that can swing the election too.
-- Joseph Stalin (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stalin-vote-count-quote/)
https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/United_States...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/nra-guns-sec...
You are, however, correct in the sense that the constitution does not "give you rights." Your rights exist a priori, the constitution merely enumerates a few of them.
In the post-Heller legal interpretation, the start of the 2nd amendment is fluff with no meaning or force. But the phrase, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," was central to the intent of the amendment in an era where every able bodied white man from 20-40 was expected to participate in an organized militia organized by local government and the state. The protected right to bear arms and what arms you were to bear belonged to the militias. And the militias included so many that they really were, "the People".
See https://www.nraila.org/heller/conamicusbriefs/07-290_amicus_... for a detailed verification and for references to dig further in.
The fact that a statement has been used in propaganda has no bearing on whether or not it is correct. As the saying goes, "Ideas are not responsible for the people who hold them."
The statement was wrong because it is wrong, and I gave a citation written by professional historians demonstrating that fact.
That the statement is popular because of NRA propaganda is a separate issue. See https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/nra-guns-sec... for a reasonable explanation of the history behind why that claim is true. And for documentation of the fact that, until said propaganda, that claim was widely and rightly rejected.
I have no reason to doubt that he has made up his own mind based on information available to him. However I also have no doubt that if he lived in any era before the NRA propaganda took hold, he would not have come to that opinion. Because it is an opinion that basically nobody ever held.
My key point was that there wasn't a right for a person...to keep and bear arms. There was a right for THE PEOPLE to do so as part of a militia. With two major points to be kept in mind. The first was that not all militias were government organized. The second was that this right was a protection from federal interference. For example Virginia didn't want Congress deciding to undermine how they ran their militia. Furthermore it is important to understand that the phrase "bear arms" at the time referred only to military service. Carrying your hunting rifle was not "bearing arms", and there are multiple court cases from that era affirming this understanding.
Now back to militias. It varied by state and time period. The brief goes into some detail. But for existence at the time of the Revolution Virginia had a state regulated militia. Pennsylvania couldn't by its Constitution, but many local areas had their own militias. (For example towns would to defend against Indian attacks.)
But in all cases, militias were set up so that the general citizenry would serve as an army in time of crisis for defense of the state or themselves. And this idea had a long history behind it.
Which is why after the justification you list, the enumeration is clear.
"the right of the _people_ to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
It doesn't actually say "arm's considered safe by the government", "people considered safe by the government", "people trained by the government" or anything else. Might be convenient for some if it did, but it doesn't. And given the history of private cannon/schooner/etc ownership it might surprise you to know that the laws in effect today are quite restrictive with respect to the historical understanding of the amendment. Which is why many consider the NFA banning machine guns and related laws to be unconstitutional, and lacking a serious challenge. Partially because the NRA mostly supported it.
Many of the cases the 1934 regulation stands upon are flimsy, obviously racist rulings against people without means.
So, I would be really careful making augments against it. And just so I'm clear, I consider both political sides to be more than willing to twist the meaning of the constitution to justify their goals. Same as the "Christians" that used the bible to justify slavery or to treat women as second class citizens.
Incidentally I failed to look up the actual law of the time. But the 1792 militia law included every "free able-bodied white male citizen" between the ages of 18 and 45. Which, in a world that only paid attention to white men, basically was "the people".
The subject of the 2nd Amendment has always been the People. The militia part of the statement cannot standalone as a substantive independent clause, therefore it is a qualifier of the primary independent clause, namely, that that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
The militia is not the one being granted an immunity to infringement of a right. It's a part of a supportive reason for the explicit grant of immunity to infringement to the right held by the People.
And if you don't think the Founders weren't writing that with the idea that what they wrote down wouldn't eventually turn itself into a tyranny that would need to be violently upset by the People, to whom was recognized in the Declaration of Independendence to hold the absolute right of revocation of consent to be governed, and the right to assemble and replace such form of government that successfully provides them service, relief and defense, then I think accusations of naivete or misunderstanding may need to be contemplated whilst staring into a mirror.
And even that brief brings into question motivations. Or particular bias for one interpretation or another.
Note this gem.
>The fact that references to the keeping of firearms are so few and terse, or that the modern academic controversy over the Second Amendment has been forced to squeeze so much modern interpretive blood from so few evidentiary turnips, is itself an indicator of how minor a question this was at the time.
I reject this implication. Nobody takes the time to write down or make a big fuss about a settled question, and it was clear that, yes, many were worried about the details of how military might would be structured; but no one was seriously prepared to say "Golly gee, let's let the government decide whether or not I have the right to own a particular machine that makes me a political obstacle to whatever abuses they may want to perpetrate whilst in office."
Also, you have to take into account the fact that jurisprudence is constrained by the principle of least action, especially when dealing with high level fundamental rights.
Considering the outright rejection of British authority, and the adoption of firearm culture in the United States to the current day, I have great difficulty taking anyone who points at Heller seriously.
But hey, let's dig into some of these.
>This was “indeed, a publick allowance under due restraints, of the natural right of resistance and self- preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.”
Note afterwards the copious backpedaling on the quote with extensive reference to every other potentially limiting part of the argument but no reference to "when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression".
This being British, that isn't necessarily surprising. To an American, however, that last part is the far more important part.
Here's another tidbit.
>There is no direct equivalent in the American declarations to the selective Protestant “subjects” invoked in the Bill of Rights of 1689...
I would hope not, given that it's always been a settled question that your religion in this country isn't something the government is allowed to infringe upon, and furthermore, arguments of "legislative Supremacy" disappear when you actually read the bill of rights in order, as the First Amendment reads,
>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The Second then read with the first as context,
>A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be i...
Basic English grammar is actually ambiguous. Does "the People" mean "the People as a group" or "each of the People"? In other words is it a communal right or an individual one?
Nobody takes the time to write down or make a big fuss about a settled question...
And the point is that the understanding of what a milita was, how it worked, and the fact that it was a system that had been in place for close to a thousand years. (Having been created by Alfred the Great for defense against the Vikings.)
There is no direct equivalent in the American declarations to the selective Protestant “subjects” invoked in the Bill of Rights of 1689...
I would hope not, given that it's always been a settled question that your religion in this country isn't something the government is allowed to infringe upon, and furthermore, arguments of "legislative Supremacy" disappear when you actually read the bill of rights in order, as the First Amendment reads,
No, it hasn't "always been settled". In fact 1689 was long before the USA existed, and while British colonies then allowed freedom of religion, all but Pennsylvania had official state churches with government support. And within living memory, many of the colonies had had restrictions on what religions were allowed. It was therefore by no means automatic that laws passed in the New World at that point would not follow the British precedent.
Furthermore the British had good reason to have that religious test. At the time Catholic doctrine supported the murder of excommunicated monarchs, they kept track of who they believed the rightful monarch of England was (never the one that the English believed to be their monarch), and the English believed in the truth of a variety of plots both real (Guy Fawkes) and imagined (the starting of the Fire of London) by Catholics bent on overthrowing the English monarchy.
Therefore allowing weapons for Catholics rather reasonably could lead to the destabilization of the government.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/opinion/second-amendment-...
From the security experts affidavit filed in Georgia court today:
15. On December 2, 2014, while the KSU server remained vulnerable, a new user named "shellshock" was created on the server. I have created the below timeline of activity related to the shellshock user after fusing logging data from multiple sources. The timeline may not be complete:
16. 12/2/2014 10:45 — the user mpears09 is modified using the Webmin console
12/2/2014 10:47 - shellshock user created using Webmin console
12/2/2014 10:49 - /home/shellshock/.bash histovy last modified
12/22014 11:02 - /home/shellshocWshellsh0ck file is deleted
12/2/2014 1106 - bash patched to version 4.2+dfsg-0.1+deb7u3 to prevent shellshock
12/2/2014 11:40 - shellshock user disabled using Webmin console
17. The file "bash history" is a kind of log that typically records all the commands a user executes. For this user, though, the file contained a single command to logout of the server. The single command to logout is suspicious since a file was created and deleted in the user's home directory, leading rne to believe the "bash history" has been modified. This indicates to rne that the "shellshock" user may have been hiding their activities.
Whether maintenance of some aspect of the CES server was part of his role at KSU at the time or if records exist of someone asking him to do that (or, say, to patch drupalgeddon and he did a 2-for-1) is what I wonder.
[1] https://github.com/tibmeister/ShellShock-Patch
Dark times in America ahead.
This is generally what the end of free society looks like.
"Grassroots organizing", or bottom-up pressure on the government, is a thing in the US, but I don't know the mechanisms by which it acts, beyond getting people to sign petitions once in a while.
I suspect most other people in the US don't know the mechanisms either.
You can hold out hope that there will some day be a ruling that changes this. But I am dubious.
To quote my brother on the USA vs China, "China is a nation of crooks ruled by honest men, while the USA is a nation of honest men ruled by crooks. It remains to be seen which is worse." This is one of the examples that I would cite for the US version of that.
[0] https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2009/wahlcomputer-urteil-bverf...
I wonder if you had a pilot? Afaik, elections canada runs things the same way all around the country.
Five years ago HN was filled with people foaming at the mouth, "We should have all electronic voting! There's no reason not to!"
Today, the pendulum has swung the other way, and people are clamoring for paper ballots, my guess is because we've learned to no longer blindly trust technology.
Voting is one of the few fields where the HN mindset isn't automatically technology=better.
Which is itself misleading - no living expert understands a computer system end to end, from silicon to microcode to code and compiler, not to mention the massive chain that went into making the code running on the machines.
That's all assuming the black box the expert is looking at is the same one he thinks he understands, and no chip- [1] or compiler-level [2] vulnerabilities were inserted, or the whole thing wasn't simply replaced with an identical-looking device.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/adding_backdo...
[2] https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html
I remember working at a polling station as a teenager during the 2004 election. One elderly lady needed help understanding how the machines worked, so I showed her how you tapped the buttons on the screen.
Well, this woman had lost a lot of fine motor control. After selecting her choice for president, she went to hit the Next button. Her hand shook so badly that she skipped about five screens worth of races.
I asked her if she's like my help going back to choose candidates for all of the races she accidentally skipped. "No," she replied, "I got the important one."
I'm thankful that this experience, and many others from working the polls, eroded my faith in the system early on in life.
https://tmp.tonyb.xyz/lamb-decl-pacer.pdf
Anyway, here's something:
https://tonybox.net/tmp/lamb-decl-pacer.pdf
https://moveything.com/tmp/lamb-decl-pacer.pdf
I have no hard data, and this is from 2017/2018, but it is very sketchy when the secretary of state, the office which oversees elections in GA, runs for governor, doesn't resign ahead of time, doesn't allow any investigations into the electronic voting systems, doesn't push forward any paper trail requirements, and subsequently wins the election for governor. Everything Kemp did and didn't do was suspect as it relates to elections.
I have zero faith in GA election results. And until the State moves off of these electronic systems and/or installs a paper trail, and brings a sense of integrity back into the election system, I will continue to feel the elections in GA are without integrity and potentially illegitimate, no matter who wins in any given election. This is outside of any political affiliation. This is the core of our country not being properly governed and protected.
EDIT>> After some research, it looks as if GA is getting a paper trail after a court order required the state to move off the previous electronic system. Now it looks like they're installing BMDs which can be verified by the voter prior to scanning to commit their vote. Of course, there are plenty of articles relating to how hackable BMDs are as well.
Of course, the right solution would be paper ballots that aren’t stupid.
Much like computer interfaces, it doesn't matter how much you dumb down the experience, there will always been dumber people.
I know that sounds harsh, but part of my job is building web sites for low-education people. There's a ton of research into this problem, much of it very interesting, and some of it just downright amazing.
For example, I follow a recommendation to use "Go" instead of "Search" for search submission buttons because more than one study has shown that a remarkable number of people with low education and poor computer skills will just click the Search button without typing anything in the search box because they believe the computer will actually read their mind and know what they want to search for. I shit you not.
The next time you're looking at your logs and you see clicks on search buttons with no text entered in the search field, it may not be a bot. It may just be someone struggling to understand your web page.
For the types of web sites I build (healthcare), I don't get to just ignore a certain group of people because they're inconvenient, or don't fit into my assumptions about how people should work or behave.
I don't see how substituting "Go" for "Search" improves anything.
The research shows it works. I'm going with the research, in large part because it involved actual testing on actual people and not just people in cubicles making presumptions.
I've experienced it as well, where the page literally says right there what to do, and I get calls from confused users not sure what to do.
I want to say "Did you read what it says 2 inches above where you clicked?" But I never do and am just polite to them.
You didn't see it in the studies you ran, or are you just thinking about through your perspective instead of that of the low-education, tech-illiterate users?
I'm not bringing up this specific instance for no reason—the 2000 election caused a lot of states to redo their voting systems in a relatively short amount of time, in order to make them understandable. In many (most?) cases, that meant moving to digital voting.
Something like a scantron ballot (which is digitally counted, but has a paper backup) is pretty darn good. Not perfect—some people will be confused—but if you put instructions at the the top with visual examples, it's pretty darn understandable.
There is one reason, which is that if you give the voter a paper record stating who they voted for, that voter can be shaken down upon leaving their polling place by goons hired by one political machine or another demanding to see that record. That sort of thing used to happen all the time back in the heyday of machine politics, as the dominant machine would very much want to know if you actually voted for their candidates or not -- particularly if they'd paid you before election day to do so.
The paper would be kept by poll workers so the electronic count can be audited.
My state has paper ballots that are counted electronically. I feel this is a good compromise and allows much easier vote total auditing.
This is really not much better.
Given the number of questions voters are voting on (at least in CA and WA, there's usually 30-50 things to vote on), hand counting everything would be immensely time consuming.
I read one of Jimmy Carter's memoir and one of the times he covers was when he was running for some office in Georgia - must have been in the late 60s/early 70s. Carter mentions some flagrant tampering then. GA elections have been rotten for a long time
The usual voting location was moved to the edge of the district to a building with limited parking despite a large Church being located next to the usual voting location. Due to undersupplying voting machines the waits were 2hours +
Average wait in traditional Republican areas was under 15 minutes.
The GOP controls the Voting committee.
I have every reason to believe that was intentional.
https://twitter.com/jennycohn1
I mention race because it is clearly a likely central motivation for malfeasance in this case, an election for a state with a history of disenfranchisement of its large black population.
Funny how that happens when the logs and other evidence that would verify problems happen to have been destroyed.
https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
There are documented cases of both, but the Heritage website, documenting about 1,200 over a period of at least 20 years (I didn't check every state, but the earliest I saw was 2000) is an insignificant amount of voter fraud over 20 years and hundreds of millions of votes cast. Even if they underreported by a factor of 100, that's no threat to democracy.
Or how about tampering with ballots after they have been cast like http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/election-fraud-is-rea...?
(Of course if you go back a little ways in history, the most egregious was probably Tammany Hall. Election fraud has a rather long history.)
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1218055746534817792.html
[Summary to remind you: "Don't trust voting software and don't listen to anyone who tells you it's safe.]
There are some risks about not having the privacy of a voting booth, but in general it seems to work pretty well.
In addition, most neighborhoods have drop off boxes where you can deposit your ballot, untouched by postal authorities.
In the past, polling places with lax security could "lose" an entire box of ballots. Nowadays, if a couple thousand ballots disappear from a certain zip code, the authorities would be on it pretty quickly.
In Washington state where I live and has email balloting, the central location is a secure county election facility that invites citizens to visit in person and through the internet to watch the counting process as it happens.
In the 2016 election, out of 2 million votes cast, they found something like 54 cases of voter fraud, mostly people voting after they'd moved out of their district.
Election fraud in Oregon is equally rare -- the big one in 2016 was a Republican volunteer in Clackamas County attempting to toss out a box of dem voter ballots. I don't remember the specifics but I think they were caught almost immediately.
The security thing is absolutely a red herring to discourage more states from adopting vote-by-mail, pushed by anyone who benefits from low turnout, because vote-by-mail significantly improves turnout without threatening election security in any meaningful way.
It's not a problem.