I'd love to hear the steelman - what's the argument in favor of using a proprietary electronic system?
There have been legit complaints about closed sourced voting systems for ~20 years and DEFCON has done a "Voting Village" for ~10 years demonstrating numerous issues, some of which were not addressed by the next elections. Transparency doesn't appear better either.
Is it speed to tally? Cost? Easier to screw with results?
It’s cheaper in the short term because these are COTS products. But that’s not a good reason. Voting security should be “zero trust.” We should count votes the same way the Taiwanese, without reliance on technology: https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo. Voting should be
You must have missed the 2000 election. We hung for weeks on the vagueness of paper ballots. Both sides filed motion after motion to exclude some batch of ballots or other. There was a huge number of extremely unlikely votes in a place with a badly designed paper ballot.
The system right now is a security nightmare, a bad implementation of a bad idea. But anybody who lived through 2000 remembers that as even worse.
Florida was using a punch-card system, thus the infamous hanging chads. Fill-in-the-bubble scantron systems are much faster and less error prone; not as fast as purely electronic voting, but you get a reliable paper trail that is more transparent and much easier to audit.
> Fill-in-the-bubble scantron systems are much faster and less error prone; not as fast as purely electronic voting, but you get a reliable paper trail that is more transparent and much easier to audit.
An even bigger advantage of scantrol systems is with two simple changes to how ballots are produced and marked you can greatly increase the security and audibility of them.
The two simple changes are:
1. When the ballots are printed you print some alphanumeric codes on them in an invisible ink, and
2. The voter fills in the bubble using a special marker provided at the polling place that turns the invisible code visible.
The scanning machines themselves do not require any modification. Voters vote the same was as before, and can ignore the code that becomes visible in the bubbles they fill in if they way.
By combining the clever chemistry used for the invisible ink and marker with some clever cryptography in how those codes are generated you can overlay and end-to-end auditable voting system on the scantron system. And end-to-end auditable voting system (also called and end-to-end voter verifiable system) has these properties:
• Individuals can verify that their ballot was included in the final count and they vote was attributed correctly.
• Any third party can verify that the ballots were counted correctly. The candidates, the parties, news organization, civil rights groups, and anyone else can check.
• Voters cannot prove to third parties who they voted for. This is called coercion-resistance.
Such a system was developed by several cryptographers, including David Chaum and Ron Rivest. It is called Scantegrity II [1] and has been used successfully in a few elections.
Here are links to a paper by its creators explaining it, in HTML [2] and PDF [3]. Here's a paper [4] showing that it is coercion-resistant.
With this system after the voting is done the election officials can publish all the codes that were revealed. A voter who wants to know if their vote was counted can check that list to see if the code that was revealed to them for that candidate is in the list.
The election officials can also publish some more information that along with the code list allows anybody to verify that the totals for each candidate were right without this revealing the mapping from codes to candidates.
With this we get all the pluses of paper system including hand recounts, plus fast machine counting that can be done with a simple single purpose machine that has no software that could be hacked, yet with the kind of end-to-end auditing that the electronic voting systems promise.
And it inexpensive to implement and operate. Around half of the districts in the US already are using the scantron machines.
As a Floridian, I apologize for the 2000 election. But we have a much better system now. We have paper ballots that are scanned. We have an auditable fallback for untrustworthy machines. There is no reason other states cannot have the same.
I think just the fact that it was the first thing on offer that wasn't the thing they were already using.
There are better alternatives, and if legislatures were designed to come up with optimal solutions, we'd probably have use one of them. Instead we have inertia, because the Sainted Holy Founders thought inertia was good for a country, so they optimized legislative branches to be useless.
The ones who most venerate the Founding Fathers are the ones who usually claim that the status quo is good. The status quo can always be attributed as the will of the Fathers.
Sometimes that means using a ouija board to assert that some vague passage happens to mean what they want it to mean.
It's bold to assert that people make up Founder Father's reasoning when just above you claim we use the current electronic voting because:
> "I think just the fact that it was the first thing on offer that wasn't the thing they were already using."
Instead of just assuming things - aka making things up - you could check.
For the Declaration, Articles, and later the Constitution specifically, much of the Founder Father's reasoning and conclusions were well-documented in public via published letters, essays, and speeches at the time. No ouija board necessary.
There are numerous quotes attributed to the founding fathers regarding how future generations would need to update their solutions for the times. As far as how some will assume, some will assume anything that fits their worldview.
Gore probably won that election. I can't help but wonder about an alternate history where he became president and there was no 9/11 due to smoother handoff between administrations.
Gore did win that election, but SCOTUS illegally decided it instead of a fair ruling requiring Florida to recount ballots using the same methods in all districts. Americans should have done general strikes and rioting.
I don't know about 9/11, but I doubt Gore's SCOTUS appointees would have made the incorrect decision on Citizens United. America would be in a better place today.
The Supreme Court did require Florida recounts of ballots using the same methods in all districts, and remanded the case to Florida Courts to figure out if there was a legal way to extended the deadline for recounts, to get it done, but they never heard the case, because Gore conceded soon after.
> there was no 9/11 due to smoother handoff between administrations.
It’s an interesting counterfactual but I don’t see the mechanism. The hijackers were mostly in country by inauguration day. While it’s true that they weren’t really operating covertly prior to the attack, I don’t envision a Gore administration that could within months ratchet up FBI/CIA natsec awareness to a level that would change the outcome.
It’s hard for many of us to remember the “before times” now but back then there was a great deal of misplaced faith that foreign attacks on American soil were more or less impossible.
Gore attempted stochastic cheating in that election. There were a large number of uncountable votes because of incompletely punched out cards. That wasn’t a problem because, statistically, the errors would be randomly distributed between the candidates. But Gore requested hand recounts in only a few counties he had clearly won. The mathematical effect of that was to bias the recount in favor of finding more Gore votes. For example, if the county had gone 60% Gore, then for every 10 votes countable by hand that couldn’t be counted by machine, 6 would be Gore votes. Stochastic cheating.
There were also lots of shenanigans where precincts were adding partial recount numbers (where some precincts had finished counting and some had not) to the totals. There is a reason that the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Gore’s recount plan was unconstitutional. (The 5-2 part was only about the remedy.)
When I say “errors” I mean votes the punchcard machines couldn’t read due to the chad not being punched out all the way. Those were the ballots that were at issue in the litigation (“undercounts”).
The butterfly ballot would have resulted in votes for Buchanan or double votes (ones for Buchanan + Gore if the person tried to go back and correct). Gore never actually tried to get those counted in his favor. And how could you know?
But the whole recount thing is stupid. It’s designed by people who don’t understand statistics. Any counting is a statistical process that’s going to have some measurement error. The Florida vote was almost certainly within that margin of error. The correct outcome then would have been re-voting, not a recount.
We're not talking about what the Bush campaign wanted. The point is that not even the Gore campaign argued that the double votes should be counted. So they're irrelevant.
They are irrelevant in the sense that there is no legal means to correct them.
They are relevant to the question of who did the voters actually wanted to win, which while not a legally relevant question is interesting. The statistical reports I've seen say that around 2000 of the Buchanan votes were very likely intended as Gore votes.
It’s pretty crazy you want to take a dig at the Bush campaign.
I once did an experiment on my FB where I described Gore’s selective recount scheme but attributed it to Trump. And people jumped up and down talking about how it was voter suppression and cheating. But when I revealed it was Gore, it was just hemming and hawing. These are all smart, college educated people too. Truly, there is no hope for the republic.
I remember the poll that asked Republican voters about their relative approval of “Obamacare” versus “an Affordable Care Act” and got a nearly 20% differential.
And then the number one Google search on the last Election Day? “Did Biden drop out?”
We truly have one of the least informed electorates in the world. And one of the worst for considering political parties as sports teams to be rewarded with loyalty at all costs.
You either misremember or misrepresent WaPo’s reporting.
> In all likelihood, George W. Bush still would have won Florida and the presidency last year if either of two limited recounts -- one requested by Al Gore, the other ordered by the Florida Supreme Court -- had been completed, according to a study commissioned by The Washington Post and other news organizations.
> But if Gore had found a way to trigger a statewide recount of all disputed ballots, or if the courts had required it, the result likely would have been different. An examination of uncounted ballots throughout Florida found enough where voter intent was clear to give Gore the narrowest of margins.
So on this basis, GP has the right of it: Gore probably won that election.
I was actually thinking of a much later CNN retrospective looking at various studies: https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-elect... (“Taken as a whole, the recount studies show Bush would have most likely won the Florida statewide hand recount of all undervotes. Undervotes are ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race.”).
The studies showed that Gore only would have won if counting over votes, which his team never pursued: “The studies also show that Gore likely would have won a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which are ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted at all. However, his legal team never pursued this action.”
Maybe if Gore had asked for a statewide hand recount the result would have been different. But instead he tried to stochastically cheat through selective recounts, which burned a huge amount of time on a process that was fundamentally unsound.
CNN says exactly the opposite! “Taken as a whole, the recount studies show Bush would have most likely won the Florida statewide hand recount of all undervotes. Undervotes are ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race.”
Counting undervotes isn't my theory. It was Gore's theory of which votes should be counted. Gore never argued overvotes--where a voter had marked multiple candidates--should be counted. The recount studies show that Gore would have lost under the only recount approach the Gore campaign actually pursued.
Of course, the whole thing was completely stupid. They should have stopped with the second machine recount. It was completely insane to entertain the idea that you should try and guess what voters meant when they didn't completely punch a ballot, or punched more than one candidate. The proper thing to do is exclude all ballots where the voter failed to fill out the ballot properly.
"The studies also show that Gore likely would have won a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which are ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted at all".
So it seems like he won the votes anyways. If your retort is "not if we count undervotes, while ignoring overvotes", that would be a different discussion altogether.
Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important.
Unsubstantiated claims of election fraud should be punished severely. Politicians who baselessly erode confidence in elections without providing timely evidence should be ineligible for political office at least and potentially tried for treason.
Faith in elections is a two-way street. The election system must also be fully transparent, minimize the degree to which voters must trust election administrators, and keep records that would allow evidence of voter fraud to be detected. You can’t punish people for not providing evidence if you’ve designed an election system that fails to keep the information that would allow anomalies to be detected.
You want to campaign on improving election security and transparency (hopefully without being misleading about all of the systems already in place and the security, statistical analysis, and auditing already done)? Go for it.
That is very different than claiming fraud without evidence.
The problem is that Americans, including our political class, are innumerate: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/mara-gay-gets-dragged-do.... They react to things based on gut feelings, not mathematical analysis. To them, isolated incidents, anomalies, and irregularities—which always exist—are “evidence” of stolen elections, without proof that those anomalies were significant enough to alter the outcomes.
Let me pick an example that hopefully isn’t controversial. I was in Iowa in 2019. Mayor Pete got on stage and credited Stacey Abrams’ claims that she had won the 2018 georgia gubernatorial election. Those claims were based on isolated incidents of people who say their voter registrations were wrongfully deleted. That kind of story hits people in the gut. But people are really, really bad at evaluating mathematically whether such incidents could have materially changed the outcome in an election that was won by 50,000 votes.
Election security must similarly operate on the gut feeling level. Look at the video of how they do things in Taiwan: taking out each vote and holding it up for everyone to see. Was it in response to evidence of people cheating? It’s to impress upon people the appearance of a system that is transparent and difficult to corrupt. It’s gut feeling weighed against gut feeling. People must be so impressed by the obvious security of the election system that they dismiss the inevitable anomalies as immaterial.
My states system is very transparent and has many systems for detecting fraud but people on the right claim otherwise and they are either ignorant of how it worked or just lying.
This and a comment under it start with the exact same sentence. “Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important.” There’s something wrong here and it makes me doubt HN
pclowes starts off the comment you quoted (“Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important”), then rayiner responds with “Faith in elections is a two-way street” and engages with pclowes point by providing a broader perspective. They are not “the exact same sentence”.
Don't worry, various governments around the world are working hard to ensure online communities can only be accessed with ID verification. Will that ease your doubt in the future?
The red haring is that voting is hacked or illegals are voting, etc etc etc. The -real- story is disenfranchising voters by making it hard for them or out-right steaming their votes in the courts. We don't have an election fraud issue in the us. We have an election legitimacy issue.
So do you only secure your computer networks after they’ve been hacked? We should have transparent, verifiable election infrastructure, like Taiwan: https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo.
The problem is implementing that in a way that doesn't disenfranchise a lot of people. Most or all countries that have the kind of robust national ID system for such a system also make sure it is easy for every citizen to get the necessary ID.
Such a system could be added to the US without too much disruption if we did it gradually, say making it only apply to people born after 2030 so there is time to get all the support infrastructure in place.
Doing it quickly, and making it apply who grew up in a US without anything like that, would be a big and probably expensive effort. None of the proposals I've seen Congress talk about, or seen states talk about or that states have passed, have addressed this.
They say it is actually easy to get the required ID, but when you dig into the documents needed to get it if you don't already have a government issued photo ID it is a lot harder.
A certified copy of your birth certification is usually good enough...but most states require government issued photo ID to issue a certified copy of your birth certificate. Oops.
Also, for many older people, it can be hard to find where to go to get a birth certificate. That's all handled by the states, not the feds, and at the time many older people were born many states just recorded those records at the county level.
There are alternatives that allow can work around the lack of a certified copy of your birth certificate, or that can work around needing a government photo ID to get the birth certificate. They involve secondary documents, such as school records. Those don't usually have difficult ID requirements to get, but are even less likely to be centralized. You might have to go to the school district to get the records. For an older person trying to dig up old elementary or middle school records to bootstrap getting an idea that will often be difficult, even if that school district is still around and somehow the records haven't been lost.
The current system does in fact work well. It should be replaced with a stronger that could stand up against larger and more well organized adversaries than it has had to face before, but it is not urgent, and we have the time to do it right.
"In order to be issued a national ID card, you need to be able to establish your identity and your German citizenship. If at the time of your application you are not able to provide any documentation of your identity, such as an expired national ID card or a birth certificate or other identity-establishing document, the issuing authority will check your identity by other suitable means (see no. 6.3.1 of the Administrative Regulation on Passports (Passverwaltungsvorschrift, PassVwV))."
If you read through administrative regulation 6.3.1, it provides for the issuing authority to look at various documents to establish identity and citizenship. If all else fails, affidavits from witnesses can be used.
U.S. states operate the same way. I'll use Georgia as an example since I've lived there: https://sos.ga.gov/page/proof-citizenship. There's twenty different ways to prove citizenship, including affidavits from third parties if all else fails.
The undeniable reality is that these measures do, in fact, constitute barriers to voting and the barriers are not evenly applied. Less privileged Americans are less likely to have ID, and that’s just a statistical fact.
If the opposition cannot be trusted to even so much as acknowledge reality and fact, we must reject all notions of voter ID, with no exceptions. One begins to wonder why the right is so unbelievably hamstrung on ignoring the issue of ID availability.
Could it be, perhaps, because their goal is not righteous as they claim, but is rather a thinly-veiled attempt at voter suppression? Based off their actions, I would say any reasonable person would have no choice but to see it that way.
There are solutions to these problems. The people you’re championing would rather die than even consider them. Sit back and ponder why.
• Birth Certificate issued by the Department of State
• A US Citizen card
• An American Indian Card issued by the Department of Homeland Security with the classification code "KIC" (Issued by DHS to identify U.S. citizen members of the Texas Band of Kickapoos living near the U.S./Mexican border)
• Final adoption decree showing the child's name and U.S. birthplace
• Evidence of civil service employment by the U.S. government before June 1976
• An official U.S. military record of service showing a U.S. place of birth
• A Northern Mariana Identification Card (Issued by the INS to a collectively naturalized citizen of the U.S. who was born in the Northern Mariana Islands before November 4, 1986)
• Extract of U.S. hospital record of birth established at the time of the person's birth indicating a U.S. place of birth
• Life or health or other insurance record which indicates a U.S. place of birth and which is dated at least 5 years before the initial application date
• Federal or State census record which indicates U.S. citizenship or a U.S. place of birth
• Institutional admission papers from a nursing home, skilled nursing care facility or other institution which indicates a U.S. place of birth
• Medical (clinical, doctor, or hospital) record which indicates a U.S. place of birth and which is dated at least 5 years before the application date.
• A driver’s license or identification card issued by an agency of a U.S. state if that agency indicates on the driver’s license or identification card that the applicant has provided satisfactory evidence of United States citizenship to the agency
• One of the following if created at least 5 years before use to prove citizenship and if showing a U.S. place of birth: Seneca Indian tribal census record; Bureau of Indian Affairs tribal census records of the Navaho Indians; U.S. State Vital Statistics official notification of birth registration; an amended or delayed U.S. public birth record that is amended more than 5 years after the person's birth; or statement signed by the physician or midwife who was in attendance at the time of birth
• If other forms of documentation cannot be obtained, documentation may be provided by a written affidavit, signed under penalty of perjury, from two citizens, one of whom cannot be related to the person in question, who have specific knowledge of event(s) establishing the person in question's citizenship status. The person in question or another knowledgeable individual must also submit an affidavit stating why the documents are not available. Affidavits are only expected to be used in rare circumstances
Most of those are only going to be useful to to a small fraction of adult Georgians who don't already have proof of citizenship. The affidavit at first seems like no big deal but it probably is because it as asking for affidavits from people who have specific knowledge of events that establish your citizenship.
You're omitting fundamental differences between these systems, for example that Germans are required by law to own a government ID, so only a tiny fraction of the population has to use this process. As far as I have seen this appears to be around 2-3%, and I haven't come across any studies showing that historically disadvantaged groups are more likely not to have an ID. Compare that to ~10% of Americans without proof of identification, and it just so happens that minorities make up a disproportionately big part of this group.
Second, in Germany there exist exactly 2 ID cards accepted for e.g. voting: your national ID card, and your passport. There are no per-state ID cards, there are no ID cards that are completely fine to use in all government interactions except for voting. Meanwhile the US has 50 different ID card systems, and the people who are making arbitrary decisions on which of these ID cards are acceptable are the same people who can electorally benefit from strategically banning/allowing certain kinds of IDs.
So no, rayiner, these situations aren't remotely comparable. They could be if the US government introduced a uniform national ID card, and if citizens had plenty of time to get one. For example I'd have no issues with voter ID if it were introduced only once >95% of the population owns this hypothetical national ID over a 5-year period.
The funny/sad part in all this: if conservatives actually cared about election security, all they'd have to do is listen to the arguments against voter ID and remove these roadblocks over a few years, maybe a decade. But for some reason their only approach seems to be to demand Voter ID be introduced right now, no time to prepare, no efforts made to solve any of the issues. I wonder why?
There are checks such as when registering to vote. They are not rigorous checks because rigorous proof of citizenship has not been needed by most US citizens for most the country's existence, and there is no way to rapidly switch to a rigorous system without disenfranchising a large number of older citizens and poorer citizens.
Registrations of individual registrants can be challenged and then a more detailed examination is done. Both Republican and Democrat local or state parties keep an eye on registrations and challenge any the think are bogus.
Extensive statistical checks after elections by numerous statisticians (and by most major political parties) shows that this system is working fine, so there is no justification for rushing a transition to a more rigorous system. There is time to design a system that will work for all citizens.
We could get a long way there by just grandfathering in everyone who voted in the last 10 years, and making sure there is extensive help going forward for anyone who cannot afford the cost of getting the necessary documents to get the new ID or who cannot get those documents.
This comment shows exactly why I made the original post. This assumes there is a problem to be solved. The flat out fact is that it hasn't been a problem. The real problem is that politicians say there is an issue with no proof in order to get into grand debates about how to solve the nonexistent problem all the while creating -real- problems of disenfranchising actual legitimate voters when they implement solutions to the nonexistant problem. The orders of magnitude of people denied their rightful ability to vote compared to the fraud in voting are not even funny. Yes, fraud does happen. It is almost never a real issue but programs to 'fix' the fraud are a real problem.
Every one of the excuses about how (and the need) to obtain ID are the red herring of this conversation, intended to distract from the fact that states have been verifying identities and holding their elections for 250 years and that Republicans are involved in the election process at every single level that are apparently complicit in these supposed “massive frauds”. They would have people believe the issue is ID and illegal voting, rather than the fact this is an attempt to take control of elections and influence them. They have already started doing shady things, like demanding access to the actual votes despite the entire system being run electronically and re-verified locally under bi-partisan oversight, and that those same states who had US cyber intelligence to assist them in securing their elections prior to Trump reducing that access in order to further his election fraud claims. It doesn’t look good when your own agencies assisted on securing the very thing they are claiming is a fraud.
This is exactly what every despot who nationalized election security did right before their Party magically started winning in every election by “overwhelming popular demand”. What a shock that they are trying to use the same playbook.
It is the responsibility of the state to enact THEIR OWN elections, as was made clear in our constitution. States oversee their elections, primarily away from federal influence. Republicans passed their own laws that they are now using to say requires them to interfere in the state election process; they created the excuse they are using and have, to date, failed to show a single shred of evidence of any real systemic issue outside of a potentially 0.001% who MIGHT have voted illegally (based on the few cases they tried to use, often paperwork errors). If fact, the most obvious acts of election interference have been consistently Republicans. They are the ones who put out fake ballot boxes in states. They were the ones caught trying to tamper in order to “prove there was fraud”. They have been inside the house the whole time, so to speak.
Claiming this is a need to identify voters, which literally every state does, is just the BS people try to use to ignore the truth; that there is nothing wrong with the elections they are trying to steal. All of the ways people claim that can be used to get an ID … are LITERALLY the ways states verify voters when they don’t have an ID…
Republicans just haven’t understood yet that his claims mean THEY are complicit and have been supporting fraud — an accusation I think they would probably take issue with if they understood the real claim. Instead, they listen to news from organizations that literally argue that their news is “entertainment” and therefore not intended to be “truthful”. The party has become a disgraced shell of itself, co-opted by the Tea Party-incarnate MAGA who for years have left Conservative values behind in their attempt to remake the constitution in their own view in order to exclude dissenting voices.
>Taiwan has a
comprehensive household registration system. The compilation of the voter list/electoral
register is handled by the Household Registration Offices 20 days prior to the
Election Day. Hence, citizens do not have to actively register to vote, with
the exception of citizens residing overseas during the Presidential and Vice
Presidential election.
I don't think the Trump administration would be interested in pursuing this degree of vote access.
Taiwan’s system is like voter ID on steroids. The key part of your quote is that voter lists are compiled by “Household Registration Offices.” In Taiwan, everyone has to register with a household registration office within 30 days of moving. You have to show up to the office in person with your national ID card, household certificate, and proof of address. So it’s actually more stringent than voting registration in the US.
This is a fairly common system. Many countries don’t have voter registration as such because they already have a mandatory system household registration they use to track exactly where everyone is and verify citizenship and ID. For example, Germany: https://handbookgermany.de/en/registration
It is also worth noting that these mandatory registration schemes are free of cost or I guess free of cost at the point of service. I think if we require a voter ID / national ID card scheme, it has to be free of cost at the point of service as well. These services should be at least AT MINIMUM as ubiquitous as a post office and / or at least TWO full time locations with extended hours for every county / parish / etc.
The funding for this has to come from somewhere and it MUST be the federal government because my state / local government doesn't have money to even build a small sidewalk so it definitely does not have money for all this nonsense.
Taiwan's isn't free. Conversely, voter ID cards in the U.S. are free for people that don't have other ID. Texas and Georgia have offered free voter ID cards for more than a decade. All this infrastructure already exists.
I think the point OP is making is that the Trump administration would never propose a system like that. They don’t want to replace voter registration with a mandatory system all citizens use as an essential part of their lives. They want to keep voter registration optional and want to gatekeep it in ways that make it difficult for undesirable voters (i.e. the ones they don’t think will vote for them) to register.
You’re right, but that’s a distraction from the bigger misconception — it’s actually “Read Herring”. The idea is that the herring has already been documented (and “read” back), no longer deserving of additional discussion.
I can’t tell if you’re serious, but my definition was certainly not, lol. My claim was that correcting “red haring” to “red herring” distracts from a bigger misunderstanding (thus making the correction itself a red herring! Please laugh.) I completely made up my claim about the true meaning. For better or worse, my brain finds that humorous.
Edit: i am honored that you found my origin story believable enough for serious consideration.
Well, you have all three issues. Voting is trivially hackable, illegals are voting, and voting is made too hard.
Any civilized nation made voting secure, easy and fast. Yet still the US of A's still insist on computerized voting. Because then the government in-power can easily block voting surprises.
Note, they are also trying to change the USPS rules regarding mail-in ballots, such that the USPS will not deliver ballots either direction unless the recipient is on a list they are allowed to make. Public comment is open until July 2
Seems to be an exclusive article that's also paywall. Anyone know the story?
Ensuring secure elections and auditing extensively seems like good practice. However the issue has become political and neither party is interested in that. The right claims fraud with no good evidence, in response the left has decided that our elections perfectly secure and to suggest otherwise gets you a sound "tsk tsk"
Pretty remarkable both-sidesism in this comment. One side _does not admit the results of the 2020 election_ and the other side says widespread voter fraud is not happening in the United States. Being a fence-setter on this one is intellectually lazy.
Conservatives in multiple states looked under every rock to find voter fraud in the 2020 election and largely came up empty handed. In Arizona they even forced a quasi-legal audit with their own citizens brigade, spending weeks pouring through records, then quietly admitted there was no systemic fraud.
All the cumulative fraud uncovered nationwide, most of which was mistaken registration, discovered through existing processes, and didn't even favor a single party, never amounted to enough to even to turn even a single state.
Isn’t it weak, two point out that no one can find evidence after the fact, versus the proper alternative that no one can prove that they’re actually-secure before the fact?
Let’s just say that you were a bad guy and manipulating elections, wouldn’t you be bad at your job if someone could detect it after the fact? How many people would a conspiracy even take to pull of?
I don’t get the US system. The people mad at Trump and 2020 claims brush off all the ways the elections can’t be proven in favor that weeks or years afterwards no one can’t point to hard evidence.
> Isn’t it weak, two point out that no one can find evidence after the fact, versus the proper alternative that no one can prove that they’re actually-secure before the fact?
Isn't it weaker, to claim fraud so vast it changed a presidential election, while presenting no evidence?
Then, to ask for billion-dollar changes to voting, which also suppress voting, and when asked why, to shrug and then repeat the same debunked claims? I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I don't get it: the people mad at voting advocates and 2020 brush off proof that their claims are unfounded, yet they just repeat the same claims. At some point, it's malice, not ignorance.
All places, outside the American South in the United States don't have a problem, the American South however, is where it is a time honored tradition to make it hard to vote for some citizens.
And it has always been political and other things in the south.
Tell me you've never been to Idaho without telling me you've never been to Idaho, where a considerable portion of the population (especially around Moscow, Idaho) wants explicitly to repeal the 19th amendment (the one that gave women the right to vote).
Or Michigan, home of both Henry Ford (and his now-infamous Dearborn Independent, which still seems to resonate with most Michiganders that I've met) and Charles Lindbergh.
What you're describing is a rural areas problem, and the South, most of which has never really developed much urbanism (outside Atlanta and maybe Charlotte) has never had to "grow up", much like rural Michigan has never had to "grow up" and remains a hotbed of MAGA racism and plots to kidnap their governor, or the same way that much of Idaho has never had to "grow up" and is a common destination for Doug-Wilsonites and similar "trad" homesteaders. Drive an hour outside of Detroit or Lansing and ask the almost-universally-white rural folks what they think of Dearborn and they'll tell you all the same wild "sharia law" white-replacement conspiracy theories they've told me over and over again.
And of course, even Boston famously took rather poorly to the notion of desegregation – look up Boston's reaction to "forced bussing" (since the only way to racially-integrate Boston schools was to bring in black kids from outside Boston, since the redlining had been so severe there, and the city was covered in widespread protests).
"The report, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, concludes that voting machines could be further safeguarded by, for example, updating their software, the sources said. It does not say the vulnerabilities have led to votes flipping, but examines security gaps in how the machines are used during U.S. elections."
My take is that they couldn't find anything that amounted to the level of fraud Trump needs to justify the deaths, chaos, and loss of faith in the system he caused, so they'll keep delaying it until they either find something or find someone willing to just make something plausible sounding up.
This is not comparable. A couple groups on the far left is not the same as the leader of the party. I don’t see any major figure on the left: Bernie, Obama, AOC, Biden, Hillary, Pelosi etc claiming fraud.
> Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday.
FWIW I believe Hillary actually knew in detail what Trump was doing (and what Trump Jr was doing) to funnel influence from Russia in the 2016 campaign that was obviously dubious (and Trump knew, else "Russia, if you're listening" would not have happened; that was a combination of deflection and projection).
We also know — despite what Trump says — the Mueller report indicated that Russian influence happened and that the Trump campaign welcomed it, that the Trump administration misled and blocked the investigation (including through the use of shady defence agreements).
We knew in real time, in fact, that Paul Manafort worked for free for Trump while being paid off by pro-Russian Ukrainians and in that time got the RNC to change the election platform language about providing offensive weapon capability to Ukraine (something that has proved difficult to get the subsequent administrations to do).
So there was a lot of murky stuff.
But:
My feeling is that Clinton was mostly in shock that the electorate was stupid enough to fall for an obvious huckster and con-man anyway, and so she believed the influence must have succeeded because the outcome was so wildly depressing.
I personally think Trump's second win put away the notion that overt Russian influence is necessary to get Americans to elect someone who so obviously adores Vladimir Putin in ways that are incredibly visible; they are ignorant enough to do it without help.
It's very much on record that the Trump campaign reached out to the Ukraine to see if they'd dig up dirt on Hunter Biden and the Biden campaign in general, and that's what Clinton is referring to.
Unless of course you think incumbent leaders should be able to use foreign intelligence services as a part of their campaign strategy to attack their oppoosition?
We agree. The statement was that no major figure on the left claims fraud. Hillary Clinton, a specifically named major figure on the left, claims fraud.
I think my point was more that Clinton claimed "inappropriate and possibly illegal election interference (or attempts)", hence illegitimate, not "specifically committed vote counting fraud".
Delaying vulnerability disclosure for political reasons undermines the entire coordinated disclosure model. If researchers learn that findings get buried when inconvenient, they stop reporting through official channels.
I used to be in the minority and actually vote but now I have joined the majority of the population and will no longer cast my vote. Maybe I am now disenfranchised but if both parties want it to be this messy and not use "well architected frameworks" because it might disenfranchise people who aren't yet disenfranchised then they are just disenfranchising a different group of people, me. I guess I haven't done the numbers and new naive voters are more valuable. "I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you!" -grandpaSimpson
> now I have joined the majority of the population and will no longer cast my vote.
>then they are just disenfranchising a different group of people, me.
"They" aren't disenfranchising you, you are disenfranchising you. You have the same access to vote you always did, your just choosing not to exercise it.
I'd love to hear the steelman - what's the argument in favor of using a proprietary electronic system?
There have been legit complaints about closed sourced voting systems for ~20 years and DEFCON has done a "Voting Village" for ~10 years demonstrating numerous issues, some of which were not addressed by the next elections. Transparency doesn't appear better either.
Is it speed to tally? Cost? Easier to screw with results?
It’s cheaper in the short term because these are COTS products. But that’s not a good reason. Voting security should be “zero trust.” We should count votes the same way the Taiwanese, without reliance on technology: https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo. Voting should be
Super interesting, thanks for the insight.
I'm 100% onboard with transparency and auditablility are table stakes and any methodology that doesn't address those should be disqualified.
You must have missed the 2000 election. We hung for weeks on the vagueness of paper ballots. Both sides filed motion after motion to exclude some batch of ballots or other. There was a huge number of extremely unlikely votes in a place with a badly designed paper ballot.
The system right now is a security nightmare, a bad implementation of a bad idea. But anybody who lived through 2000 remembers that as even worse.
Florida was using a punch-card system, thus the infamous hanging chads. Fill-in-the-bubble scantron systems are much faster and less error prone; not as fast as purely electronic voting, but you get a reliable paper trail that is more transparent and much easier to audit.
> Fill-in-the-bubble scantron systems are much faster and less error prone; not as fast as purely electronic voting, but you get a reliable paper trail that is more transparent and much easier to audit.
An even bigger advantage of scantrol systems is with two simple changes to how ballots are produced and marked you can greatly increase the security and audibility of them.
The two simple changes are:
1. When the ballots are printed you print some alphanumeric codes on them in an invisible ink, and
2. The voter fills in the bubble using a special marker provided at the polling place that turns the invisible code visible.
The scanning machines themselves do not require any modification. Voters vote the same was as before, and can ignore the code that becomes visible in the bubbles they fill in if they way.
By combining the clever chemistry used for the invisible ink and marker with some clever cryptography in how those codes are generated you can overlay and end-to-end auditable voting system on the scantron system. And end-to-end auditable voting system (also called and end-to-end voter verifiable system) has these properties:
• Individuals can verify that their ballot was included in the final count and they vote was attributed correctly.
• Any third party can verify that the ballots were counted correctly. The candidates, the parties, news organization, civil rights groups, and anyone else can check.
• Voters cannot prove to third parties who they voted for. This is called coercion-resistance.
Such a system was developed by several cryptographers, including David Chaum and Ron Rivest. It is called Scantegrity II [1] and has been used successfully in a few elections.
Here are links to a paper by its creators explaining it, in HTML [2] and PDF [3]. Here's a paper [4] showing that it is coercion-resistant.
With this system after the voting is done the election officials can publish all the codes that were revealed. A voter who wants to know if their vote was counted can check that list to see if the code that was revealed to them for that candidate is in the list.
The election officials can also publish some more information that along with the code list allows anybody to verify that the totals for each candidate were right without this revealing the mapping from codes to candidates.
With this we get all the pluses of paper system including hand recounts, plus fast machine counting that can be done with a simple single purpose machine that has no software that could be hacked, yet with the kind of end-to-end auditing that the electronic voting systems promise.
And it inexpensive to implement and operate. Around half of the districts in the US already are using the scantron machines.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
[2] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...
[3] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...
[4] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf
Votehere / Dategrity was basically this (for mail in ballots). We worked hard on these problems.
As a Floridian, I apologize for the 2000 election. But we have a much better system now. We have paper ballots that are scanned. We have an auditable fallback for untrustworthy machines. There is no reason other states cannot have the same.
I paid close attention.. and agreed that that particular approach was broken.
My question was: what's the argument in favor of using a proprietary electronic system?
I think just the fact that it was the first thing on offer that wasn't the thing they were already using.
There are better alternatives, and if legislatures were designed to come up with optimal solutions, we'd probably have use one of them. Instead we have inertia, because the Sainted Holy Founders thought inertia was good for a country, so they optimized legislative branches to be useless.
This is entirely unrelated to your point, but as you brought up the sanctity some Americans hold their founding fathers to:
How do some assume the American founding fathers thought ahead, and had it all planned out, with good solutions (instead of merely solutions),
...while also being aware of the Flynn effect?
The ones who most venerate the Founding Fathers are the ones who usually claim that the status quo is good. The status quo can always be attributed as the will of the Fathers.
Sometimes that means using a ouija board to assert that some vague passage happens to mean what they want it to mean.
It's bold to assert that people make up Founder Father's reasoning when just above you claim we use the current electronic voting because:
> "I think just the fact that it was the first thing on offer that wasn't the thing they were already using."
Instead of just assuming things - aka making things up - you could check.
For the Declaration, Articles, and later the Constitution specifically, much of the Founder Father's reasoning and conclusions were well-documented in public via published letters, essays, and speeches at the time. No ouija board necessary.
There are numerous quotes attributed to the founding fathers regarding how future generations would need to update their solutions for the times. As far as how some will assume, some will assume anything that fits their worldview.
> both sides
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
Gore probably won that election. I can't help but wonder about an alternate history where he became president and there was no 9/11 due to smoother handoff between administrations.
Gore did win that election, but SCOTUS illegally decided it instead of a fair ruling requiring Florida to recount ballots using the same methods in all districts. Americans should have done general strikes and rioting.
I don't know about 9/11, but I doubt Gore's SCOTUS appointees would have made the incorrect decision on Citizens United. America would be in a better place today.
The Supreme Court did require Florida recounts of ballots using the same methods in all districts, and remanded the case to Florida Courts to figure out if there was a legal way to extended the deadline for recounts, to get it done, but they never heard the case, because Gore conceded soon after.
> there was no 9/11 due to smoother handoff between administrations.
It’s an interesting counterfactual but I don’t see the mechanism. The hijackers were mostly in country by inauguration day. While it’s true that they weren’t really operating covertly prior to the attack, I don’t envision a Gore administration that could within months ratchet up FBI/CIA natsec awareness to a level that would change the outcome.
It’s hard for many of us to remember the “before times” now but back then there was a great deal of misplaced faith that foreign attacks on American soil were more or less impossible.
WaPo did a recount many years later and found that Bush would have won with further counting. (EDIT: It was a CNN meta-analysis, not WaPo: https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-elect...)
Gore attempted stochastic cheating in that election. There were a large number of uncountable votes because of incompletely punched out cards. That wasn’t a problem because, statistically, the errors would be randomly distributed between the candidates. But Gore requested hand recounts in only a few counties he had clearly won. The mathematical effect of that was to bias the recount in favor of finding more Gore votes. For example, if the county had gone 60% Gore, then for every 10 votes countable by hand that couldn’t be counted by machine, 6 would be Gore votes. Stochastic cheating.
There were also lots of shenanigans where precincts were adding partial recount numbers (where some precincts had finished counting and some had not) to the totals. There is a reason that the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Gore’s recount plan was unconstitutional. (The 5-2 part was only about the remedy.)
What about the butterfly ballots? The errors those likely caused would not be randomly distributed.
When I say “errors” I mean votes the punchcard machines couldn’t read due to the chad not being punched out all the way. Those were the ballots that were at issue in the litigation (“undercounts”).
The butterfly ballot would have resulted in votes for Buchanan or double votes (ones for Buchanan + Gore if the person tried to go back and correct). Gore never actually tried to get those counted in his favor. And how could you know?
But the whole recount thing is stupid. It’s designed by people who don’t understand statistics. Any counting is a statistical process that’s going to have some measurement error. The Florida vote was almost certainly within that margin of error. The correct outcome then would have been re-voting, not a recount.
> Gore never actually tried to get those counted in his favor. And how could you know?
Whereas of course the Bush campaign was absolutely eager to ensure every vote, including those for Gore, were verified, right?
> The correct outcome then would have been re-voting, not a recount.
I do agree with you on this, entirely. Although even if that was the plan, the state of Florida is not exactly known for making poll access easy.
> Whereas of course the Bush campaign
We're not talking about what the Bush campaign wanted. The point is that not even the Gore campaign argued that the double votes should be counted. So they're irrelevant.
They are irrelevant in the sense that there is no legal means to correct them.
They are relevant to the question of who did the voters actually wanted to win, which while not a legally relevant question is interesting. The statistical reports I've seen say that around 2000 of the Buchanan votes were very likely intended as Gore votes.
It’s pretty crazy you want to take a dig at the Bush campaign.
I once did an experiment on my FB where I described Gore’s selective recount scheme but attributed it to Trump. And people jumped up and down talking about how it was voter suppression and cheating. But when I revealed it was Gore, it was just hemming and hawing. These are all smart, college educated people too. Truly, there is no hope for the republic.
I remember the poll that asked Republican voters about their relative approval of “Obamacare” versus “an Affordable Care Act” and got a nearly 20% differential.
And then the number one Google search on the last Election Day? “Did Biden drop out?”
We truly have one of the least informed electorates in the world. And one of the worst for considering political parties as sports teams to be rewarded with loyalty at all costs.
You either misremember or misrepresent WaPo’s reporting.
> In all likelihood, George W. Bush still would have won Florida and the presidency last year if either of two limited recounts -- one requested by Al Gore, the other ordered by the Florida Supreme Court -- had been completed, according to a study commissioned by The Washington Post and other news organizations.
> But if Gore had found a way to trigger a statewide recount of all disputed ballots, or if the courts had required it, the result likely would have been different. An examination of uncounted ballots throughout Florida found enough where voter intent was clear to give Gore the narrowest of margins.
So on this basis, GP has the right of it: Gore probably won that election.
I was actually thinking of a much later CNN retrospective looking at various studies: https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-elect... (“Taken as a whole, the recount studies show Bush would have most likely won the Florida statewide hand recount of all undervotes. Undervotes are ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race.”).
The studies showed that Gore only would have won if counting over votes, which his team never pursued: “The studies also show that Gore likely would have won a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which are ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted at all. However, his legal team never pursued this action.”
Maybe if Gore had asked for a statewide hand recount the result would have been different. But instead he tried to stochastically cheat through selective recounts, which burned a huge amount of time on a process that was fundamentally unsound.
Maybe you're right about your theory, but based on the above investigations, he won the vote anyways.
CNN says exactly the opposite! “Taken as a whole, the recount studies show Bush would have most likely won the Florida statewide hand recount of all undervotes. Undervotes are ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race.”
Counting undervotes isn't my theory. It was Gore's theory of which votes should be counted. Gore never argued overvotes--where a voter had marked multiple candidates--should be counted. The recount studies show that Gore would have lost under the only recount approach the Gore campaign actually pursued.
Of course, the whole thing was completely stupid. They should have stopped with the second machine recount. It was completely insane to entertain the idea that you should try and guess what voters meant when they didn't completely punch a ballot, or punched more than one candidate. The proper thing to do is exclude all ballots where the voter failed to fill out the ballot properly.
"The studies also show that Gore likely would have won a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which are ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted at all".
So it seems like he won the votes anyways. If your retort is "not if we count undervotes, while ignoring overvotes", that would be a different discussion altogether.
I’m not sure that what’s happening right now in California is any better.. even Nate Silver is crying foul and this point.
Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important.
Unsubstantiated claims of election fraud should be punished severely. Politicians who baselessly erode confidence in elections without providing timely evidence should be ineligible for political office at least and potentially tried for treason.
Faith in elections is a two-way street. The election system must also be fully transparent, minimize the degree to which voters must trust election administrators, and keep records that would allow evidence of voter fraud to be detected. You can’t punish people for not providing evidence if you’ve designed an election system that fails to keep the information that would allow anomalies to be detected.
You want to campaign on improving election security and transparency (hopefully without being misleading about all of the systems already in place and the security, statistical analysis, and auditing already done)? Go for it.
That is very different than claiming fraud without evidence.
The problem is that Americans, including our political class, are innumerate: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/mara-gay-gets-dragged-do.... They react to things based on gut feelings, not mathematical analysis. To them, isolated incidents, anomalies, and irregularities—which always exist—are “evidence” of stolen elections, without proof that those anomalies were significant enough to alter the outcomes.
Let me pick an example that hopefully isn’t controversial. I was in Iowa in 2019. Mayor Pete got on stage and credited Stacey Abrams’ claims that she had won the 2018 georgia gubernatorial election. Those claims were based on isolated incidents of people who say their voter registrations were wrongfully deleted. That kind of story hits people in the gut. But people are really, really bad at evaluating mathematically whether such incidents could have materially changed the outcome in an election that was won by 50,000 votes.
Election security must similarly operate on the gut feeling level. Look at the video of how they do things in Taiwan: taking out each vote and holding it up for everyone to see. Was it in response to evidence of people cheating? It’s to impress upon people the appearance of a system that is transparent and difficult to corrupt. It’s gut feeling weighed against gut feeling. People must be so impressed by the obvious security of the election system that they dismiss the inevitable anomalies as immaterial.
> The election system must also be fully transparent
It should not be fully transparent. I should not be able to look up who you voted for. That should be private information.
With that caveat in mind, to my eyes the election system we have is doing exactly what you’re saying it should do.
That's not what transparent means here.
My states system is very transparent and has many systems for detecting fraud but people on the right claim otherwise and they are either ignorant of how it worked or just lying.
What’s your state?
This and a comment under it start with the exact same sentence. “Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important.” There’s something wrong here and it makes me doubt HN
That’s not what I’m seeing.
pclowes starts off the comment you quoted (“Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important”), then rayiner responds with “Faith in elections is a two-way street” and engages with pclowes point by providing a broader perspective. They are not “the exact same sentence”.
The referenced comment has been flagged dead. You can turn on showdead to see it.
Ah thanks.
Don't worry, various governments around the world are working hard to ensure online communities can only be accessed with ID verification. Will that ease your doubt in the future?
Doing such is probably as old as elections.
Without going too far back, https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/factchecking-clintons-vote...
The red haring is that voting is hacked or illegals are voting, etc etc etc. The -real- story is disenfranchising voters by making it hard for them or out-right steaming their votes in the courts. We don't have an election fraud issue in the us. We have an election legitimacy issue.
So do you only secure your computer networks after they’ve been hacked? We should have transparent, verifiable election infrastructure, like Taiwan: https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo.
The problem is implementing that in a way that doesn't disenfranchise a lot of people. Most or all countries that have the kind of robust national ID system for such a system also make sure it is easy for every citizen to get the necessary ID.
Such a system could be added to the US without too much disruption if we did it gradually, say making it only apply to people born after 2030 so there is time to get all the support infrastructure in place.
Doing it quickly, and making it apply who grew up in a US without anything like that, would be a big and probably expensive effort. None of the proposals I've seen Congress talk about, or seen states talk about or that states have passed, have addressed this.
They say it is actually easy to get the required ID, but when you dig into the documents needed to get it if you don't already have a government issued photo ID it is a lot harder.
A certified copy of your birth certification is usually good enough...but most states require government issued photo ID to issue a certified copy of your birth certificate. Oops.
Also, for many older people, it can be hard to find where to go to get a birth certificate. That's all handled by the states, not the feds, and at the time many older people were born many states just recorded those records at the county level.
There are alternatives that allow can work around the lack of a certified copy of your birth certificate, or that can work around needing a government photo ID to get the birth certificate. They involve secondary documents, such as school records. Those don't usually have difficult ID requirements to get, but are even less likely to be centralized. You might have to go to the school district to get the records. For an older person trying to dig up old elementary or middle school records to bootstrap getting an idea that will often be difficult, even if that school district is still around and somehow the records haven't been lost.
The current system does in fact work well. It should be replaced with a stronger that could stand up against larger and more well organized adversaries than it has had to face before, but it is not urgent, and we have the time to do it right.
It's not any easier to get a national ID in say Germany if you don't already have one. E.g. https://www.personalausweisportal.de/SharedDocs/faqs/Webs/PA...
"In order to be issued a national ID card, you need to be able to establish your identity and your German citizenship. If at the time of your application you are not able to provide any documentation of your identity, such as an expired national ID card or a birth certificate or other identity-establishing document, the issuing authority will check your identity by other suitable means (see no. 6.3.1 of the Administrative Regulation on Passports (Passverwaltungsvorschrift, PassVwV))."
If you read through administrative regulation 6.3.1, it provides for the issuing authority to look at various documents to establish identity and citizenship. If all else fails, affidavits from witnesses can be used.
U.S. states operate the same way. I'll use Georgia as an example since I've lived there: https://sos.ga.gov/page/proof-citizenship. There's twenty different ways to prove citizenship, including affidavits from third parties if all else fails.
The undeniable reality is that these measures do, in fact, constitute barriers to voting and the barriers are not evenly applied. Less privileged Americans are less likely to have ID, and that’s just a statistical fact.
If the opposition cannot be trusted to even so much as acknowledge reality and fact, we must reject all notions of voter ID, with no exceptions. One begins to wonder why the right is so unbelievably hamstrung on ignoring the issue of ID availability.
Could it be, perhaps, because their goal is not righteous as they claim, but is rather a thinly-veiled attempt at voter suppression? Based off their actions, I would say any reasonable person would have no choice but to see it that way.
There are solutions to these problems. The people you’re championing would rather die than even consider them. Sit back and ponder why.
Georgia accepts these documents.
• Birth certificate issued by a US state
• Passport
• Certificate of Citizenship
• Naturalization Certificate
• A Report of Birth Abroad of a US Citizen
• Birth Certificate issued by the Department of State
• A US Citizen card
• An American Indian Card issued by the Department of Homeland Security with the classification code "KIC" (Issued by DHS to identify U.S. citizen members of the Texas Band of Kickapoos living near the U.S./Mexican border)
• Final adoption decree showing the child's name and U.S. birthplace
• Evidence of civil service employment by the U.S. government before June 1976
• An official U.S. military record of service showing a U.S. place of birth
• A Northern Mariana Identification Card (Issued by the INS to a collectively naturalized citizen of the U.S. who was born in the Northern Mariana Islands before November 4, 1986)
• Extract of U.S. hospital record of birth established at the time of the person's birth indicating a U.S. place of birth
• Life or health or other insurance record which indicates a U.S. place of birth and which is dated at least 5 years before the initial application date
• Federal or State census record which indicates U.S. citizenship or a U.S. place of birth
• Institutional admission papers from a nursing home, skilled nursing care facility or other institution which indicates a U.S. place of birth
• Medical (clinical, doctor, or hospital) record which indicates a U.S. place of birth and which is dated at least 5 years before the application date.
• A driver’s license or identification card issued by an agency of a U.S. state if that agency indicates on the driver’s license or identification card that the applicant has provided satisfactory evidence of United States citizenship to the agency
• One of the following if created at least 5 years before use to prove citizenship and if showing a U.S. place of birth: Seneca Indian tribal census record; Bureau of Indian Affairs tribal census records of the Navaho Indians; U.S. State Vital Statistics official notification of birth registration; an amended or delayed U.S. public birth record that is amended more than 5 years after the person's birth; or statement signed by the physician or midwife who was in attendance at the time of birth
• If other forms of documentation cannot be obtained, documentation may be provided by a written affidavit, signed under penalty of perjury, from two citizens, one of whom cannot be related to the person in question, who have specific knowledge of event(s) establishing the person in question's citizenship status. The person in question or another knowledgeable individual must also submit an affidavit stating why the documents are not available. Affidavits are only expected to be used in rare circumstances
Most of those are only going to be useful to to a small fraction of adult Georgians who don't already have proof of citizenship. The affidavit at first seems like no big deal but it probably is because it as asking for affidavits from people who have specific knowledge of events that establish your citizenship.
You're omitting fundamental differences between these systems, for example that Germans are required by law to own a government ID, so only a tiny fraction of the population has to use this process. As far as I have seen this appears to be around 2-3%, and I haven't come across any studies showing that historically disadvantaged groups are more likely not to have an ID. Compare that to ~10% of Americans without proof of identification, and it just so happens that minorities make up a disproportionately big part of this group.
Second, in Germany there exist exactly 2 ID cards accepted for e.g. voting: your national ID card, and your passport. There are no per-state ID cards, there are no ID cards that are completely fine to use in all government interactions except for voting. Meanwhile the US has 50 different ID card systems, and the people who are making arbitrary decisions on which of these ID cards are acceptable are the same people who can electorally benefit from strategically banning/allowing certain kinds of IDs.
So no, rayiner, these situations aren't remotely comparable. They could be if the US government introduced a uniform national ID card, and if citizens had plenty of time to get one. For example I'd have no issues with voter ID if it were introduced only once >95% of the population owns this hypothetical national ID over a 5-year period.
The funny/sad part in all this: if conservatives actually cared about election security, all they'd have to do is listen to the arguments against voter ID and remove these roadblocks over a few years, maybe a decade. But for some reason their only approach seems to be to demand Voter ID be introduced right now, no time to prepare, no efforts made to solve any of the issues. I wonder why?
Only US citizens are allowed to vote. How do you control for that without ID of some sort?
There are checks such as when registering to vote. They are not rigorous checks because rigorous proof of citizenship has not been needed by most US citizens for most the country's existence, and there is no way to rapidly switch to a rigorous system without disenfranchising a large number of older citizens and poorer citizens.
Registrations of individual registrants can be challenged and then a more detailed examination is done. Both Republican and Democrat local or state parties keep an eye on registrations and challenge any the think are bogus.
Extensive statistical checks after elections by numerous statisticians (and by most major political parties) shows that this system is working fine, so there is no justification for rushing a transition to a more rigorous system. There is time to design a system that will work for all citizens.
We could get a long way there by just grandfathering in everyone who voted in the last 10 years, and making sure there is extensive help going forward for anyone who cannot afford the cost of getting the necessary documents to get the new ID or who cannot get those documents.
The check for citizenship is not done at the polling place; it's done at the time of voter registration with plenty of accepted IDs.
How did the US solve this issue during every election until now?
This comment shows exactly why I made the original post. This assumes there is a problem to be solved. The flat out fact is that it hasn't been a problem. The real problem is that politicians say there is an issue with no proof in order to get into grand debates about how to solve the nonexistent problem all the while creating -real- problems of disenfranchising actual legitimate voters when they implement solutions to the nonexistant problem. The orders of magnitude of people denied their rightful ability to vote compared to the fraud in voting are not even funny. Yes, fraud does happen. It is almost never a real issue but programs to 'fix' the fraud are a real problem.
Has it been solved?
What does it mean to solve?
Every one of the excuses about how (and the need) to obtain ID are the red herring of this conversation, intended to distract from the fact that states have been verifying identities and holding their elections for 250 years and that Republicans are involved in the election process at every single level that are apparently complicit in these supposed “massive frauds”. They would have people believe the issue is ID and illegal voting, rather than the fact this is an attempt to take control of elections and influence them. They have already started doing shady things, like demanding access to the actual votes despite the entire system being run electronically and re-verified locally under bi-partisan oversight, and that those same states who had US cyber intelligence to assist them in securing their elections prior to Trump reducing that access in order to further his election fraud claims. It doesn’t look good when your own agencies assisted on securing the very thing they are claiming is a fraud.
This is exactly what every despot who nationalized election security did right before their Party magically started winning in every election by “overwhelming popular demand”. What a shock that they are trying to use the same playbook.
It is the responsibility of the state to enact THEIR OWN elections, as was made clear in our constitution. States oversee their elections, primarily away from federal influence. Republicans passed their own laws that they are now using to say requires them to interfere in the state election process; they created the excuse they are using and have, to date, failed to show a single shred of evidence of any real systemic issue outside of a potentially 0.001% who MIGHT have voted illegally (based on the few cases they tried to use, often paperwork errors). If fact, the most obvious acts of election interference have been consistently Republicans. They are the ones who put out fake ballot boxes in states. They were the ones caught trying to tamper in order to “prove there was fraud”. They have been inside the house the whole time, so to speak.
Claiming this is a need to identify voters, which literally every state does, is just the BS people try to use to ignore the truth; that there is nothing wrong with the elections they are trying to steal. All of the ways people claim that can be used to get an ID … are LITERALLY the ways states verify voters when they don’t have an ID…
Republicans just haven’t understood yet that his claims mean THEY are complicit and have been supporting fraud — an accusation I think they would probably take issue with if they understood the real claim. Instead, they listen to news from organizations that literally argue that their news is “entertainment” and therefore not intended to be “truthful”. The party has become a disgraced shell of itself, co-opted by the Tea Party-incarnate MAGA who for years have left Conservative values behind in their attempt to remake the constitution in their own view in order to exclude dissenting voices.
https://web.cec.gov.tw/english/article/23550
>Taiwan has a comprehensive household registration system. The compilation of the voter list/electoral register is handled by the Household Registration Offices 20 days prior to the Election Day. Hence, citizens do not have to actively register to vote, with the exception of citizens residing overseas during the Presidential and Vice Presidential election.
I don't think the Trump administration would be interested in pursuing this degree of vote access.
Taiwan’s system is like voter ID on steroids. The key part of your quote is that voter lists are compiled by “Household Registration Offices.” In Taiwan, everyone has to register with a household registration office within 30 days of moving. You have to show up to the office in person with your national ID card, household certificate, and proof of address. So it’s actually more stringent than voting registration in the US.
This is a fairly common system. Many countries don’t have voter registration as such because they already have a mandatory system household registration they use to track exactly where everyone is and verify citizenship and ID. For example, Germany: https://handbookgermany.de/en/registration
It is also worth noting that these mandatory registration schemes are free of cost or I guess free of cost at the point of service. I think if we require a voter ID / national ID card scheme, it has to be free of cost at the point of service as well. These services should be at least AT MINIMUM as ubiquitous as a post office and / or at least TWO full time locations with extended hours for every county / parish / etc.
The funding for this has to come from somewhere and it MUST be the federal government because my state / local government doesn't have money to even build a small sidewalk so it definitely does not have money for all this nonsense.
Taiwan's isn't free. Conversely, voter ID cards in the U.S. are free for people that don't have other ID. Texas and Georgia have offered free voter ID cards for more than a decade. All this infrastructure already exists.
I think the point OP is making is that the Trump administration would never propose a system like that. They don’t want to replace voter registration with a mandatory system all citizens use as an essential part of their lives. They want to keep voter registration optional and want to gatekeep it in ways that make it difficult for undesirable voters (i.e. the ones they don’t think will vote for them) to register.
> So do you only secure your computer networks after they’ve been hacked?
Idk seems to be an industry standard.
Red Herring* - it's a fish, not a rabbit
Well, on the bright side, you can tell I didn't have AI write the comment for me! Thanks for the correction.
You’re right, but that’s a distraction from the bigger misconception — it’s actually “Read Herring”. The idea is that the herring has already been documented (and “read” back), no longer deserving of additional discussion.
I have never heard that suggestion... if you can document it, the wiki entry would need an update[1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring#History
I can’t tell if you’re serious, but my definition was certainly not, lol. My claim was that correcting “red haring” to “red herring” distracts from a bigger misunderstanding (thus making the correction itself a red herring! Please laugh.) I completely made up my claim about the true meaning. For better or worse, my brain finds that humorous.
Edit: i am honored that you found my origin story believable enough for serious consideration.
where am i?
In Internet Misinformation 101, as am I.
Well, you have all three issues. Voting is trivially hackable, illegals are voting, and voting is made too hard.
Any civilized nation made voting secure, easy and fast. Yet still the US of A's still insist on computerized voting. Because then the government in-power can easily block voting surprises.
Every Accusation is a Confession.
Voter fraud means:
1. I did it.
2. I need to blame someone else.
3. The more general definition of fraud is: anything done by someone who disagrees with me.
4. Jim Crow.
5. Must go.
Is anyone aware of any viable, or close to viable open-source options exist? That also have capacity for something like a CA statewide election?
What does HN know about https://www.voting.works/ ? (open source/hardware voting machine)
Note, they are also trying to change the USPS rules regarding mail-in ballots, such that the USPS will not deliver ballots either direction unless the recipient is on a list they are allowed to make. Public comment is open until July 2
https://www.regulations.gov/document/USPS-2026-1289-0001
What does USPS assume for chain of custody for a ballot? Do they hand them directly to a person?
Seems to be an exclusive article that's also paywall. Anyone know the story?
Ensuring secure elections and auditing extensively seems like good practice. However the issue has become political and neither party is interested in that. The right claims fraud with no good evidence, in response the left has decided that our elections perfectly secure and to suggest otherwise gets you a sound "tsk tsk"
Pretty remarkable both-sidesism in this comment. One side _does not admit the results of the 2020 election_ and the other side says widespread voter fraud is not happening in the United States. Being a fence-setter on this one is intellectually lazy.
Conservatives in multiple states looked under every rock to find voter fraud in the 2020 election and largely came up empty handed. In Arizona they even forced a quasi-legal audit with their own citizens brigade, spending weeks pouring through records, then quietly admitted there was no systemic fraud.
All the cumulative fraud uncovered nationwide, most of which was mistaken registration, discovered through existing processes, and didn't even favor a single party, never amounted to enough to even to turn even a single state.
I don’t get this.
Isn’t it weak, two point out that no one can find evidence after the fact, versus the proper alternative that no one can prove that they’re actually-secure before the fact?
Let’s just say that you were a bad guy and manipulating elections, wouldn’t you be bad at your job if someone could detect it after the fact? How many people would a conspiracy even take to pull of?
I don’t get the US system. The people mad at Trump and 2020 claims brush off all the ways the elections can’t be proven in favor that weeks or years afterwards no one can’t point to hard evidence.
> Isn’t it weak, two point out that no one can find evidence after the fact, versus the proper alternative that no one can prove that they’re actually-secure before the fact?
Isn't it weaker, to claim fraud so vast it changed a presidential election, while presenting no evidence?
Then, to ask for billion-dollar changes to voting, which also suppress voting, and when asked why, to shrug and then repeat the same debunked claims? I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I don't get it: the people mad at voting advocates and 2020 brush off proof that their claims are unfounded, yet they just repeat the same claims. At some point, it's malice, not ignorance.
Did you memory hole 2016?
Did Clinton claim that she actually won?
"tsk tsk"
A local media channel running the same wire service report: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ktvu.com/news/report-white-...
All places, outside the American South in the United States don't have a problem, the American South however, is where it is a time honored tradition to make it hard to vote for some citizens.
And it has always been political and other things in the south.
The South does have this problem. But pretending it's /only/ the South does no favors to people who are disenfranchised elsewhere.
A quick google will show that it has been a nationwide problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
Tell me you've never been to Idaho without telling me you've never been to Idaho, where a considerable portion of the population (especially around Moscow, Idaho) wants explicitly to repeal the 19th amendment (the one that gave women the right to vote).
Or Michigan, home of both Henry Ford (and his now-infamous Dearborn Independent, which still seems to resonate with most Michiganders that I've met) and Charles Lindbergh.
What you're describing is a rural areas problem, and the South, most of which has never really developed much urbanism (outside Atlanta and maybe Charlotte) has never had to "grow up", much like rural Michigan has never had to "grow up" and remains a hotbed of MAGA racism and plots to kidnap their governor, or the same way that much of Idaho has never had to "grow up" and is a common destination for Doug-Wilsonites and similar "trad" homesteaders. Drive an hour outside of Detroit or Lansing and ask the almost-universally-white rural folks what they think of Dearborn and they'll tell you all the same wild "sharia law" white-replacement conspiracy theories they've told me over and over again.
And of course, even Boston famously took rather poorly to the notion of desegregation – look up Boston's reaction to "forced bussing" (since the only way to racially-integrate Boston schools was to bring in black kids from outside Boston, since the redlining had been so severe there, and the city was covered in widespread protests).
Non-paywalled - https://archive.is/ki4vM
I think this paragraph summarizes it nicely.
"The report, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, concludes that voting machines could be further safeguarded by, for example, updating their software, the sources said. It does not say the vulnerabilities have led to votes flipping, but examines security gaps in how the machines are used during U.S. elections."
My take is that they couldn't find anything that amounted to the level of fraud Trump needs to justify the deaths, chaos, and loss of faith in the system he caused, so they'll keep delaying it until they either find something or find someone willing to just make something plausible sounding up.
> the right claims fraud
So does the left every time Trump wins.
This is not comparable. A couple groups on the far left is not the same as the leader of the party. I don’t see any major figure on the left: Bernie, Obama, AOC, Biden, Hillary, Pelosi etc claiming fraud.
> Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday.
From https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum..., among literally hundreds of other instances claiming the election was stolen, rigged, Russianed, whatever.
FWIW I believe Hillary actually knew in detail what Trump was doing (and what Trump Jr was doing) to funnel influence from Russia in the 2016 campaign that was obviously dubious (and Trump knew, else "Russia, if you're listening" would not have happened; that was a combination of deflection and projection).
We also know — despite what Trump says — the Mueller report indicated that Russian influence happened and that the Trump campaign welcomed it, that the Trump administration misled and blocked the investigation (including through the use of shady defence agreements).
We knew in real time, in fact, that Paul Manafort worked for free for Trump while being paid off by pro-Russian Ukrainians and in that time got the RNC to change the election platform language about providing offensive weapon capability to Ukraine (something that has proved difficult to get the subsequent administrations to do).
So there was a lot of murky stuff.
But:
My feeling is that Clinton was mostly in shock that the electorate was stupid enough to fall for an obvious huckster and con-man anyway, and so she believed the influence must have succeeded because the outcome was so wildly depressing.
I personally think Trump's second win put away the notion that overt Russian influence is necessary to get Americans to elect someone who so obviously adores Vladimir Putin in ways that are incredibly visible; they are ignorant enough to do it without help.
It's very much on record that the Trump campaign reached out to the Ukraine to see if they'd dig up dirt on Hunter Biden and the Biden campaign in general, and that's what Clinton is referring to.
Unless of course you think incumbent leaders should be able to use foreign intelligence services as a part of their campaign strategy to attack their oppoosition?
> that's what Clinton is referring to
We agree. The statement was that no major figure on the left claims fraud. Hillary Clinton, a specifically named major figure on the left, claims fraud.
I think my point was more that Clinton claimed "inappropriate and possibly illegal election interference (or attempts)", hence illegitimate, not "specifically committed vote counting fraud".
Delaying vulnerability disclosure for political reasons undermines the entire coordinated disclosure model. If researchers learn that findings get buried when inconvenient, they stop reporting through official channels.
I used to be in the minority and actually vote but now I have joined the majority of the population and will no longer cast my vote. Maybe I am now disenfranchised but if both parties want it to be this messy and not use "well architected frameworks" because it might disenfranchise people who aren't yet disenfranchised then they are just disenfranchising a different group of people, me. I guess I haven't done the numbers and new naive voters are more valuable. "I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you!" -grandpaSimpson
> now I have joined the majority of the population and will no longer cast my vote.
>then they are just disenfranchising a different group of people, me.
"They" aren't disenfranchising you, you are disenfranchising you. You have the same access to vote you always did, your just choosing not to exercise it.
Not voting tends towards causing worse outcomes than voting.
The way I recommend people vote is this:
1) think of the worst, stupidest, most revolting, irritating and consistently wrong you know in your local area
2) wouldn't you like the power to potentially cancel out the damage they could do with their vote?
3) congratulations: you have that power. It's using your vote.