Posted on 12/05/2020 9:13:41 PM PST by zeugma
No, the original tallies need to be hand counted—with plenty of local businesses.
The tech you propose is still an invitation to fraud. I’d go so far as to call it an attractive nuisance for political critters.
Not entirely, but I'd tend to lean that way. If voting is important to you, and knowing that your vote is going to be accurately counted is important to you, you should make every effort to attempt to show up. Mail in voting should be severely restricted because it simply opens up too many avenues for fraud. I'm sure there would be exceptions made, but those should be exactly that, exceptions, not the rule.
The reason I support mail in voting for the military should be obvious, as they have little to no control over their movement, and are performing an important enough service to the nation, that I think it would be criminal to restrict their ability to vote.
Bruce Schneier, (who I don't particularly care for from a political standpoint) is an actual cryptographer who has written about the comparisons between commerce and voting rather extensively over the years. I still think this article is one of the better ones at outlining the issues. It was written in 2004, and is still relevant today.
No it isn't. None of my banks or brokerages require me to use it and I don't because it doesn't add much security. It's security theater.
How much effort do you think some nefarious entity is willing to expend to gain access to ONE vote?
How many records of personal (unchangeable) information did China hack from OPM? 23 million.
The email address would be part of the information you provide when appearing in person at a government office to set up or renew your voter account.
Then I will appear in person pretending to be you. But more likely I won't need to do that, I will do it by mail or internet and that's much lower effort. Like you said, how much effort do I want to expend to get one vote? That's really your only protection against masquarading.
Changing your email address would have be done while logged in to your account.
None of that stops China from getting into 23 million accounts using personal information like mother's maiden name, city and date of birth, etc.
Thanks for the link. That’s considerably longer than my write up. :-) I’ll dig through it. Looks interesting.
See comment 62 above. I think mail-in balloting needs to be severely restricted, perhaps not entirely eliminated, but we should start from a more restrictive standpoint and only make exceptions where it makes the most sense to do so. Convenience isn't really a valid reason to mail your vote in IMO. OTOH, some folks can't get out, and we'd have to deal with that.
No, it's the same ball of wax. Apply your same nerd skills. Think about how an privacy protecting system could check for duplicate registrations such as a hash of key personal information used to register. You would choose information that can be validated like SSN and DOB but concatenate them and store as one-way hashes so records can be checked for duplicates everywhere in the country.
One of our biggest problems with voting in this country is that everything is managed individually by the states
Doesn't have to be problem. The alternative could be worse. Think cheating democrats nationwide.
...must be cooperation amongst the states...Death records should be ... Illegal voting should have real punishment, and be swift and sure.
It won't be swift and sure unless you put the nerd hat back on and solve the registration problem. It's not easy and certainly not as easy as securing the vote itself. Tackle the hard problem first and you will find the less hard problem will be solved too.
Again, this proposal is mostly concerned with mechanics of...
Voting. That's easy. Back to the drawing board.
My comment: Until the Republican Party is destroyed, nothing positive such as your most excellent suggestion can ever happen.
Added. I'll be making more additions to the page. Note the postmark caveat I added.
All absentee ballots must be received (not just postmarked) by 7pm on election day; no exceptions. H/T WildHighlander57
Just because if have bad knees, have trouble driving and can't stand for very long at one time, doesn't mean I lose my constitutional right to vote. My wife and I have been voting absentee all through our 20 years in the military and ever since. It worked fine until this election when the democRATS, not my wife and I, decided to engage in massive election fraud. Go after policies and procedures and processes that will prevent them from doing what they did again and stop trying to blame people like my wife and I.
I suggest you take your idea of disenfranchising us from being able to vote in the country we served for 40 years between us in the military and take it to Venezuela where they would be glad to implement your bad idea.
Great, zeugma. The silver lining in all this is education of the public. It has been sadly missing!
Once the dust settles, a good project of Free Republic is to spearhead creation of an informational website where people can learn the principles of good voting procedure.
It’s really the same thing as protecting your on-line identity with proper passwords and practices. Or stopping phishing attacks in your email.
This is a good use of the brainpower of FReepers.
If you’re not using 2FA, you are less secure than you could be. My credit union has required it for literally 20 years. My brokerage accounts require using an authenticator browser extension or an authenticator fob. There is no credible argument that it’s impossible to secure an online account sufficiently to protect ONE vote.
I have no doubt the Chinese, or you and anyone else willing to pay the price, have my security clearance application. Nothing on it would give you the slightest advantage in hacking into my online accounts, unless you are willing to get on the phone and attempt social engineering to hijack my account because you know my SSN and mother’s name. A hell of a lot of work for ONE vote, and I would be instantly notified by email of any changes to my account, so you would not get far my friend.
We have mastered the procedures for doing secure business online, and I consider this an “expert” opinion because I’ve been doing online business daily for 20 years without incident.
I thought of that, but was too lazy to explain my work around on that.
What if *one* "sample ballot" was printed for every voter, and each ballot is one of 10-100 or more *different* potential combinations of ballots--the only difference being random spacing/location of the fill-in circles/punches on the voters' particular ballot? The voter's particular combination is given to them after they leave the booth, on a sheet of paper, and their ballot has a specific "voter id" number assigned to it.
When the count is over, the rolls are run again through the machine, and the voter gets mailed a printed punched-paper "receipt" with their designated random "voter id" number instead of their name on the receipt. They put the "receipt" on top of the sheet they are given on election day, and they should match up.
Yes, the fob is secure because it uses PKI and the private key cannot be stolen from the fob. Ewerything else you use, from passwords to questions to text messages to any kind of software can be compromised and under the right conditions compromized en masse. Not just one vote, millions of votes if 2FA is your voting "security"
You won't get notified by email either or if on the odd chance you do I'll make sure you get dozens of notifications so you will ignore the useful one (actually Google does that already when I use the same account on multiple laptops and phones).
If you really want a purely tech solution then hand each voter a PKI fob in person upon presentation of ID and credentials. I've written browser extensions, both PKCS #11 and Microsoft CSP. Software tokens are not secure, only hardware is secure. I've also written the server side java and client javaascript to use FIDO U2F to secure web accounts. FIDO U2F fobs are secure just like the PKI fobs (some fobs do both).
Two things: in case you missed that page in the dictionary, yes, I said page, that defines ‘infirmed’, or, ‘housebound’, these are terms the average yokel, like you or me, would not hear unless coming from your doctor, or the guy your doctor sends you to
Here are my infirmities: lower leg edema brought on by congestive heart failure. This means i have to keep my feet elevated and wrappings applied by a visiting nurse a couple times a week. I have stage 4 kidney disease brought on by diabetes, which means for 31/2 hours 3 times a week, I have to sit connected to a dialysis machine. I cannot walk the aisles of a big walmart without near exhaustion.
I vote by absentee ballot, just like my military brothers and sisters do, and as I did, when they are overseas!
It is not my intention to 'disenfranchise' anyone. Another Freeper suggested here a possible solution of:
4) Portable voting machines will be hand carried to voters that are infirm or who cannot vote in person.
This would work, though it would be necessary to have proper safeguards in place so you don't run into things such as someone voting for dozens of folk in a nursing home or something similar. 'Vote harvesting' is a real thing. Your identity should be validated in the same manner as would occur at a normal voting location, and your vote should be secured in a sealed, tamper-resistant box.
This early canvas should happen as close to the actual election date as possible, as it should be self-evident that all voters should have the same information available to them. This 'early voting' crap that goes on for weeks is bogus.
This should all be planned in advance. If you cannot get to a voting location, chances are, you know it ahead of time.
Ok...well i always have the right info for myself...never vote for a dumblecrat at any level.
Early or on Election Day, it won’t matter.
“I thought of that, but was too lazy to explain my work around on that.”
I didn’t understand that scheme, but if you give a voter any way to see how he voted after he’s gotten home, it’s not a secret ballot.
Actually, a voter being able to see how he voted when he’s gotten home is of no use because he doesn’t know whether or not the vote was properly counted.
The only solution I can think of is the vote counting process is done by more than one group of vote counters, and the counters are not from the same political party.
If the counts don’t agree the two groups go over the data again until the counts agree.
True. The biggest mistake many German-Jews had pre-Holocaust was saying, “Things are bad now, but they will get better.” Yes, but only after getting much, much worse.
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