Technology Approaches to Enhancing Election Security

Vanity | 12/14/2020 | Warthog

[Wonder Warthog]

Imagine:

Blank ballot paper pre-printed over the entire surface with “Q” codes in permanent inks not visible to the naked eye, and then provided to all states ONLY from the Federal Election Comission to state election offices.

States then use that paper to print the “human readable” ballot in permanent black ink.

Those ballots are then “read” by optical scanners also provided ONLY by the FEC and whose software source code and construction specs are publicly available to all citizens interested.

Those optical scanners then retain all scanned ballots in locked compartments, whose keys are also issued to state elections offices by the FEC......ONLY AFTER THE ELECTION.

[Clay Moore]

Vote by text? How many times do the people with a pile of obama phones get to vote?

[PallMal]

I heard that some countries tally the total number of votes cast right after the polls closed, and discloses this total to the public immediately.

Any votes "discovered" after the polls closed -- tough toenails, they get tossed.

[Brian Griffin]

The horses will be hopelessly over the hill sometime tomorrow.

With 30 million new Democratic voters, future US elections will be a mere formality.

[The Antiyuppie]

No technology needed at all. Technology creates more, not less, opportunity for fraud undetectable by the public.

Paper ballots. Election fraud punishable by death 30 days after conviction.

[camle]

you are 100% correct. he who writes the vote counting software controls the outcome. it is simple, and impossible to detect. the more technology we use, the more fraudulent the election can become. we are seeing this now, pencil checking a box next to the person’s name, drop into a box under supervision of both parties. photo id required AND dip your finger in ink. military folks voting overseas vote on site using the same criteria.
it is time the powers that be take concrete steps to make sure that this fiasco does not reccurr. thus far i have not heard any of this

[no-to-illegals]

How is the software for the optical scanner insured to read a ballot correctly ?

[poconopundit]

You may be right.  But also consider this: what is "technology"?  It's a technique or tool.  You're right that technology must be used correctly by humans with the right moral motives. And when tech is marshalled for good purposes, look at the marvels it can create. Smartphones could not exist today as personal devices without tremendous investment and human energy put into securing cellphones and stopping hundreds of thousands of criminals from breaking into our cell phones, stealing our identities, and emptying our bank accounts. The firewall to prevent this is not people alone -- it is also automated systems and technology operated by people at banks and telecoms.  To grow their wealth, the accomplish that goal, the owners and stakeholders of these firms are committed to maintaining security -- because the worse thing to be is an untrustworthy company surrounded by competitors with a solid reputation. That right there is the problem with government -- there's NO competition.  You have to live with the government you have.  And if both parties are corrupt, well, that's where America is today. Most of our governors and senators are in on the game of robbing from the public and selling out our workers' livelihood to China.  And so the only way to can defeat them is for We the People to be strong -- but we also need technology to help us -- fraud fighting technology, social media outrage to keep our governors in check, and as a last resort personal firearms -- another technology. The samurai were big believers in technology. That's why they built castles like Himeji that magnificently still stand today :- )

Himeji Castle (near Osaka)

[The Duke]

A perfect solution is not needed, only one that is “smarter than Democrats”. That should be easy enough.

Each ballot should contain an encrypted, unique serial number (actually an encrypted UUID) printed on it as a scannable 2D bar code. Once a vote is cast, no other votes should be allowed for that ID.

The voting machine itself should be able to be easily opened for inspection, and should verify a checksum of the operating system against a remotely-provided list of valid checksums before it can process ballots. New entries to that checksum list should require approval of all political parties involved in the election.

BONUS: Each ballot should also have printed, above the ballot, 5 American civics/history questions randomly drawn from a poll of thousands of questions. If more than one of these questions is answered incorrectly (e.g. “What was the first name of George Washington’s wife?”) then the vote should be silently ignored.

Finally, legislation should be passed that requires a minimum of 10 years imprisonment for all instances of a person particiating in the corruption or disruption of the US voting process (non-technical, but the most important measure of all).

[CodeToad]

I don’t think you understand what just happened.

The communist party stood there and filled in ballots then counted them right in front our faces and not a single court, AG, or DA did anything about it.

Rules? Regulations? Laws? Big freaking deal. Make more of them but nothing changes if outright unlawful conduct is not prosecuted or stopped in any way.

[DeFault User]

Check out this video. Fraud can be detected easily.

https://generaldispatch.whatfinger.com/breaking-technology-expert-can-determine-if-ballots-are-legitimate-or-fake-in-seconds-9this-guy-invested-things-you-use-daily-holy-cow-nice/

[BiglyCommentary]

State casino control boards have long solved this problem. Solution is straight forward.

The Nevada and New Jersey Gaming Commissions require the gaming manufactures to provide the source code, build environment, and final binary result (firmware running in the machine) to them of ANY MACHINE that runs in a casino.

This came about after several instances of the machine manufacturers software developers sneaking in back door jackpot triggering code.

The tech types at the gaming commissions examine the source for “bad code” (click the upper button 3 times within 2 seconds, lower button 6 times in 2 seconds, pull slot arm down half way, trigger jackpot...), then compile the code and the checksum MUST MATCH what is in the machine, else it DOES NOT GET USED, CAN’T BE CERTIFIED for use.

Same thing needs to be done for voting machines. And of course that also means absolutely no outside connectivity of any type.

Some of the commentary here on about the Dominion source code is foolish. You can’t checksum the source code since any change in the build environment could result in a different binary result, so no way to know if one version of source code produced the binary that will be executing.

[bert]

See...... you were gullibly taken in by the misdirection.

The votes that come in are irrelevant.

Once received and entered a total for the corrupt controlling candidate number is increased by a predetermined, preprogrammed factor. So,ifthe votes cast by a citizen using multiple
phones, it doesn.t matter. The crook prevails even though the multiple votes were removed

[Wonder Warthog]

""States then use that paper to print an extra 100k the “human readable” ballots in permanent black ink.""

States would only be issued blank ballots equaling the number of registered voters.

[Wonder Warthog]

"No technology needed at all. Technology creates more, not less, opportunity for fraud undetectable by the public."

This approach remedies most of those involved.

[Wonder Warthog]

"How is the software for the optical scanner insured to read a ballot correctly ?"

Because both the source code and prototypes will have been tested before use. With the source code and hardware schematics and components posted, it can be far more closely checked that the current (bad) tech.

[Wonder Warthog]

Which is what triggered the chain of thought behind the approach I am suggesting.

[Wonder Warthog]

All of which is why both software and hardware would be developed and provided solelyy by the FEC AND openly available for examination by anyone.

[poconopundit]

I don’t disagreed with you about hand verification of ballots. But have you examined the technology in question? What do you think of it? I am not dismissing it out of hand. It sounds like it could rapidly evaluate how many ballots were authentic mailed in ballots and how many were fake.