NonScienceNonsense | CTVotersCount.org

See a problem, propose a solution you want that might make the problem worse

There were long lines for Election Day Registration (EDR) and it took a whole 10 hours to count enough votes to determine the Governor in Connecticut. Our EDR is a problem, but waiting ten hours for result is just a concern hyped up by a overly impatient press and used as a opportunity by advocates to promote early voting as a solution.

As of this time the states of California, Colorado, Florida, and Georgia are still counting votes. They all have mail-in early voting. California has a Friday deadline to receive mail-in ballots postmarked by election day and counts them for weeks after election day. As of Friday all those other states were still counting.

There real are problems and there are reasonable solutions.

An example is this article in the CTPost: Changes to Connecticut’s voting laws could streamline elections<read>

It took nearly 10 hours after the polls closed for Connecticut voters to learn who won the hard-fought race for governor, and by the time Ned Lamont was named the next governor, voters were beginning a new day.

It’s not the first time election results have been delayed — Connecticut’s cities have developed a reputation for holding up the process — but with a broader majority in the state Legislature, Secretary of the State Denise Merrill hopes changes in the state’s voting laws could be on the horizon.

Merrill plans to again propose a change to allow early voting, as well as create no-excuses absentee voting. She also plans to propose automatic registration for 16-year-olds, who could be registered when they visit the state Department of Motor Vehicles for their learners permits.

“There’s more optimism for passing early voting,” said Gabe Rosenberg, a spokesman for Merrill’s office. “I think that there’s a real hunger for early voting. So many people want to vote early, especially when they see how many people in other states do it.”

Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia allow early voting in person, which cuts down lines on Election Day, especially in highly populated cities, and helps results come in faster. A record 36 million people across the nation voted ahead of Election Day.

That last statement is blatantly untrue. As of this time the states of California, Colorado, Florida, and Georgia are still counting votes. They all have mail-in early voting. California has a Friday deadline to receive mail-in ballots postmarked by election day and counts them for weeks after election day. As of Friday all those other states were still counting.

It seems that whenever there is an apparent problem, the Connecticut response is to claim that the cure is whatever you have been proposing all along. There real are problems and there are reasonable solutions:

EDR is a problem caused by a too restrictive process unique to Connecticut. And by the Secretary of the State unilaterally declaring that persons in line at 8:00pm for EDR have no right to an opportunity to register and vote. <see our coverage and opinions>

Yes, New Haven and many towns in Connecticut should spend more on staffing polling places and EDR for these large elections.

However, New Haven should be applauded for taking the necessary time to count votes by hand that could not be counted by machine. Perhaps they should even have given their pollworkers more time to rest and resume counting, extending the time to get accurate results to maybe 24 hours.

Compare New Haven 2018 to Bridgeport in 2010 where, under pressure, they rushed hand counting and missed many votes in a somewhat comparable emergency. Those votes were counted by the CTPost and the Citizen Audit – yet were never counted or recognized by the Official system. <read>

the Myth of “Secure” Blockchain Voting

From David Jefferson at Verified Voting: Verified Voting Blog: The Myth of “Secure” Blockchain Voting <read>

Internet voting has been studied by computer security researchers for over twenty years. Cyber security experts universally agree that no technology, including blockchains, can adequately secure an online public election. Elections have unique security and privacy requirements fundamentally different from and much more stringent than those in other applications, such as e-commerce. They are uniquely vulnerable because anyone on Earth can attack them, and a successful cyberattack might go completely undetected, resulting in the wrong people elected with no evidence that anything was amiss….

Election security is a matter of national security. Blockchains, despite all the hype surrounding them, offer no defense against any of these well-known threats to which all online elections are vulnerable.

From David Jefferson at Verified Voting: Verified Voting Blog: The Myth of “Secure” Blockchain Voting <read>

Several startup companies have recently begun to promote Internet voting systems, but with a new twist – using a blockchain as the container for voted ballots transmitted over the Internet from the voter’s private device. Blockchains are a relatively new system category a little akin to a distributed database. Proponents of blockchain voting promote it as a revolutionary innovation providing strong security guarantees that enable truly secure online elections. Unfortunately, these claims are false. Blockchains do not offer any real election security at all.

Internet voting has been studied by computer security researchers for over twenty years. Cyber security experts universally agree that no technology, including blockchains, can adequately secure an online public election. Elections have unique security and privacy requirements fundamentally different from and much more stringent than those in other applications, such as e-commerce. They are uniquely vulnerable because anyone on Earth can attack them, and a successful cyberattack might go completely undetected, resulting in the wrong people elected with no evidence that anything was amiss.

There are many foundational computer security problems that must be solved before we can safely conduct elections online, and we are not close to solving any of them. The use of blockchains does not even address these problems. Here are just a few:

No reliable voter identification: There is no foolproof way of determining exactly who is trying to vote remotely through the Internet. All known and proposed methods have grave weaknesses, and blockchains do not address the issue at all.

Malware: The voter’s device may be infected by a virus or counterfeit app that could change votes even before they are even transmitted, or it may silently discard the ballot, or send the voter’s name and vote choices to a third party, thereby enabling coercion, retaliation, vote buying and selling, or pre-counting of votes, all undetectably. Blockchains cannot address malware.

Denial of service attacks: A server can be overwhelmed with fake traffic from a botnet so that real ballots cannot get through. Blockchains as proposed for elections use multiple redundant servers, but they offer no additional protection against denial of service attacks beyond what is achievable with a conventional system having the same aggregate communication capacity.

Penetration attacks: No servers, including blockchain servers, are immune to remote penetration and surreptitious takeover by determined sophisticated attackers. Even though blockchains use multiple servers, if attackers can disable or gain control of more than 1/3 of them they can totally disrupt or control the outcome of the election.

Nonauditability: Online voting systems, including blockchain systems, do not allow for the kind of true, voter-verified paper ballot backup that is necessary for a meaningful recount, audit, or statistical spot check. Thus, the most powerful and common-sense tools we have for protection against cyberattack are unavailable.

Election security is a matter of national security. Blockchains, despite all the hype surrounding them, offer no defense against any of these well-known threats to which all online elections are vulnerable. National rivals like Russia have demonstrated a capacity and willingness to interfere with our electoral processes and would have no difficulty disrupting or undermining a blockchain election. In this era of ubiquitous cyber threats, it is reckless and irresponsible to introduce any kind of online voting in the U.S.

We emphasize that these are just a few of the problems. We especially note that any online voting system must be subject to a comprehensive, truly independent security review followed by sufficient open public testing. The current proposed system in West Virginia is touted publicly, yet its details and alleged security review are secret. Unlike Bitcoin that itself has proven vulnerable, the West Virginia system is apparently not open to the public to participate in holding the blockchain.

What we don’t understand seems all but impossible and fictional

Like you I don’t know a lot about brain surgery, flying a jet, or hacking a cell-phone. Off-hand I often think of all of those somewhere on a spectrum from taking years to learn, to almost impossible, fictional or magical. Yet the evidence is different. People learn brain surgery, perform it regularly and well. Just this week we saw a mechanic take-off and fly a jumbo jet, apparently with only some video game experience. Which brings me to my newest proverb:

What we don’t understand seems all but impossible and fictional.

But that is not true. Case in point, DEFCON.

What we don’t understand seems all but impossible and fictional.

But that is not true. Perhaps I know that because I was once an expert in one software product. In the 1970’s I was an expert in a product by IBM called IMS. It was relatively new and it had occasional problem. IBM gave customers access to its source code. I could occasionally diagnose and cure problems by studying the symptoms and speculating on the possible errors in the code that would cause them, suggesting fixes to IBM often fixing them myself when IBM refused to address them. Few, if any, know how I did it. I knew, it was years of education, interest, access to that code, combined with a job that offered me an opportunity to do good things for my employer. Others, not everyone, could have done the same thing with enough motivation and interest. Even when I don’t know how to do something, I can understand how others could. How many of you know how to build apps for an iPhone? Well thousands have learned how to do that. And those apps often steal our data and can do many things with our iPhone. Do you trust those apps? Do you trust your iPhone? I rely on mine, yet I know danger always lurks.

A could of weeks ago I spent some time with an election official. He was obviously smart and accomplished, with a wide-ranging prospective. Yet, near the end of our time together, another computer scientist and I were unable to convince him that voting scanners were in any danger because his elections office did pre-election testing, had election definition files encrypted from a vendor, had no scanner internet connectivity, and kept the devices secured. Those all are good practices, yet even altogether they are insufficient with proven vulnerabilities. When we ended that discussion, I could tell he thought I must be crazy as we agreed to disagree.

Anyone who knows computers and software understands the risks. Any who has read in detail about STUXNET understands such threats are real. Few really understand how much more real and easy are threats from insiders. Every one of those security measures can by broken by outsiders, yet are much more easily broken by a myriad of insiders.

Case in point DEFCON, last week where some threats from outsiders are close to “Child’s Play”, many take just a bit more maturity, experience, and knowledge: US voting systems: Full of holes, loaded with pop music, and ‘hacked’ by an 11-year-old <read>

The first day saw 39 kids, ranging in age from six to 17, try to crack into facsimiles of government election results websites, developed by former White House technology advisor Brian Markus. The sites had deliberate security holes for the youngsters to exploit – SQL injection flaws, and similar classic coding cockups.

All but four of the children managed to leverage the planted vulnerabilities within the allotted three-hour contest. Thus, it really is child’s play to commandeer a website that doesn’t follow basic secure programming practices nor keep up to date with patches – something that ought to focus the minds of people maintaining election information websites…

On the adult side, Premier/Diebold’s* TSX voting machines were found to be using SSL certificates that were five years old, and one person managed to, with physical access, upload a Linux operating system to the device and use it to play music, although that hack took a little more time than you’d get while voting.

Diebold’s Express Poll 5000 machines were even easier to crack, thanks to having an easily accessible memory card, which you could swap out while voting, containing supervisor passwords in plain text. An attacker could physically access and tamper with these cards, which also hold the unencoded personal records for all voters including the last four digits of their social security numbers, addresses, and driver’s license numbers.

Hackers thus found that by inserting specially programmed memory cards when no election official is looking, they could change voting tallies and voter registration information. And take a guess what the root password was? Yes, “Password” – again stored in plain text.

It’s Impossible to Know (how) Your Internet Vote Counted

As West Virginia plans, once again, to allow Internet voting for military voters, it is a good time to remind everyone that Internet voting (web page, web application, email, fax voting etc.) are all unsafe for democracy. And that block-chains cannot solve those problems.

One of those problems is that there is no guarantee that your laptop or smart phone has not been hacked in a way that alters your vote. Another challenge is the, so called, Secret Ballot.

West Virginia’s new scheme involves block-chains which entrepreneurs bent on profit claim will make Internet voting safe <read>, Several years ago Secretary of the State, Denise Merrill, held a Symposium on Internet Voting including three experts and the Secretary of State of West Virginia. The problem is that block-chains fail to solve the major unsolved problems remaining preventing trusted Internet voting.

One of those problems is that there is no guarantee that your laptop or smart phone has not been hacked in a way that alters your vote, such that what you see is not what is presented and recorded by the actual voting system. A hack could fool you, the voting system, or both.

How easy is it to hack your laptop or smart phone? Check out this recent story by a computer expert, Micah Lee: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked. I Spent Two Years Finding Out. <read> Do you understand the article? Lee, an expert, could not guarantee his own laptop was not hacked. Do you check your laptop to the level that Lee did for an experiment? Block-chains do not solve this.

Another challenge is the, so called, Secret Ballot – which requires that nobody can associate your vote with you. And that you cannot prove how you voted to anyone. There are Internet voting systems that let you check that your ballot was recorded properly, yet they cannot allow you to prove that to anyone else. Block-chains do not solve this.

Block-chains do provide assurance, that without a central authority, the vote sent to the voting system is not changed after it was recorded. Yet, that is unnecessary given that there is a central voting authority.

Do you need a blockchain? (Probably not!)

Blockchains are the latest technology to enter the mainstream. A blockchain powers and makes BitCoin possible. Many are treating blockchains as the next big breakthrough in technology. There is even a Blockchain Caucus in Congress.

Do not get your hopes up or bet your retirement savings on blockchains, they are definitely not the next Internet or Hula Hoop. Most importantly they will not transform elections or solve the challenges of online voting.

From IEEE Do You Need a Blockchain?

“I find myself debunking a blockchain voting effort about every few weeks,” says Josh Benaloh, the senior cryptographer at Microsoft Research. “It feels like a very good fit for voting, until you dig a couple millimeters below the surface.”

From IEEE Do You Need a Blockchain? <read>

Blockchain technology is, in essence, a novel way to manage data. As such, it competes with the data-management systems we already have. Relational databases…suffer from one major constraint: They put the task of storing and updating entries in the hands of one or a few entities, whom you have to trust won’t mess with the data or get hacked.

Blockchains, as an alternative, improve upon this architecture in one specific way—by removing the need for a trusted authority. With public blockchains…, a group of anonymous strangers (and their computers) can work together to store, curate, and secure a perpetually growing set of data without anyone having to trust anyone else. Because blockchains are replicated across a peer-to-peer network, the information they contain is very difficult to corrupt or extinguish.

This feature alone is enough to justify using a blockchain if the intended service is the kind that attracts censors…

However, removing the need for trust comes with limitations. Public blockchains are slower and less private than traditional databases, precisely because they have to coordinate the resources of multiple unaffiliated participants. To import data onto them, users often pay transaction fees in amounts that are constantly changing and therefore difficult to predict. And the long-term status of the software is unpredictable as well. Just as no one person or company manages the data on a public blockchain, no one entity updates the software. Rather, a whole community of developers contributes to the open-source code in a process that, in Bitcoin at least, lacks formal governance…

“If you don’t mind putting someone in charge of a database…then there’s no point using a blockchain, because [the blockchain] is just a more inefficient version of what you would otherwise do,” says Gideon Greenspan, the CEO of Coin Sciences, a company that builds technologies on top of both public and permissioned blockchains.

With this one rule, you can mow down quite a few blockchain fantasies. Online voting, for example, has inspired many well-intentioned blockchain developers, but it probably does not stand to gain much from the technology.

“I find myself debunking a blockchain voting effort about every few weeks,” says Josh Benaloh, the senior cryptographer at Microsoft Research. “It feels like a very good fit for voting, until you dig a couple millimeters below the surface.”

Benaloh points out that tallying votes on a blockchain doesn’t obviate the need for a central authority. Election officials will still take the role of creating ballots and authenticating voters. And if you trust them to do that, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t also record votes.

In my early days of advocacy, my congressman at a forum claimed that there would be no problems with electronic voting because of a magic new technology, “encryption”. It has not worked out that way. Like encryption, blockchains cannot protect against corruption of the computer itself – a laptop or smartphone used for online voting, an optical scanner or touch-screen voting machine, or the central server collecting and reporting results.

Nonscience Nonsense, insults our intelligence and the Granite State

Coverage by Alternet: The GOP Is Plowing Ahead with an Audacious Effort to Hijack the Vote and Rig Elections <read>

“Plowing” is apt. They are really piling it on. It could be worse. They may hide their emails, yet their agenda is transparent. Instead they could have a hidden agenda and succeed in reducing voting rights by a thousand cuts.

The Republican Party’s efforts to disrupt voting and thwart representative government was on full display this past week, when despite ridicule in the press, the GOP’s leading proponents of undermining voters and rigging elections were unbowed and forged ahead.

Coverage by Alternet: The GOP Is Plowing Ahead with an Audacious Effort to Hijack the Vote and Rig Elections <read>

The Republican Party’s efforts to disrupt voting and thwart representative government was on full display this past week, when despite ridicule in the press, the GOP’s leading proponents of undermining voters and rigging elections were unbowed and forged ahead.

First came Kris Kobach’s willfully incorrect—but headline-grabbing—accusation on Breitbart.com that more than 5,000 people illegally voted last fall in New Hampshire, delivering an Electoral College majority to Hillary Clinton and a U.S. senate seat to a Democrat. Kobach, an attorney whose anti-immigrant activism launched his career, is the Kansas secretary of state, a current gubernatorial candidate, and co-chair of President Trump’s Orwellian-titled “election integrity” commission. Kobach was caught mangling some Republican-produced data about New Hampshire college students who were perfectly legal voters to make his false claim about presumed Democrats voting illegally…

Trump’s election commission keeps getting clownish grades for its antics. This week’s New Hampshire field hearing invited only white men to testify, prompting ridicule. Members were caught communicating via private emails for official business—the same thing right-wingers went crazy about when Hillary Clinton did it. But Kobach didn’t backtrack on his voter fraud claims and von Spakovsky didn’t resign. No, they forged ahead with the panel’s real goal: to impede any citizen who doesn’t support the GOP from voting, even as fellow panel members publicly chastised them for it.

That brings us to this week’s most notorious witness who testified before the panel in a New Hampshire field hearing. In recent years, John Lott has made more of a name as a firearms fanatic than as a voting rights crusader. But he testified that anyone registering to vote should undergo the same background checks as are needed to get a firearms permit. That too, was ridiculed in the press as a false equivalency, because the legal requirements to be an eligible voter are not the same as for being a gun owner.

However, what nobody mentioned in news reports was perhaps the most salient detail about Lott’s proposal that would appeal to Republican vote suppressors. Gun licenses aren’t issued to people with criminal records, which if applied to voting, could greatly expand today’s current landscape of felon disenfranchisement.

Since our founding, we have a consistent history of opposing the appointments of Mr. von Spakovsky: Senator Dodd: Keep Bush’s Hans Off Our Elections

Beware the vendor/technologist offering a panacea

The general public, legislators, business people, and many technologists – all of us – often miss-estimate the potential and applicability of technologies. I remember in 2004, my congressman, told an audience we did not have to worry about electronic voting because of encryption.

The latest “new” technology is Blockchains, the technology that underlies BitCoin. It has some valuable applicability, yet I suspect not that much.

Using blockchains for voting has been considered by academics for decades, but only as a thought experiment. If you ask any cryptographer who knows the basics of cryptocurrencies (remember, blockchains were invented by cryptographers) if elections should be conducted using blockchains, they would laugh and say, “Hell no, that doesn’t even make sense!”

Spending much of my career being called upon to evaluate various new technology, my experience is that many get the applicability and time frames wrong. In the early eighties I was assigned to evaluate personal computer technologies. In general, corporations thought they were late to the table in applying personal computers. In retrospect most were pretty much on time with evaluating the technology. I was called into my boss’s office in the summer of 1985 – higher ups had decided to pursue artificial intelligence in a big way, they did not want to be late, I would lead the effort. Its over thirty years and over the last few years some really good applications have been implemented. Maybe we don’t notice so much, but voice simulation and recognition were initially though next to impossible. We are still hearing about AI breakthroughs coming soon. I am sure they have been and will continue. So it is and continues to be with various technologies such as database, data communications, email, voice mail, and the Internet.

The latest “new” technology is Blockchains, the technology that underlies BitCoin. It has some valuable applicability, yet I suspect not that much. There was a recent Newshour show, (15min in) a Blockchain Caucus in the U.S. House, this recent article that claims election panacea status Blockchain voting app puts democracy in the hands of the people <read>

BITCOIN changed the way we think about money forever. Now a type of political cryptocurrency wants to do the same for votes, reinventing how we participate in democracy.

Sovereign is being unveiled this week by Democracy Earth, a not-for-profit organisation in Palo Alto, California. It combines liquid democracy – which gives individuals more flexibility in how they use their votes – with blockchains, digital ledgers of transactions that keep cryptocurrencies like bitcoin secure. Sovereign’s developers hope it could signal the beginning of a democratic system that transcends national borders.

“There’s an intrinsic incompatibility between the internet and nation states,” says Santiago Siri, one of Democracy Earth’s co-founders. “If we’re going to think about digital governance, we need to think in a borderless, global way.”

The basic concept of liquid democracy is that voters can express their wishes on an issue directly or delegate their vote to someone else they think is better-placed to decide on their behalf. In turn, those delegates can also pass those votes upwards through the chain. Crucially, users can see how their delegate voted and reclaim their vote to use themselves.

This is not the first claim we have heard that blockchains can solve the ills of electronic voting. It won’t be the last. The antidote to going overboard is understanding the natural tendency to get it wrong, look for panaceas, and knowledge. Take this from our friends at Free and Fair: BLOCKCHAINS AND ELECTIONS <read>

As people and companies seek new ways to conduct elections that make better sense in our high tech world, several startups have proposed using blockchains, or even Bitcoin itself, to conduct elections.

Using Bitcoin (or a blockchain) as an election system is a bad idea that really doesn’t make sense. While blockchains can be useful in the election process, they are only appropriate for use in one small part of a larger election system…

Using blockchains for voting has been considered by academics for decades, but only as a thought experiment. If you ask any cryptographer who knows the basics of cryptocurrencies (remember, blockchains were invented by cryptographers) if elections should be conducted using blockchains, they would laugh and say, “Hell no, that doesn’t even make sense!” While blockchains are great at securely storing information, they do literally nothing to solve the many, many challenges that elections face, like the necessity for voter anonymity, the ability to determine that only eligible voters cast votes, that only legal votes are tabulated, and that ballots and ballot boxes cannot be manipulated by anyone, etc… and the list goes on. Blockchains do nothing to address any of these critical issues.

We do believe blockchains can be useful. But like many technologies they are not a panacea. There will be applicability, yet I would not expect much from a bitchain caucus and hope my representative spends his time elsewhere. Yet, I could always be wrong.

Surprising statements by Denise Merrill and Neil Jenkins

Denise Merrill, Secretary of the State and President of the National Association of Secretaries of State and Neil Jenkins from Homeland Security spoke on NPR on election integrity. <listen>

We disagree with both their similar statements:

.”Because our system is highly decentralized there’s no way to disrupt the voting process in any large-scale meaningful way through cyber attacks because there’s no national system to attack,” [Merrill] said Tuesday at a hearing before the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on the impact of the critical infrastructure designation.

Jenkins was quoted as saying “having thousands of elections offices each with their own systems making hacking elections nearly impossible”

Denise Merrill, Secretary of the State and President of the National Association of Secretaries of State and Neil Jenkins from Homeland Security spoke on NPR on election integrity. <listen>

We disagree with both their similar statements:

.”Because our system is highly decentralized there’s no way to disrupt the voting process in any large-scale meaningful way through cyber attacks because there’s no national system to attack,” [Merrill] said Tuesday at a hearing before the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on the impact of the critical infrastructure designation.

Jenkins was quoted as saying “having thousands of elections offices each with their own systems making hacking elections nearly impossible”

Others may wish to believe differently, but based on science, recent history, and common sense, we point out:

Secretary/President Merrill is almost correct when she says “Because our system is highly decentralized there’s no way to disrupt the voting process in any large-scale meaningful way through cyber attacks because there’s no national system to attack,” However, it is possible to attack Federal elections in a “meaningful’ way, especially a non-cyber way, in that a few thousand votes could sway a state’s electoral votes, senator, or representatives. That may or not be large-scale, but it is meaningful. Put a few of states together and it could change the apparent President and the balance in the Senate and House. In 2016 attacks in three states, PA, MI, and WI, could have done the job. In 2000, FL, and 2004, OH, just one state could have changed the result.
Elections are not as decentralized as the Secretary and Jenkins imply. It is inaccurate to say that thousands of jurisdictions have their own systems: I.e. all of Connecticut’s scanners are programmed and maintained by a single out-of-state vendor. That same vendor does the same for most of New England. Nationwide some jurisdictions are very large in many states such as LA County in CA, Cuyahoga County OH, or several FL counties. Some cities are rather large. In this past election there were major errors in Detroit. Philadelphia all votes are “counted” on unauditable touch screen machines.
A single entity is now responsible for the non-random auditing of all of Connecticut’s memory cards, reporting on our post-election election audits, and programming and supervising the software dependent machines now doing our electronic post-election “audit”.
Connecticut’s new voting machines for those with disabilities are programmed by another single entity, not tested in a meaningful end-to-end way, and are now used in most municipalities to test the optical scanners in a way that reduces the value of the pre-election tests. (Rather than an actual test of the interface, a canned set of ballots is printed by the machine. Those ballots produce huge black squares rather than filled in bubbles. When they are used to test the scanners it does not test that the scanners actually detect bubbles at the correct coordinates.)

These do not meet my definition of decentralized (or independent). I am not necessarily arguing for more centralization. I am arguing for more skepticism, more vigilance, more awareness, more transparency, and less obfuscation.

We and officials cannot prove negatives, that there were no cyber-attacks; that there were no conventional attacks; that there were no significant errors in the results reported.

Officials have not proven that the election results were accurate enough to support the . With paper ballots uniformly required, with effective post-election audits, and process audits they would be able to prove it.

*****Update 4/15/2017

Alex Halderman agrees <read>

Halderman said that most people think that the United States’ voting machines are secure because they are different in each county and they aren’t connected to the Internet. “In fact, many of these things break down,” said Halderman.

Halderman said an attacker can select the machines that are the most vulnerable or attack the third-party vendors that provide the memory cards for each machine. By using this method, an attacker could have altered the votes in 75 percent of Michigan counties, according to Halderman. He said that although he thinks that no states carried out sufficient forensics to determine whether their voting machines were hacked, he does not believe that those votes were manipulated.

Trick n Tweet: The Age of the Unsound Bite

I was going to write a post discussing the allegations of “widespread illegal immigrant voter fraud”. Yet, voter fraud is not the problem; Russian hacking is not the problem; Immigrants are not the problem; How many attended the inauguration is not the issue.

The problem is that, like Three Card Monte, the controversy takes our our attention off the real issues.

I was going to write a post discussing the allegations of “widespread illegal immigrant voter fraud” which have been widely debunked e.g. <here> <here> <here>. (Basically there is no proof, no anecdotal evidence, and every credible investigation has come up empty looking significant outsider fraud, other than absentee voting fraud). And maybe also cover the lack of evidence for Russian hacking of our election <here>.

Yet, voter fraud is not the problem; Russian hacking is not the problem; Immigrants are not the problem; How many attended the inauguration is not the issue.

The problem is that, like Three Card Monte, the controversy takes our our attention off the real issues, takes our attention off actual analysis, and takes our attention off policies actually being implemented. We should be concerned that congress is baring the OMB from analyzing the financial impact of ending or replacing Obamacare; Concerned that education has been altered, science is being suppressed, and will be altered without expertise, analysis, and debate. Concerned that defense spending is out of control, wasteful, ineffective, and unaccounted, no matter ones views on foreign policy. Concerned as Naomi Kline is that we may be heading steadily toward Disaster Capitalism.

The problems for voting are the real risks of our vulnerable voting systems; the risks from insider manipulation; the disaster that is our voter registration systems; the inequality in our state by state voting systems; and the lack of actual evidence that our elections were correctly or incorrectly decided. And ignoring the low costs of actually strengthening our systems and preforming effective audits to demonstrate or refute the reported results.

Another Annotation: Don’t stop being concerned about election integrity.

Lately the news is filled with Donald Trump saying the election is rigged and with election officials and others saying that is impossible. We continue to disagree with both. As we have said:

The truth is that there is no more or less risk to elections this year than in the recent past. The bad news is that the risks of election skullduggery are significant and do not come only from one adversary.

So, lets annotate a recent Op-Ed in the Hartford Courant: Nothing Rigged About American Elections

Lately the news is filled with Donald Trump saying the election is rigged and with election officials and others saying that is impossible. We continue to disagree with both. As we have said: (And we and others have said again, again, and again more this year,)

The truth is that there is no more or less risk to elections this year than in the recent past. The bad news is that the risks of election skullduggery are significant and do not come only from one adversary. A report from the Institute for Critical Infrastructure technology says it all: “Hacking Elections is Easy!” The report discusses how our election infrastructure, from voting machines to registration and reporting systems, are all at risk.

In Connecticut, like most states, a disruption in our centralized voter registration system on Election Day or its compromise before voter lists are printed, would disrupt an election. In many municipalities, voted ballots are easily accessible to multiple single individuals, “protected” only by all but useless tamper-evident seals. Partisans run our elections from top to bottom. Most are of high integrity, yet there is high motivation for manipulation.

We can do much better in the long run, if the actual risks are not forgotten after November.

So, lets annotate a recent Op-Ed in the Hartford Courant

Nothing Rigged About American Elections

By SCOTT BATES

Amid the rubble of war, a woman stood against a cold and bitter wind. I asked her why she stood patiently waiting in a line with hundreds of her neighbors. “I have waited 90 years to cast my vote,” she said with a smile. “I can wait just a little longer.”

In the autumn of 2001, I had the privilege to be with this woman and thousands of others for the first parliamentary elections in war torn Kosovo. For decades, the people of this east European land were ruled by kings and dictators, and occupied by Nazis and Communists. But at the dawn of a new century, with American help, they emerged from the shadow of genocidal war and put their faith in a future decided by free and fair elections.

In the past quarter century, I have worked alongside people in more than a dozen countries on four continents to help advance the democratic process by holding free and fair elections. Here at home, I

worked on a team that called on the U.S. Justice Department to push back against voter intimidation against African-Americans in east Texas. As a member of the National Association of Secretaries of State,

I stood with Republican and Democratic election officials to ensure that the integrity of our electoral system is respected and protected.

[There are, of course, deserved respect and blind faith. One can work for either or both.]

That’s why I’ve taken claims that our election system is “rigged” very seriously. Once faith in the integrity of the electoral system is undermined, the legitimacy of government is called into question. Democracy itself cannot long endure in such an environment.
[If faith in the integrity of the electoral system is undermined, then we should use facts and reason to determine if faith is justified, or if the system needs attention.]

Fortunately, there are some internationally accepted guidelines that help us determine if an electoral system is rigged.

First, there needs to be a legal framework that specifies the time, place and manner of holding elections. We’ve got that—it’s in the Constitution along with 50 state constitutions and related local regulations.

Second, there should be universal and equal suffrage and nondiscrimination when it comes to who canvote. This has not always been the case in the United States. It could be said that elections in which African-Americans and women were denied the vote in the past were rigged, but fortunately that is no longer the case.

[Unfortunately, our 50-state system is not uniform and in many states barriers are in-place to make it easier or more difficult for particular classes of citizens to vote.]

Third, electoral management bodies should be formed that can hold and monitor the conduct of elections. In the United States, each of the 50 states separately controls conduct of the electoral processthrough their respective offices of the secretary of state. Today, the majority of these officers are, infact, Republicans. All of these offices are staffed with career professionals. At the local level, tens of thousands of municipalities across the United States have town or city clerks or registrars of voters who administer elections and count ballots.

[This are not necessarily an exhaustive list of requirements. Also often the devil is in the details. There is no guarantee that each one of these individuals is honest and unbiased. We all remember Ken Blackwell and Katherine Harris. We note that Government finances are under the control of individuals in every state, county and town, yet that does not guarantee the money is all accounted for.] [PS: Those officials do not, in general, count the ballots. It is left to pollworkers and the vast majority of ballots are not counted by people but by machines that those people do not fully understand or control.]

Fourth, provision should be made for election observers to be present during the casting of ballots, as well as being present during tabulation of the ballots. These duties are carried out by hundreds of

thousands of our fellow Americans at polling sites across the country. Thank them when you see them this Nov. 8.

[I am one of them and appreciate thanks. Here in Connecticut no observers are allowed – yet with machine counting there is not much to observers and when votes are counted by hand, observers are allowed to watch from quite a distance.]

Working in places like Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, I have seen men and women put their lives on the line to organize and participate in elections. They did it because they believed democracy offered them a way forward. They saw it as a flawed system, but one with more hope than the one from which they emerged.

[Many of them would be happy to be here. But the question is, do we have a flawed system and hope for improvement or unjustified blind faith?]

Those who denigrate our democracy with groundless claims not

only insult the thousands of officials and hundreds of thousands of poll workers who make the system work, they risk undermining the faith that millions across the globe have placed in democracy as the best system to advance equality of opportunity and protect the rights of the individual and the dignity of all.

[When one disagrees with our foreign policy, one is accused of insulting the troops and veterans. Here questioning our election system is diffused as insulting pollworkers. If one is to have faith in Democracy, it must be fully realized and open to improvement and questioning.]

By any measure, America’s electoral system is a wonder to behold, for on this Election Day, one of the most diverse populations on the planet will show the world—once again—that free people can govern themselves.
[Apparently not as Obama said four years ago “We can fix this.”]

Scott Bates of Stonington is an adjunct senior fellow at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I., the former Secretary of the Commonwealth of Virginia and has worked on U.S.-funded democracy assistance missions in over a dozen countries.

[Yes Virginia, which until recently used widely viewed as the most notorious voting system system in use, the WinVote. <read>. The WinVote probably did happen after Bate’s service as Secretary of State in the mid 90’s <bio>]