Will We Ever Know The Truth About The Election? Still Hiding Everything...

[HoosierLife]

One wonders what the real numbers are if they had to use a D+14 sample for this poll ...

Does that mean there were 14% more democrats polled?

 

[HoosierLife]

A lawyer is now asking anyone living in AZ and was given a sharpie to vote with to contact him, seems he is filing a lawsuit of some kind.

I remember hearing about that when it was originally happening.

 

[jamil]

Does that mean there were 14% more democrats polled?

My understanding is that it's a weighting that reflects what they believe the ratio of political affiliation is in the given scope of the poll, so yeah. It's been pretty much around D+7 for awhile so D+14 sounds absurd.

But on the other hand, polling has shown that Republicans have lost favor of late. Partly due to 1/6, but I'd say mostly due to the way the press has covered it.

Oh. And if the poll is D+14, I'd say it says Joe ain't doing so hot.

 

[BugI02]

Okay, I don't know a whole lot about "sharpiegate". So someone up on this partiular conspiracy needs to walk me through it. Okay so my understanding of the controversy is that they started handing out sharpies for people to use to mark their ballots, instead of pens, and that caused machines to cancel their votes.

So my question is, did they only hand out sharpies to republican voters, and handed out pens to democrat voters? Seems like if they handed out sharpies to everyone, and if sharpies cause the machines to cancel their votes, how is that voter fraud? I would think it would have the same effect on all votes regardless. And, is there actual evidence that the machines actually gave a ****? Black is black, isn't it?

They only handed out sharpies for voting on Election Day itself, when data from previous elections showed Republican voters were more likely to vote. It seems if they thought they could contaminate 1.2 or 1.3 Republican votes for every lost Democratic vote they were willing to make that trade; and as Ingomike said, in some locations uncertainty in the readability of a ballot would allow poll workers to 'clarify' what they believed the ballot indicated was the voter's intent

 

[BugI02]

I think there's a case for fraud, if they were handing out sharpies, knowing that they'd get to adjudicated them, and then the audit revealed that a large portion of those ballots were manually adjudicated to favor Biden, after the sharpies were handed out.

There are sworn affidavits from poll workers that every day prior to Election Day, they were told again and again to only give out ball point pens as sharpies would bleed through, so it made them sit up and take notice when on Election Day only they were given sharpies to hand out

 

[DoggyDaddy]

There are sworn affidavits from poll workers that every day prior to Election Day, they were told again and again to only give out ball point pens as sharpies would bleed through, so it made them sit up and take notice when on Election Day only they were given sharpies to hand out

Pretty sure that Sharpies are more expensive than Bic ballpoint pens, so there is no doubt that this was done on purpose. They had to go out of their way to provide Sharpies when a simple Bic pen would've been more economical (not to mention being the recommended/approved writing utensil).

 

[jamil]

There are sworn affidavits from poll workers that every day prior to Election Day, they were told again and again to only give out ball point pens as sharpies would bleed through, so it made them sit up and take notice when on Election Day only they were given sharpies to hand out

Shouldn’t the audit corroborate it then?

 

[BugI02]

It would be most likely that the audit would discover either that votes for Trump were counted as votes for Biden (due to manual 'disambiguation'), or less likely that they were not counted at all

I don't see it corroborating anything besides massive fraud

 

[jamil]

It would be most likely that the audit would discover either that votes for Trump were counted as votes for Biden (due to manual 'disambiguation'), or less likely that they were not counted at all

I don't see it corroborating anything besides massive fraud

That’s the point. If they used the sharpies to cheat, the audit should confirm it.

 

[BugI02]

It could prove aggregate, statistical fraud; but it won't be granular enough to prove Voter A voted for Trump but his sharpie marked ballot bled through and when manually processed Voter A's vote was fraudulently tabulated as a vote for Biden

Statistical fraud will always be less compelling, allowing argument about assumptions made in arriving at the aggregate numbers and leaving room for 'honest mistake' defenses. The best case to present would be a number of cases of the 'Voter A' type sufficient to change the outcome as well as offering the potential to catch perpetrators red handed and prosecute them. I don't believe any state allows that level of granularity (for very good reason)

It might be time to implement protocols that would allow such drilling down, with the voter's permission (perhaps public key encryption of a ballot image and info verification that individual voters could decide to download to a stick at the completion of voting or that would be archived at several secure locations)

 

[rhamersley]

The whole sharpie thing sounds like the old "#2 pencil on the SAT" thing from (way back in) my time...

 

[jamil]

It could prove aggregate, statistical fraud; but it won't be granular enough to prove Voter A voted for Trump but his sharpie marked ballot bled through and when manually processed Voter A's vote was fraudulently tabulated as a vote for Biden

Statistical fraud will always be less compelling, allowing argument about assumptions made in arriving at the aggregate numbers and leaving room for 'honest mistake' defenses. The best case to present would be a number of cases of the 'Voter A' type sufficient to change the outcome as well as offering the potential to catch perpetrators red handed and prosecute them. I don't believe any state allows that level of granularity (for very good reason)

It might be time to implement protocols that would allow such drilling down, with the voter's permission (perhaps public key encryption of a ballot image and info verification that individual voters could decide to download to a stick at the completion of voting or that would be archived at several secure locations)

I think if we're talking about preventing such things in the future, method of voting has to be way up there. Marking ballots by hand is problematic. I liked the way Indiana did it in my county back in 2016. You select your choices on a touch screen. When done it printed your ballot. On the ballot it had your choices printed in machine readable print which was also human readable. So you could verify the choices registered on your ballot before putting it through the counter machine. And then you put it through the counter yourself. I think that process is more reliable.

It's problematic for some techphobes though. My mother-in-law who is elderly was very frustrated with the touch screen.

 

[BugI02]

I think if we're talking about preventing such things in the future, method of voting has to be way up there. Marking ballots by hand is problematic. I liked the way Indiana did it in my county back in 2016. You select your choices on a touch screen. When done it printed your ballot. On the ballot it had your choices printed in machine readable print which was also human readable. So you could verify the choices registered on your ballot before putting it through the counter machine. And then you put it through the counter yourself. I think that process is more reliable.

It's problematic for some techphobes though. My mother-in-law who is elderly was very frustrated with the touch screen.

I still see a problem with a 'counter machine' and no user-retainable copy of one's ballot. The machine can be programmed to change a certain percentage of votes randomly and few would be the wiser; and just as is true now, without Voter A having a reference copy of his ballot and the ability to check it against how the system recorded his specific vote it will remain difficult to unambiguously prove fraud

 

[rugertoter]

No, we will never know the truth of the election...anymore than what for sure happened with JFK.

 

[indyartisan]

No, we will never know the truth of the election...anymore than what for sure happened with JFK.

I still have faith that we are going to find out about both.

 

[bwframe]

 

[jamil]

I still see a problem with a 'counter machine' and no user-retainable copy of one's ballot. The machine can be programmed to change a certain percentage of votes randomly and few would be the wiser; and just as is true now, without Voter A having a reference copy of his ballot and the ability to check it against how the system recorded his specific vote it will remain difficult to unambiguously prove fraud

I think one thing we can agree on is that when election officials are willing to ignore laws and protocols, no voting system has high integrity. I don't really see the practicality of your receipt. How would individuals be able to independently verify their own vote in a scaled system? The paper ballots with the machine/human readable print are still retained and auditable.

Another issue with receipts is that if you can prove how you voted, it opens up another vector of fraud, where one can be paid for proof of vote. Secret ballot is a feature of a high integrity election, not a bug. Not only does the receipt enable being paid for votes, it also can subject someone to being threatened to vote a certain way. I'd rather keep ballots secret.

Incidentally, several years ago INGO's big L Libertarians complained because they couldn't take ballot selfies (presumably to signal their big L purity). Maybe you recall, but I don't remember if that was before you joined or after. Not the same thing as a receipt, but along the same lines in terms of having the ability to prove how one voted. Indiana had passed a law making it ballot selfies a felony (which a judge later issued an injunction against). We had a fairly long argument about the virtues/perils of that.

Getting back to election officials ignoring laws and protocols, the only way to get counting machines deployed with modified code is if election officials ignore laws and protocols. And if that's the case, you're ****ed no matter what. It takes that level of involvement to pull something like that off.

Maybe a law that forbids proprietary code on any computer system involved in tallying or casting votes would work. All such machines need to run open-source code and have a verifiable checksum system for verifying compiled executables on demand. Laws should impose voting system transparency. Any attempts to subvert that transparency should be a giant red flag.

 

[jwamplerusa]

I think one thing we can agree on is that when election officials are willing to ignore laws and protocols, no voting system has high integrity. I don't really see the practicality of your receipt. How would individuals be able to independently verify their own vote in a scaled system? The paper ballots with the machine/human readable print are still retained and auditable.

Another issue with receipts is that if you can prove how you voted, it opens up another vector of fraud, where one can be paid for proof of vote. Secret ballot is a feature of a high integrity election, not a bug. Not only does the receipt enable being paid for votes, it also can subject someone to being threatened to vote a certain way. I'd rather keep ballots secret.

Incidentally, several years ago INGO's big L Libertarians complained because they couldn't take ballot selfies (presumably to signal their big L purity). Maybe you recall, but I don't remember if that was before you joined or after. Not the same thing as a receipt, but along the same lines in terms of having the ability to prove how one voted. Indiana had passed a law making it ballot selfies a felony (which a judge later issued an injunction against). We had a fairly long argument about the virtues/perils of that.

Getting back to election officials ignoring laws and protocols, the only way to get counting machines deployed with modified code is if election officials ignore laws and protocols. And if that's the case, you're ****ed no matter what. It takes that level of involvement to pull something like that off.

Maybe a law that forbids proprietary code on any computer system involved in tallying or casting votes would work. All such machines need to run open-source code and have a verifiable checksum system for verifying compiled executables on demand. Laws should impose voting system transparency. Any attempts to subvert that transparency should be a giant red flag.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
THIS!!!!!!

closed source proprietary voting machines are a BAD idea.

 

[BugI02]

I think one thing we can agree on is that when election officials are willing to ignore laws and protocols, no voting system has high integrity. I don't really see the practicality of your receipt. How would individuals be able to independently verify their own vote in a scaled system? The paper ballots with the machine/human readable print are still retained and auditable.

I still don't think any counting machinery can be made secure. If I program a system to ignore every nth vote for Trump entirely in tabulation there will not be a checksum mismatch. I had envisioned more of a user verifiable vote image, where information uniquely recorded on your voting receipt could be used as part of a public key encryption system to unlock what information the system recorded for your unique vote. That way, if it did not record your vote at all then you would detect fraud or if it recorded your vote for races of concern erroneously the same would be true

I'm not sure how much of a problem using the information to be paid for voting a certain way would genuinely be, or that it would be worse than it could be now. Do you think that people that were willing to be paid to vote for Biden really would just lie and then vote for Trump? Sounds like the 80 year old woman of color who doesn't drive and has no other form of picture ID problem. You don't distort the entire system to accommodate a tiny fraction of it, likewise you don't limit improvements to a system in order to accommodate what might be a minuscule problem. I don't think you would be compromising secret ballot as the public key set up would require the co-operation of the voter. If you're worried about government knowing how you voted, with the human/machine readable copy in use now what is to stop them. I think you would need a distributed system with hundreds if not thousands of random people checking the recorded results against how they actually voted to make fraud difficult enough to discourage it. Even with the human/machine readable ballot, how would you know the machine language encodes for the same vote the human legible language is showing you?

 

[jamil]

I still don't think any counting machinery can be made secure. If I program a system to ignore every nth vote for Trump entirely in tabulation there will not be a checksum mismatch. I had envisioned more of a user verifiable vote image, where information uniquely recorded on your voting receipt could be used as part of a public key encryption system to unlock what information the system recorded for your unique vote. That way, if it did not record your vote at all then you would detect fraud or if it recorded your vote for races of concern erroneously the same would be true

I'm not sure how much of a problem using the information to be paid for voting a certain way would genuinely be, or that it would be worse than it could be now. Do you think that people that were willing to be paid to vote for Biden really would just lie and then vote for Trump? Sounds like the 80 year old woman of color who doesn't drive and has no other form of picture ID problem. You don't distort the entire system to accommodate a tiny fraction of it, likewise you don't limit improvements to a system in order to accommodate what might be a minuscule problem. I don't think you would be compromising secret ballot as the public key set up would require the co-operation of the voter. If you're worried about government knowing how you voted, with the human/machine readable copy in use now what is to stop them. I think you would need a distributed system with hundreds if not thousands of random people checking the recorded results against how they actually voted to make fraud difficult enough to discourage it. Even with the human/machine readable ballot, how would you know the machine language encodes for the same vote the human legible language is showing you?

If you program a system to ignore every nth vote for Trump and it's open source code, software engineers will be able to find that in the code. Okay so maybe you take the open source code, modify it to ignore every nth vote for Trump, and then deploy that to the counting system. Well, the checksum of that compiled modified code won't match the checksum of the compiled open source code.

I'm trying to understand the vote image. So how and when would this be used? Is it something that just gives the voter a warm fuzzy that his or her vote was recorded as intended? And why could that not be manipulated as well? As I think through what I think you're saying, I'm trying to think about how I might implement it. And I think I don't understand exactly what you're proposing. So walk me through it.

The idea of secret ballots to prevent the ability to prove who they voted for isn't new.

Secrecy of the Ballot and Ballot Selfies

The issue of “ballot selfies” has been a hot one in legislatures. Should voters be able to photograph their ballots and post them on social media—or not?

www.ncsl.org

The issue of ballot selfies was kinda new. But a fad a few years ago. I haven't heard anything more of ballot selfies after 2014. But that article does explain the reasoning around secret ballots, an idea that's been around for a long time.

I'm not any more worried about the government knowing how I voted than I would be if I marked a ballot with a pen. In that scenario, you take a ballot, go to some private station, mark your ballot choices, and then walk the paper ballot over to a bin and put it in the bin. At some point they feed the ballots through a counting machine of some kind.

With the machine/human readable ballots, the voting machine printed out the ballot after I was finished. I took the ballot over to a station that had a person who instructed me to feed it through the counter. I was given an envelope to put the ballot in, and then was instructed to put through a slot on a bin with a paddle lock on it. None of the election workers ever touched my ballot during the whole process. And when I left my ballot was locked in the bin.

The weak link in that system is the integrity of the counting system as you pointed out. I'm saying that the software driver for the counting machine should be open source, and the compiled code should have a strong checksum that ensures minimal collisions so that if the executable running the counter is even slightly different from the compiled open source standard, then that's a red flag.