Of course it will be hacked. I find it hilarious that people think that our political parties have some type of moral code they actually use to play by the "rules", whatever nonexistent rules those are. As long as they aren't doing something directly illegal or can deflect the blame for illegal behavior to an underling that "misunderstood the directions", the incentive is there for ALL political parties to play as dirty as they possibly can. Democrat, Republican, whatever, doesn't matter.
The party's game is to win seats in Congress and the Presidency. Not win fairly. Not win "by the rules". To win, at whatever cost, as long as that cost isn't the elected positions themselves.
I think you may have misread this article. The fear is hacking by criminals or other nation states, not our own political parties. That would be a case of rigging.
>As long as they aren't doing something directly illegal
Manipulating votes on a voting machine would definitely be directly illegal.
Gerrymandering would be less useful if fewer people voted along party lines, but not useless. Any demographic edge is better than nothing; even if only 5% of voters decide on the basis of party affiliation, that's 5% more than nothing.
In the normal case, wouldn't a person usually vote in the next election the way they voted previously? A party's platform is generally the same election-to-election, and if I voted previously for that platform, I'd tend to continue voting for it unless I had a pretty significant change of heart--and then changed it again for the election following? Unless either the party or the voter swung wildly around, gerrymandering doesn't require "blind" allegiance to a party.
The issues favored by one party or another change dramatically over a period of even a decade. "Party" is just a way to make people feel like they're part of a team.
> There's no natural or fair way to draw districts, it doesn't work that way.
All maps may be biased, but not all maps are equally biased, so there's still room for refinement.
You could define "nothing up my sleeve" measures, similar to the way some cryptographers pick arbitrary constants in ways that are possibly biased, but unlikely to be selected in advance according to that bias.
So for example, there are some systems that automatically divide states into districts, though a looser version would be to accept proposals and choose the one that most effectively satisfies certain reasonable constraints.
It would require a thorough study to determine if these methods biased political power towards or away from population centers. Many political issues have an urban rural split, so that's not a trivial issue.
They would be at least an incremental improvement over intentionally gerrymandered districts though, where the probability of bias is approximately 1.
That study has been done, by Chris Fedor. Salient quote: “In both the 2008 and 2010 elections, the actual districts used by the 111th Congress […] were in fact about as fair as you could reasonably expect from a voting system based on contiguous geographies.”
After a closer read of Fedor's research, what it reveals is that methods that look purely at geography and population density aren't sufficient, because of urban / rural clustering patterns.
Gerrymandering relies on a guideline to conserve resources in game theory: win by a little and lose by a lot. That is, pick the districts you lose and pack opponents into those districts. Edge out competition in others.
If you incorporated exit polling data and revised your constraints to draw districts to create as many tossup districts as possible based on recent elections, then you should find a district map that is the most weakly gerrymandered. It will still have some aesthetically unappealing shapes, some salamander districts. But while the shape of districts can illustrate gerrymandering, I don't think it's the real concern.
Fedor judged systems on how likely it was for the representation to match the statewide split in the voters. If that's the real standard of fairness, the easiest solution would probably just be proportional representation.
Thanks for flagging the article, interesting stuff.
Much like Arrow's impossibility theorem for voting methods, it can be shown that a set of reasonable-sounding criteria cannot be perfectly satisfied by any district-drawing method. But that doesn't mean all methods are equally bad.
I was an election judge in Colorado in 1994, '98, '00, and '04. I observed elections in North Carolina in 2006 and '08.
The Colorado elections used paper ballots (complete with "hanging chads") and from what I could tell were run pretty fair and square. One year there were some problems with some of the kids from the local college where rich Easterners send their lower-caliber offspring when they can't get into the Ivy League. They flooded a particular precinct insisting that they be given provisional ballots (name not on the list and ballots not counted unless it's close). They didn't meet the requirements even for those ballots and some threw a hissy fit. The local prosecutor discovered that many had already voted absentee back in their home state. They were not prosecuted, unfortunately.
In North Carolina in '06, the precinct captain ran it by the books. In '08, same precinct, same captain, many were allowed to vote provisionally even though they didn't meet the requirements (didn't live in the county they were trying to vote in). Others told me it was similar in other precincts.
Paper ballots, ID, and lots of well-trained observers seem to be the best way to avoid the threats from social engineering and hack attacks on the integrity of the voting process. I would even go for the purple dye they use on the thumbs of voters in some countries to prevent people from traveling precinct to precinct to vote for dead people and people who have moved away who are still on the rolls. (There are more than you probably think.)
In general, my observation has been that the voting process has become more corrupt over the past 20 years. It's just damn hard to catch it if the people who are supposed to enforce the rules don't care to.
But here's the problem: "You want to check ID at the polling place? You must be a racist! Here's how that represents a tiny, yet unacceptable burden, for some underprivileged group."
This is actually where we are as a country. It's depressing.
It disproportionately affects the poor who have trouble with transportation and scheduling to get a photo ID (since they may not be drivers, and therefore previously may not have had the need for a photo ID), and also the elderly, whose birth records may be difficult to find. It obviously doesn't affect those who regularly have up-to-date photo IDs, say, because they already drive everywhere.
If we offered same-day voter registration at every polling place, or had automatic voter registration by virtue of some other government process, this would be a non-issue.
I think that the issue there is not with the ID per se, but with the cost (in time and money) disproportionately affecting the poor and also with the fact that it de facto creates a national ID system (which some are ideologically opposed to).
I would be ok with voter ID laws which accepted a multitude of valid existing documents. E.g if you allow passport, driver license, state ID, SS card and birth cert then there probably does not exist a person whom does not have at least one of those.
>I would be ok with voter ID laws which accepted a multitude of valid existing documents. E.g if you allow passport, driver license, state ID, SS card and birth cert then there probably does not exist a person whom does not have at least one of those.
In Canada, this is how it works [0]. If you don't have photo ID, you can show an ID with name and an ID with name and address (where "ID" is defined very broadly and includes things like credit card statements or letters issued by university residences and soup kitchens). While this requirement still has an onus on the underprivileged, the ID legislation is very focused on allowing as many people as possible to vote.
You can register on the day of the election. Canadian (federal) elections also are still counted by hand.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but it generally works with few problems. This is what legislation designed to mitigate fraud, while still acting in good faith to let everyone vote, looks like.
> E.g if you allow passport, driver license, state ID, SS card and birth cert then there probably does not exist a person whom does not have at least one of those.
Passports, driver licenses, and state IDs are dependent upon first having an SS card and/or birth certificate, depending on the state. Therefore, we can narrow the nexus down to a birth certificate or an SS card.
There are plenty of domestically-born citizens who do not have an SS card (based on some state birth procedures I am familiar with, acquiring a federal SS number at birth is optional at the choice of the parents).
There are also plenty of people who were not born in the US, but have become naturalized citizens.
So it seems that there would be plenty of people who have neither of those nexuses.
> There are plenty of domestically-born citizens who do not have an SS card (based on some state birth procedures I am familiar with, acquiring a federal SS number at birth is optional at the choice of the parents).
There are also plenty of people who were not born in the US, but have become naturalized citizens.
I don't have ball in the game (not US citizen), but your argument is flawed, specifically in two cases:
- Domestically-born citizens who do not have an SS card but have a birth certificate.
- Naturalized citizens without birth certificate but have SS.
You didn't specify why it could happen that these two cases would not cover everyone in your two listings.
A person doesn't necessarily get an SS number at birth. And a naturalized citizen doesn't have a birth certificate. Therefore, some people might not have either one of these documents.
Of course, a citizen is normally eligible to get such documents by applying at whichever bureau. But, it is conceivable that some people don't have them.
Practically speaking, it is difficult to live life in the US without an SS number/card. You can't open a bank account, get identity documents, (get a passport?), get student loans, or be a employee in a company that wants to record your SS for tax compliance purposes.
Anecdotally, I have read that some people refuse to give their kids a number at birth via SS. This then means they have to go through extra paperwork later in life if they want to get one when they are adults.
Also anecdotally, I was renewing my driver's license recently, and I overheard the 40+ year old woman at the counter next to me tell the clerk she never had a driver's license or a state ID.
She seemed pretty embarrassed about it, probably because without a driver's license or state ID, it's clear that she wasn't able to participate in things like opening a bank account, for which a photo ID is required (unless she had a passport).
If this all seems kind of crazy, just consider that in the US, the federal government, state government and individual are all sovereign, just in different and sometimes overlapping ways.
Regulations on some things, for example driver's licenses, private mailboxes (and maybe bank accounts?), got tightened up/federalized with the passing of the Patriot Act/Real ID Act in (2004?). For example, to open a private mailbox, I have to fill out a federal form now. Additionally, I can no longer use that mailbox as a registered address for a bank account.
Did you use any kind of federal identifier, for example an EIN (something you can apply to the feds to get, often used for businesses), or did you use your passport/passport number, or none of the above?
The Patriot Act requires bank to keep home address of foreigner in the foreign country on file. But otherwise, you only need to provide passport + 1 more type of picture ID to open the bank account. This was in 2010
Unfortunately, your political opponents will be happy to show the media a parade of people who by some external circumstances couldn't access any of those when they needed too.
It can't be that hard to find a non-white single working mother who had her purse with her driver's license in it stolen.
It is possible to have respectable motives for trying to enact voter ID requirements. That doesn't mean the voter ID requirements that have been enacted were well-intentioned.
The patterns in what forms of ID were deemed acceptable (eg. gun licenses but not student IDs), the limited options for obtaining the free IDs that states are required to make available (eg. office open only of the fifth Wednesday of the month), and the other restrictions often enacted simultaneously (eg. reduced early voting times and locations) all add up to an undeniable pattern of discriminatory intent, especially when the coordinating efforts of organizations like ALEC are considered. Voter ID, for all that it may be justifiable in some incarnations, has been tainted by association with bigotry for at least the next generation or two. The problems with our elections will either have to be solved through other means, or at least with a very different kind of voter ID system.
I think it's more depressing that the people advocating for the rules are looking to disproportionately affect the poor and/or minorities. The goal isn't reduced voter fraud. Its to win elections.
Its also concerning given the history of discriminating against black voters in this country.
> I have not verified the accuracy of this analysis
It's not so much that it's inaccurate as that it's not really anything but an op-ed with some basic data.
The general form of it is thus: "here is some data. I'm saying it means X, which could be explained in Y way or tampering but I won't say it can be explained other ways. Here's a very handwaving explanation of why Y doesn't fit, so I therefore conclude that it must be tampering... I will now devote lots of pages to conspiracy theories about who and why this tampering was done - assuming that I am correct and there is no other explanation."
Skimmed through it. Just because its a PDF, and happens to be someone's 'paper' Does not make it a good source. I don't believe this was peer reviewed...
If someone hacked the voting machines, I would expect them to only find vulnerabilities in some of the machines, not all of them. Thus if the paper finds a discrepancy that isn't related to the type of machine, I would expect it is some other kind of cheating (or just an anomaly).
You don't need to hack voting machines. If you control the body that allocates them in your area you send more of them to areas favourable to your desired outcome. So in other areas the lines get too long and some people don't get to vote. That alone will swing things a few percent.
I wish that we would abandon the concept of all-in-one electronic voting machines and instead incentivize ballot printers.
They could have a happy touch screen UI that is easy to localize, and then print out a human-readable paper ballot for the voter to review and then drop into a physical ballot box. And you could have one machine with a special printer to produce raised-character printing for blind voters to verify.
All the advantages of a computer UI and very few of the disadvantages of the DRE voting machines.
The electronic voting machines used by many districts are not only insecure, but run by former felons (link from 2003!) [1].
The only reason I can see why we use voting machines run by criminals is that the powers-that-be want it that way. No amount of ineptitude can survive for 15 years without a small group benefitting immensely (and then selling that access).
Is there any practical difference between rigging and hacking? Whether the election outcome is manipulated by government officials, one or both major political parties, Vladimir Putin, corporate insiders at the vendors that supply voting machines, some guy named Chad, or some collaboration between any of the above, it amounts to the same thing: the loss of voter's right to hold their elected leaders accountable.
Most election tampering requires a pretty big conspiracy and is therefore hard to pull off on a large enough scale to change the outcome without being caught, but electronic voting with no paper trail makes it possible for someone to do just that without more than one or a handful of people knowing about it, which I think makes it the biggest threat to the accuracy and credibility of elections in the United States.
Even in the absence of real election fraud, if the voters have no credible reason to believe it didn't happen, then the election system ought to be fixed. Ideally, the burden of proof should be on election officials to show that the results are correct, not on activists to prove fraud.
After the Wikileaks releases, we know without a doubt that the Democrat primaries were rigged for Clinton. Multiple people were forced to resign from high paying DNC posts over it.
I see no reason to think that the actual election in November won't also be rigged to the maximum extent possible for Clinton.
"Rigged". You keep using that word... In which primaries (enumerate the states, please) did Clinton win fewer votes (than Sanders or O'Malley) yet receive the majority of delegates?
Why was Clinton so effective compared to the GOP's old guard? They absolutely despise their nominee- why weren't they able to pull enough dirty tricks to sink Trump?
And, again, in the general, I've seen no evidence that the Clinton camp is vastly less moral than the GOP/Trump camp- why attribute all potential rigging to Clinton when the GOP has just as much reason to pull the same tricks?
Similarly, the Democrats have a lot of people who wanted Clinton, and 3 million more of them appear to have turned out to vote than did Sanders supporters.
I just don't see how, if widespread primary rigging is effective and not all that difficult (since the DNC, who really aren't all THAT clever, supposedly "rigged" it without much in the way of repercussions) Trump could end up the GOP nominee against the wishes of the GOP elite.
It's quite easy to explain Clinton's win without any shady "rigging." It's quite difficult to manufacture 3 million net votes- that's either a lot of ballot-box stuffing or a huge voter disenfranchisement campaign and there's no evidence of either. The simplest explanation is that the Dem constituency consists of people who want her.
Uh yeah, because it's impossible to manipulate an election from the voting booth under basically any circumstances. That's why ID laws make no sense.
The physical ID manufacturing isn't the hard part and never would be. It's finding the identity you're masquerading as and then actually standing in line at a voting booth.
it's impossible to manipulate an election from the voting booth under basically any circumstances.
That's just a lack of creativity. A popular mechanism in the past was the false-bottom ballot box (the man who first brought that to SF in the 1800s was rewarded handsomely, reported by Irving Stone).
You can have ghost voters, for example. People registered at addresses that don't exist, then bus people from precinct to precinct voting multiple times. Also, people register to vote in two different places: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/200...
I have seen foreigners vote with my own eyes. I don't know how common that is (or any of it is, actually), but that is something that happens.
Which you didn't seem to think were relevant to list while making your claim. And which are both odd things to "just know" about a person. Did they say one day "oh yeah, I voted illegally lol"? Doesn't seem like the type of thing which comes up in conversation easily.
EDIT: To be clear, I am asking specifically how you know you saw people who were ineligible to vote voting. A follow up would also be why you observed this and didn't tell anyone.
The ID process doesn't have to be perfect, just effective enough to curtail most attempts at fraud. If ID didn't work why do so many other nations require it for voting and why does the US use it for buying a beer.
If the election gets hacked, won't it by definition be rigged by the hacker(s)? I just don't see how it's "ridiculous" to think the vote somewhat impacted by 1) some people voting more than once since many jurisdictions are basically "honor system", 2) exploits of vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems, and 3) ballot stuffing and other illicit activities by poll workers.
How prevalent those are, the full impact, etc. are debatable, but it seems a little naive to say those things never happen at all or that people who suspect they happen are crazy conspiracy theorists.
I don't think you understand how voting works in the US. Voting isn't even close to the honor system. The people who run precincts are incredibly decentralized and individual precincts have such a small impact on national elections.
In my area (and most without voter ID) anybody can give any name and address and vote as that person. The "honor system" refers to the fact people are trusted to not just look up a name/address and vote as someone else.
Yes, the electoral system and general statistics of the election mean in any one case that doesn't necessarily sway the outcome. Which is why I said the impact is debatable but to deny it could happen is naive.
Could someone please describe a plausible scenario in which an election is impacted by so-called "voter fraud"?
While elections have been rigged from the very beginning (ballot stuffing etc.), "voter fraud" is an invented concept that didn't exist before passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Not sure how many more times I can say "the impact is debatable" in recognition that individuals voting as other individuals would be an inefficient way to sway an election. However, it is fairly well documented that this happens to some degree:
https://ballotpedia.org/Dead_people_voting
But, since you asked, here is a scenario that I think is entirely plausible: A group of over-zealous activists travel to a very tight state with a handful of close precincts. They look up recent deaths in the areas and get a list of 1000 names and addresses that they then use to vote, each voting multiple times. They simply go in, give the name and address, and vote, then go to another polling location and repeat. Other groups decide on other tactics. A poll worker decides to stuff a box. A hacker changes a few 100 votes just to see if she can. No one technique alone would have swayed the election, but in concert they push it to the opposite of what a 100% fair election would have been.
In this scenario, note that there is no big evil conspiracy - just a handful of misguided people taking actions with a collective big consequence.
Obviously the risk of fraud has to be weighed against the risk that someone due a vote will be unable to do so because they couldn't obtain an ID or lost it. It's also worth pointing out that before the general election, the various shenanigans of the primaries and two parties mean that the general is not really "fair" before it even starts. Again, my point is that it's not "ridiculous" to posit that US elections have systemic flaws that could sway the outcome.
It still requires some cooperation, which means it's subject to game theory and defector risk. And there are numerous after the fact approaches to enforcement.
Just make a $1,000,000 reward for anyone exposing a conspiracy to rig an election, and audit the voter rolls on close elections, and impose stiff penalties for voter fraud.
These are all cheaper and probably more effective than voter ID laws. Strangely, these kinds of approaches come up far less than imposing an ID requirement. Also, mail in voter fraud is a far greater risk, yet is also ignored.
I'd be interested in seeing if a transparent, fair and honest voting booth can be achieved with commodity hardware:
- Raspberry Pi with a multiple checksum-verified OS image
- simple receipt printer with a verifiable hash of your vote
- etc.
Given only 40% of living Americans vote, and that it's likely 35-45% voted for the party that benefited from the fraud - that would leave a very small group of people to force a reversal.
Again, possible that all Americans would reject it, but seems possible that they would not.
The party's game is to win seats in Congress and the Presidency. Not win fairly. Not win "by the rules". To win, at whatever cost, as long as that cost isn't the elected positions themselves.