I’m reminded of an xkcd alt text, “ There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired.”
Good thing Dominion voting machines do leave an auditable paper trail, which was hand-audited in all of these disputed states and which verified the electronically-reported results.
We've banned this account for ideological flamewar. Not what this site is for.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with—it will eventually get your main account banned as well.
In case anyone's worried about it, yes, we ban accounts for this regardless of which ideology they're flaming for. It's an existential issue for HN; we'd rather not burn to a crisp, regardless of the color of the flames.
Even a cursory review of the Ramsland report you linked to indicates it was largely fiction. From the politifact review:
Ramsland lists "Fenton" without specifying Fenton City or Fenton Township. But the turnout Ramsland lists for Fenton does not match the turnout in either jurisdiction.
The actual turnout statistics reveal the inaccuracy of Ramsland’s numbers. His figure for North Muskegon is off by a factor of 10: The actual number is 78.11%, not 781.91%. For Zeeland Charter Township, he inflated the turnout nearly sixfold. For Grout Township and the City of Muskegon, his number is more than triple the correct number.
First paragraph: simply made up by Ramsland, by basically treating all the times a ballot was entered incorrectly (such as upside down) as a vote requiring adjudication.
Second paragraph: False. The person in charge of updating the system...was a Republican. Also, the voting machines were in compliance with federal voting system standards. The machine that was not updated prior to the election was the computer that the voting machines connected to, which was updated after the election during vote tabulation. (A hand recount of the paper receipts printed on Election Day confirmed the post-update count.)
Third paragraph: Also fiction, and quite literally contradicts your first paragraph. (They can't both possibly be true; either the adjudication logs were there and there were a lot of adjudicated votes, or they weren't, and the first paragraph is made up.) Also, the machines were audited after the election...by Republicans.
On a further note, neither NASA or MIT has any record of Ramsland or any of his companies, doing any work for them as he claims (and which forms the basis of his supposed technical expertise).
>Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Stop making throwaway sock puppet accounts every time your lies are rightfully downvoted and your posting rights restricted. Your lies aren't "sensitive information".
We've ALL heard the tired old conspiracy theories you're parroting before, and we've ALL seen them thoroughly debunked already. You're the only one who seems surprised you were duped.
That's implicitly assuming that you can't do cryptographic voting protocols with paper ballots. That is false. You can in fact make a cryptographic voting system where:
1. Voters vote by marking ovals with a marker pen on paper ballots.
3. The paper ballots can be counted by the optical scan machines that are already widely used in many places.
4. The paper ballots can be hand counted.
5. All the ballots can be published, allowing anyone to independently verify the counts.
6. An individual voter if they choose to can make a note of short alphanumeric code that is revealed when they vote for a candidate, and using that note later can verify that their vote was included in the total and went to the correct candidate.
7. An individual voter cannot prove to a third party that they voted for a particular candidate.
Almost all of the cryptographic mojo takes place when the ballots are printed, so no modifications are required to the scanners. You do have to use a special marker to mark the ballots.
Doing the cryptographic verification of all the votes would almost certainly be done by software, but as all the ballots are published and the system is completely open and documented, independent parties can easily do their own counts. The software is also fairly simple.
There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired.
It's funny how things change. Just five years ago, HN was awash in people shouting that paper ballots are not secure and everyone should switch to electronic. Now the conventional wisdom is the opposite. Much like the way that in the 90's, keeping a password on a Post-It note was considered not secure, and now it's the safest thing going.
They could blockchain votes and have independently auditable election results easily available.
Instead, time after time, we get shady software from shady people with disturbing political connections (I’m not talking the dominion thing either — this seems true for all voting software). The idea that crooked politicians hire crooked companies to wrire crooked software shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
Software does control airplanes and elevators. When it fails, it can kill people.
But when people think elevator software is broken, they don't take the elevator. When (enough) people think voting software is broken, they topple governments and start civil wars.
And some people who disagree with you are still thinking for themselves. That "not thinking for yourself" is lazy argument.
> When (enough) people think voting software is broken, they topple governments and start civil wars.
But why would they be distrustful unless non-sequitur arguments are presented as the holy grail of truth? "Bro trust me, software engineers and our entire profession are total hacks". Thanks XKCD, very cool.
Yet you fly in airplanes and drive in cars that are digitally controlled. You trust the unsecured web with your banking details because a green padlock appears in your browser. The federal reserve and their network banks don't mail each other IOU's "to be secure" so why should that be the MO for accounting public consensus? I'd call it tired reasoning but it's not even reasoning, it's just some hand-wavy appeal to.. p a p e r
https://xkcd.com/2030/