Elon's biggest problem @ Twitter - he's not funny at tweeting

Online voting is very hard to secure and verify. Instead of physically hacking one diebold machine for a voter station, you have the world trying to hack the entire database.

Mail in ballots are mostly pain free if you have a physical address and the fraud is reduced to anyone else living in the household.

So the scale of catastrophic fraud and failure is immensely different to the point where online voting would guarantee a constitutional crisis once it's fully accessible.

I'd rather have an arcane system of redundancies and a lengthy paper trail than some overworked website contractor forgetting to look at security guidelines and allowing outsiders use scripts to dump a database...

 

Current estimates of households without broadband or internet access in Texas is one in four and one in five nationally.

 

Voter fraud is already a rare occurrence, and our primary concern should be voter suppression. Typically, less than 50% of people vote because the process isn't overly convenient (and no, we shouldn't complicate it as some sort of 'good voter' test).

I wholeheartedly support providing multiple voting options to make the process easier, including e-voting. I believe we possess the technology and expertise for secure e-voting, but it's crucial to implement a 'paper' trail and redundancy check system to counter potential attacks or hacks. We can't afford a single point of failure that could instantly invalidate millions of votes, which is a new risk with e-voting. The transition should be a phased process without phasing out existing voting methods.

Since the 2020 election, TX (and many GOP states) have taken the opposite approach, removing options and making it harder to vote. The changes they have made effectively disenfranchise voters.

 

You don't necessarily need fast-speed internet access for e-voting. But anyway, the gap will close. TX received ~5B in federal+state funding to expand fast-speed internet access (yes, thanks to Biden's infrastructure bill).

 

Hard doesn't mean impossible. Our entire practical society is built on secure financial transactions. Most people care more about that than voting, and they trust the system enough to live by it (who still has money under their pillow?). The PoC for secure transactions on the internet with very sensitive data is already done, but of course, the risks aren't zero. It can be done, but it needs to be implemented with multiple layers of protection, checks, and redundancy. In case of a disastrous attack, go manually count the 'paper' backup.

 

In 2021 PC Magazine reported that 21 % of homes in the US had no internet access. Even the most optimistic numbers are that over 10% of homes in the US don't have an internet subscription. I suspect those numbers raise significantly in areas outside large cities and suburbs. And in poorer areas.

That said, I would love to move to a computer based voting system. Growing internet access improves all sorts of quality of life... education, employment, commerce. I also don't complain about our current voting process... but we should make it easier for everyone to vote.

 

It's a technical nightmare across the entire chain. I'm in the Bruce Schneider camp.

Secure financial transactions through SSL is just a baseline of people feeling safe enough with their money to adopt it. Fraudulent purchases or withdrawals usually take weeks to months to resolve so the pressure for time to resolution and recovery is mostly minimal. Banks themselves run constant internal audits to the .00001 cent to make sure no one is stealing on the sly whereas elections are one-off events that promotes discretion. Much harder to check against.

Having one disastrous attack, let alone a seasonal one is not confidence inducing and would be enough make people question the integrity of the vote even more than whatever an insurrectionist candidate can fling out about physical votes.

 

Mr. Free Speech is banning liberals who are critical of him.

He is such a turd and has ruined what popularity he had.

He is at the beginning stages of the Mike Lindell movement.

DD

 

This makes absolutely no sense and based on nothing. And further ignoring my point. There is no measure to determine if your vote was fully accounted for the way the voter intended.

 

How do you know your vote was accounted for? You don't. You have to trust the system. How is it every election there are tens of thousands of ballots that get 'found' during a recount? While this may not have a big effect on the outcome between Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dum, it can have significant impact on state level elections.

UPS can manage logistics of a weeks worth of packages that equates to the volume of voters. Every package can be tracked and where it was delivered.
We trust the financial system which is nearly completely digital.

The truth of the matter is that government is so incompetent that we can't trust them to build a digital voting system. It really isn't that hard to create a system that can verify a voters transaction.

 

Voting has never been easier. With mail-in ballots, I don't think voter suppression is a serious discussion anymore. However there is a point where the voter has to be held responsible, and quite frankly, if they are too incompetent or too lazy to ensure they are registered properly, that is on the voter.

I am not that invested in voter fraud debate, but I do imagine it is much bigger and serious than many imagine...and that of course is up for debate on what constitutes voter fraud. There are simply too many cases of 'unaccounted' ballots being found in storage rooms and on the side of the road for me to dismiss it as accidents. And given that the election system is heavily depended on highly partisan volunteers from both sides brings out the skeptic in me.

The current system is already a hybrid of electronic and paper. A digital receipt is just as good as a paper receipt, but as I keep pointing out, voters do not get receipts, just a sticker.

An electronic backed system doesn't imply it gets switched on over night nor does it mean it should be purely electronic.

 

Bullshit. Tens of thousands of ballots don’t get found in recounts. That’s virtually impossible. You clearly don’t understand how the current system works or what a centralized system entails.

Banks and UPS have had decades of continuous development to transition from paper to electronic system and they are still error prone. Your take is uninformed, to put it nicely, and shows your lack of knowledge of the field.

 

Is @Space Ghost turning into a QNON member? When did tens of thousands of ballots get found? They were over 100 audits of the 2020 election and after the audits bidens lead grew to couple hundred more in over 90% of the audits lol....

 

Here's musk amplifying more far right wing conspiracy misinformation. james lindsay pushes critical race theory, anti-LBGT, and other wack conspiracy stuff. In this case, he blames DEI for air accidents, without any proof. He claims the industry replaces safety as a priority with DEI, again, with no proof. Even the content he includes in his quotes doesn't support his "theory".

 

Yeah you're right. I can't find any meaningful collaboration on these stories.
So I will take my original stance... election system is fine. No changes needed. No fraud. Carry on. Everyone needs to quit b****ing.

But I am confused. You said Bidens numbers increased after audits ... so which is it? I also stated I am more concerned with state level politics, not which idiot gets elected President.

 

Yes his lead grew by a couple hundred more in the Arizona audit that trumps team hired, his lead grew in Wisconsin and it grew in Georgia after y different recounts.

A couple hundred isn't the same as tens of thousands as you claimed. That's why states have automatic recount rules if the result is less than 1% and the state covers it.

There's already safe guardrails to protect against what you're describing.

 

Voter suppression is ongoing. 24/7 voting has been disallowed. Mail-in voting has been restricted. In TX, you have to go through unnecessary steps to mail in a ballot. Just a few examples off the top of my head. All of these are unnecessary.

Registration is bs. Everyone should be automatically registered by default. The system can easily know who is qualified and who isn't. Anyone left off for some reason can then go through some exception process to get "registered."

A digital receipt is NOT as good as a paper receipt, but a digital receipt is just as good when it's fully authenticated and safeguarded properly. Any system without authentication and safeguards still needs to have a paper trail backup.

No, you don't get a receipt. We, as citizens, have to trust our voting institutions. If we don't, we go check and recheck it. Manual recounts over and over show that the paper trail matches the result. (Any system without that paper trial cannot do this verification).

 

Too much to get into this now. Hope to get back later. Probably should be in a different thread anyway.