CompSci Prof raises ballot hacking fears over strange pro-Trump voting patterns Donald Trump's surprise win in the United States' presidential election could conceivably be attributed to illegal hacking and needs to be investigated, according to a security expert. A statistical analysis by J Alex Halderman, professor of computer science at the University of Michigan's Center for Computer Security and …
Some people might see this as opening up opportunities for them.
I think one of them is called "Trump".
That said, that US voting machines are not secure or trustworthy is something that was well known well before even George W Bush was elected, but it's not entirely surprising that there never was much appetite or funding to have that addressed, something I find telling in itself.
I suspect this is why they need to have elections that are close: if the candidates are much apart, any "creative adjustment" would have drawn attention, now it's just a matter of tipping the balance which is far more difficult to detect.
So, up until a couple of weeks ago, the Democrat party line was "Vote fraud? Don't be ridiculous! Never happens!"
And "People who contest elections are practically traitors, and should be shunned!"
So, to fix this issue, we'll start a major program to go back to paper ballots, voter ID, and lengthy sentences in prison for people who get caught committing vote fraud. Happy now? Hello? Democrats? Why are you running away so fast?
You've missed the point - it's not the Democrats that are calling "Vote fraud", it's some academic saying, "this looks odd". It's been shown that many of the machines can be hacked, he's asking, were they hacked?
The underlying question is why the USA tolerates insecure voting machines, but Trump it seems is also uninterested in this when the results favour him.
"Some academic" who just happens to be a Democrat.
And, once again, the Democrats have been telling us for YEARS that there's no such thing as vote fraud - until it benefits them to claim it does.
Let's deal with that first - by requiring voter ID and paper ballots. You know, the things that Democrats have been fighting tooth and nail for more than twenty years, and that Republicans have been demanding.
Once we get that in place, we can talk about the rest of it.
"Some academic" who just happens to be a Democrat.
Do you have a source for that? None of the articles I've seen on this identify Halderman's political affiliation.
Re-read the article, particularly where it says:
"I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked. But I don’t believe that either one of these seemingly unlikely explanations is overwhelmingly more likely than the other," Halderman writes.
In short, this isn't a partisan academic claiming that vote fraud happened, or that it's even likely. He's simply saying it's one possible explanation for the swing in those close states -- and if it happened anywhere, those states would be the places to look for it.
The rest is just El Reg being true to form, and oversensationalizing a story with little sensation in it.
the fact is Obama had the DOJ monitoring Detroit and other intercity voting areas to ensure minorities would not be afraid to vote for Hillary. Halderman claims are just noise and more of an attempt to put in a statistic model to generate votes that Hillary didn't get. Hillary didn't get the minority percentage expected by the dems. Halderman and "Nelson" ethics never interfere with getting the desired results, no matter how much they have to "adjust" and loss out subsets of the raw data..
Democrats have been saying for years there's no such thing as voter fraud on the specific issues that Republicans and especially the Alt-Right have been spewing about. That of illegals and the "dead" voting in their zombie masses.
Paper ballots are a good idea.
Republicans want to require voter ID because it's known that any hurdle to voting causes issues for the poorest in society and the numbers have born that up every time it's happened. Since the poorest in society tend not to be stupid enough to vote Republican the motive is obvious.
It's also totally unnecessary. I've voted in elections 5 times in my country, every time with a paper ballot and I've never needed to show ID to do so.
The fact that you feel they are linked is telling.
What a load of crap.Republicans want voter ID laws because there are credible reports of voting by non-citizens and others such as dead people. Such methods have been used for years almost entirely to the benefit of the Democrats; which is of course why they object so strenuously to any attempt to curb their abuse.
Where such Voter ID laws have been introduced, they have been demonstrated NOT to cause any issues with stupid minority voters or the poor; but they DO cause issues with illegal voters.
It is widely accepted that JFK defeated Nixon in 1960 because of voter fraud in Illinois.
Finally, you may have voted 5 times without ID, but I bet you haven't driven or purchased alcohol without documentation. And which is more important ?
> "but I bet you haven't driven or purchased alcohol without documentation."
>> if the buyer is of an age where they might be either side of the line, but everyone, even a 70 year old retired person?
Yes. Drivers License, Food Stamps, higher-powered Non-Prescription Cold Medicine, Doctor Offices, Prescriptions, and Social Services - in our state.
> there are credible reports of voting by non-citizens and others such as dead people
No there aren't. Several, extensive surveys have shown minimal such fraud. It's a lie.
>Where such Voter ID laws have been introduced, they have been demonstrated NOT to cause any issues with stupid minority voters or the poor
On the contrary, there is extensive evidence that such laws inhibit minority voters. After all, that's what they are passed. Another lie.
>Finally, you may have voted 5 times without ID, but I bet you haven't driven or purchased alcohol without documentation. And which is more important ?
Which is a right? And which are privileges?
"And, once again, the Democrats have been telling us for YEARS that there's no such thing as vote fraud - until it benefits them to claim it does."
On the other hand, Trump spent a lot of his campaign time repeatedly telling us that the vote was rigged and he'd challenge it when he lost, which he quite strongly implied was the expected result a number of times. Now that he's won, it was all fair and above board and of course no one rigged the system, how could they, the right result was achieved </sarc>
The vote fraud of which Democrats were so dismissive was an older type in which people voted who were not permitted for reasons such as death or lack of citizenship. Arguably, that was quite rare and unlikely to affect the outcome except in rare cases of extremely close elections, although as far as I am aware, the presumed rarity stems as much or more from general failure to look for it as any actual analysis.
Fraudulent configuration or programming of systems used for vote recording and counting is a legitimate matter for concern. It has been in principle for many of us since they were introduced, and for quite a few more after demonstration of various vulnerabilities in the recording machines and the general vulnerability of the systems and networks on which the software is prepared, stored, and transferred. It should be noted that similar vulnerabilities existed on rather old electromechanical vote recording systems, although complaints about that were rare to nonexistent.
The primary goal in using these machines seems to be quicker tabulation and announcement of results, hopefully by the nighttime news readings. This is an illegitimate reason. However, it can be met decently by using optically scanned human-readable paper ballots, which offer a reasonable possibility of manual recount, as is legally required in some jurisdictions when the lead is narrow enough.
Until that is done, auditing the results makes a good deal of sense, especially in cases where there is potential for wholesale manipulation that would be difficult or impossible to identify and correct. "Recounting" and machine auditing probably would not allow anything better than discarding results from dodgy machines, but it could hasten adoption of properly verifiable and transparent voting systems.
If you looked to the source documents you would have found this:
Want to Know if the Election was Hacked? Look at the Ballots
You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical states. That article, which includes somebody else’s description of my views, incorrectly describes the reasons manually checking ballots is an essential security safeguard (and includes some incorrect numbers, to boot). Let me set the record straight about what I and other leading election security experts have actually been saying to the campaign and everyone else who’s willing to listen.
So you might want to reconsider your statement.
>So, up until a couple of weeks ago, the Democrat party line was "Vote fraud? Don't be ridiculous! Never happens!"
They didn't say it never happened, they said it hadn't happened when Trump said it had. It was just another example of people doing some fact-checking, and this fact-checking being wilfully misinterpreted as anti-Trump bias.
There was a case of a woman whose submitted a postal vote on behalf of her husband, who later died before polling day. The Trump camp interpreted this as pro-Clinton fraud.
Anyway, your duty now is get out of your bubble, and that goes for the Democrats too. Remember you have to live amongst each other, and you have more in common than your polarised media suggests.
I'm a Liberal Democrat, not a Democrat, because we don't have that party here (and they're much too right wing for my taste in the context of UK government, anyway), so it's nothing really to do with me. However I see nothing with that proposal - it's what we do here - modulo "voter identification" mechanisms that are thily disguised mechanisms to stop black and ethnic minority members of the electorate voting, which I understand has traditionally been the case in some of the more benighted areas of the flyover states. (Can we have equally lengthy sentences for attempting to intimidate voters?)
The idea isn't that someone who shouldn't be able to vote is voting, but that a hacker is CHANGING the votes in touchscreen voting machines, via software which would have to be loaded in before the election since the machines aren't connected to the internet on election day. Or perhaps more easily by compromising the machines at local and state election HQ which gather and tally the results from the precincts.
IMHO what we should do is this:
1) wait until after the electoral college meets, because the country is divided enough without going back and trying to make Hillary president even if it could be proven she won and hackers stole the election. She conceded, get over it.
2) audit some randomly selected precincts using various types of machines, in both swing states and non swing states. The reason you do it in non-swing states is while hacking there isn't going to change the results (at least for the president) if someone was going to do this they might first try a proof of concept somewhere they'd be less likely to get caught.
3) add laws requiring a few percent of randomly chosen precincts be audited after every election, with a full statewide audit mandated if a certain error threshold is exceeded.
4) ban any voting machines that do not leave a paper trail - if it can't be audited it should be illegal to use!
Since elections are run by the states these laws would need to be passed at a state level, but the FEC could set some standards. IMHO they should be the sole arbiter that approves voting machines in the future, and while they can't force states to adopt the above laws they should take any means at their disposal to nudge them in that direction.
The big obstacle is that most local and state election officials are VERY much against such auditing. In their eyes they have nothing to gain by proving their election was conducted properly, and everything to lose is something wrong is found. That's also a disincentive for state governors, legislators, etc. to do this - what if someone finds that Governor X actually got 5% less votes than he did, even though he still would have won? Even if he had zero knowledge or involvement, the scandal would probably take him down. Why should he want to do this? That's why it almost has to be forced on them. Unfortunately the average person doesn't realize that this is even possible, and those who voted for the winner may assume it is sour grapes, or turn it into a political battle by saying "this isn't a problem, let's focus on the real problem and fix real by requiring voter IDs"
You are comparing apples to oranges. The voter fraud the Republicans are against seldom occurs and the real reason is the disenfranchisement of those who are not expected to vote Republican. The fraud that the Green Party is alleging not only has a lot of evidence supporting it, but is likely to have a much bigger effect on the election.
Voter suppression laws, so called, did not disenfranchise anyone. They also made no racial or ethnic distinctions, although they plainly had more impact on those who were poor, unmotivated, or not very bright, or who would have had trouble documenting their eligibility to vote. Few of them, if any, failed to make the required ID available at no delivery point charge, although for some people assembling the documentation required and going to the place of issue, usually the same place that issues driving licenses. The required documentation is generally in line with that required to obtain a Social Security card, and probably in line with that required to register for other federal and state benefit programs.
The big disenfranchisement in the US is not these laws, but the sometimes permanent legal disenfranchisement of convicted felons, along with the large number of former felons resulting from the ill-conceived War on Drugs. This number almost certainly is at least an order of magnitude larger than the number of those actually disenfranchised due to "voter suppression." In some states, this can be undone only on approval of the governor of an individual request. A few states allow convicts to vote, and some that do not lift the ban at completion of the sentence.
The "evidence" for fraud seems to be hypothesized hacking of some equipment combined with deviation of some results from pre-election polling reports. As the BrExit and last UK general election shows us, These cannot be considered reliable. As a matter of historical fact, recounts rarely change election outcomes, especially above the local level. Even Michigan, with a reported Trump plurality of almost 11,000 votes, has a very low probability of changing after a recount. Pennsylvania, with a margin approaching 70,000 will not flip, and Wisconsin, with a margin of around 22,000 also is very unlikely to be changed. Clinton would need all three.
What a crock of BS. All of the controls were in for Clinton. The media, nearly all corporations, the president, etc. And she still couldn't win in spite of the current Democrat administration controlling the machines, even here in the "red" states. Her absurd 63-31 percent "win" in California, for people like myself who lived there for 26 years, is prima facie evidence of gross fraud. The Democrats lost, and if they can't accept that, we the winners are going to make sure they do accept it - the easy way or the hard way.
Wow that's amazing. Just imagine, despite the fact that you all and all the other Trump voting Breitbart loving tosspots told us that the election was going to rigged, that she was a criminal, that she was going to jail, that she secretly ran a paedophile ring from her pentagram inscribed email server, that the democrats and the Jews completely controlled the media, that the election was going to be rigged using every method from good old lies and deceit, through state sponsored computer hacking and ending with magic-mushroom-powered-mind-f**king-control beams fired from Satan's Democratic arse. We now find out that the Democrat lizards also had FULL control of the nations voting machines.
And yet she still lost!
I can only imagine what a bunch of strangely honest yet utterly criminal, mind-controlling, lying, vote-rigging traitor lizards the Democrats are.
Good luck with your complete-outsider, anti-establishment, old-white-billionaire.
"Good luck with your complete-outsider, anti-establishment, old-white-billionaire."
Thanks. Wait a year, then see why we're "right". Results will speak for themselves.
As for the allegations that hacking the votes caused Trump to win, it's only because the usual hacking by Demo-rats [from voter manipulation, october surprises, media bias, and unauthorized voting practices when nobody's paying enough attention] did *NOT* work. It suggests that the percentage of people actually FOR Trump was probably a LOT higher than reported, even at the polls...
And its amaaaaaazing that every single piece of video I have seen about wonky machines were a vor Trump being recorded as a vote the Hildebeastand machines were started up with votes already recorded for the Dems.
No, it's not amazing. You're selecting evidence which matches your preconceived notions. That's human nature, and the nature of the internet actually enforces that behavior.
There is no more reason to believe an exit poll than there is to believe one taken in advance of the election. Aside from sampling error and refusal to answer, some people will lie, especially if, as in the immediate past election, one of the candidates is widely viewed as unworthy of respect.
"I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked."
So even the good boffin himself thinks it's most likely just the polls were wrong, but in the next breath:
" But I don’t believe that either one of these seemingly unlikely explanations is overwhelmingly more likely than the other,"
The "most likely explanation", suddenly becomes "one of these seemingly unlikely explanations"?
(I mean, it's not like polls were ever wrong in politics before, right?)
I think the good professor still can't wrap his head around the fact Trump actually won*, and is looking for any excuse.
*To be fair, I can't either!
"So even the good boffin himself thinks it's most likely just the polls were wrong ..."
You're halfway there.
A "good boffin" considers all possibilities and considers the likelihood of each one.
He has, in this case, identified at least two possibilities and has attributed equal likelihood to each of the two most likely, and says there should be some investigation (or "measurement" as a "boffin" might say)
Considering, measuring and testing hypothesis is the basis of science.
Considering and testing every hypothesis and not prematurely throwing any away because of political or other beliefs is the basis of *good* science.
The problem with the polls is many don't accurately reflect the electorate and report raw numbers. Many polls I've seen lack some fundamental data such as education level. Of the polls I've seen with that data clearly over represent people with at least a bachelor's degree. For instance, the latest Emerson poll showed 47.7% of Michigan voters polled had at least an Bachelor's degree when only about 26% of Michigan residents over 25 have attained that level. The polls don't normalize for the discrepancy and this particular one had Clinton leading by 7 percent. Similar problems arise when looking at race as the poll shows 10% of respondents in NH being black but the demographics of the state show that Black or African American only make up 1.5% of the population.
It's pretty clear to me that the polls are far from the mark and any that were close are likely to be so only by chance.
Said professor very carelessly appears to have neglected even cursory statistical tests to see if the results stand up. Because they don't; it's pure snowflake wawawawa stuff and click bait.
1. If you control the data for education levels, the effect disappears, so obviously not robust that the original authors ought to be ashamed;
2. Effect exists in places with and, critically, without electronic voting;
3. Many of the machines in areas affected are essentially stand-alone installations; they don't have external internet connections. So hacking them on any consistent basis would involve significant manpower and a physical presence in the polling places. So it's impractical.
Get over it people, crap click-bait is crap click-bait.
It is all but certain that said professor knows a great deal more about information security than he does about voting behavior.
As for connection of voting machines to the public Internet, it is all but certain that there were effective controls to prevent that, even for voting machines with the capability. However, hacking of individual voting machines is not the only way, and not the most likely or effective, to alter the ultimate vote count - as the professor and others have pointed out elsewhere.
is to ensure the validity of future elections, regardless of the outcome of this election.
It never cedes to amaze me that for many citizens (worldwide) and to the elReg commentards in this forum, the election process is discussed like a soccer match: my team won and I don't care if that referee decision was correct. The future of democracy, and thereby your ability to influence the future of your country, relies on a working democratic process. If you damage that process today, you might not have a working democracy in the future when it might be critical. Is it just for me, as a German, to see this as a problem?
Now somebody remind me again, why was it a good idea to replace paper ballots with voting machines in the first place?
Now somebody remind me again, why was it a good idea to replace paper ballots with voting machines in the first place?
The main issue is the sheer number of choices a voter has to make. Including all state and local ballot items, there may well be several dozen votes to cast. Designing a paper ballot which is convenient to use, not confusing to a voter, and permits easy counting becomes a bit of a challenge. A number of things could still be done, of course, including:
- borrowing ballot and counting template designs from standardized, multiple-choice exam industry
- mandating human-readable paper printouts of the voting choices, which have to be kept by the election officials for a possible recount
- separating national, state, and local elections (and the associated ballots) to keep things simple, if possibly less efficient
However given the fractured jurisdiction over how US elections are organized locally, the most likely outcome involves a broom and a very large carpet.
The main issue is the sheer number of choices a voter has to make. Including all state and local ballot items, there may well be several dozen votes to cast.
And your point is?
I voted in a rather ridiculous banana republic style Eastern European election a few weeks ago. There were 23 f*** muppets on the f*** ballot.
1. People still voted.
2. The political parties have adjusted to the ridiculous number of choices on the ballot. Some of the smaller ones spend more resources advertising which number do you need to tick instead of their name.
The main issue is the sheer number of choices a voter has to make
Well here in the UK when I've had multiple polls on the same day, it's been as simple as the different polls being on different papers (colour coded).
So on the (say) white paper - the choice is "tick one box for your choice of MP ..."
On the (say) yellow paper it's "tick one box for your choice of county councillor ..."
And so on.
being colour coded, it's easy for the invigilators to help if you struggle working out that the white paper goes in the box with the white label, the yellow paper goes in the box with the yellow paper, and so on.
it only gets complicated (for the count at least) when it's a transferable vote system and you have to put 1, 2, 3 ... in the boxes. Even then it's doable.
The key thing is that while it is labour intensive, it is hard to fiddle with - barring seriously corrupt places where (for example) boxes can arrive empty with fresh official seals on them. More importantly, it's open for pretty well anyone to watch and so the process can be seen to be correct.
That latter bit is important - that the process can be seen to be fair. The voting machines may have worked perfectly - but they cannot be seen to have done so and so there is always that suspicion that they might have been tampered with. The machines almost certainly weren't tampered with - but that can't be seen easily.
"Well here in the UK when I've had multiple polls on the same day, it's been as simple as the different polls being on different papers (colour coded)."
UK here as well. I think you may be slightly underestimating the amount of crap on a US ballot.
See, we very, very rarely have more than 4 or 5 things to vote on at once in most European countries - we might do local council and parliament, and maybe even European Parliament as well, but that's about it. Having 3 bits of paper isn't too bad, and we can colour-code easily.
For comparison, this year Texas alone had 50 separate ballot initiatives, in addition to the actual elections. Some districts also had to vote for congressmen. Not sure if the senate was up for grabs in Texas this year, but sometimes they've voting on that too.
So you're looking at somewhere between 52 and 55 separate votes per person, just in Texas. That's a lot of separate bits of paper or different colours to pick from - and at the same time, the other 49 states also have all their own random ballot initiatives, and may or may not be voting for a senator or member of congress this year depending on districting and term limits.
So yeah, the fairly sensible measures implemented over here for keeping voting quick and easy don't really work over there.
... Texas alone had 50 separate ballot initiatives ...
WTF !
How on earth can they come up with a crap arrangement like that, the icon sums up what should happen to the idiots who let it happen.
Even so, that is not something that can't be handled by paper - just "a bit more difficult". One option that comes to mind is a larger paper divided into sections, and fist job at the counting station is to separate them (along the perforations) and feed the bits to the separate points.
Actually, the counting could still be done by OMR - the tech for that is well established. OK, once you introduce OMR then there's a tech angle to be compromised - but it's on a relatively small scale (ie at the counting station only) and cross checking is "just" a case of taking the stack of paper that a machine has counted and hand counting them (or running them through a "check" counter under the sole control of the auditors).
As long as there are some spot checks done on randomly chosen machines - there's always a readily visible opportunity for fraud to be detected. If youa re going to fiddle the results systematically, then you need to affect a lot of machines - so a good chance of getting caught by a random check. And statistical checks would highlight if a small number of machines were tampered with in a big way.
"How on earth can they come up with a crap arrangement like that, the icon sums up what should happen to the idiots who let it happen."
Yeah, it's not ideal :) When going to vote, in most states you literally get given a booklet with a dozen pages to fill in. This is also a major cause of why the US has giant queues for voting, and it drives down turnout because it can take upwards of half an hour to fill out the full ballot - some states have what's called 'straight ticket voting', which allows you to vote for one party all the way down the ticket, but not all of them. And you might be voting for everything from who gets to be president all the way down to the choice of municipal dog catcher, on top of various initiatives.
Worse, some of these ballot initiatives are phrases almost incomprehensibly - I think it was Colorado (though it may be one of the other states) this year which was voting on repealing the repeal of the death penalty, so it had a ballot question asking 'are you in favour of repeal', for which 'yes' was a vote in favour of re-instating the death penalty.
This is why the US has actually had problems with designing paper ballots in the past - one of the (many) big problems in 2000 was that the design of the Florida 'butterfly' ballot booklet wasn't entirely clear which way you were voting, so many people who may have been trying to vote for Gore ended up voting for a third party candidate - or spoiling their ballot accidentally. This was the infamous 'hanging chads' problem, which lead to a chaotic recount process even before the courts got involved and started acting in ludicrously partisan ways (at every level and by both sides).
Hence, voting machines were eagerly seized upon as a way round this insane level of complexity, which is why many were bought prior to security or sensible design standards being employed. The ideal option would be replacing all of them with a standardized voting machine which provided a paper receipt that could be checked, but the US electoral system is NOT standardized in any way, means, shape or form - every state deals with voting itself, using it's own standards, and sometimes it's own voting methods (so Maine and Nebraska use a semi-proportional system, while most places are FPTP) and in some places this stretches right down to precinct level - and at all places handled by partisan officials who have vested interests in making the system work to their own side's advantage.
A couple of weeks before the election, this was all being claimed as a great advantage of the system because it makes it harder to rig it.
So even relatively sensible suggestions for reform and standardization are unlikely to be adopted.
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