“Hacked by AI” fucking lol
“All my information about AI comes from watching Avengers films”
“All my information about AI comes from AI.”
A broken clock etc etc
Also, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/
A classic. By the way electronic with paper trail gives you faster counts, a way to validate the results and recompute them by hand when there’s an issue.
And doing voting over multiple days and/or by mail in ballots gives you time to count everything.
The people pushing for same day and only that day with all votes counted that day just ignore the logistics and practicality of having people vote. Or, I suspect, rather like that it makes it impossible for highly populated areas to have their votes counted while lower populated areas votes are counted.
I’ve seen pushes for mail in ballots to be held and not counted until Election Day and then only those ballots counted by the end of Election Day counted. Which is absurd. Do mail in, count them up to and after. Or count them up to and give people with mail in ballots access to them a lot earlier. So they can be accurately counted leading up to Election Day.
Of course the logistics of having people able to monitor those ballots over a larger period of time is tricky too. Hence why they’re often not counted until day of and so, by extension, result in ballots not being fully counted for a few days.
One day only in person voting is purposeful suppression of votes.
Also, am coder, 100% agree with xkcd. I’m still amazed the Internet itself works.
It is theoretically possible to devise a mathematically secure electronic voting system using cryptography, but only if everyone can follow instructions perfectly and people can understand how it works and why their vote is secure. In other words, not in any way that would work in real life.
The principal benefit of pen-and-paper voting is that it is really easy to convince people that taking a ballot paper into a booth, marking it, and then depositing the ballot into a locked glass box which is later counted in front of a room of independent observers is a secure way to run elections. It is impossible to convince the average voter that cryptographically secure voting schemes are actually immune from tampering.
Edit: I never understood why we have “election days”. Why not have an “election week”?
Having multiple days of open voting would be a game changer for some people. It can be absurdly difficult to actually get the day off, depending on the employer, and I’ve had ones try to treat it as a “perk”, like it shouldn’t be the damned baseline that we’re able to actually take part in the democratic process they’re parading around like a shiny bauble.
In Minnesota, the law requires employers to give employees time off (of their choosing) to vote. At my previous job where they were anal about time in the office, I made a point of voting in the middle of the day which would require another commute. When I got the nasty email about “break too long”. I just replied with a link the statute. And made sure all my co-workers knew what their rights were.
Personally I think they should do something like opening the polls on October 1st and then have November 1st be closing day, and all through October we take a page from the aussies and just have a rolling cookout/party at each of the polling places.
Ya get your “I voted sticker” any time in the month and can walk right in for beer and hot dogs and heck maybe even some of Kronk’s spinach puffs if that one guy can make Babish’s recipe work like he said he was gonna at the planning meeting for who’s bringing the goods, and best of all, it’s rolling for a month, so you’ve got every opportunity to stop in and cast your ballot, or just to come back with your “I voted” sticker to keep enjoying the festivities!
This is our most sacred institution as a nation, we should be making a celebration out of it!
Yup, I’m in a state with mail voting, and it’s great! The ballot comes with the “I voted” sticker, you can drop off the ballot any time before election day (or mail it), and you can check if they’ve received and counted it online. It’s great! I’ve never been to a voting booth and I don’t intend to ever go.
That sounds a lot like early voting which I have used in the past.
Yah, on this particular thing, he’s not wrong.
Everythinge else, though, he’s fucking batshit.
Exactly what I was thinking.
Blockchain technology based (BBVS) could be safer but regular EVMs are still hackable
Trustless systems are always better than centralised systems especially when the government in power is also in authority to decide whether they continue to stay in power.
US has been blessed till now.
But look at Russian or North Korean elections. They also use paper ballots
I am confident that Putin is not gonna last if they go for a blockchain based voting system.
The problem is not being secure; it is convincing people that it is secure. Even the stupidest person understands that marking off a paper in a booth and then depositing it in a locked box is secure. The voting method must give voters confidence that their vote was counted, the election was fair, and the results are legitimate.
Also, you can recount papers if you think something somewhere went wrong for some reason. You can’t manually recheck software.
That gives so much more opportunity for human intervention.
A good locksmith is all it takes to manipulate the votes.
Even if you keep it under tight security and surveillance they can bribe the security.
In many countries there is a security camera placed over the ballot box which is livestreamed to the Internet
Just turn off the camera and manipulate all you like
In my state, here’s how it works:
- Receive ballot by mail
- Drop ballot off at a drop box
- Wait a few days
- Check online that it was received and the signature is accepted
- Check on election day that the vote was counted
To break that system, you’d need to also hack the website or manipulate the votes on election day. That’s a lot harder than manipulating proprietary software by bribing a software engineer somewhere.
In my country here’s how it works:
- Parties provides free food and transport to unemployed masses they know will vote for them
- Wait 3-4 hours in queue at polling station to receive ballot in person
- Drop ballot in secure box
- Go back to work for a few days
- See on election day that the party that spent the most on voter courting wins
How would you propose we deal with this when people who are working (and can’t take a day off to go vote) would come out in much smaller numbers than ones that have nothing else to do (and get free lunch and transit to and from the polling stations) and even when voting happens on a weekend you have to trade your only time off to go and vote out of the goodness of your heart.
I think this is one of the reasons for digital voting - I’d much rather be able to vote from work or home or anywhere when I don’t have the time to sit on a queue for 5 hours just to have my vote diminished by a group that isn’t politically active but loves a free lunch and something to do
EVMs aren’t a vote from home option, they just replace steps 1&2 with a machine instead of a ballot drop box. So maybe your wait goes down to 2-3 hours because it’s a little faster.
I’m saying we replace the physical voting locations entirely and you can drop your ballot in your mailbox, or drop it at one of the secure voting boxes throughout the city. So it doesn’t matter if you work two jobs and can’t get a couple hours off, if you can check your mail and fill out a form, you can vote. And the ballot comes a few weeks before election day, so you have time.
I think we should also have a federal “election day” holiday so people can research candidates and vote.
I am not in favour of EVMs here.
However there are pros and cons for both systems
I am just saying if you go for an electronic voting system using an airtight blockchain like Bitcoin and ethereum to verify votes using a biometric database is the only system trustworthy enough because.
If you use multiple blockchains like these it would require 10 trillion dollars or more to get the computing and staking power to hack the system.
It’s inconceivably costlier than hacking a physical election.
Russia also has paper ballots and I can assure you we can easily kick out Putin with a blockchain based voting system.
No it wouldn’t.
Well, he’s got that one right.
Elections should be as low tech as possible. Everything going on should be verifiable with your eyes and basic tools only.
Keep it simple and keep it monitored by at least 3 to 5 people at all times.
who cares if the counting takes a few days, as long as i can trust the results.
And dear fellows in the USA, for the love of god, move the voting day to a Sunday already.
Counterpoint: There’s a big difference between electronic voting machines and electronic counting machines.
The way we do elections in Canada, your vote is made on paper. The paper ballots are fed though electronic counting machines to get the initial tally, but the paper record is then kept and tallied up separately to check for discrepancies. This is both fast and secure.
Electronic voting machines, on the other hand, are an exercise in absolute insanity that security experts universally agree no one should be using.
Of course, Musk is railing against them because he’s drunk the far right Kool-Aid about stolen elections, but actual smart, educated people have been saying the same thing for a lot longer.
Good point, thanks!
As long as the hand count is recognized as the actual result i would be fine with that.Knowing humans and our tendency to be lazy, i fear we would first reduce the redundant checks and then skip them completely. In the name of efficiency of course.
Also after witnessing the history of absolute fuckups my government (germany) produced in the field of software and IT, i don’t want them to use machines. They lost any trust i had in them with any kind of technology. Let them count and add up by hand, i’ll gladly pay extra taxes for that.
Maybe i’m just a bit to paranoid :/
It’s pretty rich that one of his stans is harping about how the Left “steals elections”, yet his guy literally tried that in the last election cycle. Then there’s also Bush v Gore. But yeah, it’s those crafty lefties doing the stealing!
“hundreds of voting irregularities”
Out of how many votes? Oh, enough votes that hundreds of irregularities is statistically irrelevant? Cool, just checking.
Oh, a fraction of a percent of the thousands of manual votes that Republicans had and tried to have thrown out so that dumps could win in 2020? k, just checking.
Seems almost paradoxical but yeah physical voting is the way to go https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
As others have said, the scalability ideal is to have electric/mechanical counters but with paper ballots. Keeps the paper trail for double checking, but also allows poll workers to deliver quick initial results to everyone breathing down their necks.
Well here in Germany we have about 40-50 million votes to count in a federal election. Right when the booths close we get an exit poll that is already pretty close. After 1-2 hours there are extrapolations that are even closer and next morning, there is usually the certified result. All on paper, counted by hand.
Unfortunately the software we use(d?) to transmitt and add up the votes is abysmal:
Pretty sure that’s how we do it up on Canada. I think random samples are hand-counted to make sure the machine count is accurate. There’s early voting too so not all just in one day.
I’ve never used a machine in 40 years of voting in Canada. And if they show up, I won’t use them.
We fill out a paper, but a machine might scan them based on what OP is saying.
Then they will spot check it and have the paper backup if needed.
My state does Scantron style ballots. You fill in the little ovals and put it into a machine to be counted.
Isn’t this the doofus who wanted to send a submarine into a cave? Dude doesn’t have the intellectual heft necessary to manage a QuikTrip in Topeka.
But, take this drivel seriously. They like it when rural, red areas report their vote totals first, so that the news outlets will report that Republicans are “leading” early in the evening, before the blue cities finish their counting and overtake the early totals. It’s a cheap trick to sell the claim that the election was stolen to their followers, y’know, the people who think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
Reminder that this fucking moron is pushing Twitter as a financial tool. He wants you to use X like you would use your credit card.
But voting machines are insecure?
He wants you to use X like you would use your credit card.
I won’t even use xitter like social media. Why in hell would I consider it as a credit card? Oh, I get it. The target audience is the idiot army.
He’s still pissed he got booted from PayPal. He cashed in, but they didn’t let him run it.
Wow, this is one of the very few oppinions me and Musk share.
@OP why add an acronym when it is just a twitter post that doesn’t even mention said acronym?
You’re not even American, you’re Swedish
Correct, but how is that relevant?
You’re saying you don’t trust our voting machines… even though you’re not American? Elon Musk is referring to American voting machines.
There is no safe voting machines. Countries or annoying Musk have nothing to do with that fact.
What do you suggest then, since in-person voting has actually been linked to fraud and manipulation. Voting machines are perfectly acceptable.
Let’s just do a quick AI generated list of examples:
Ballot Box Stuffing
-
1948 Texas Senate Race: In the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Lyndon B. Johnson narrowly defeated Coke Stevenson. Allegations of ballot box stuffing were rampant, particularly involving Box 13 in Jim Wells County, where 202 votes, all in alphabetical order and all for Johnson, were suspiciously added late.
-
Chicago, Illinois (1960 Presidential Election): Allegations persist that Chicago’s Cook County, under Mayor Richard J. Daley, engaged in ballot box stuffing to help John F. Kennedy win Illinois and thus the presidency. Investigations revealed irregularities and improbable vote counts in several precincts.
-
East Chicago, Indiana (2003 Mayoral Election): Incumbent Mayor Robert Pastrick was accused of ballot box stuffing. Investigations revealed that absentee ballots were manipulated, leading to multiple convictions of election officials for their roles in the fraud.
Ballot Destruction
-
Kentucky (1944 U.S. Senate Election): In the Democratic primary, incumbent Senator Happy Chandler faced charges of ballot destruction. Boxes of ballots from counties favorable to his opponent were allegedly thrown out or destroyed, leading to investigations and widespread controversy.
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Georgia (1946 Governor’s Election): During the “Three Governors Controversy,” ballots in Telfair County were reportedly burned or otherwise destroyed to influence the election outcome. Supporters of Eugene Talmadge were implicated in the destruction of ballots that favored his opponents.
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2004 Ohio Presidential Election: In Cuyahoga County, reports surfaced that provisional ballots were improperly discarded or lost. Election observers noted that some ballots from predominantly Democratic precincts were missing or destroyed, raising questions about the integrity of the vote count.
These examples underscore the persistent vulnerabilities in the electoral process and the importance of robust oversight and security measures to safeguard the integrity of elections.
-
Those must be the ones he can’t pay to manipulate.
not even joking, i find that if there’s one Twitter account to act as a definitive guide to policy, science, technology and various issues, it’s Elon’s account.
just carefully read every tweet and do the exact opposite. there’s no way you can go wrong with it.
Even his good opinions need to overhype AI…
Anyway, we all saw that Tom Scott video, we know it’s a bad idea.
I agree. While we’re at it, we can also make election day a holiday and require employers to give workers at least a paid half-day off so that they can vote, and create a citizenship ID that is free and easy to get rather than using ID with requirements like a driver’s license. Then maybe we can try out ranked choice voting and eliminate the electoral college. You know, since we want the election to be fair.
Honestly, I’m open to election reform if it means dead people can’t vote.
Wow. I actually agree with Elon Musk about something for once, what a shock!
Tom Scott has a very good video explaining why electronic voting is terrible all around and it will probably never be secure.
Tom Scott’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs Tom Scott’s video via the Computerphile channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI&t=1s
That’s loads of BS. Manual in person voting is easily scammed, just look at voting in Russia. Fuck this shit, everything should be 100% digital.
Paper voting leaves a literal paper trail unlike electronic voting that’s always a total black box in all countries that have tried it.
Look, mate, paper voting simply doesn’t work. And Russia is not the only example.
If you think results contradict content of the boxes, then online voting just allows to do it on greater scale much easier.
No, online voting prevents malicious actors from scamming the voting process.
I don’t get what’s wrong with paper ballots sent by mail. It’s convenient and easy, with a paper trail for recounts. It’s worked great in Washington for decades.
Look at my other replies.
it absolutely is not easily scammed at all.
every single piece of paper is numbered and tracked. (tickets and stubbs, basically). all counting is done by multiple people and watched by anyone who wants. political parties are banned from voting premises.
even better: early voting, in person, up to a week or two before. no crowds.
errors happen about 1 in 1,000,000 with a maximum of a couple hundred, and are caught immediately.
there is no scamming. all of the USA’s voting problems are self-created.
Ahaha! Ok.
Manual in person voting is not easily scammed on a scale that can swing an election. The slow, inefficient, in person, physical process is a security feature.
Lol what?
A system being slow and inefficient makes defrauding that system similarly slow and inefficient. To affect an election run on paper ballots you have to somehow physically alter or insert thousands or millions of pieces of paper without being detected. This will mean spending large amounts of time and money and must necessarily involve numerous people.
Mate, are you high? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owSxq50-DsI
Not just digital but trustless decentralised blockchain based so it’s impossibly hard to manipulate
