'SAVE Act' Aims To Do The Impossible: Secure Electronic Voting In The US

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Voter - *votes for Democratic candidate*
Machine - You have voted for [Republican candidate]. Is that correct?
Voter - *frantically taps no*
Machine - Thank you. Your vote for [Republican candidate] has been saved. God bless democracy.
 
I have a Security+ cert and the only 100% secure computer is one that is taken off the internet, turned off and stored in a safe. And that's only if you trust the person with the combination. Voting should never, ever be electronic.
 
All electronic no way. Must physically vote, even then fraud will occur. But not on the order of hacked results.
 
Sounds like this would more likely allow tampering to be covered up.
"We can't comment on the tampering proof you've obtained... it's a National Security issue you understand"

Just get rid of these systems. Both neocons and neoliberals want this to make sure political outsiders like Trump will never come to power again, even if the people vote them in.
 
Nevada uses a system that prints a copy of your selections before you finish. If these were automatically checked versus the machine's results for every machine for every election this would eliminate a lot of potential for fraud.
 


If you're allowed to take that home, that opens another level of fraud.

"If you wish to have a job on Wednesday afternoon, you'll bring me your printout that shows you voted for MyGuy"
 


Fortunately, or maybe not, the paper copy is behind a plastic window and stays with the machine.
 
From the Wa.Post before the election on why votes CAN'T BE COMPRIMISED:

"The election system covers voter registration systems and other data centralization and is specific to jurisdictions. The voting system is the actual process of voting: the machines, the ballots and the designations of who votes where and on what. Information flows between these systems, but not always in two directions: Campaigns, for example, use voter registration data from the elections system but don't send information back to it. So if a campaign is hacked (or if the Democratic National Committee is), there's no risk to the voter registration database."

This was one of 100 articles hammering home the point that no physical votes will be altered during the 2016 election, of course this was when the corrupt liberal media shilling for Hillary were 200% confident she was winning every state.

I find it embarrassing and sad that the media is now trying to discredit 60+million voters and push the narrative that if it weren't for Boris standing over me in the booth, I would have had to vote Clinton right? No one is buying this except the useful idiots.
 
All electronic voting ballots should be made public. Randomly-assigned voter ID numbers on a printed receipt would protect individual privacy. Each voter could then check to make sure the votes attached to his ID were correctly reported. Large monetary rewards for uncovering fraud would motivate the public to look for any voting irregularities such as more votes than voters, incorrect counting, suspicious patterns, etc. Private systems reward corruption. Public systems can use rewards to fight corruption.
 
I can vividly remember a few years back how everyone was clamoring for all-digital voting; not just voting machines, but internet voting for elections. I remember people furiously demanding that we switch to the same internet-based voting system used in some European nations. And my argument now, as it was then, is that it's not secure, and unlike those nations, there is a huge target on the US voting system.

I think the US system, particularly the US voters, some 45% who couldn't be bothered to vote in the last election, is done a disservice by a misleading thinking that just making things digital makes things better. A little physical effort when deciding something like who will make some of the most impactful decisions about the world around you in the years to come shouldn't be so much to ask, but i guess it is for a great many of us.
 


Great idea but I would go a step further.

Don't assign a code to a person just have the machine generate a random code each time some one votes.

You write down your code and compare it to the database of all votes.

Only you would know your code and if it was compromised the person stealing it would still have nothing due to the next elections machine generating an entirely different code.

 
@derekullo That's what I intended. The voter ID numbers would be associated with each ballot rather than the voter. The printed receipt or other more secure electronic receipt would be needed to collect an award for discovering voting discrepancies.
 




Yup. It could be abused or hacked either way... or less likely, even in favor of a third-party candidate that otherwise would have a snowball's chance the way both Dems and Reps suppress the chances of any other party or independent candidates at high level elections. Sometimes a third party gets lucky, but only at state levels or less... maybe even federal level senate/house levels sometimes.

Regardless of the guilty party... that is one scenario of hacking.
 
Frankly there is no need to go beyond the simple fill in the bubble style paper ballot. It's idiot proof as we're all taught how to fill in the bubble at school. It has the ability to be rapidly computer scanned for a quick vote count and be hand counted by the human eye if the vote is too close/disputed.

Also requires zero electricity or computer system to actually fill out. So a power outage or glitching voting booth doesn't stop anyone from voting.

It baffles me why any other voting method is even considered.
 


And how do you prevent a group from destroying, adding to, or replacing the ballots? You have no audit trail with that system to verify that the ballots being counted are the ones that were originally cast by the voters. A fully electronic system can also be abused the same way so a hybrid system is necessary. One that combines an electronic vote and a paper receipt to compare it to.

 


Bar codes, Bar codes and bar codes. These aren't just blank pieces of papers with bubbles. We know how many are printed, we know what districts they are sent to. If in person voting then we know how many are actually taken by voters to be filled out vs. how many are never claimed and thus left blank.

What you are complaining about is institutional manipulation, which is how El Presidente wins his 8th election with 100% of the vote. This is something only an inside party can do and is combated by having a healthy neutral voting commission and 3rd party observers during counting.

Basically the only way a paper ballot doesn't work is if the voting mechanism is sham from the very beginning.
 


A couple of problems with your method are how do you verify that the ballot returning from the polling site are the ones that you sent out and how do you make sure that each polling place has enough ballots? Pieces of paper can be forged very easily and with people able to vote at any site it is very hard to make sure that you send enough ballots to each site.
You mentioned that 3rd party oversight would take care of the first problem, but it is those same people that have the greatest chance to harm you. They may only be able to affect a small number of polling sites but it could be enough to throw an election. Without any way to detect this tampering it may never be noticed or fixed.
 


It's actually pretty simple. My state uses scantron sheets with barcodes on them. When the scantron sheet is inserted into the machine (by the voter himself/herself), the barcode is read by the machine along with the marked bubbles.

To ensure the proper quantity of ballots end up at each voting station, we're all assigned to a specific voting station where our identities are "verified" by voter registration card, photo ID and address verification. Each voting station has a list of all registered voters assigned to that voting station. If you're not on the list, you get sent to the station that is designated for your area. Each voting station has 1 ballot for each person registered to vote at that station.

My particular voting station has 4 registrars, 2 voter registration administrators, 2 voting machine supervisors and no fewer than 4 uniformed police officers on site from open to close on election day.

The scantron machines we use for voting are "unhackable" as the only cable going into them is the power cable. When voting is done, they print out a "receipt" with the vote counts. Since the scantron sheets are stored inside the machines, it's very easy to go back and audit the results.

One of the neighboring cities was caught a few years ago doing what appeared to be rigging an election. The machines were altered to only allow votes for Republicans to be cast. They used electronic voting systems with touchscreens...

I do find this "SAVE Act" to be particularly suspicious seeing as how Trump put together an "Election Integrity Commission" that is 100% "Conservative" Republican that has requested detailed voting information on every US citizen, including voting history, with an obvious intention to suppress voters that aren't likely to vote Republican..... Just screams rigged future elections. What better way to rig future elections than to turn the entire country's voting systems over the "conservative" Republicans. It's better for voting systems to be in the hands of neutral parties.
 


Nevada has early voting where a person can vote at specific sites for weeks before election day. They do not have to go to their regular polling station for these early votes. The fact that the votes would be saved inside the Scantrons allows a person to open the machine and change the ballots inside with new ones with the same bar codes but different ballots. Without a copy of the ballots outside the machine there is no way to verify this has not happened.
 
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