Discussion
No matter the outcome of tomorrow's elections, Wednesday will likely be "the election was rigged by hackers!" day for many disgruntled supporters of losing candidates.
Remember, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Think before you boost, especially when the message tells you what you want to hear.
@mattblaze Bush v. Gore I think it was a stolen election.
@djmitche I apologize, but if you don't already understand the difference between "something could possibly happen" and "something has actually happened", I probably lack the tools to explain it to you.
In Broward County Florida it was Republicans that drove adoption of electronic voting.
They slandered and bullied the Clerk of Elections, a Haitian woman, claiming she was a bad administrator of the 15 million dollar budget.
Three years after she was driven from office the County had the electronic voting system, supported by an annual budget of 30 million dollars.
Yes , Republicans driving the crazy train.
Oh, and by the way, Darline Nordone changed her name back to Darline Graham, in an attempt to confuse voters in South Carolina.
@mattblaze @djmitche it’s sort of like the advice about not using USB ports at airports to charge your phone though.
That is probably one of the most well-known cybersecurity threats a layperson will know about, despite having never actually happened to anyone.
The media frequently uses experts’ claims of things being possible to back up more sensationalist claims, which in turn just makes it harder to dissuade people of those fears later.
@mattblaze @draNgNon Remember, “many disgruntled supporters,” means, “Trump voters.” Because, and I say this as a caring human being, the rest of humanity doesn’t actually think that the libs are hacking the voting infrastructure.
@pirateguillermo @draNgNon Spurious and unfounded claims of election hacking have sadly become an affliction of both the left and the right. Look up the “election truth alliance” bozos for a prominent recent (and persistent) example.
@mattblaze saw a fair bit of that after the last election - some people on The Other Place(tm) were going about how they couldn't believe it could be true and so it couldn't be true and so the only way it could have happened was Bad People(tm) doing Bad Things(tm) to voting machines. Very depressing. 😢
@chris_bloke yup. It’s the one thing both sides agree on now.
Israel is interfering in US democracy.
@mattblaze I think Wed-Fri should be social media and unreliable news media black out days for this reason... and WTF, why not just take off the weekend, too? I don't think we're going to have results for weeks because of Drumpf's ongoing election interference efforts through so many access points. It's going to be a nasty knot to unweave but eventually we'll get there.
@mattblaze systems seem to work okay, the real "tampering" is the lies and distortions on the news and shared on social media beforehand.
Feel sorry for anyone working a polling station when the allegations and "investigations" start
@mattblaze Thank you, Matt, for being a voice of reason. I have been exposed to news stories that made some pretty big claims about elections, and I think I genuinely may have been swayed by some of them if I hadn't had your consistent reminders that, no, the US election system is actually quite robust, and subverting it in the manner described by those claiming fraud would take a substantial effort that would be impossible to conceal.
So, y'know. Thanks for keeping this one internet rand sane.
@mattblaze Spoken as a true time traveler :-). I thought it would be fun to make up a bingo card that had all of the various pretext theories people use. Making fun of them seems to help mitigate their impact.
@mattblaze The lion does not concern himself with "voting."
There is one sure way of not having your election results rigged by hackers - do it the old fashioned way.
Here in the UK we use paper ballots and pencil (or pen if you wish) to mark an X on your ballot. The ballots are then taken to a central point in the voting area and manually* counted where candidates and there reps can observe the procedure.
*some specific elections may use ballot counting machines but it is not the norm for most. The ballots are all physical.
@raymierussell Thanks for the information. I'm completely unfamiliar with even the most elementary principles of election security, because I've only been thinking about this full time for a bit more than a quarter century now.
Do you know how US elections work? Are you aware, for example, that the vast majority of US voters use hand marked paper ballots?
But thanks for the advice. We'll get right on it.
I find that most folks in the Anglosphere outside the US have no idea that some US ballots are two full pages. Multiple offices over multiple jurisdictions as well as ballot initiatives or, in Oklahoma's case, “judicial retention” elections.
@raymierussell Yes, I'm snarky and irritable about this topic.
Well that answers that question ;-)
I hate, hate, HATE that "the election was rigged" has become the go-to explanation (across the US political spectrum) for any election that doesn't go your way.
Remember: despite real progress, there are still vulnerabilities in parts of our election infrastructure. But there is NO EVIDENCE that any US election outcome has ever been successfully altered by technical means.
It's not IMPOSSIBLE, but it's not something that we've actually seen happen (so far). Perspective, please.
@mattblaze There's also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology)
One of the problems is that there have been so many claims in recent years (from both left and right) that some election was "hacked" that people who aren't paying close attention think that it actually happens all the time. "So many cases that it's not even possible to list them all" is the impression.
Except there are no documented cases of technical attacks altering US election outcomes. None. Nada. Zilch. Bupkis.
Maybe it could happen, but no evidence of it yet (fingers crossed).
I'm not in the US, and we do paper based voting.
The problem for me is that I can clearly point to the process chain: there is the voting place where the votes are cast. Those are probably safe, enough people are watching those. But what happens then? Votes are counted and passed up a hierarchy. And that hierarchy is not transparent. I don't have proof that they do their job correctly and I'm not allowed to observe that step. 😐
Voting is still better than not voting though.
@mattblaze that's the problem with adopting a voting system that's impenetrable for most voters.
You don't even need to actually hack it, just the fact that almost no one has the ability to tell whether or not the result actually reflects the voter's will is enough.
Pen and paper ballots, which only require elementary grade education to verify, don't have that problem.
Yes, it may take a few more hours to get the result, so what?
@gnpar You do realize that's how most US voters cast their ballots, right?
@mattblaze I get the impression that "The election was hacked/rigged!" is more of an admission of "I'd compromise the election in a heartbeat if I could, so everybody else _must_ be doing it, right?".
Anyway, if you haven't yet cast your ballot, go vote!
@mattblaze Kids on the playground: YOU CHEATED!
@tonyangelo Zero cases of election outcomes fraudulently altered by technological means. ZERO.
@tonyangelo The closest thing to a documented case of “voting machine hacking” used to alter an election outcome was the Clay County, KY conspiracy. But there, a group of corrupt election officials (who sold local offices) provided incorrect instructions to voters and then snuck into the voting booth after a voter left without actually casting their ballot and “corrected” it for them. No actual technical attacks involved.
@mattblaze
Vote fraud and election interference are two different things that could both be labeled "election rigging".
Vote fraud is a very minor issue with minimal impact (this sounds like what you're talking about).
Election interference happens on massive and small scales, both in the past and now. The Cambridge Analytica scandal was very real, very impactful, and very illegal. Making voting less convenient by closing polling stations (happening in my city right now), intimidating legal voters, having the USPS interfere with mail in ballots, etc, is all a very real and dangerous problem.
@mattblaze So I think this has the same root cause as the "Ukraine killed the Russian bots and Twitter became usable" myth.
Which is to say, it's exculpatory. There is a desperate USAmerican impulse to reassign the blame for USAmerican carnage to others. It would be a neat little world if RuuuUUuUUuUUssia was responsible for Trump, and for fascism, and for global collapse. But the reality is that it's the USA that's responsible for that.
It's the same energy as "all homophobes are secretly gay" being implicitly equivalent to saying "straight people aren't the ones doing homophobia".
@mattblaze Except for the gerrymandering.
The fact that Spanky is so freaked out about 2 Dan Sullivans in Alaska should reassure folk that it’s not so easy to hack the machines.
@CStamp I used to work with a guy named Dan Sullivan. I wonder where he is now. I should check around and see if he's listed on a ballot somewhere.
Is everyone a Sullivan down there?
@mattblaze Awww yeah! Election security! Love it when Matt plays the hits!
Encore! Risk Limiting Audits!
FREEBIRD!!!!!
@mattblaze "The election is rigged" for many people is easier to take than "a majority of people are have chosen to ruin the country"
@mattblaze It is frustrating that when people say "the election was rigged" they usually mean it in the context of actual fabrication, which is without evidence, and without some extraordinary measures to do so covertly, utterly implausible.
Meanwhile "the election was rigged" is very real in the systemic, political sense (gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc), with plenty of documentary evidence and far too commonly a reality. It is a shame people fall back on the former.
@mattblaze the psychology behind it is also so weird. Why is it so hard for someone, anyone, to accept that most people who voted disagreed with them? Sometimes your opinion, even if it's correct, is in the minority!
@mattblaze I’m sure this is anecdotally true, but the only time it’s in the news is when the voices on the right are making the claim. Not coincidentally, the vast majority of voter fraud comes from the right, in both large (Leslie McCrae, Bladen County, NC) and small (an individual voting in multiple jurisdictions) cases.