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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35668 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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All of your points are great and you're probably right.

But if you wanted to cheat, you would merely need a mechanism to delay likely opponent's votes, i.e. areas where their constituents live.

Basically, anonymous voting already has a trade off of less security in exchange for anonymity. But it allows backdoor attacks since a voter cannot check to who their vote was finally counted for. Combined with the security tradeoffs of mass mail in ballots, a sophisticated agency could cheat the vote, and while suspicions might be raised if it didnt go smoothly, the anonymous voting means there is no means to check the final count by the backdoor.

I cannot say for certain if there was cheating only that the current system is vulnerable to it.

But if you wanted to cheat, you would merely need a mechanism to delay likely opponent's votes, i.e. areas where their constituents live.

This is word for word what Democrats said while losing their shit for the moral outrage du jour in 2020 with DeJoy, who was going to stop all the Democratic ballots from being sent in.

I do not like mail-in ballots in general, and I can say why if we want to get into it. But on this particular front, the people who are given the convenience to vote from home can make the reasonable effort to send their ballot in early, verify their ballot was received, or even deliver them to the county clerk.

I cannot say for certain if there was cheating only that the current system is vulnerable to it.

If Canadian voting scares you then you need to read up on California voting.

I'm saying it's a possible vulnerability. We are so accustomed to anonymous voting that we forget that it creates backdoor security issues. Usually those are difficult to implement but much less so with mass mail ballots. The vulnerabilities overlap well for an agency looking to surreptitiously control election results.

Maybe it hasn't happened yet but it certainly could happen.

If we applied basic infosec sensibility (assuming the worst when seeing a obviously exploitable gaping vulnerability) to voting, almost no election can be considered legitimate.

But most people don't for some reason.

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