Re: POTUS 45.1 - You take the high road and I'll take the low road
So this voter fraud thing has a very interesting tangent- election validity.
Saw this movie last night- "I Voted?"
http://www.ivotedmovie.com/ Which is basically about our voting system and the lack of any common specifications and even worse, the total lack of checking if a vote is real or not. Not the illegal voter kind- but if you pushed the button for X or drew on a page for X, did the vote go for X or Y?
The movie starts with a primary election in South Carolina where a total unknown person who didn't campaign won the primary overwhelmingly. How did that happen?
It points out that the voting machines that are commonly used are not very reliable, and are also quite easy to hack. And for many of them, there's no actual way to do a recount because there is no paper trail to use.
Even with a paper trail, there can be problems- in a county in Florida, there was a city council election that used a very similar system that we use here in Michigan, where there's a scanned paper ballot. As it turns out, for a reason that nobody still knows why- votes going to one potential council member counted for someone else. Thankfully, they had a paper trail to recount with, otherwise, there would have been a totally wrong election.
It was very interesting.
After which Alex Halderman-
https://jhalderm.com/ did a great presentation. He was featured in the film- he lead a group of students at Michigan who managed to hack into an on line election, as asked by the election board. The crux of the presentation was two conclusions- one- it's still highly unlikely that there was widespread voter fraud, or that the election was hacked. BUT- it's REALLY easy to have one of the machines make a mistake OR for it to be easily hacked, which will completely throw out an election.
Basically, the push of the two things was to get our states to 1) use a paper ballot, and regulate around that instead of the machine that counts them. (recall that some of the Detroit ballots were not counted just because a seal on the paper was broken- it took the machine tally over it) 2) increase security around the voting system (don't leave machines out unattended before the election, and make sure that the systems that are programming the machines are truly secure) and 3) include an audit in each election- can be just a bunch of random voting districts to make a solid statistical check, and move up the chain if issues are found.
This should be a bi-partisan thing, too. With all of the anger going around this country, it would take a little tweak to the system by a handful of people to throw things very badly off. Either way. Anyone who currently holds office could easily make someone mad enough to do this, and I don't think anyone would want to lose an election due to either an honest mistake or an intentional hack.
After the talk, we heard that there is going to be some proposed legislation in Michigan to address this. But it would be a good idea to talk to your state, and get the election to be secure.
