• bluGill@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Can someone who isn’t trained figure out how to audit the results to verify they are correct without figuring out who anyone voted for? With simple paper ballots anyone can. With computer voting machines, as someone with a computer science degree i’m confident I can rig the results in a.way that I wouldn’t catch is someone else was rigging the results.

    • Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      You can easily just chuck paper ballots and write new ones. It’s easier than hacking a computer system. Trust me, I wrote through all of school.

      • TechyDad@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        And either one of these attacks is high risk, low reward. Let’s say you can modify a voting machine or toss/replace some paper ballots. You, as one person, aren’t going to make much of a difference in the election results - especially national ones. Meanwhile, you’ll be risking significant prison time if caught. (And a lot of people will be watching during your attempt.)

        Scaling this attack up would require armies of co-conspirators all operating silently, nobody ratting out the others, nobody getting caught, and everyone successfully pulling off their missions. This is something that might be possible in a movie, but it’s extremely unlikely in the real world.

      • bluGill@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Sure, but any idiot understands that attack. Which is why the major political parties send volunteers to watch elections go ensure that doesn’t happen.

    • dhork@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The irony is that computer scientists were all over this in the 2000’s, and absolutely did find that the electronic voting machines were insecure, during elections in 2000, 2002, and 2004, including in Georgia:

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Election_Solutions#Security_and_concealment_issues

      There’s no reason to believe that these researchers have stopped, and it is probably due to their efforts that we have more reliable electronic voting systems now with verified paper trails.

      And since with Conservatives, every accusation is a confession, when they accuse the 2020 vote of being rigged, maybe we should ask them what they know about the 2000 and 2004 votes.

    • TechyDad@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Any computerized voting system should produce a human readable paper receipt which should be deposited into a box at the voting site.

      Alternatively, you can use a Scantron method (like my polling place uses). You fill in bubbles corresponding to who you want to vote for. A machine then scans it, adds your votes to the totals, and stores the original paper.

      Either way, you can do hand recount spot checks to ensure that the machine count matches with the paper trail. This was done in the 2020 election and no significant discrepancies were found. Of course, that didn’t stop the conspiracy theorists who just added more nonsense to their theories.