munkle
Diamond Member
- Dec 18, 2012
- 4,744
- 7,925
How to Have Hack-Proof Elections in America, Easily, and Why Politicians are Against it
It may come as a surprise to many people that we can now easily have elections that are virtually hack proof. The only reportage of this development has been not from any major media, but from alternative news sites such as Jonathan Alter's Alternet.
Local media has duly reported court fights over the central element of the solution: the digital images of all paper ballots taken in about half the country's voting jurisdictions..But they fail to place these stories in the greater context.
The context is this. Over the past two years, as all manner of problems with our elections have hit the news, activists have discovered a way to make elections virtually hack-proof by the use of these ballot images, which are made in milliseconds as paper ballots are fed into modern vote-counting machines. Yet legislators in the US Congress, along with their chosen "experts" in congressional staff committees, the industry, and large parts of academia, are circling over purported reforms which would make US elections even more insecure than they were before.
These citizen-activists, many of whom are well-known among people who study election integrity, concern themselves with making sure that every legal vote is counted, and with making sure that all who are eligible to vote get the chance to.
But before discussing the unreported story of how to get to hack-proof elections, it is necessary to understand how vote-counting in most of America works.
After the 2000 presidential fiasco, many states moved to voter hand-marked paper ballots, fed into an optical scan vote counting machine. This was a positive development, since a paper ballot hand-marked by the voter is the best permanent record of a voter's intentions. This is undisputed by the true experts not tainted by business or the corrupt political interests which rule us now.
The movement, often known as the Election Transparency Movement, consists of citizens and election software experts such as Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer programmer, who have been uncovering for years how Russians, or anyone else with average skills, can hack into US voting systems to alter the totals in an election, whether precincts and counties are linked by Internet or not.
This kind of fraud is called election fraud, as opposed to voter fraud, which is when an unqualified voter casts an illegal vote. Election fraud, or vote flipping, is the easiest manner by which an election's outcome can be altered, whether it is by one percent or twenty. It is also the hardest to detect, at present, and therefore the least risky.
Edited to shorten.
Please make a short to medium cut/copy/paste, and not an entire article, as the Rules state.
munkle
It may come as a surprise to many people that we can now easily have elections that are virtually hack proof. The only reportage of this development has been not from any major media, but from alternative news sites such as Jonathan Alter's Alternet.
Local media has duly reported court fights over the central element of the solution: the digital images of all paper ballots taken in about half the country's voting jurisdictions..But they fail to place these stories in the greater context.
The context is this. Over the past two years, as all manner of problems with our elections have hit the news, activists have discovered a way to make elections virtually hack-proof by the use of these ballot images, which are made in milliseconds as paper ballots are fed into modern vote-counting machines. Yet legislators in the US Congress, along with their chosen "experts" in congressional staff committees, the industry, and large parts of academia, are circling over purported reforms which would make US elections even more insecure than they were before.
These citizen-activists, many of whom are well-known among people who study election integrity, concern themselves with making sure that every legal vote is counted, and with making sure that all who are eligible to vote get the chance to.
But before discussing the unreported story of how to get to hack-proof elections, it is necessary to understand how vote-counting in most of America works.
After the 2000 presidential fiasco, many states moved to voter hand-marked paper ballots, fed into an optical scan vote counting machine. This was a positive development, since a paper ballot hand-marked by the voter is the best permanent record of a voter's intentions. This is undisputed by the true experts not tainted by business or the corrupt political interests which rule us now.
The movement, often known as the Election Transparency Movement, consists of citizens and election software experts such as Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer programmer, who have been uncovering for years how Russians, or anyone else with average skills, can hack into US voting systems to alter the totals in an election, whether precincts and counties are linked by Internet or not.
This kind of fraud is called election fraud, as opposed to voter fraud, which is when an unqualified voter casts an illegal vote. Election fraud, or vote flipping, is the easiest manner by which an election's outcome can be altered, whether it is by one percent or twenty. It is also the hardest to detect, at present, and therefore the least risky.
Edited to shorten.
Please make a short to medium cut/copy/paste, and not an entire article, as the Rules state.
munkle
Last edited by a moderator:
