The US's FBI/CIA/NSA is entirely helpless with all the manpower and billion/trillion dollar budgets to the hacky Russians, and prevent this kind of tampering, which somehow altered the election? The electoral college was given no information from the intelligence community about the election tampering.

Essentially, there's no Barney Fife to just nip it in the bud. Just someone tell me where I'm wrong. I mean there has to be a reason.

btw, this could go in either P or P7, so I flipped a coin. There are of course many things that puzzle me.

There's apparently a huge iceberg that nobody's able to reach somehow.

We could make the elections hack proof. Currently they are extremely vulnerable, despite what is being said in the press, that Russia is getting in despite our best efforts. We could implement paper ballots and auditing, but that would prevent the right people, domestic elements, from hacking the elections.

I think the problem is that there are 50 state election systems, many of which contract with private companies who have no idea what the **** they're doing (security-wise) to make crappy machines to handle the voting process. What you're asking for is, like, the government to go into the business of making voting machines or something, or standardizing elections on a national level, and good luck getting Congress on board with that.

Still though, even with the hacking, intelligent people can speak to the electoral college and flip votes, though that did not happen. Perhaps the electoral college isn't all that able to cast their own vote or something. I dunno.

Bring back Barn, I reckon.

Our electoral system is absolutely not set up to deal with cheating on a national level. At all.

The Constitution delegates the administration of elections to the states. IANAL, but I don't believe that the federal government could mandate a particular voting method to be adopted nationwide.

You think the NSA is providing security for the DNC's computer system? No.

Who would give them this information? Even if the CIA director wanted to brief the electoral college, how does that work? Just show up on the day they vote? It's not like the electoral college is some deliberative body that holds meetings.

Even if there was 100% proof that Russia changed vote totals and Trump promised favorable treatment in return, Republican electors would still vote for him.

Like how this all started with unverified claims from Buzzfeed?

What you're missing is even if a server or workstation is fully up to date and there are no known vulnerabilities, or even any zero day vulns, all it takes is one idiot to get an email and say "oh no, someone accessed my account, I better click here now to change my password." *gets phished*

People are the weakest link, and there's no shortage of people who know nothing about cyber security.

.

Lol trump is going to get Bill Clinton'd by his own party

hilarious

This is why I think it's not a question of "if" an election will be hacked, but when (and the answer is probably, when we finally have a good candidate who's poised to win). Also, it's only a few companies managing all the machines.

But nevermind that, the real issue is one person out of 300 million committing voter fraud

Two points.

1) The United States Intelligence apparatus has more resources than both of our closest adversaries by multiple factors. Yes, ease of access and the democratization of 'hacking' tools has lowered the bar for our competition, but to doubt the the United State's prowess in this arena is foolish. Funny though - it's not whether others will catch up (although China's GDP is progressing), it's that technology makes these hacks more accessible with fewer resources.

2) I think Blockchain may be our savior here. Electronic voting records will eventually come into existence. As I posit - we cannot right now verify that our votes were accurately counted in any election we voted in. Why don't we have receipts for our votes? I understand anonymity, but we've kind of moved past that point. If we can trust our money to computers, we can trust our votes.

Prowess isn't everything though. Ingenuity, creativity, idealism, and staying small has proven to be enough to be a worthy adversary over time. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Forgot the bolded, and I can't decide which one I think is more likely to happen first.

Banks are more secure, and when a bank is hacked, we know it was. Or if a bank purposely deleted people's money, we'd know about that too. If an election is rigged or hacked, we can't possibly know, we can only infer by exit polls. If you want to make a banking analogy, a better one would be you handing me (a stranger) a sack of untraceable cash and trusting that I'll keep it safe for you and won't spend it.

But I can't comment on whether blockchain is a solution.

The US isn't #1 when it comes to hacking, but besides, the hack might come from within the NSA/CIA. And you probably wouldn't need to be elite to hack our election.

The video is a pretty bad argument against electronic voting.

It seems to me that it would be important to have people register in person so that there's a paper trail verifying their intent to vote, but aside from that there's no reason why you can't allow them to vote by logging into their government accounts. They can then look at the records afterwards and verify that it matches what they voted for, and if there's a discrepancy they'll bring attention to it. If they get hacked? Ok, so then go down to city hall with your papers, tell them what you actually wanted to vote for, and have a new password set. It's really pretty easy and much less prone to fraud than online banking since the pay off is negligible and the chances of it getting rectified are very high.

Nothing revolutionary. It seems like we refuse to embrace these types of systems because of stupidly high standards for anonymity. Oh noes... there's a feint chance someone might know who i voted for. Let's just stick with the system that's prone to fraud and costs billions to operate instead.

You're totally missing the points. Anonymity is a feature because it cuts out the ability to reward/punish a particular vote, both of which are awful for reasons that should be obvious. And if you're intending the stored vote to only be visible to you, even if that's possible (it basically isn't), it's useless because a compromised system can just show *you* that you voted for whoever whenever you log in while actually recording a vote for another candidate (the Iranian centrifuge attack already did a much more complicated version of this).

Im not saying the ability to reward/punish for votes isn't a negative, i'm saying the value of completely eliminating it is tiny relative to the costs of attaining absolute anonymity.

Concerned about trojans being put on peoples computer distorting the info they're getting? Require it be done on designated computers, and give them serial codes that correspond to their ballot on an online database.

He said something to the effect of that if a technology is new the only way we can test it is during elections - that's obviously not true. But the great thing with this particular variation of electronic voting is that, unlike with paper voting, if there is fraud taking place people will know almost instantly and you can isolate the specific ballots that were compromised.

Congrats, you've just invented the world's most expensive pencil (while still missing the point).

The key to electronic voting is traceability and auditing. You cannot prove your vote was ever counted for your candidate.

If we had electronic voting, you could use surveys and anonymized data to ensure election integrity. Teams and researchers on both sides could verify election results far more accurately than we do today.

It will happen eventually - in fact, it might take a fraud scandal or illegitimate election to make it happen (not that Trump's was one or big enough, but still). We will live in a fully digital world eventually.