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Janet Logan

Fri, 19 Oct 2018 08:58:47 -0400 from Diaspora

With 19 Days to Midterms, Georgia Is Rejecting Ballots Over Handwriting

State laws that require election officials to reject all absentee ballots and absentee ballot applications if they believe that signatures within the voter’s paperwork do not match each other.

#politics #votingrights #votersuppression

With 19 Days to Midterms, Georgia Is Rejecting Ballots Over Handwriting | American Civil Liberties Union

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Rob Hansen

Fri, 19 Oct 2018 09:38:58 -0400 from Diaspora

One of the things I'm darkly grateful to the President for is getting the various civil liberties groups to actually take note that this is happening. Requiring election workers untrained in handwriting analysis to do signature matching, with potentially vote-discarding consequences, is not a new thing — the United States has done it in various places at least since the Nixon administration (and probably long before that).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "feh, they only care because it's Trump in the White House". I mean, well, yes, I am totally saying that — but given how long I've been trying to get people to care...

Janet Logan

Fri, 19 Oct 2018 09:47:44 -0400 from Diaspora

@Rob Hansen I wasn't aware this was a widespread practice. TIL a thing worth knowing. Thanks.

Rob Hansen

Fri, 19 Oct 2018 10:19:13 -0400 from Diaspora

I was part of an NSF-funded voting security research team from 2005-2008 while I was doing my Ph.D studies. This was one of the attacks we looked at — the possibility of a rogue election official disenfranchising people by using social media to figure out which party they probably voted for, then deciding to exercise unreviewable authority to discard their ballot silently. As with most of our research, we had great trouble getting anyone to listen to us.

Although I'm deeply grateful people are paying attention, it is a continuing annoyance to me how many people think these problems are new. Few of them are: most of the election security issues I see in the newspapers today I was working on in 2005-2008, and even back then they'd been known about for years.

Janet Logan

Fri, 19 Oct 2018 10:21:59 -0400 from Diaspora

@Rob Hansen Wow, that's disturbing.

Rob Hansen

Fri, 19 Oct 2018 10:40:16 -0400 from Diaspora

Everything in voting security is disturbing. I left the field because I was becoming a bitter misanthrope.

One day in 2008 I was reading the newspaper and saw a column from A Major Election Official In A Major State (name and state will not be provided, for reasons you will soon understand). The official was writing a guest editorial in which the public was assured the electronic voting machines in use in the upcoming election were hack-proof and their vote was completely safe. The official was emphatic: the Diebold AccuVote TSX was hack-proof.

At the time I read this column, I had an AccuVote TSX on my desk which I'd rooted and converted into a MAME box. At the time I read it, I had it rigged up to play Tetris.

So I wrote a polite letter to this Major Election Official in which I presented my bonafides (Ph.D candidate in computer science, focusing in computer security, NSF-funded researcher in voting security, etc.) and said that I had a working exploit against AccuVote TSXes. This official had a public demonstration coming up in two weeks: I would be happy to come out to the public demo and present my exploit and discuss with the official and the public mitigation strategies.

I got a terse response back telling me I WOULD BE ARRESTED if I set foot in the state during that time period. They didn't take kindly to out-of-state fearmongers interfering in their elections, and besides, Major Official had conferred with Diebold and had been assured by them that my claims were bogus therefore my only possible purpose could be undermining the confidence of elections.

Janet Logan

Fri, 19 Oct 2018 12:38:09 -0400 from Diaspora

@Rob Hansen Sigh