Sorry, it's 2025 but you can't vote bc we didn't print & cut enough small pieces of paper 🤷‍♀️
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Very detailed Lemmy post I wrote about this fuckery and more
Local news article containing the quote about the voter registrar
On Homer Plessey Way, board member Daniel Milojevic stood outside the Bywater polling place in the Press Street Gallery suggesting people try the two Jefferson Parish locations.
He said the local registrar of voters gave the district only 300 ballots per location and told them they could expect about 20 people.
“We had to confirm the number of ballots weeks ago,” he said, before it was clear how high the turnout would be. Milojevic conceded that planning had clearly missed the mark.
As one astute gentleman asked while defending Reddit, and accusing me of spreading misinformation:
If hardly anybody knew, how did turnout exceed expectations within 2 hours?
Because the "expectation" provided by the registrar was literally 20 voters per location (60 voters in total) for the entire fucking city.
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Very detailed Lemmy post I wrote about this fuckery and more
Local news article containing the quote about the voter registrar
On Homer Plessey Way, board member Daniel Milojevic stood outside the Bywater polling place in the Press Street Gallery suggesting people try the two Jefferson Parish locations.
He said the local registrar of voters gave the district only 300 ballots per location and told them they could expect about 20 people.
“We had to confirm the number of ballots weeks ago,” he said, before it was clear how high the turnout would be. Milojevic conceded that planning had clearly missed the mark.
As one astute gentleman asked while defending Reddit, and accusing me of spreading misinformation:
If hardly anybody knew, how did turnout exceed expectations within 2 hours?
Because the "expectation" provided by the registrar was literally 20 voters per location (60 voters in total) for the entire fucking city.
Electronic voting is not safe, print and cut more paper!
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Very detailed Lemmy post I wrote about this fuckery and more
Local news article containing the quote about the voter registrar
On Homer Plessey Way, board member Daniel Milojevic stood outside the Bywater polling place in the Press Street Gallery suggesting people try the two Jefferson Parish locations.
He said the local registrar of voters gave the district only 300 ballots per location and told them they could expect about 20 people.
“We had to confirm the number of ballots weeks ago,” he said, before it was clear how high the turnout would be. Milojevic conceded that planning had clearly missed the mark.
As one astute gentleman asked while defending Reddit, and accusing me of spreading misinformation:
If hardly anybody knew, how did turnout exceed expectations within 2 hours?
Because the "expectation" provided by the registrar was literally 20 voters per location (60 voters in total) for the entire fucking city.
The election is unique in that it is organized and managed by the district itself, not the Louisiana Secretary of State's office, and seats on the board are rarely contested. The race for this particular seat is reported to be the first ever.
So perhaps some degree of incompetence/not having any clue how many people would show up. Not necessarily malicious intent. Seems like it was such a shitshow it'll force a redo. Clearly it should.
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Electronic voting is not safe, print and cut more paper!
Multiple checks and balances are required for paper, too.
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Multiple checks and balances are required for paper, too.
It’s not checks that are the issue, but the scalability of the offensive and the inevitable opaqueness of countermeasures.
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Very detailed Lemmy post I wrote about this fuckery and more
Local news article containing the quote about the voter registrar
On Homer Plessey Way, board member Daniel Milojevic stood outside the Bywater polling place in the Press Street Gallery suggesting people try the two Jefferson Parish locations.
He said the local registrar of voters gave the district only 300 ballots per location and told them they could expect about 20 people.
“We had to confirm the number of ballots weeks ago,” he said, before it was clear how high the turnout would be. Milojevic conceded that planning had clearly missed the mark.
As one astute gentleman asked while defending Reddit, and accusing me of spreading misinformation:
If hardly anybody knew, how did turnout exceed expectations within 2 hours?
Because the "expectation" provided by the registrar was literally 20 voters per location (60 voters in total) for the entire fucking city.
That's NOT Voter Fraud! Voter Fraud is when TRUMP LOSES!
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Electronic voting is not safe, print and cut more paper!
In NY we have these amazing devices, where they can adhere a chemical to blank ballots before voters mark them to be scanned.
It's a fairly obscure tech, kind of like an additive manufacturing rig that, instead of adding one plane at a time to build a 3D physical thing from the bottom up, uses small rows of line segments to create a two-dimensional image. These "printers" used to be widespread, but still do have enough niche uses that the government was able to acquire some fairly easily.
It's also going to make that lawsuit in New Paltz very interesting.
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The election is unique in that it is organized and managed by the district itself, not the Louisiana Secretary of State's office, and seats on the board are rarely contested. The race for this particular seat is reported to be the first ever.
So perhaps some degree of incompetence/not having any clue how many people would show up. Not necessarily malicious intent. Seems like it was such a shitshow it'll force a redo. Clearly it should.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]That's the thing though, is it just incompetence or is it an attempt to see what people are willing to let slide?
We definitely need a re-do bc otherwise it signals that we're ok with letting it happen again and again. Will there be enough ballots when it's time for us to vote for elections with more at stake like mayor or in the midterms?
I could see low expectations from the registrar of voters for turnout, but 60 people in the entire city? And they just didn't have any kind of plans if more showed up?
We're the first state to start using the DOGE voter database maintenance system. Will we end up with some kind of "glitch" that purges voters on top of being told the registrar made a miscalculation when estimating how many people would actually show up to vote?
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It’s not checks that are the issue, but the scalability of the offensive and the inevitable opaqueness of countermeasures.
Surely there is a cryptographic way to count votes where someone can check that the results are correct but not how individuals voted, right?
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The election is unique in that it is organized and managed by the district itself, not the Louisiana Secretary of State's office, and seats on the board are rarely contested. The race for this particular seat is reported to be the first ever.
So perhaps some degree of incompetence/not having any clue how many people would show up. Not necessarily malicious intent. Seems like it was such a shitshow it'll force a redo. Clearly it should.
Nah, there's been a few recent elections and ballot initiatives that are explicitly designed to undermine democracy and set up separate courts. This is definitely on purpose.
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Surely there is a cryptographic way to count votes where someone can check that the results are correct but not how individuals voted, right?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Now you have to trust the software used to do this, the algorithm itself, and that there was no tampering before the data got stored. Which is something truly verifiable by a very tiny subset of population and even then with full cooperation from authorities. This is the opaqueness of countermeasures.
Vote counting is not a mathematical problem, but a sociological one. Any „always correct machine” is useless if people can’t reasonably trust it.
Paper ballots don’t scale - you can’t stuff ballots without someone being present - and are designed exactly in the problem space vote counting itself occupies. As an additional evidence in their favor, autocratic regimes and corrupt politicians are way too eager to switch to electronic voting.
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Now you have to trust the software used to do this, the algorithm itself, and that there was no tampering before the data got stored. Which is something truly verifiable by a very tiny subset of population and even then with full cooperation from authorities. This is the opaqueness of countermeasures.
Vote counting is not a mathematical problem, but a sociological one. Any „always correct machine” is useless if people can’t reasonably trust it.
Paper ballots don’t scale - you can’t stuff ballots without someone being present - and are designed exactly in the problem space vote counting itself occupies. As an additional evidence in their favor, autocratic regimes and corrupt politicians are way too eager to switch to electronic voting.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]That’s the whole point of crypto though, you publish the mathematically verifiable results, and everyone becomes a vote counter. Instead of trusting a small group of people to do it right, you can verify the counts yourself in a trustless system.
The algorithm isn’t a black box like you’re saying, it’s fully auditable and decentralized so any fuckery is immediately visible.
Now maybe I’m wrong and a mathematically verifiable algorithm can’t exist, but to my knowledge that’s never been shown to be the case.
Edit: turns out there are MANY such systems, and they are mathematically verifiable, and used in actual use cases today. The only thing stopping it is lack of political will, and arguably, the fact that even people without computers have the right to vote.
You do not have to trust the software. You could do that math for yourself if you really cared.
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That's NOT Voter Fraud! Voter Fraud is when TRUMP LOSES!
I hope this is sarcasm.... god I fuckin hope.
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Very detailed Lemmy post I wrote about this fuckery and more
Local news article containing the quote about the voter registrar
On Homer Plessey Way, board member Daniel Milojevic stood outside the Bywater polling place in the Press Street Gallery suggesting people try the two Jefferson Parish locations.
He said the local registrar of voters gave the district only 300 ballots per location and told them they could expect about 20 people.
“We had to confirm the number of ballots weeks ago,” he said, before it was clear how high the turnout would be. Milojevic conceded that planning had clearly missed the mark.
As one astute gentleman asked while defending Reddit, and accusing me of spreading misinformation:
If hardly anybody knew, how did turnout exceed expectations within 2 hours?
Because the "expectation" provided by the registrar was literally 20 voters per location (60 voters in total) for the entire fucking city.
Just a slight correction in that it doesn't sound like the City of New Orleans has much to do with this election, as it's an election for a district the covers three parishes, the whole region. If anything, it seems like there may have been an effort to provide disproportionally more votes to the two more conservative parishes by giving the same total number of "available votes" to each polling station, whereas Orleans Parish could've hands-down elected their preferred candidate otherwise.
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Nah, there's been a few recent elections and ballot initiatives that are explicitly designed to undermine democracy and set up separate courts. This is definitely on purpose.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I'm willing to agree with malicious intent if they try keep the result. There should be no need to count the ballots, with the need to redo being so obvious.
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That's the thing though, is it just incompetence or is it an attempt to see what people are willing to let slide?
We definitely need a re-do bc otherwise it signals that we're ok with letting it happen again and again. Will there be enough ballots when it's time for us to vote for elections with more at stake like mayor or in the midterms?
I could see low expectations from the registrar of voters for turnout, but 60 people in the entire city? And they just didn't have any kind of plans if more showed up?
We're the first state to start using the DOGE voter database maintenance system. Will we end up with some kind of "glitch" that purges voters on top of being told the registrar made a miscalculation when estimating how many people would actually show up to vote?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]The one thing I'll say in their defense is that a water district board seat, in a special election, is not typically something that generates votes. Perhaps they did that on purpose, thinking the low turnout would help one candidate. We're talking about school board election numbers. The kind of thing where a bus full of people could swing the whole election.
You'll know if it was on purpose or not immediately when we see who won and if they try to stick with the result. If they were out of ballots at 9 am, then they shouldn't even try to count the votes or declare a winner. With the need for a redo being so obvious.
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That’s the whole point of crypto though, you publish the mathematically verifiable results, and everyone becomes a vote counter. Instead of trusting a small group of people to do it right, you can verify the counts yourself in a trustless system.
The algorithm isn’t a black box like you’re saying, it’s fully auditable and decentralized so any fuckery is immediately visible.
Now maybe I’m wrong and a mathematically verifiable algorithm can’t exist, but to my knowledge that’s never been shown to be the case.
Edit: turns out there are MANY such systems, and they are mathematically verifiable, and used in actual use cases today. The only thing stopping it is lack of political will, and arguably, the fact that even people without computers have the right to vote.
You do not have to trust the software. You could do that math for yourself if you really cared.
You're thinking about the voting problem wrong, specifically not including all of the requirements
The algorithm isn’t a black box like you’re saying, it’s fully auditable and decentralized so any fuckery is immediately visible.
Their point is that even in this system, there is both a small and finite number of people who are skilled enough/qualified enough to perform that audit. I'm not sure I've got the math to be able to validate a blockchain transaction by hand without referring to a (potentially tainted) source repo. There's a world where blockchain voting can solve this problem, but the competing requirements make it the less-optimal solution compared with paper voting.
Specifically, there are 3 potentially competing requirements for a secure voting system in a functioning democracy:
- Votes must be accurately recorded and tallied
- Votes must not be attributable to any specific individual
- Votes must be auditable for an arbitrary amount of time
Blockchains, potentially, optimize the voting problem for #1 while introducing explicit exposure in #s 2 and 3, while paper ballots optimize for 2 first, then 3.
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Very detailed Lemmy post I wrote about this fuckery and more
Local news article containing the quote about the voter registrar
On Homer Plessey Way, board member Daniel Milojevic stood outside the Bywater polling place in the Press Street Gallery suggesting people try the two Jefferson Parish locations.
He said the local registrar of voters gave the district only 300 ballots per location and told them they could expect about 20 people.
“We had to confirm the number of ballots weeks ago,” he said, before it was clear how high the turnout would be. Milojevic conceded that planning had clearly missed the mark.
As one astute gentleman asked while defending Reddit, and accusing me of spreading misinformation:
If hardly anybody knew, how did turnout exceed expectations within 2 hours?
Because the "expectation" provided by the registrar was literally 20 voters per location (60 voters in total) for the entire fucking city.
Election officials: "Nonsense! If an excess of voters show up we will be happy to provide waxed paper and ballpoint pens for them to vote with."
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I hope this is sarcasm.... god I fuckin hope.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]it is; that's their entire account. you can tell who it is by the unique capitalization.
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Surely there is a cryptographic way to count votes where someone can check that the results are correct but not how individuals voted, right?
I'm sure that exists, yes. But you can't give the voting key to individual voters, because that can be bought. So you're using the same black-box voting machines with all the same attack vectors (or even worse if they're connected to the internet).
The only way to make voting machines safe is to have them print out the ballot, but at that point they're just very expensive pencils.
