Just give your ballots to us
Top elections officials in California are scrambling to find out how many illegal ballot drop boxes Republican staffers put up in three counties across the state over the weekend, as local law enforcement authorities continue to search for outstanding witnesses and potential suspects. The state’s Republican Party, meanwhile, has indicated that it won’t comply with an official order to remove the boxes, and may even add more.
Law and order party, folks.
On Monday, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said his office, in conjunction with the state justice department, issued a cease-and-desist order to the California GOP to remove the illegal ballot drop boxes that have appeared in Los Angeles County, Orange County and Fresno County. … Last Thursday a regional field director with the California Republican Party in Orange County tweeted a photo of himself holding a vote-by-mail ballot, standing next to a black cabinet with a taped sign that read “official ballot drop off box.” The staffer, Jordan Tygh, encouraged voters to message him for “convenient locations” to drop off their ballots.
Republicans say this is just ballot harvesting — a practice that allows volunteers, organizations, or campaign workers to collect completed ballots and drop them off at county election offices.
And what possible reason could anyone have to doubt them?
Why is compliance necessary? Just have the cops remove the boxes.
For one thing they don’t necessarily know where they all are.
Lucky they are trying this in a guaranteed anti-Trump state, this would be much more concerning in terms of the damage it could do in one of the states in the balance. So long as authorities have the gumption to follow through with the penalties, rather than wilting away for fear of being called partisan, this could end up with some deserving idiots netting themselves a criminal record.
One thing I found interesting:
If these boxes of ballots are found to be illegally collected and dumped, or if the organisers lose them, a glance over that list of locations – gun shops, churches, Rep HQ – suggests that the bulk of the ballots in jeopardy are going to be Republican. It seems to me that this is therefore one of the most boneheaded moves possible – breaking voting laws in a manner that will probably harm your party, in a state where the needle wouldn’t have shifted anyway.
Oh I dunno about that, if you wanted evidence that ballots are being handled improperly creating it yourself is the thing to do… This is probably an underpants gnome scheme though.
I would say the the same technology that gives the world safe and secure internet banking could be adapted to give us safe and secure online voting.
Certainly would have to be less corruptible than the present antiquated system.
Omar,
You’d think so, but in face online voting is really hard from a security perspective. An election is a fundamentally different sort of thing to banking. There are different kinds of potential attacker with different motivations using different kinds of attacks.
If someone tells you their online voting system is secure, they’re mistaken or lying.
It’s one of those things that seems like it ought to be simple enough but is a security nightmare in practice.
latsot:
Oh, I dunno. For my banking, I have a plastic card issued by the bank with my account number on it. To access my account, I need to enter my account number together with my secret PIN number, which gets me to a series of options like which account I want to access, make a deposit, withdrawal, transfer between accounts etc.
On polling day, an extra option could come up: Do you want to vote? Yes/No? If yes, a new window might open with a ballot ‘paper’ on it. I mark it. The window closes, and will not let me vote again till next polling day; not using this or any other account at any other bank or outlet..
The bank website becomes a polling booth, on loan to the electoral authorities for the day. The disadvantage would be that how I voted would probably be available to those running the whole system, and so would be not quite as secret as before. But it could only be an improvement over the paper ballot system as described in this thread’s story. And it would require minimal additional hardware to what is already in place.
Omar #7, this is the key difference between banking and voting
The banking system is transparent by design. Every transaction is recorded and logged. Every ATM user is on video tape. If something goes wrong–or if something is even questioned–you can go through the logs and the videos and figure out what happened and make sure that the money ends up where it is supposed to.
The voting system is opaque by design. You identify yourself when you check in at the polling place, and then you vote, but once you have voted there is no way for anyone to find out how you voted. It’s called “the secret ballot”, and it is absolutely essential. If someone can find out how you voted, then every voter is wide open to coercion and vote buying. Your words “not quite as secret” would seem to minimize this, but it is a catastrophic vulnerability.
Another problem with computerized voting systems is that it is virtually impossible to audit or validate them. We oughtn’t trust them. I don’t trust them, and I’m a computer engineer. Here’s a quote from an article that ran in a trade magazine nearly 20 years ago illustrating the difficulty of validating computerized voting machines
Building a computerized voting system that has all the security properties that you need for an election is an extremely hard problem, and, IMO, not worth the trouble. We should all vote on paper ballots.
Also, re: online banking, it’s really not as secure as people think. Online banking fraud costs billions of dollars a year, which is covered by insurance–but no insurance can fix stolen votes.
Omar,
I do this for a living and Steven is exactly right. So is James, for that matter.
You will not find a genuine security expert who recommends online voting for the reasons Steven gave and a whole bunch of others.
Ah well. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Thanks anyway.
GOP: Ballot harvesting is fraud!!
Also GOP: Democrat anger is overblown. Ballot harvesting isn’t illegal.