Dominion Voting Systems and Fox reach last-minute settlement

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/dominion-voting-fox-news-trial-1.6813876

by throw0101a • 3 years ago

41 69 3 years ago

georgyo• 3 years ago

It would have been nice if this went to trail, though I can understand why they decided to settle. It would have been a mud fight.

Still, it would have been nice to get some light on both parties.

It would also be nice to know what the final settlement ended up being.

jmclnx• 3 years ago

I was hoping FOX would be forced to retract their lies on their news channel in a long and noticeable segment on prime time.

But with the settlement I doubt that will happen.

netsharc• 3 years ago

In theory a settlement deal could also include such an apology/retraction, it's whatever both parties agree to.

ceejayoz5• 3 years ago

It's possible the settlement will require public retractions and apologies. The hefty payout - $787.5M - seems to demonstrate Dominion had the upper hand in this negotiation, as does the judge's sanctioning Fox and appointing a special master to look into misconduct.

generj3• 3 years ago

Dominion in recent days has said they wanted an equivalent effort retracting the lies as was spent spreading them.

We’ll see if that was just posturing with what the settlement terms end up being.

standeven• 3 years ago

I am really, really curious to know the terms of the resolution.

mkmk• 3 years ago

$787.5 million, for starters.

TechBro86154• 3 years ago

The worst damage done by GOP rhetoric on the 2020 election is that it set us back decades in terms of our ability to have rational and productive discourse about election security. It's become an albatross that otherwise rational and technically minded people are unwilling to publicly discuss, lest they be labeled extremist by association.

The fact of the matter is our elections are not secure, in the sense that their results cannot be cryptographically verified. You either cannot verify your vote was counted, and/or cannot verify it contributed to the total votes received by the candidate for whom you voted. In aggregate, we can rarely verify that "all legitimate ballots were counted," and can never verify that only legitimate ballots were counted.

This is a problem, it's been a problem, and it will continue to be a problem. Our election infrastructure is only secure insofar as people trust it's secure, and people can only trust what they can verify. Otherwise, the winning party is asking the losing party to commit an act of faith in "trusting" a system that cannot be verified for correctness.

In 2017, Democrats recognized it as a problem, just like Republicans did in 2021. Yet we have so much whiplash from back and forth politicization of the issue that it's impossible to have a sane discussion about it.

LeoPanthera5• 3 years ago

The UK has the most secure voting system I know. Voting machines are not used, votes are always paper-and-pencil. Your ballot form contains a unique serial number to prevent multiple votes.

Votes are counted at the district level, with only totals being submitted up the chain, in order to protect privacy.

It's simple and it works.

mnd999• 3 years ago

That doesn’t stop media firms after faster results and American voting machine manufacturers lobbying to change things every time we have an election.

explorer83• 3 years ago

How is the serial number used to confirm that the person using it is who the ballet was issued to?

generj3• 3 years ago

Paper and pencil doesn’t work in the US because of how litigious we are, and because each state operates their own elections. If every state ran elections the same way we could standardize on something like the UK has and have collective faith in it.

When some battleground states routinely come down to less than 1% of voters, incredibly marginal effects matter.

The US still has institutional trauma from Hanging chads.

Just look at all the varied reasons mailed ballots are rejected, especially in tight races.

With paper and pencil, what happens if a mark got erased? If the circle is half filled? If the circle is quarter filled? All of these are questions that will be the subject of lawsuits in a mix of jurisdictions.

cm2187• 3 years ago

I wouldn't call it "the most secure", there is no id check (because there is no mandatory ID scheme) so the process to verify your identity is super loose. Also very little constraints on voting by mail, with the only form of authentication being a signature which is weak to say the least.

France has much stronger controls on ID checks at the voting booth and vote by mail (in fact for most elections there is no vote by mail, you can only delegate your vote to a person who cannot act as a delegate to more than two people to prevent ballot harvesting).

burkaman2• 3 years ago

cannot verify it contributed to the total votes received by the candidate for whom you voted

Isn't this by design? If you can verify this, then someone else can force you to verify it in front of them to make sure you did what they told you to do, and then we don't have a secret ballot anymore. It's not obvious to me that the risk of fraud from miscounting is worse than the risk of fraud from voter intimidation or bribery.

Imagine everyone you know is posting screenshots of their verification on social media, and you voted for someone or something considered controversial in your community. If you post that verification you get harassed, if you don't post anything then everyone knows what that means and you get harassed anyway. That's the type of voter intimidation I'd worry about.

tzs2• 3 years ago

If you can verify this, then someone else can force you to verify it in front of them to make sure you did what they told you to do, and then we don't have a secret ballot anymore.

Not being able to prove to someone else that you voted a particular way is called "coercion resistance", and it is in fact possible to design a voting system where you can verify you vote was included and counted correctly but that are coercion resistant.

See this comment [1] from a while back about such a system. Link #3 in that comment is to a paper showing that system is coercion resistant.

There are several systems that provide verifiability but are coercion resistant. The one discussed in that comment is noteworthy because it is an easy add-on to existing optical scan voting systems. The cryptographic cleverness that it depends on is in how the ballots are generated and what is printed on them, with the only modification in the voting booth is that you have to use a special marker to mark the ballots.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675726

fknorangesite4• 3 years ago

I agree with your first paragraph here, but that's about it.

I know that the userbase on a site like this one tends to want to solve these types of issues with technology, but that's just because all we've got here on HN is a hammer, ya know?

Pencil-and-paper works. Anything else is a solution in search of a problem.

ceejayoz5• 3 years ago

Pencil-and-paper works.

Paper has its own issues, effectively illustrated by photos from 2000: https://imgur.com/a/lpDhmQP

stonogo• 3 years ago

Computer enthusiasts have conflated cryptography and security for so long that simple ballot verification systems like the ones in use for decades around the country are regarded as "insecure" merely because the speaker doesn't really have a clear definition of the term.

My ballot has a tear-off receipt and a bar code. I can verify when and how my ballot was counted. If I suspect fraud at the ballot counting site I can supervise the process myself in person. If my signature doesn't match the ballot office can contact me to verify.

There is no world where cryptography is a requisite for ballot security, and I would not want to live in a world where computers are required for something as basic as democracy.

Loughla• 3 years ago

That's it entirely. I live in a VERY rural area, and we have receipts with barcodes that you can track either electronically or in person if you want to. They are not attached to you, they are attached to your vote and have unique ID's on them. In theory anyone can track your vote, but only you know which is yours and whether it's accurate or not.

This is not the difficult problem. The difficult problem is that we have thousands of systems, depending on where you live, and politically, getting anyone to agree on any one system is probably impossible.

But I am with you, cryptography is absolutely not required, and computers should not be fundamental to the process. Hell, electricity should be optional as well, just in case the shit hits the real fan.

robswc• 3 years ago

It's been a thing every since I can remember. Whichever side losses claims some sort of voter fraud.

Fraud exists and should heavily be punished but I think its effects are overstated by everyone.

marcodiego• 3 years ago

You either cannot verify your vote was counted, and/or cannot verify it contributed to the total votes received by the candidate for whom you voted.

That would break the privacy of the vote. It would allow for actors to oblige or coerce people into voting in a candidate and then forcing them to prove their vote.

jp42• 3 years ago

Election commission of India conducts elections really well, given the scale of 800M+ voter. despite of isolated incidents booth capturing in remote or ungovernable areas, overall results reflects the mood of public. It super super hard to manipulated system at scale.

roughly the way it works is - there is standalone electronic voting machine (EVM). it is NOT connected to network at all. for each vote, a receipt gets printed and vote puts that receipt in ballot box. the EVM count is used to aggregate over vote count. it speeds up counting process. Some percentage of randomly selected voting machines vote counts and corresponding printed vote ballot is cross verified.

During the whole process, a representatives from all the parties are present in all election activity

jcranmer3• 3 years ago

It is not a problem. The solution to running high-trust elections is:

* Use paper ballots with fill-in-the-oval results. This method has very little chance of user error filling out the ballot (modulo concerns like two-sided sheets, etc.).

* Chain-of-custody the ballot box the ballots get fed into at the polling place. Keep a roster of who voted, which lets you count how many ballots should be in that box. If that count is incorrect for the number of voters, you have issues. (This is rare.)

* Count the ballots with a ballot-reading machine. Verify the machine's counts by doing hand checks of samples. (The US runs too many races not to use machine counts.)

* For mail-in ballots, use envelope-inside-envelope to preserve secrecy. The inner envelope contains the ballot, and only the ballot, while the outer envelope contains the information needed to verify the voter.

At that point, the only real question is determining who is eligible to vote, and it turns out that it's not really a question about the security of the voting process, but rather about how to prevent the undesirables from voting. Aspersions on the security of the voting process are really about trying to justify changes to laws to keep undesirables from being able to vote.

tptacek5• 3 years ago

You can still safely do touchscreen voting in this system: just use ballot-marking devices that produce human-readable paper ballots. That's what happens in Cook County: you vote on a touchscreen (if you don't request a big cardboard paper ballot) and get a printed ballot that you cast as if you had marked paper yourself.

quantified4• 3 years ago

This is it.

tzs2• 3 years ago

That's almost the solution. Just add this [1], which requires just minor changes to how the ballots are printed and the use of special pens to fill in the ovals, and you gain these properties:

1. The ballots can be published after the vote allowed anyone to verify the counts,

2. Individual voters can, if they want to, note some information when they vote that will allow them to verify when the ballots are published that their vote was counted and it was counted correctly, but will not allow them to prove to a third party that they voted a particular way,

3. Individual voters can check before they vote that the ballot they have been given has probably not been tampered with.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/evt08/tech/full_papers/...

TechBro86154• 3 years ago

For mail-in ballots, use envelope-inside-envelope to preserve secrecy.

This would work better if mail-in ballots were only printed on request, and had some kind of one way hashing so that someone who voted by mail could optionally verify their vote was counted correctly.

Otherwise, isn't the count unauditable as soon as ballots are separated from their envelopes? You can only verify that the number of ballots matches the number of envelopes, and perhaps that there exists a bijection between them - but you cannot verify that the same set of ballots that was in the envelopes was the set of ballots which was counted. How can you verify that ballots were not replaced, after removing them from the envelopes but before counting them, with duplicate ballots that contained different votes? An attacker might not even need to duplicate a unique ID on each ballot, depending on how the "verify my vote" system is setup, because the verification is only that you removed a ballot from my envelope. As a voter, I can call my county and offer the ID number from my envelope, and the county can honestly tell me they "processed" it - but I cannot verify that my ballot itself was "processed," nor can I verify that it was counted toward the total votes with the weight I'd expect given the number of voters.

Inversely, it's important that mail-in ballots only be printed on request, and that the (potential) voter receive a unique hash upon requesting the ballot (not just after voting with it). Because that way you can ensure that if someone receives a ballot but doesn't vote, they can call to verify that their vote was not processed. Whereas if they only receive a unique hash after voting, then only those who executed their ballot could verify it was counted, and any unexecuted mail-in ballots could be mixed into the tally with confidence that nobody would call to verify they were not counted.

Surely there is some kind of "accumulator" system that can be used here, but I'm not familiar enough with the literature to identify it.

However, I think it's clear that this is a deceptively hard problem, and worth the effort of our best minds publicly solving it, rather than deferring it to a private Canadian-owned, Serbian-operated corporation that produces proprietary systems and sues anyone who questions their trustworthiness.

mandmandam2• 3 years ago

In 2017, Democrats recognized it as a problem

In 2016, Hillary beat Sanders by up to ~12% more than exit polls would have suggested in states without paper trails. [0]

The fact that this only happened in states without paper trails raised some eyebrows among Sanders voters, but "Democrats" bent over backwards to explain how this was just a quirk, and 'probably the fault of Bernie Bros somehow anyway, who gives a shit about them, they're not Real Democrats TM'.

And then we stopped doing exit polls at all. Because apparently that's a sensible thing to do when there's no paper trail, and indications of systemic fraud - remove the only remaining tell-tale sign.

So, yeah - this is a problem, will continue to be a problem, and will be completely ignored by media unless it serves them to associate questioning voting machines with the far-right.

0 - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stanford-study-proves-elec...

daveguy2• 3 years ago

The paper is suspect at best. Your own link enumerates the problems. Also, there are many reasons why exit polls don't match votes. And they have to do with votes being anonymous and exit polls not being anonymous.

Did you read your own link?

generj3• 3 years ago

It will be interesting to see what the terms of the settlement are.

I’m always amazed that firms go right to the brink of trial before settling. Sometimes the judge issues certain rulings that may lead a party to realize their odds are lower than hoped. But otherwise it seems like both parties wasted the court’s time when a settlement could have been reached at any prior point.

Settling often deprives the country of useful case law, or prevents bad actors from having to admit guilt. Totally understandable for the parties involved to take the sure thing rather than risking it all on a trial but it does negatively impact our society.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 3 years ago

What new case law is needed? Fox lied about Dominion and caused provable harm to their business.

mmcconnell1618• 3 years ago

787.5 Million

Analemma_• 3 years ago

I agree that happens a lot but this may not have been an instance of it: Fox might've genuinely liked their odds before the judge slammed them for lying about Murdoch's role and ordering a special investigation. They might've re-evaluated based on the new disclosures they had to do and an angry judge who now would've assumed bad faith from them, and decided to bail.

sufiyan• 3 years ago

Wow the guys in the newsroom didn’t believe what they were saying and still said it. If there was a word for journalistic non-integrity, I’m searching for it now.

lockhouse4• 3 years ago

“In total, 28 states used Dominion voting machines to tabulate their votes during the 2020 United States presidential election, including most of the swing states.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems

However you feel about the claims made during the 2020 election, that should terrify every American that closed source computerized voting machines from a single company counted enough votes to potentially decide the presidential election. I’m not saying that any of Trump and his supporters claims have any substance, but the optics of that stat do not look good.

Voting machine software should be public record and produce a fully auditable paper trail.

tptacek5• 3 years ago

I don't know anything about Dominion's, but Cook County's touchscreen electronic voting machines all produce a human-readable, auditable paper record.

lockhouse4• 3 years ago

Do they produce something that a voter would read and see prior to actually casting the vote or is it just an internal log?

If it’s the former then the voter can actually verify that the machine cast their vote as intended. If it’s the latter, there is literally nothing stopping the machine from changing votes as they are cast.

To clarify I’m not saying that is actually happening, just that there is nothing stopping your vote from being switched by the machine either through malice or a software bug if the machine doesn’t generate a physical slip of paper that you actually put in a ballot box.

ceejayoz5• 3 years ago

Voting machines are typically purchased at the county level, so that means at least one county in 28 states bought them. They're a big vendor, but they're not the largest, and not as big as that stat implies.

The fact that voting is administered at the local level is one of the biggest fraud protections we have. It drastically reduces the damage that can be done, and makes outliers much harder to hide.

lockhouse4• 3 years ago

The problem is that due to the concentration of population within a handful of cities, and therefore counties, you only need to win in just a couple of counties per state to take most states. This has been the Democrat strategy for a long time now, focusing on issues that matter to urban voters.

Hypothetically, (again, I’m not saying this is actually what happened in 2020), compromised voting machines could easily sway a national election by being installed in a relatively small number of counties.

See the below voting map by county for the 2020 election…

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-electio...

ZeroGravitas• 3 years ago

The fun is not yet over:

another U.S. voting technology company, Smartmatic, is pursuing its own defamation lawsuit against Fox seeking $2.7 billion US in damages in a New York state court.
Fox Corp. shareholders are demanding company records that may show whether directors and executives properly oversaw the Fox News coverage of Trump's election-rigging claims, sources told Reuters, in what could be a prelude to lawsuits seeking to make directors liable for costs.

tptacek5• 3 years ago

Just a periodic reminder that if you're interested in how voting works where you live, every election administration probably badly needs volunteer election judges (EJs). You'll get trained up on all the machines and processes they're using to collect votes, and get paid for the experience. At least where I live, there's a lot of subtlety to the process that make obvious-seeming "attacks" pretty untenable in reality; maybe you'll learn something different about yours.

Dominion Voting Systems and Fox reach last-minute settlement

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