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Forums - Politics - Official 2020 US Presidential Election Thread

EnricoPallazzo said:

.

For a very long time I was against the system in Brazil as everything can be hacked. And after I saw how Nato was able to cause damage to Iran nuclear system that was totally disconnected from the internet I just thought I could never trust elections in Brazil again.

Then I listened to a podcast with a guy that works with the system in Brazil and started to explain all the tricks that happened in the past with paper voting and were so common, some really crazy stories on how the votes could be manipulated from the voting point up to the tabulation. So today I became a supporter of the electronic system.

To the record

I worked for 16 months as an intern on our electoral court. And I'm major in technology. There they explained to us how the electronic machines works and why is not factible to hack them. It's an embedded system, it's like saying you can hack an electronic calculator from distance.

The machines votes also do not cross the internet except in few smaller regions in the rural island-like areas and villages of the North, those cities does not have an access to the mainland by land, only by river. Otherwise all votes are transported into a intranet  managed by the state itself, it has no point to internet connection except on the supreme electoral court (I call it TSE) in the Capitol. This is the only server that in practice can be invaded or hacked

 Even if TSE were hacked, there is a hundred other regional and local courts called TRE. Each TRE counts it's own votes, only votes for president are aggregated and counted on TSE, and those TRE system cannot be hacked as they don't have worldwide web access. 

TSE mission is just take a look on TRE votes and make them public available. If anything on TSE were be hacked (which never happened by the way), it's just a matter of destroying TSE votes and asking TRE to send their numbers again. 

I'm also volunteer since I was 16 to work on my session in election days and as I worked I saw how the process in handled 

And the process is crazy secure. The only way to corrupt it is with a mutual agreement between the citizens representatives, the electoral courts workers, and the parties involved (in Brazil we have over 50 parties competing against each other), all them in the electoral zone, which can happen but it's very unlikely 



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JRPGfan said:
Bofferbrauer2 said:

Paper votes are destructible. However, any changes made to them are immediately obvious.

Electronic votes are also destructible. You just need to hack into the voting machines and you can make any changes you want. If you know how everything works you can change the outcome of the election on the fly and nobody would even know anything about it.

This is the reason why European countries still use paper ballots - they're more fragile, but it's much more difficult to tamper with them.

There are also multiple observers standing near the box's the votes are collected into.
They follow the boxes, and the counting until done.

Its not possible to cheat, by destroying votes, or tossing them out or the like, without observers noticeing.

You get your paper ballot, go to a voteing place, hand it in (they check your social security number/name/adr, ect to see if you are who you are, and your checked off a list (they know how many people live in area and are voteing there). Theres no chance to vote multiple times.

The waiting in line in denmark is like 5-10mins at most.
You go home after and eat, and usually the same day (3-4hours after voteing closes) you have results.

Honestly our way seems vastly better than the american one.
Like someone said above, its just about manpower.

I knew I came across a series of videos explaining in detail why paper ballots are much better than electronic voting. I couldn't find the videos on time before, but here they are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

Paper ballots will always be safer, no matter what.



RolStoppable said:
EnricoPallazzo said:

(...)

Also voting ID... If a poor country like Brazil can do it, you can be sure US can do it to.

But what impresses me the most in the american system is... WHY THE HELL VOTE ON A TUESDAY???? I know it's the rules, but really, most people need to work and it impacts poor people the most as they would probably feel less inclined to abandon their job for a few hours to vote, also transportation, etc.

The American system is all about rigging the election within the confines of the law, because the GOP knows that an actually fair and democratic process would be unfavorable for them.

The electoral college itself allows that a minority can win the election. In the current election Biden has received about four million votes more than Trump, but it's still not a 100% confirmed thing that Biden won.

In the senate the republicans held the majority of seats (53 of 100) despite only getting ~45% of the votes in the elections for the senate. This is where the "winner takes it all" system strikes again, because voting districts get redefined to play the system. It's called gerrymandering and isn't a thing in countries where plain majorities win elections. The point of gerrymandering is to draw lines on the map that concentrate a large amount of opposing voters into one district while the own voters get a better spread across a multitude of districts. The idea is to lose one or two districts by huge margins, but in turn win a great number of remaining districts by small margins. That's how a minority can be declared winners of an election, because it's about how many districts you win, not how many votes you get.

Voting on a Tuesday favors the republican party, because many people who vote for the democrats won't be able to show up in time due to work. The reduction of places where people can vote is another means to prevent people from voting. In a proper democracy it's the norm that every town has its dedicated place to cast votes, but not so much in the USA. Voting ID, badmouthing mail-in ballots are other tricks in the book, just like revoking the right to vote for a lifetime for people who have served a prison sentence (this differs by state), regardless of the severity of the crime that was committed.

This leaves the question why the DNC hasn't made a bigger effort to change the rules to a more democratic process, because that would obviously favor them. It's because they are idiots and too concerned about the moral high ground, just like on the topic of nominations for the supreme court where they gave in to the republicans and did not get in their own nominee while the republicans did not return the same favor. This is why the tolerant left is dangerous for the USA.

Just to give you some perspective of scope here, Houston had only one single polling station for all it's 5 million inhabitants. Meanwhile, during our last election here in Luxembourg, our little capital city of Luxembourg has 27 polling stations despite only having barely 100k inhabitants. Heck, even just our town with it's 2500 inhabitants, while just having one polling station, had 6 lines depending on your last name (A-C, D-G, H-L, M-O, P-S, T-Z), and casting a vote only takes you 1-3 minutes depending how sure you are who to give your vote.



vivster said:
LuccaCardoso1 said:
2020 is being such a bitch that I'm not celebrating Trump's loss until all counting ends. But I already bought the party hats and horns.

This is how it's gonna feel for both sides.

Funny. You choose an image of communists winning over fascists. Was that on purpose or accidental? (-:



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IcaroRibeiro said:
EnricoPallazzo said:

For a very long time I was against the system in Brazil as everything can be hacked. And after I saw how Nato was able to cause damage to Iran nuclear system that was totally disconnected from the internet I just thought I could never trust elections in Brazil again.

Then I listened to a podcast with a guy that works with the system in Brazil and started to explain all the tricks that happened in the past with paper voting and were so common, some really crazy stories on how the votes could be manipulated from the voting point up to the tabulation. So today I became a supporter of the electronic system.

To the record

I worked for 16 months as an intern on our electoral court. And I'm major in technology. There they explained to us how the electronic machines works and why is not factible to hack them. It's an embedded system, it's like saying you can hack an electronic calculator from distance.

The machines votes also do not cross the internet except in few smaller regions in the rural island-like areas and villages of the North, those cities does not have an access to the mainland by land, only by river. Otherwise all votes are transported into a intranet  managed by the state itself, it has no point to internet connection except on the supreme electoral court (I call it TSE) in the Capitol. This is the only server that in practice can be invaded or hacked

 Even if TSE were hacked, there is a hundred other regional and local courts called TRE. Each TRE counts it's own votes, only votes for president are aggregated and counted on TSE, and those TRE system cannot be hacked as they don't have worldwide web access. 

TSE mission is just take a look on TRE votes and make them public available. If anything on TSE were be hacked (which never happened by the way), it's just a matter of destroying TSE votes and asking TRE to send their numbers again. 

I'm also volunteer since I was 16 to work on my session in election days and as I worked I saw how the process in handled 

And the process is crazy secure. The only way to corrupt it is with a mutual agreement between the citizens representatives, the electoral courts workers, and the parties involved (in Brazil we have over 50 parties competing against each other), all them in the electoral zone, which can happen but it's very unlikely 

Yes, I worked on several elections since it became electronic and can tell that from my part it was just impossible to be physically hacked. But to be honest I really dont know, from that moment, how the information was handled. Also there is the print that comes out of every machine that can be later cross checked if necessary. One of the ways of having wrongdoings is also if someone is voting with another person's ID. We can check the face but if it is a lookalike, like me and my brother, nothing can be done. But that would be very unlikely. The explanation you gave is really good, I just wonder why we dont have detailed and good explanations like this when discussing the matter in Brazil.

Last edited by EnricoPallazzo - on 06 November 2020

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IcaroRibeiro said:
EnricoPallazzo said:

For a very long time I was against the system in Brazil as everything can be hacked. And after I saw how Nato was able to cause damage to Iran nuclear system that was totally disconnected from the internet I just thought I could never trust elections in Brazil again.

Then I listened to a podcast with a guy that works with the system in Brazil and started to explain all the tricks that happened in the past with paper voting and were so common, some really crazy stories on how the votes could be manipulated from the voting point up to the tabulation. So today I became a supporter of the electronic system.

To the record

I worked for 16 months as an intern on our electoral court. And I'm major in technology. There they explained to us how the electronic machines works and why is not factible to hack them. It's an embedded system, it's like saying you can hack an electronic calculator from distance.

The machines votes also do not cross the internet except in few smaller regions in the rural island-like areas and villages of the North, those cities does not have an access to the mainland by land, only by river. Otherwise all votes are transported into a intranet  managed by the state itself, it has no point to internet connection except on the supreme electoral court (I call it TSE) in the Capitol. This is the only server that in practice can be invaded or hacked

 Even if TSE were hacked, there is a hundred other regional and local courts called TRE. Each TRE counts it's own votes, only votes for president are aggregated and counted on TSE, and those TRE system cannot be hacked as they don't have worldwide web access. 

TSE mission is just take a look on TRE votes and make them public available. If anything on TSE were be hacked (which never happened by the way), it's just a matter of destroying TSE votes and asking TRE to send their numbers again. 

I'm also volunteer since I was 16 to work on my session in election days and as I worked I saw how the process in handled 

And the process is crazy secure. The only way to corrupt it is with a mutual agreement between the citizens representatives, the electoral courts workers, and the parties involved (in Brazil we have over 50 parties competing against each other), all them in the electoral zone, which can happen but it's very unlikely 

It is imperative that the voting machines aren't on the internet. But even then security banks on them under lock for access for the time between elections. And that doesn't always happen. Especially in thousands of counties.

With access to the machines pretty much all models got hacked in tests.

But the really worrying part is: there is no way to control the results. Even if not hacked - some errors in the software can lead to wrong counts. But nobody would ever know, because it can't be checked. And we know software is always correct - right?



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Bofferbrauer2 said:
RolStoppable said:

The American system is all about rigging the election within the confines of the law, because the GOP knows that an actually fair and democratic process would be unfavorable for them.

The electoral college itself allows that a minority can win the election. In the current election Biden has received about four million votes more than Trump, but it's still not a 100% confirmed thing that Biden won.

In the senate the republicans held the majority of seats (53 of 100) despite only getting ~45% of the votes in the elections for the senate. This is where the "winner takes it all" system strikes again, because voting districts get redefined to play the system. It's called gerrymandering and isn't a thing in countries where plain majorities win elections. The point of gerrymandering is to draw lines on the map that concentrate a large amount of opposing voters into one district while the own voters get a better spread across a multitude of districts. The idea is to lose one or two districts by huge margins, but in turn win a great number of remaining districts by small margins. That's how a minority can be declared winners of an election, because it's about how many districts you win, not how many votes you get.

Voting on a Tuesday favors the republican party, because many people who vote for the democrats won't be able to show up in time due to work. The reduction of places where people can vote is another means to prevent people from voting. In a proper democracy it's the norm that every town has its dedicated place to cast votes, but not so much in the USA. Voting ID, badmouthing mail-in ballots are other tricks in the book, just like revoking the right to vote for a lifetime for people who have served a prison sentence (this differs by state), regardless of the severity of the crime that was committed.

This leaves the question why the DNC hasn't made a bigger effort to change the rules to a more democratic process, because that would obviously favor them. It's because they are idiots and too concerned about the moral high ground, just like on the topic of nominations for the supreme court where they gave in to the republicans and did not get in their own nominee while the republicans did not return the same favor. This is why the tolerant left is dangerous for the USA.

Just to give you some perspective of scope here, Houston had only one single polling station for all it's 5 million inhabitants. Meanwhile, during our last election here in Luxembourg, our little capital city of Luxembourg has 27 polling stations despite only having barely 100k inhabitants. Heck, even just our town with it's 2500 inhabitants, while just having one polling station, had 6 lines depending on your last name (A-C, D-G, H-L, M-O, P-S, T-Z), and casting a vote only takes you 1-3 minutes depending how sure you are who to give your vote.

I live in Potsdam, Germany. The town has 180K inhabitants. 2019 were european elections, this is the list of polling stations: https://data.opendatasoft.com/explore/dataset/wahlbezirke_wahllokale%40potsdam/table/?dataChart=eyJxdWVyaWVzIjpbeyJjb25maWciOnsiZGF0YXNldCI6IndhaGxiZXppcmtlX3dhaGxsb2thbGVAcG90c2RhbSIsIm9wdGlvbnMiOnt9fSwiY2hhcnRzIjpbeyJhbGlnbk1vbnRoIjp0cnVlLCJ0eXBlIjoiY29sdW1uIiwiZnVuYyI6IkFWRyIsInlBeGlzIjoid2FobGJlemlyayIsInNjaWVudGlmaWNEaXNwbGF5Ijp0cnVlLCJjb2xvciI6IiMxNDJFN0IifV0sInhBeGlzIjoid2FobGJlemlyayIsIm1heHBvaW50cyI6NTAsInNvcnQiOiIifV0sInRpbWVzY2FsZSI6IiIsImRpc3BsYXlMZWdlbmQiOnRydWUsImFsaWduTW9udGgiOnRydWV9

I don't know how many that are, a hundred?



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Trump will win and the truth will be revealed very soon. The democrats fell into a trap



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Ashadelo said:
Trump will win and the truth will be revealed very soon. The democrats fell into a trap

What truth? 



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Ashadelo said:
Trump will win and the truth will be revealed very soon. The democrats fell into a trap

And you are basing this on what precisely?