Secure Elections
Secure and trusted elections are a major part of what our government needs to provide for us. And our current one is failing.
The president controls the most powerful military in the world. The US exerts a powerful influence in every corner of the planet. Congress controls a six trillion dollar budget. There's so much at stake that we have to assume that bad actors will try to influence our elections at all levels.
Local poll workers who see an opportunity to give their preferred candidate a nudge without getting detected. Ballot harvesting. Ineligible people voting.
All kinds of things could happen, and we have to assume people will try.
And that’s not even counting foreign disinformation campaigns, media and tech companies censoring or running cover, or big events or announcements intentionally being pulled forward or back to influence the election. Those are harder to prove and tackle.
When it comes to the election itself, the assumption that elections will be attacked means two things in my mind:
We need a rock solid mechanism for voting that makes it hard to cheat and easy to audit.
It’s up to the government to prove that the result is valid. It’s not up to the campaigns or individuals to sue to prove fraud happened.
I think we can all get behind that.
Nobody wants the Lance Armstrong situation where the team that's the best at cheating wins.
At least I hope so.
If You Wanted to Cheat
Say you were a nefarious actor who wanted to cheat in US elections.
How would you do it?
You’d make sure fraud was easy to do and hard or impossible to prove.
You’d want an election process that makes it easy to sneak in illegitimate ballots that are impossible to identify after.
A process where you can selectively apply the rules depending on which way the county is leaning, without any way to prove this after the fact, is perfect.
For example, in an area you know will vote mostly for your opponent, you can be stricter about throwing out ballots that don’t fit the requirements, maybe even sometimes discarding entirely valid votes. And in counties that vote overwhelmingly for your preferred candidate, you can be more lenient or skip the checks entirely. And you’d want this kind of fraud to be very hard to prove.
You’d make it hard to verify if every voter was eligible to vote, so you could have a crowd of ineligible people to vote for you.
You’d want voting machines where an audit is impossible, so they can be manipulated without detection.
You’d set the expectation ahead of time that the outcome cannot be known for days, giving you enough time to produce the extra ballots to create outcome you want.
You’d shame and silence anyone questioning the result or pointing to issues with the election.
You’d make sure lawsuits didn’t go to trial, so you can avoid going through legal discovery or looking at evidence.
That would be the smart thing to do … if you wanted to cheat, that is.
But nobody would do that, would they?
The 2020 Election
So let’s jump straight onto the third rail: The 2020 election.
We’ve all been told over and over again that it’s case closed. It’s time to “turn the page”. To “look forward, not back”.
And of course, that’s exactly what we’d expect to hear from someone who successfully stole the election.
You may think Biden won fair and square. That’s fine.
But the fact is that 78% of Republicans (2021 CNN poll) and 28% of all Americans (2021 YouGov poll) said they didn’t believe Joe Biden’s win was legitimate.
That means it’s something we cannot just dismiss. And continuing to label them “election deniers” and repeating the slogan that “there’s no evidence of widespread election fraud” will not do the job.
We need a path to unity and healing as a nation.
We need to be able to trust elections.
We need a trusted process that allows us all to come together after an election and say “that was a fair fight, you won, you get the next four years, we wish you the best of luck, and I’ll see you in the next election.”
In 2016 according to YouGov, 35% of Democrats believed that Trump’s election was not legitimate.
This is not a Democrat problem.
It’s not a Republican problem.
It’s an “all of us” problem.
Margin of Victory
In order to win in 2020, Trump would have needed to flip just three states:
Arizona: Biden won by around 10,500 votes.
Georgia: Biden won by around 11,800 votes.
Wisconsin: Biden won by around 20,700 votes.
That’s a total of just 43,000 votes.
Or 21,500 if you were to flip votes from Biden to Trump.
Three more swing states went more decisively for Biden yet were still pretty close:
Michigan: 154,000 votes (2.8%)
Nevada: 33,600 votes (2.4%)
Pennsylvania: 80,500 votes (1.2%)
I don’t know if the election was fraudulent.
But there’s a few things I do know.
History of Fraud
First, fraud is never zero. We don’t know exactly how much there is, but we know it’s not zero. The US has a long history of alleged election fraud.
According to ChatGPT:
Large political machines, like Chicago’s Democratic machine under Mayor Richard J. Daley, were known for manipulating elections through fraud. Tactics included miscounting ballots and busing voters from precinct to precinct.
Ballot stuffing was a common method of fraud in the early 20th century, and election officials would sometimes spoil or discard ballots that were cast for opposition candidates.
One of the most infamous alleged instances of election fraud occurred in Illinois during the 1960 presidential election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Some claim that fraudulent votes in Chicago, controlled by the Daley machine, helped Kennedy narrowly win Illinois, which was critical in securing his overall victory. However, investigations did not definitively prove widespread fraud.
Although not fraud in the traditional sense, the controversies surrounding the Florida recount in the Bush vs. Gore election raised concerns about voter disenfranchisement and ballot integrity, especially with issues like “hanging chads” on punch-card ballots.
So fraud and allegations of fraud are not new, and we have to assume that some happened. The question is how much.
The Laptop
We know that the Hunter Biden laptop story was censored across social media and not covered by any mainstream media outlet except for the NY Post. The contents of the laptop, which any journalist could have gotten a copy of if they’d wanted, and which had been in the FBI’s possession since December 2019, made it pretty likely that Hunter Biden had been collecting the money for Joe Biden’s business of using his role as Senator and VP to sell political influence.
To discredit the story, 51 people in the intelligence community signed a letter saying that it…
…has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.
We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.
That letter was used by the media and Joe Biden to dismiss and censor the story without actually looking at the facts until after the election. In March 2022, the NY Times finally acknowledged the laptop was real, but by then it was too late.
You can see how some people don’t trust the media, the FBI, or the intelligence community much.
Could the laptop story have changed 21,500 votes across these three states from Biden to Trump and caused Trump to win? It’s definitely possible.
Election Law Changes
We also know that the laws were changed in favor of mail in ballots, and that mail in ballots make it harder to prove fraud.
With in person voting, you actually have to get people to the polls and vote themselves. You can’t go into the booth with them. You can’t coerce them to vote one way or another.
With mail in ballots, you can collect all the ballots and envelopes and organize the voting for people. Heck, if you wanted to, you could even fill them out on other people’s behalf, and either forge their signatures, or get them to sign it for you.
The only way you “know“ that the person who’s eligible to vote was the person who actually did vote is by comparing a signature on the envelope with the one on file with the voter record. Some states require notarization or witnesses, but most don’t.
Once the ballot is taken out of the envelope, there’s no way to ever audit the verification piece, which means that if a batch of questionable ballots were intentionally let through, we can never correct for that to find the true result.
So if you were to be a bit more lenient with the signature verification in counties that you know vote overwhelmingly Democrat, that would get the job done.
Again, it’s just 21,500 votes that would need to be flipped.
But you could also be more enterprising.
Millions of Fake Ballots?
Just today, October 14, 2024, I saw a story from Patrick Byrne of The America Project and author of The Deep Rig: How Election Fraud Cost Donald J. Trump the White House, By a Man Who did not Vote for Him, claiming that at least 10 million ballots that he knows of were printed extra by legitimate ballot printers, filled out for Joe Biden, stuffed in envelopes that were signed, and then slipped into the regular mail flow to be counted as legit votes.
He’s been pursuing the case for years, trying to get the official records from USPS, but they’ve been withholding and obfuscating and changing their own record keeping rules to keep the story under wraps.
I’m not saying this is true.
I am saying it’s possible, and we have no way of knowing for sure. Nor do we have a media or government who we can trust to investigate this fully.
Voting Machines
Then there’s the voting machines.
During the 2004 election, I was back in Denmark, and one of my employees was an American who was very much into politics, and on the Democrat side like me. He taught me about Diebold voting machines, and how the CEO of Diebold—who was a big Republican donor—said he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to [Bush].” And indeed Bush did win a narrow victory in Ohio which was crucial in helping him win in 2004.
I was incensed. I hated Bush. He was a war criminal in my mind. Still is.
As software engineers we both agreed there’s a few things you absolutely need in order to have verifiable elections when voting machines are being used.
One, the software needs to be open source.
You want all the programmers all over the world to help identify any vector of attack or any potential cause of fraud of skewed results. The only way to put people's legitimate concerns about the code at ease is to give everyone access to read the source code, and have a way to ensure that the code running on the machine is indeed the code the public can see.
Two, there must be a paper trail.
The machine must print a paper ballot that shows exactly how you voted, which the voter can verify and then drop it into a ballot box. That way, if there are any questions, we can go back and count the physical paper ballots and know for sure.
If we don’t have those, then election machines are wide open to fraud, and we simply have no defense. As a software engineer, I’m here to tell you just how easy it would be to mess with the numbers if the software isn’t open source.
We should be able to agree that’s a problem.
No Evidence
One of the media and the government’s favorite tropes is “no evidence.”
They use it with everything, including elections. “No evidence of widespread voter fraud.”
First off, “widespread” is one of those fungible words that sounds meaningful but in reality has no useful definition. It allows you to hide anything.
If it means “across all 50 states” or even “throughout each state where fraud is alleged” then that’s not what’s being alleged. It’s a strawman.
What’s being alleged is targeted fraud in a few select precincts that allowed them to produce enough fake ballots or selective application of rules to push Biden over the edge.
The margin was razor thin.
But more importantly, “no evidence of” doesn’t mean no evidence exists.
It just means they haven’t seen any.
It could be that they didn’t look. It could be they looked in all the wrong places It could be they looked the other way even as someone waved the evidence right in their faces.
All of these things happen all the time, and the media and the government love to use that phrase “no evidence of.”
It sounds so honest but it’s pure deception.
Look out for it. Now you know.
Is It Knowable?
Bottom line is that whether an election was stolen or not is currently not knowable.
We have to assume this is by design.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Some people want hackable elections.
Why? Obviously so they can cheat.
Who?
Who do you think?
The ones who claim there was fraud? Or the ones who call anyone who questions the result “election deniers”?
Think about this, too:
Lots of people were told repeatedly and genuinely believed (and still do) that Trump was America’s Hitler, was a serious threat to democracy, would jail his opponents, use the military against them, and would never let go of power ever again.
If you believed for certain that Trump was America’s Hitler, and you had the opportunity to fudge the election a little bit in a way that would be hard to prove, would you do it?
If you trusted that the media and the courts and the legislature would have your back.
If you see yourself as a moral, decent human being on the right side of history, it’s not a far stretch to think you would.
In short, we know some people had means (elections that cannot be audited) and motive (“Trump is the next Hitler”).
It’s not a far stretch to think it happened.
Did it swing the election for Biden?
I think so, obviously.
But we cannot know.
By design.
To me, that’s the only thing that matters.
Every sane person in the country wants secure elections.
If our leaders wanted secure elections, we’d have them.
Someone with a lot of power benefits from them not being secure.
How to Secure Elections
Aside from open source software and paper ballots on election machines, I’d argue for in-person voting on election day with ID in hand.
Make it a Holiday. If you don’t care enough about democracy to get your ass down there, you don’t get to vote. Unless you’re overseas or disabled or whatnot. We can make exceptions for that.
To me, the benefit of secure elections completely outweighs any downsides there. It’s that important that we can all trust our elections.
And then, if the system breaks down, and the election result is disputed, as it has been by both parties throughout the years, what do we do?
Open source all the data, all the video tape, and get all media institutions and the public involved in finding any wrongdoing.
We go into all-out fact finding mode. Let’s get all the data on the table and find out what really happened.
If any fraud is found, we instantly hold people to account.
We don’t wait for the losing campaign to sue. It’s not up to some private actor with standing and funding and rock solid proof to go to the courts.
It’s up to the government to prove that the result was legitimate. By releasing everything.
The public is really smart, and they have a vested interest.
Let them have at it. Let’s root out all the cheaters for good.
Of course, none of this ever happens.
In the case of 2020, according to Wikipedia:
“Nearly all the suits were dismissed or dropped due to lack of evidence or lack of standing, including 30 lawsuits that were dismissed by the judge after a hearing on the merits.”
Lack of standing means we’re not going to look at it because the entity filing the suit doesn’t have a horse in the race.
That’s fine, that’s how the courts work. You must have standing.
But the government and the media are allowed to conduct their own research. And the government can share all the data so the public can help out too.
But they didn’t, and they won’t.
Because we don’t have secure, auditable elections.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
