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Senator Wants Nationwide, All-Mail Voting To Counter Election Hacks (arstechnica.com) 454

Posted by BeauHD from the common-sense dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In the wake of the Obama administration's announcement that the Russian government directed hacks on the Democratic National Committee and other institutions to influence U.S. elections, a senator from Oregon says the nation should conduct its elections like his home state does: all-mail voting. In an e-mail, Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat, told Ars: "We should not underestimate how dangerous... attacks on election systems could be. If a foreign state were to eliminate registration records for a particular group of Americans immediately before an election, they could very likely disenfranchise those Americans and swing the results of an election. Recent efforts by some states to make it more difficult to vote only serves to increase the danger of such attacks. This is why I have proposed taking Oregon's unique vote-by-mail system nationwide to protect our democratic process against foreign and domestic attacks." The only states to hold all elections entirely by mail are Oregon, Washington, and Colorado, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. More than a dozen others have various provisions for mail voting. The National Conference of State Legislatures has a breakdown here on how Americans cast their votes across the union. Wyden co-sponsored the Vote By Mail Act in July, and he did so for reasons at the time that were unconnected to cybersecurity. Instead, the measure was originally proposed to help minorities and others cast ballots. The plan requires the U.S. Postal Service to deliver ballots to all registered voters. Voters could also register to vote when applying for driver's licenses, too. The measure fell on deaf ears this year and didn't even get a committee vote. A Wyden spokesperson said the proposal will have a "better chance" next year if Democrats win a majority of Senate seats.
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Senator Wants Nationwide, All-Mail Voting To Counter Election Hacks More

Senator Wants Nationwide, All-Mail Voting To Counter Election Hacks

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  • Because the US mail has never been tampered with. http://ktla.com/2016/08/27/33-... [ktla.com]

    • Re:US Post Office always secure. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by _Sharp'r_ ( 649297 ) <sharper@@@booksunderreview...com> on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @07:22PM (#53065855) Homepage Journal

      It's much easier to buy/intimidate votes than to tamper with the post office. Now the voter (or their mom,don't forget that recent case in the news) can just drop their blank ballot off at the local party/union/employer/funder's headquarters in exchange for whatever incentive and the ballots can be voted the "right" way. Much closer to the Russian model, actually, where the person officially voting isn't necessarily the decision maker.

      How about just making it so we have a disconnected backup, maybe even a paper copy somewhere just in case, and then the threat from "hackers" isn't much of one. But that would expect a modicum of competence, right?

      • Re:US Post Office always secure. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by MouseTheLuckyDog ( 2752443 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @08:27PM (#53066225)

        No. Not in Chicago.
        Modern system is that you cannot remove ballots from the polling area. However what precinct captains can and sometimes do do is to get a bunch of blank ballots prepunch them. Then meet a person outside give them a prepunched ballot which the person then takes and throws into the ballot box while keeping the blank ballot given him. He then turns it over to the precinct captain who pays him.

        That is why it is highly illegal to posses blank ballots.

    • Because the US mail has never been tampered with. http://ktla.com/2016/08/27/33-... [ktla.com]

      And when people vote by mail there's absolutely no chance that their vote might have been coerced.

      • Re:US Post Office always secure. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by lgw ( 121541 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @07:32PM (#53065923) Journal

        Does "vote by mail" require any sort of ID? If not, how on earth is this more secure than a ballot box?

        In pretty much any kind of fraud, people are far less willing to show their face to any sort of authority. Fraud online or by mail is just much easier to work up the courage for.

        What's going to stop $PARTY_YOU_HATE from mailing in thousands of ballots for people that didn't vote (the recently dead/felons, people they know directly that didn't vote, etc). When all you need is a name to forge a ballot, no risk to the fraudster, vote fraud will be epic.

        • Re:US Post Office always secure. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @07:41PM (#53065985) Journal
          Not only does it NOT require ID, it is easy to "find" ballots [wikipedia.org] well after the election. Or to make sure ballots are mailed late to certain constituencies [wikipedia.org] (such as overseas military) who may "vote the wrong way" - and thereby ensure their votes aren't counted.
        • They passed a law in my state to require ID when voting. The Democrats challenged it and the Supreme Court (with all of its new appointees) ruled in their favor, so no ID check at our polls either.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward

            That's because in your poor ass state you did away with DOL locations in poor areas so that poor people couldn't get their license to get ID.

            They should really just switch to vote by mail. It's more secure and it's sent to registered voters. If you move, it's a few clicks on a website to update your address or get a form at the USPS. Internet access available to all at a public library.

            It's about being open and available and you're state was choosing to not be that way and they got corrected by intellige

            • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

              by frovingslosh ( 582462 )
              That's a complete lie. While they do move driver's licenses offices (I spent an afternoon trying to track one down about 10 years ago when the one that I used to go to wasn't there any more), the number seems to be increasing and well distributed. And there are provisions to get a free ID if you don't drive (if you do drive then there is no reason that you can't get to a license office). They have actually made things easier, since you can renew a registration over the Internet now, which you couldn't do b

              • Re:US Post Office always secure. (Score:5, Informative)

                by dywolf ( 2673597 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @08:51AM (#53068753)

                https://thinkprogress.org/afte... [thinkprogress.org]

                http://billmoyers.com/story/go... [billmoyers.com]

                It is no coincidence that 17 states have enacted new voting restrictions just in time for the 2016 presidential election — or that 22 states have toughened access to the ballot box since 2010. Here are those 17 states: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin.

                It’s also no coincidence that 16 of these 17 states (save only Rhode Island) have legislatures that are dominated entirely by Republicans. NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice calls this “part of a broader movement to curtail voting rights, which began after the 2010 election, when state lawmakers nationwide started introducing hundreds of harsh measures making it harder to vote.”

                In North Carolina — home to perhaps the most gerrymandered legislature in America — the judges were even more emphatic as they connected the dots between the GOP-implemented voter-ID laws and the desire on behalf of Republicans to tamp down the turnout of minority voters unlikely to cast ballots for conservatives. Their ruling painstakingly dismisses any problem with voter fraud in North Carolina, and compiles voluminous evidence that “the ‘problem’ the majority in the General Assembly sought to remedy was emerging support for the minority party.” The legislature, according to the ruling, “unmistakably” sought to “entrench itself” by “targeting voters who, based on race, were unlikely to vote for the majority party.”

                sure sounds like fraud to me.
                the real kind.

                and then there was Wisconsin shutting down dmvs or changing their hours, to make them difficult to access.
                Georgia has moved polling places out of poor and/or black neighborhoods, switching peoples polling places from across the street to 3 buses across town.
                your party is blatantly deceitful, guilty of blatantly rigging the vote, yet you call democrats the party of deceit?

                and now you idiots are calling for the 19th amendment to be repealed, because if woman couldn't vote, trump would easily win?

                let me spell it out for you jack: the party of voter fraud is the republican party

        • Re:US Post Office always secure. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Obfuscant ( 592200 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @10:22PM (#53066777)

          Does "vote by mail" require any sort of ID?

          In Oregon, no. It requires a signature of the voter on the "secrecy" envelope. The election officials are supposed to verify the signature against the registration documents.

          If they think the signatures don't match they don't count the vote. They don't notify the voter of the problem, they just don't count it. (The address of the voter is on the envelope, they COULD send a postcard if they thought telling you that your vote wasn't being counted was important to know. Hell, a postcard that was sent to the voter telling them their vote WAS counted would be a good idea anyway.) If you find out about it prior to the end of voting, I think you can go in to the election office and vote in person, but that requires a trip to the county election office and knowing that your vote wasn't counted.

          And now with motor-voter in Oregon, the signature they have to match against will be a stored, digitized version as it appears on your driver's license or state id. That makes it impossible for anyone to ever produce your signature on a forged ballot. Yes.

          I haven't bothered to check, but I'd guess that those who get their ballots at a PO box and don't care about voting may discard them in the PO itself -- a collection of known valid but unvoted ballots. But the issue is much worse than just mailed in fake or forged ballots. As others have pointed out, vote by mail opens a big wide door to coerced/sold votes. On the other hand, what a marvelous DOS attack to produce and drop off a few hundred thousand fake ballots. No postage necessary, every county has several convenient, free ballot drop off sites, which are usually just a standard looking postal collection box with the sign "vote here". You wouldn't even have to print actual ballots, just the outer and secrecy envelopes and put a piece of blank paper inside. The election folks would be so busy verifying addresses and signatures it would delay the results for days.

          Besides the ability to create fake voting sites to gather official, signed ballots to be fixed, there were warnings about "helpful people" who would stand near the official drop sites and offer to drop your ballot into the box for you so you didn't even need to get out of your car.

          I am not surprised at all that our dear Doctor Wyden has suggested the entire country go to this system.

    • That's unfortunate. Would you say more people are affected by the mail slip ups or computer breaches presently? How would you suggest the lack of a paper trail that voting machines enable be addressed?
    • This and also with email voting, someone can sell his vote to anyone and it is possible for the buyer to make sure he got the vote he bought. Also, with email vote, someone can be under a third party (family or other) to vote for a given candidate. No, email voting is far to be the best system. Paper track is mandatory of course to trust elections, however I don't see anything to replace the voting polls.
    • You miss the obvious advantage that so many more people will have the opportunity to exercise their right to vote this way. Why here in North Carolina we have people as old as 160 who still vote by absent-tee ballot (mostly Democrats), which I doubt they would be able to do if they had to appear at the poles. I'm sure there would be no problem, like selling of uncompleted ballots to a political party, since our parties are so scrupulously honest.

    • More problematic is that vote by mail isn't private / anonymous - your actual vote is visible for all to read.

  • Mail-only voting (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mhkohne ( 3854 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @07:21PM (#53065853) Homepage

    Senator, you do know there's a REASON we went to the secret ballot originally, right? Because without it, a political figure who wants to buy votes can easily see if the people he bribed or threatened did what he wanted. (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-vote-that-failed-159427766/?no-ist)

    I've long considered Oregon insane for going to all-mail-in voting, for precisely that reason. I can easily imagine a union getting all their members together and 'helping' them vote. Under the guise of pressuring everyone to vote, they'd actually be pressuring everyone to vote for the candidate that they wanted.

    Even if they don't do anything overtly illegal, peer pressure is a powerful thing, and a secret ballot nicely end-runs around it by making it so that you can lie to people about who you voted for, if you like.

    • See who voted (Score:3, Informative)

      by bjamesv ( 1528503 )

      Senator, you do know there's a REASON we went to the secret ballot originally, right? Because without it, a political figure who wants to buy votes can easily see if the people he bribed or threatened did what he wanted. (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-vote-that-failed-159427766/?no-ist)

      I've long considered Oregon insane for going to all-mail-in voting, for precisely that reason.

      Here in WA ballots are SENT by mail but returning ballot by mail is just one of several options, to include: counties organize to provide large, physical dropboxes you can walk up to & place your ballot in.
      The fairly long window for voting also greatly increases the cost needed to approimate the fabled 'thugs pressuring at polling places'. Partisan grousers are just mad their traditional methods of supressing/tampering with votes arent readily applied; "I already submitted my ballot" is a ready excuse t

      • "Thugs pressuring at the voting place"? Where do you live, Philadelphia? It shouldn't take very long at all to have police show up and read the riot act to anyone loitering outside the voting location. Also, there are these nifty new things called cell phone, they're great for capturing evidence of such shenanigans.

      • The long voting window is a severe problem, as it encourages voting before all the relevant scandals have been exposed.

      • Here in WA ballots are SENT by mail but returning ballot by mail is just one of several options, to include: counties organize to provide large, physical dropboxes you can walk up to & place your ballot in.

        Dropboxes solve none of the problems of by-mail voting. They are a difference that makes no difference.

        The fairly long window for voting also greatly increases the cost needed to approimate the fabled 'thugs pressuring at polling places'.

        No, it just moves the thuggery up to the day before the ballots are mailed. "When you get your ballot, sign it and give it to me" doesn't need to happen on one day in November to be effective.

        "I already submitted my ballot" is a ready excuse to attempted coercion here.

        "I told you to sign it and hand it over before you sent it in. You thought your life in this union was bad before, now you're going to face hell."

        Saves me (and the impoverished/the state) from having to pay the $0.50 to mail it back individually.

        Vote by mail does not save the expense of returning a ballot. And the s

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by meerling ( 1487879 )
          Really? You think people are going to be extorting whole neighborhoods for an extended period for their ballots, and have them sign the security envelope it's sealed in just to try and rig an election? Due to the obvious exploitation and manpower requirements, it would be far more efficient, safer, and faster to just extort the ballot officials that tally the damn things. Of course, that doesn't even need a vote by mail system.

          Your paranoia is unfounded and silly.

      • "I already submitted my ballot" is a ready excuse to attempted coercion here.

        Not if the coercion starts before postal voting starts.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by antimatter_16 ( 1523793 )
        I was a ballot observer last November in WA for a morning. The head of the elections office showed me around, and I was pretty impressed with their method. Ballots are counted at every step of the way from the ballot box and meticulously documented. In addition, there is added security by using two envelopes to hold the ballot. The outside enveloped has your identification signature on it, which is compared to your signature on file from your driver's license or your voter registration by a human being. I'v

    • Re:Mail-only voting (Score:5, Insightful)

      by meerling ( 1487879 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @01:34AM (#53067539)
      Dumbass. People do this in their homes, you know, where they receive their mail. If people are coming into your home and strongarming you, you have some other serious issues to contend with. As to getting a meeting where everyone brings their blank ballots, there is no way to keep that shit secret! It will be found out, and the law will be on their ass! It's not going to happen, so you can put your tinfoil hat down, this isn't a hollywood movie.
  • fraud but identifies as mail

  • voting day holiday (Score:4, Insightful)

    by zlives ( 2009072 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @07:42PM (#53066001)

    why is this not a thing for registered voters?

    • Re:voting day holiday (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jeff4747 ( 256583 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @08:25PM (#53066213)

      Because there still would be lots of people who can not get a random Tuesday off. They also tend to be the same people who currently have difficulty fitting in waiting in a multi-hour line to vote on a random Tuesday.

      If we're going the holiday route, make the election Saturday and Sunday, and require employers to give at least one of those days off (So if you work Saturday, you are off Sunday and vice-versa). Should make it possible for almost everyone to fit in one day or the other. And the extra day would hopefully spread out the load that mysteriously surprises election officials in the certain places over and over again.

  • far bigger danger (Score:3)

    by ooloorie ( 4394035 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @07:47PM (#53066025)

    If a foreign state were to eliminate registration records for a particular group of Americans immediately before an election, they could very likely disenfranchise those Americans and swing the results of an election. Recent efforts by some states to make it more difficult to vote only serves to increase the danger of such attacks. This is why I have proposed taking Oregon's unique vote-by-mail system nationwide to protect our democratic process against foreign and domestic attacks

    The far bigger danger to the integrity of elections is of the vote early, vote often [wikipedia.org] variety. Well, that, and dead people voting [townhall.com].

    Of course, we could just do what European nations do [wikipedia.org], which is citizen-verifiable voting, government voter and residency address registration based on valid identification, and a requirement that people carry a government-issue photo id and show it on demand. Of course, according to Democrats, Americans are too stupid for that.

    • I like the idea of using purple ink on one finger. It almost trivially avoids double voting, and lets you relax citizenship verification because it's auditable by anyone else who knows the voter and sees them.

    • Of course, according to Democrats, Americans are too stupid for that.

      No, it turns out there are lots of people who can vote who do not have a government ID. And it turns out being able to take off time in the middle of the day to go to an office many hours away when you don't have a car is a tad problematic.

      And that's ignoring some of the byzantine "problems" that appear. For example, it took me 9 tries to get my CO drivers license changed to an NY drivers license when I moved. Magically the documentation was never sufficient, and documentation that was good enough on att

      • No, it turns out there are lots of people who can vote who do not have a government ID.

        Well, not in Europe, because possessing (though not necessarily carrying) a government-issued ID is legally required. It's something the US should also consider because it is quite sensible.

        And that's ignoring some of the byzantine "problems" that appear. For example, it took me 9 tries to get my CO drivers license changed to an NY drivers license when I moved.

        The solution to that is obviously to fix the byzantine problem

        • Well, not in Europe, because possessing (though not necessarily carrying) a government-issued ID is legally required. It's something the US should also consider because it is quite sensible.

          This will not pass in the US. The fever swamps believe national ID cards are the first step in rounding up "true patriots" and sending them to the camps. Even though we're all issued Social Security cards...they just don't have a picture so magically they are not evil.

          Those same fever swamps are absolutely convinced that all sorts of terrible people are getting fake IDs, so they keep increasing the difficulty to get one. And since the rules change state-by-state, there is little consistency. Even within

    • Seriously? Do you have any examples that this has happened any time in the past 50 years? Anecdotes and urban legends don't count.

      No, I didn't think so.

      • Seriously? Do you have any examples that this has happened any time in the past 50 years? Anecdotes and urban legends don't count.

        How would anybody be able to prove voter fraud under the current system? A significant percentage of votes could be fraudulent and nobody could tell. I'm not talking (just) about non-citizens voting, but fraud by staff, voting machine manufacturers, and others.

        The real question is why the US shouldn't do what other Western nations do: require clear identification and establishmen

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by meglon ( 1001833 )

      Of course, according to Democrats, Americans are too stupid for that.

      No, but we are smart enough to know that if you don't have a problem, then you don't need a solution that causes other problems. We do know for certain though, that republicans are stupid enough to to buy into the bullshit they're fed by the political overlords they're conned into voting for. It must be hell going through life so scared of everything.

      http://www.nbcnews.com/id/2449... [nbcnews.com]

      • Obama, Clinton, Sanders and all these guys keep talking about how we should do what other "advanced democracies" do. Well, other advanced democracies issue every citizen a clear form of government ID, uniform across the country, and require it for voting and all other government services. That not only prevents voter fraud, it also prevents non-citizens from taking advantage of government services they are not entitled to. It doesn't "cause other problems", it fixes other problems, as experience shows.

  • Paper Trails (Score:4, Interesting)

    by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @08:04PM (#53066119)
    Let us remember, Bernie won the primary by 51% total in all of the states that have a paper trail, and lost overwhelmingly in the rest of the states that do not have a paper trail. Isn't that interesting, I wonder what it means.

    • Placebo voting (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @08:25PM (#53066217) Homepage Journal

      Let us remember, Bernie won the primary by 51% total in all of the states that have a paper trail, and lost overwhelmingly in the rest of the states that do not have a paper trail. Isn't that interesting, I wonder what it means.

      People seem to think that voting has some sort of meaning, and not a placebo to calm and comfort the masses.

      Consider that Bernie raised $60 million to Clinton's $20 million, so the DNC quickly moved $60 million from down-ballot elections directly into the Clinton campaign. The popular vote by percentage was almost exactly proportional to the amount each candidate spent, so if the DNC hadn't done that, Bernie would have won.

      Then consider that if you swap Hillary's superdelegates with Bernies, Bernie would have won. A candidate can have upwards of 30% more votes, and the superdelegates will still outweigh the popular vote.

      Let's not forget that Clinton and Bernie were in a dead heat in several Iowa counties, and delegates were assigned by coin toss, of which Hillary won all 6.

      A recent Wikileaks leak [infowars.com] shows that, well... here's the relevant quote:

      Why not throw Bernie a bone and reduce the super delegates in the future to the original draft of members of the House and Senate, governors and big city mayors, eliminating the DNC members who are not State chairs or vice-Chairs. (Frankly, DNC members don’t really represent constituencies anyway. I should know. I served on the DNC first as Executive Director and then as an elected member for 10 years.)

      So if we “give” Bernie this in the Convention’s rules committee, his people will think they’ve “won” something from the Party Establishment. And it functionally doesn’t make any difference anyway. They win. We don’t lose. Everyone is happy.”

      On the Republican side, several candidates signed a pledge to support the candidate whoever it should be, and we know how that turned out. "Except when they call my wife a bad name" is an exception, apparently.

      And of course many Republicans don't support Trump, and the RNC cut off funding to his campaign and redirected funds to down-ballot elections [thewrap.com].

      Which prompted the recent tweet: "Shouldn't the goal of the party be to elect the candidate we voted for?"

      People think that voting means something, but it doesn't. Not when the party can withhold support and sabotage their campaigns.

      (The stock answer is that "The $x party is a private club, they can make whatever rules they want." Why do we even *bother* with primaries?)

    • Re:Paper Trails (Score:4, Informative)

      by Shadow of Eternity ( 795165 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @09:56PM (#53066647)

      and that the DNC staffer who actually leaked those emails was shot repeatedly in the back and left with all of his money and valuables.

  • Wyden's plan eliminates secret ballot so that people who vote the wrong way can be properly retaliated against.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nkwe ( 604125 )

      Wyden's plan eliminates secret ballot so that people who vote the wrong way can be properly retaliated against.

      Actually here in Oregon, the mail in ballot is still secret. You mark your optically scanable ballot (fill in the bubbles), and you put it in a provided secrecy envelope. Neither the ballot or secrecy envelope have any identifying marks on it. The secrecy envelope is put inside a mailing envelope that you sign and mail or hand deliver to a nearby drop box. When the ballots get to the elections office, your signature is checked by one elections official who marks you as voted. They then take the still sealed

  • People casting votes decide nothing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mi ( 197448 ) <slashdot-2017q4@virtual-estates.net> on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @08:53PM (#53066343) Homepage Journal

    As Stalin once put it:

    People casting votes decide nothing. People counting votes decide everything.

    The only hope for the electorate is to keep the latter group decentralized and otherwise disconnected from each other — to keep both fraud and honest mistakes small-scale and thus unprofitable. Any attempts to centralize vote-counting is the end of Democracy.

    • The counters also have to either consist of, or be monitored by, representatives of all interested parties.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )
      Instead of spewing stupid platitudes who about looking at some of those attempts to centralize vote-counting that actually reinforced democracy?
      Clue number one - it's done in public with representatives from all the people on the ballot watching. The UK, Australia, a lot of places have something a thousand times better run than the Florida hanging chad bullshit or people having to wait in line for hours on a fucking Tuesday just because the local electoral office just cannot get their shit together.

  • Here's a solution offered by one segment of the population:

    http://www.nydailynews.com/new... [nydailynews.com]

  • Always create a full paper trail for verification and audit. Any computer election system that doesn't do that was intentionally designed to make hacks easy and undectable.

  • What could possibly go wrong?

    Gawd, these people can't possibly believe their own hype, can they?

  • So we should replace an electronic system that's moderately difficult to hack, with a system that's hackable with nothing more high-tech than the willingness to pop mailboxes?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Boronx ( 228853 )

      We should replace it with non-electronic voting booths. Do what Canada does: a piece of paper with some check boxes. Respectable little old ladies count them in public.

  • Secret Ballot no more (Score:3)

    by Frankie70 ( 803801 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @11:44PM (#53067151)

    Postal Voting should not be allowed at all, forget 100%. Postal Voting does not provide Secret Ballot.

    Assume, someone is either paying your or threatening you to vote for Candidate X. At the voting booth, you could still go ahead and vote for Candidate Y without him being any wiser.

    This gets compromised in Postal Voting (and Internet Voting). The guy can make sure you vote for him.

  • All mail voting sucks. It's traceable, and you be coerced into voting by an overbearing spouse, parent, or some social group. It's an incredibly bad idea.

  • So, russians can't hack anything to make me president. So the most that they can do is cause Trump to win, or cause Hilary to win.

    Given that, right now, without knowing what voters will do, both hilary and trump are legitimate and viable options, then allowing russia to pick between two already-vetted contenders ain't sooooo bad. You've got plenty of checks and balances to cover anything.

    Of course, if you're saying that one of the contenders is horrible for the country, then shouldn't they a) have not made

  • Can vote by mail possibly be gamed? Yes. Everything can possibly be gamed. If you are worried there are places in every county where you can directly drop off your ballet. What is incredibly difficult to do by mail is change 10,000 votes at once. This is entirely possible with electronic voting.

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