politics

WTF happened this year

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This is a post that I started writing shortly after the Democratic convention, as I started thinking that Trump was going to end up beating Clinton.    Now that the “impossible” has happened (haha all those “old media” predicting <2% for Trump) I find myself publishing this post as an attempted reflection on how we got here.

So what went wrong and what can be learned from this year? I think that the first and easiest way to frame this year might be “old establishment” vs “random unknowns” where a large number of individuals decided that unknowns would be better than more of the same for themselves. These individuals IMO tend to view the status quo as getting themselves screwed over by some external force, such as technological progress, trade deals, banks or immigrants, and as such wanted some candidate that would end what ever entity was screwing them over. When this battle comes down to between HRC and the Orange, we have one candidate that was essentially saying that things are not so bad and that what happened with the financial meltdown and bailing out the banks had to happen, and the other simply channeling people’s anger towards an undeserving group of people (immigrants). In the end, speaking to one’s frustrations rather than trying to tell them they are “crazy” and they are better off then X years ago was the better strategy (who would have guessed).

While it is easy to forget where we came from in terms of the primaries, considering that I starting this posts months before it was posted, it is easy to recall the events of a few weeks ago.

First, when the Tangerine said that he might consider a third party run if he was not treated fairly by the Republicans, this was an extremely smart home in hindsight. This was basically his escape hatch from the party which would have allowed the Tangerine to prevent a successful presidential bid if it came to light that there was any foul play during the primary processes. As such, the Republican party was forced in to playing a fair game and thus as an outsider Tangerine was given a fair shot.
The flip side of this issue was Bernie, who said that he would not consider a third party run which basically meant that he gave license to the Democratic party to sabotage the primary processes against him without their being any consequences (such as directly losing in November as a result). This is something that we know happened given the wide array of emails that have been leaked. (1, 2)  (In the last few weeks alone there have been countless wikileaks which have shown the additional details of how the

Simply looking at the Democratic primary, we had HRC with Clinton being one of the few name brands bigger than Lewinsky (sorry, bad joke… someone had to make it), and Bernie, a politician who many (at least on the west coast) have never heard about before. The massive HRC name brand politician then proceeded to lose 22 primaries. Additionally, winning the primaries that she did required that she conspired with major media providers and spend years specifically maneuvering to control the Democratic party through DWS becoming the party head (her campaign manager in 2008) and getting countless super delegates to pre-signup with her campaign. When in it came to fund raising, Bernie was consistently out raising HRC and he was doing it using a larger pool of donors making smaller contributions which IMO indicates a campaign which was better in touch with the actual voters. We see a similar parallel when comparing the sizes of HRC and Bernie rallies.

In directly comparing Clinton to Tangerine and Bernie, we have HRC who continued to “evolve” her position to try and always attract the most voters while Bernie and Trump both took a position and keep pushing a core message.  The fact that Tangerine keep changing exactly what he said on specific policy issues didn’t change the core message which was simple enough that it easily resonated with his core voting base.

False unity at the DNC
Primary election fraud
More info on voter fraud/suppression for Bernie voters
Large report on election fraud

TL;DR: If you fix your primary such that you ignore the “public poll” that you are conducing, the candidate that you get out is going to be weaker then they should be in the general election.

 

 

Some additional comments:

  • While the mainstream media is likely going to frame this as “America wasn’t ready for a woman president,” I don’t think that was the issue.  Instead, Clinton was a weak candidate which to many Americans symbolized the failures of government that they can’t stand
    • The fact that “the most qualified Woman/person ever” just lost to the biggest “joke” we are unlikely to see another “Woman from a major political party” within the next 20 years.  The only chance that the next woman has of getting a nomination is that she wins on a populace surge, the party insiders of the Republicans and Democrats are going to be unwilling to risk it
  • At some level the country has just “approved” the Tangerine’s personal views on race and women (given that this election wasn’t won on policy)
  • Once Clinton pivoted to the general, talks of policy basically stopped.  Instead she started using personal attacks (forcing all those meaningless leaks about personal qualities).  Instead of Bernie had been in the general, he would have keep the message focused on policy, people would have been able to more easily recognize that Tangerine had no real policy and would be unable to deliver.
    • If you want to have a chance of winning against Tangerine in 4 years, you are going to have to defeat him on the fact that he has bad policies or the poor job that he has done.  More personal attacks are not going to work and is a dumb position to take and isn’t going to resonate well with younger generations.
  • The Tangerine tape scandal made no sense.  (Again this isn’t a policy issue attack but a personal attack.)  Some have said that this was a “waking up call” to women that were supporting Tangerine, I don’t think that actually holds that much weight.  Lets suppose for a moment that Tangerine had “much better” policies then HRC w.r.t. women’s issues and this tape still came out, the conversation would have been: “So he said these things, but he is still much better for me as a woman.”  America’s history of presidents has been a string of questionable views on women and marriages etc, one more shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone regardless of how many times the media plays it.  Most people will never directly interact with the president, “we” (or at least I), do not care if the person who wins the presidency is likable or has done some questionable things in the past, all that “we” care about is whether or not their policies are going to be good for “us.”

 

What a surprise mainstream media:
Donald Trump would have lost US election if Bernie Sanders had been the candidate
How the Washington Post killed Bernie Sanders’ candidacy
The Democratic Party Establishment Is Finished

Theoretical online voting system

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With the election a few days away, I found myself recently looking at the state of voting in America and contemplating that there is still no online-based voting system in place. The main arguments against online voting or digital-based voting has been that it would be hard to verify and would require a computer security expert to identify if something has been tampered with.

Now to create a system that is “provably incorruptible” would be very difficult and impracticable to expect average poll workers to verify the correctness of such a system, however, there is probably a widely unexplored range of systems that are better than our current system but still have some easy to verify properties. In this post, I attempt to create a voting system which no worse then our current voting system with respect to voter fraud and ensuring the votes are counted.

First, let’s consider the state of our current voting system, specifically the voting-by-mail system. Step 1 is to go online and register your address along with some identifying voter information. At a later point in time, the state will mail a ballot to your address which contains a “voting key” which maps various voting positions (who you would like for some office or position on a proposition) to some number \([1, 200]\). To vote, you bubble in your corresponding chosen numbers, wrap your ballot in more paper called a “secrecy sleeve,” put this in another envelope and mail it to the ballot counting location. Presumably, once your ballot arrives, someone will check the identifying information on the mailing envelope to prevent duplication and then pass the ballot and secrecy sleeve to someone else who is just going to count the votes. This two-level operation would prevent people from knowing who you voted for, assuming that the first poll works don’t look at the ballot inside the secrecy sleeve. In terms of ensuring that your vote is counted, we have to then trust the second poll worker to count the votes correctly. We might use more than one person for this second part to prevent errors etc.

Now in making a new system, we have to consider what possible vulnerabilities exist in the current system, as those could still be allowed in the new system:

  1. Trusting the United states postal services (USPS) to properly deliver mail — If your ballot never makes it back to the polling place, then it will essentially be lost (there might be some ways to identify that it is lost, but still no real/easy recourse for ensuring that it gets counted)
  2. The USPS needs to get you your ballot to you in the first place — If the ballot was sent to the wrong address, it is possible that someone fills in the ballot in your name, forges your signature, and then mails it back in
  3. People are trusted to bubble in their choice correctly — Eg, they are at least able to understand that given some “number” on a “ballot key,” they are supposed to transfer that number correctly to the ballot itself
  4. A malicious poll worker could prevent a vote from getting counted that they didn’t agree with — Given that your vote is easily identifiable on the ballot, it is trivial for someone to reject all ballots which have bubbled in number 10 (ideally, there are two or more people to double check that this does not happen)

Given this set of vulnerabilities in our current system, lets now try to design a better system that allows for internet voting:

Our first steps would be very similar to the current voting system, where someone goes online and registers with their mailing address. The state would then mail out a “ballot key” to the provided address. The reason that we would still require that something is mailed out is that there is currently no good way to identify a citizen online in a secure way, however, like the current vote-by-mail system, it is acceptable to trust the USPS as a “broker of identities.” Now our vote by internet ballot key will be a bit different from existing ballots where each vote is represented by \([1, 200]\) and instead have a number in \([0, 2^{256}]\), additionally, instead of having a single number (say 10) represent a position on the ballot, each voter would be given a unique number for each position on the ballot. (A sample ballot is at the end of this post) We can then use a simple website to collect the keys which represent a person’s choice. Given that each user has different codes generated for their ballot, we can use untrusted channels to communicate these codes to the vote-counting authority. Additionally, we do not have to worry about “suppressing” the vote that a poll worker disagrees with since the intermediate communication mechanisms don’t even know which vote was cast. All they know is that they are responsible for is communicating some number to the voting authority.  Even if voter’s computer was infected with a computer virus, it would be unable to change your vote since it only knows the key that was entered representing your choice, while the other keys would only be present on the paper ballot key that was mailed to your address.

Some properties of this system:

  1. We are still trusting the USPS to properly identify people and communicate information with them securely. (Same as before)
  2. Submitting a vote for someone else still depends on your receiving or intercepting their ballot and “forging” a signature (Same as before)
  3. The intermediaries do not know your vote (better than before) — Now your vote is a number that is specific to you, so the only people who will know the vote are the person who generated the “voting key” and whoever has the voting key
    1. The intermediaries can not suppress your vote based on who you voted for — They do not who you voted for, so it can not be suppressed based on this reason
    2. Your vote can not be changed after the fact — Changing your vote would require that the malicious intermediary have your “voting key book,” which was printed by the state and mailed by the USPS (which is a trusted medium)
    3. Your computer (now technically also an intermediary) can not change your vote even if it was infected with a virus —  your computer does not know the alternate keys you were provided since they were printed and mailed, so it can not switch between them.
  4. The number that you have to enter is a lot longer (worse) — Currently, you only enter some number \([1, 200]\), however, a 256 bit number is notably longer.  Given how people are already used to entering 16 digit credit card numbers, this might not be such a big issue.  We could even include checksums to limit erroneously entering something (bitcoin already uses a 32-bit checksum on all addresses)

Some might point out that one could set up false voting websites to try to confuse voters or perform a DOS attack on the voting website. First, with false websites, we could follow the trend of some banking websites where an image is displayed to ensure that you are on the correct website. However, we might make it some confirmation code that is sufficiently long that it would be difficult to counterfeit and easy to print on a “ballot key.” For the DOS attack, we already know how to build systems that can deal with DOS attacks. Additionally, if we have a confirmation code system that confirms that a vote has been recorded, then any mechanism which takes a voting key and returns the confirmation code is as good as any other. This means you could have voting via email or even text message, which are “more difficult” to perform a DOS attack against or allow for third-party websites to spring up to collect votes as they would have to be still backed by the state vote recording authority.

Sample theoretical ballot key:

Politician Office key Confirmation code
T Sandwich President NMosFJizjPgUV2BKEhGE rjvUZzKZVAFCyqPy7w3t FuT8VDz3z
Giant D President Tru4oZn9y3RMnxAsb7g 5Gqs7Fu13FX4ExaQSer6y bFcCf4MJA
None of the above President LaGeinvoBUduEbovp5z JDQJ6DQEdgSqZWgXzArhi xjzEahMdi

(These politician names are based on this current season of south park.)

TL;DR: Online voting where you are still mailed your ballot via USPS, and your ballot contains keys that we consider “secure,” and you only submit one key that corresponds to your vote.

Update / additional background info / other posts on this topic:

While the mathematical concepts in these schemes are sound, it would be difficult to convince the public at large.  In these cases, people would have to just generally trust that someone has done the correct thing with designing the voting systems.  From an academic point of view, if these systems are implemented correctly, there wouldn’t even be a need for there to be vote checkers since they would “have to be correct.”