> Konnech distributes and sells its proprietary PollChief software, which is an election worker management system that was utilized by the county in the last California election. The software assists with poll worker assignments, communications and payroll. PollChief requires that workers submit personal identifying information, which is retained by the Konnech.
I'm so very tired of proprietary software made by tiny little outfits being critical to elections.
in my previous/previous/previous career I was heavily involved with various states election systems (juicily enough starting in hanging chads Florida). The field is full of tiny little outfits AND huge consultancies (Accenture in my personal example) doing stuff. The quality varies tremendously from amazing to amazingly atrocious. When I did all this work the cloud was not yet a big thing so no servers were provisioned in anything other than well known data centers, but it's you get what you pay for. Since it's secretaries of state paying for some, and then tons of random counties paying for some others, these are not incredibly lucrative contracts, and it does attract just random small software firms.
I wonder what an ideal solution might look like. I kind of envision the Federal government funding a small organization overseeing an open source "election software" system, which would be run on some sort of well-defined stock hardware. The government would periodically pay for the hardware and software combination to be audited against a variety of attacks. The machines would produce standardized audit logs, published as openly as possible (someone smarter than me should figure out whether it's safe or good to publish the times or votes or the votes themselves. I'm leaning towards yes to both, but I'm concerned that you could figure out someone's vote if you knew the timestamps of the individual votes). Security researchers could purchase the hardware, install the software on it, and analyze it on their own. Then you'd do the same thing for the vote tabulators or whatever hardware and software exists asides from the voting machines themselves.
Then I think about what might look like a nice halfway point. Voting machine software is still written by companies, but we require that all software running on a voting machine be published and hermetically reproducible. They don't have to take pull requests, they still own it, but we should be able to open one up and be 100% sure that the software running on it is exactly what they've documented.
Were you aware that Konnech has an Australian subsidiary? It's right on their website. Doesn't mention specific clients there or total number of employees. I am a East Lansing local so I spent some time today on their website ;<).
Well you can tell that it isn't an Atlassian product, because you can know the results within a week. If they used an Atlassian product the total count page would return right around the same time the next election started.
make it a highly promoted position in the space force. we did this with AEGIS stuff and the navy, as well as SPAWAR and SCC software, and it was generally quite successful. release early and often, and always AGPL3. consider pull requests to be a civic minded thing and recognize courageous and hard working citizens who find security bugs and flaws in the code.
Paper really is the best hardware platform for voting. Scantron results are nice because they are fast, so people can find out results quickly, but they are also able to be verified against the physical record which is far more important.
I'm just tired of the rhetoric that 100% of such software is 100% unassailable and 100% utilized by 100% honest actors with 100% honest motives, 100% of the time, and anything else is a "conspiracy theory."
Nobody believes this: there's a reason why DEF CON has had a voting village for years.
What people believe is that, in spite of numerous flaws in voting software, the integrity of the vote is not seriously in question. And there are good reasons for believing this: physical backups, consistency with exit polling and, well, the fact that no party in this godforsaken country has been able to hold onto the presidency for more than 2 terms in nearly 30 years.
Oh, I agree that elections are not 100% unassailable. In fact, I strongly believe that they are being assailed. Mostly through voter suppression and disenfranchisement.
A good example of this is when the state tells you that you can vote, and then arrests you and charges you with voter fraud, because you actually can't. [1]
Or, alternatively, when the state bars you from voting until you pay all outstanding court fees and fines, but also refuses to tell you whether or not you actually owe any outstanding court fees or fines.
You can't have a free and fair election when you secretly disqualify people from voting, but refuse to tell them that until after they vote.
> A good example of this is when the state tells you that you can vote, and then arrests you and charges you with voter fraud, because you actually can't. [1]
I'm confused. How is this voter suppression? You agree the person in question had no right to vote, right? So no one's vote is being suppressed.
The only way the election is unfair in this case is if the vote was counted.
Moreover, I see no difference in this practice than how we prosecute people for tax fraud. Several times I call the IRS and they tell me one rule and then it turns out they adjust my tax later. Luckily mine is so simple they can do that but I imagine if it were more complicated they wouldn't and I would be liable.
> I'm confused. How is this voter suppression? You agree the person in question had no right to vote, right? So no one's vote is being suppressed.
Arguably, it could be said that if people who have every reason to think that they are allowed to vote can later be arrested and charged with voter fraud, then every voter unwilling to risk being arrested would be better off not voting to avoid finding out the hard way that despite assurances that they can vote they were guilty of fraud.
It's still a bit of a reach though because the article highlights two cases which seem pretty specific. I don't doubt Washington believed he was eligible to vote, but that belief was based on an assumption about the law and an election worker telling him his voter card was legitimate. I don't think that situation is going to apply to very many people including people with a criminal record.
The second case, where Stribling claims she was just randomly checking boxes on her voter registration form since she can't read or write is even less likely to be a problem for others. I think these cases are unfortunate, but very unlikely to have a chilling effect on other voters.
The article however does give a quote from a Florida senator which says “Some of the individuals did check with (supervisors of elections) and believed they could register,” and that's a bit more disturbing. I think anyone who contacts election officials to make sure they can vote would have every reason to expect that they can if that's what they are told, but it's hard to say what impact that might have without more information.
> The article however does give a quote from a Florida senator which says “Some of the individuals did check with (supervisors of elections) and believed they could register,” and that's a bit more disturbing. I think anyone who contacts election officials to make sure they can vote would have every reason to expect that they can if that's what they are told, but it's hard to say what impact that might have without more information.
For sure... this reeks of incompetence by these bureaucrats and they too ought to be reprimanded.
This is a kind of strawman fallacy. You're starting with an argument (of the form "this particular idea about election software is a conspiracy theory"), and then pretending that it was actually an argument for the maximal refutation of the original, which you then show to be "wrong". But that's not an argument in favor of the original contention!
No one serious argues that election management systems are bug free or that their operators can't possibly make mistakes. We're just saying that nothing has broken yet.
Can you point to a single person who has asserted even one prong of that supposed rhetoric? All anyone reasonable is saying, is if there's widespread or systemic wrongdoing, where's the evidence?
I am so frustrated that the discussion space is so often forced around this topic.
The claim is not that there was “widespread systemic” wrongdoing, the claim is that it would only take a very tiny amount of weight to push an election in direction that benefits the one doing the pushing.
That's sort of a specious point, though. In two party systems, elections are always close more or less by definition. If you want to show wrongdoing, you need to show actual wrongdoing and not just that it's possible. I'd argue that the fact that no single group/party/cabal/whatever has managed to disproportionately cheat stands are very good evidence that this is not, in fact, happening.
> the fact that no single group/party/cabal/whatever has managed to disproportionately cheat
there's at least one feature about elections in the US that makes detecting cheating pretty difficult. there's no good way for me to verify that my vote was recorded a specific way subsequent to casting it.
Which jurisdictions implement that feature? Prior to advent of modern cryptography it wasn't even possible (well, without giving up the secret ballot, which is how you get vote buying and coercion).
I am not aware of any precisely because of the concerns you raised with buying and coercion. I am not aware how modern cryptography allows this either, while preserving secret ballot. Please let me know if there are advancements that render my opinion incorrect. I just think it is a really interesting information-security problem that seems intractable. My personal opinion is paper ballots and in-person voting is probably the most effective pair of policies at preventing wide-spread voting fraud.
The point about cryptography was me being glib, but the math does exist. The relevant subfield is "homomorphic encryption" and I remember seeing a paper over the last few years (probably linked here on HN if I had to guess) claiming to have an election-relevant algorithm that was supposed to be workable in practice. I can't find it right now though.
I submit that a still bigger problem preventing people from actually talking to one another about this is the lack of evidence of an actual stolen election.
All that stuff is just junk, you realize. And you can tell because none of it makes sense! It's got a bunch of numbers and a long list of links to click on that makes you feel like there must be evience (which is the whole point), but when you actually drill down... there's nothing there. It's all argumentation of the form "Why would X be true if we know Y?", leading you to suspect that the "real" reason must be "Z" without saying it. That's not argument, it's a gish gallop. And it's fooled you.
I mean, just to make a point using the same logic[1]: if elections were this easy to cheat, then why aren't the cheaters winning all the time? Why do both sides share power at all? How does it not devolve into a single party illuminati running everything? I submit that it doesn't because elections aren't being stolen.
[1] But in favor of bland conservatism about "stuff works normally" and not a particular criminal conspiracy.
I mean.. the New York Times just defamed an organization for apparently telling the truth about American election data being held in China. So there's a few people who asserted that.
Much like cnn.com, the domain name is not a seal of quality.
In this case, every source that has told you there was no fraud in the 2020 election appears to be a mash of conspiracy Twitter accounts, fringe blogs, or links to itself. Ho hum.
Really unfortunate that these are disorganized and don't make clear statements as to what was improper. Two years on I would have hoped for more clarity from detractors.
Another poster in this discussion posted some links including this one https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/here-is-the-evidence but I didn't find it very satisfying because while it does mention a lot of problems with that site, it doesn't really address the specific evidence itself. I was hoping to see somebody break down the evidence found on hereistheevidence and explain what was so wrong with it. I mean, even heavily biased sources that have been caught spreading lies in the past can still post some truths right? A biased source is a reason for caution, not a reason to outright dismiss something!
So, not having that readily available, I thought I'd check some of the evidence myself. I started with
"143,835 votes in Georgia were in violation to state laws". That sure sounds pretty serious! That claim consists of nothing more than a link to https://thepostmillennial.com/trump-lawyer-lists-exhaustive-.... No evidence, but I guess they linked to it so I ignored the nagging voice saying "WTF is thepostmillennial.com?" and clicked that link so that I could take in all the glorious evidence I was promised! I'll save you a click though. There is no evidence there. It's just a blog post about how somebody else made a bunch of claims and a video of those claims being made. Not once in the text of that site does the number "143,835" even come up and nowhere is there any evidence available to review.
Okay, so there's zero evidence at that link, maybe it was just a bad example...
I next checked the entry for "300,000 Fake People Voted In Arizona Election" - Wow! So many fake people! How did I not hear about this?! The entry for that claim is also nothing more than another link. Okay, so no evidence of fake people, but surely that link must take me straight to it!
The link goes to
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/12/01/data_expe... and once again, I'll save you the click, it's still just a post about someone else's claims. There's zero evidence there.
Links to stories about people making claims without evidence is not evidence. If there's any evidence at all to be found on hereistheevidence.com, I didn't find it. I guess we need someone to create "hereistheevidenceonhereistheevidence.com"
I can't blame people for not taking the time to go over all of the evidence at hereistheevidence.com and verify it, because there is no evidence, which I guess we all should have known by now.
National security wise better to avoid the risk of nation wide vote hacking by having many separate systems. Yes it increases the likelihood of a successful hacking event, but it decreases expected damage.
If that was a concern, surely the only reasonable thing to do would be to move to a popular vote as soon as possible. As things stand, an entity that could reliably hack 2 or 3 states would have a better than even chance of controlling the election outcome.
that doesn't help at all, and in fact makes it worse - with a popular vote you can just hack one or two communities with very large populations (i.e. LA and NYC), and change or cast enough votes to cancel out about 30 other states in total.
You can't trivially shift huge numbers of votes without getting caught. To get away with it, you'd have to shift small numbers of votes in specific locations. But with a popular votes, small numbers of votes don't make a difference. Reliably shifting 1% of the vote in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, would throw an election one way or another under the current system. Switching 1% of the vote in Los Angeles and New York wouldn't reliably change anything with a popular vote system.
The most reliable way would be to do what some states used to do which is have the state legislatures vote instead of the individuals in the state. Dealing with a couple hundred (thousand?) people would be significantly more manageable than millions.
The electoral college can vote not in alignment to their district's popular vote (in many states)
> There is no Constitutional provision or Federal law that requires electors to vote according to the results of the popular vote in their States. Some States, however, require electors to cast their votes according to the popular vote.
Not sure what you are trying to say? Some states used to elect electors not by popular vote, but by a vote by their legislatures. If we want to ensure the legitimacy of a vote it seems easier to secure a system where only a few are voting instead of everybody. I am not positive, but I think the votes in the legislatures were public so there would be no issues with potential voting machine manipulation or anything of the sort.
If a private company can't do it, then what chance does the government have? I should also add, my comment about sarcasm should probably be taken into account.
I never quite understood the "feds screw everything up" meme. It’s like a large company where are some incredibly talented people (NIST, NASA, etc) as well as some people who are "vested and rested". Unlike most large companies, policy makers are appointed every few years by shareholder vote, except each shareholder has the same voting power as every other shareholder and most shareholders decline to exercise their governance privileges. There is wide disagreement between factions of shareholders on the most appropriate policies so progress can sometimes appear slow and fitful.
Some federal elections, like presidential elections are run by the states. With the current system, one doesn't vote directly for president, but instead who they would like their state (via the electoral college) to cast a vote for. As such they are state-run federal elections. Some people don't like this system. Not sure if this was where you were going with your comment. If not, my apologies.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. No elections are run by the Federal Government. They are all run by the states, per the US Constitution. The bills referenced above are "altering rules" as you put it, and that is a form of control.
How does your statement align with the Constitution's Article 1 Section 4 which seems to explicitly allow for congress to alter federal rules at the federal level?
"The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators."
> "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators
Congress can regulate elections for representatives, but they cannot run them. The president or the executive of the federal government cannot run elections. Only state executives (governors, secretaries of state) can run an election.
If those bills pass, elections would still be run by state and local governments. There would simply be additional restrictions on how they choose to run elections.
This particular role of the software doesn't sound particularly critical, in the sense that if it caught fire tomorrow, elections would still happen in the same way, maybe with more human labour involved on the planning side.
But sure, I agree that it's stupid to have every municipality and polity, down to the five mud farmers living in unincorporated East Mudsville, Nowhere figuring out how to do their elections in their own special way. Perhaps it would be good to look into how Elections Canada[1] does things?
[1] It has the unfortunate side effect of providing federal oversight over elections, which is not something that republicans seem to be interested in this year.
No this is false. Imagine if tomorrow all GOP poll workers were 'dismissed' due to a technical glitch and lo and behold a democrat one a formerly red district. Or vice versa.
This opens up the election to unnecessary allegations of fraud.
Unnecessary because of how simple this is to manage.
Then there would be procedures for redress and emergency injunctions that could be made, with enough time to do so.. The situation would have to be unfucked by hand. 'The computer said so' does not overturn election rules.
This kind of scheduling is not critical, because it happens early enough that you can actually correct mistakes with it without compromising the election.
That's the whole point of defense in depth. Compromising this layer does not actually break the system. Because any failures from it are both visible and redressable.
There is no evidence of "infiltration" here. The reality is that, in its march to privatize everything it can, the US government has incentivized a race to the bottom. If Chinese companies provide the cheapest services, then American data is going to end up on Chinese servers until the incentives are fixed.
Is this good? No. But it also isn't CCP infiltration; it's the logical consequence of trying to channel public money into private economies, public money that is meant to fund our most basic civic activity.
> it's the logical consequence of trying to channel public money into private economies, public money that is meant to fund our most basic civic activity.
Yes, and that logical consequence is being exploited by foreign governments. By "infiltrate" I mean "taking advantage of our shortsightedness," similar to how we ignorantly offshored pharmaceutical sourcing/production to China [1].
There's plenty [2] of loose threads that warrant my "only the paranoid survive" POV on stuff like this.
Hell, there's even a book that goes into detail about the strategy [3]:
> "If one party is at war with another, and the other party does not realize it is at war, the party who knows it is at war almost always has the advantage and usually wins.” And this is the strategy set forth in Unrestricted Warfare: waging a war on an adversary with methods so covert at first and seemingly so benign that the party being attacked does not realize it’s being attacked." - Qiao Liang
This is quibbling, but I don’t think that’s “infiltration.” We don’t get to pawn out incompetencies off on other countries; they don’t owe us anything in particular.
More to the point: there’s no evidence that China actually did anything here, other than provide a service and get some overeager DA to interpret that in the worst possible light. Which, if you’re China, is a win-win: you didn’t have to do anything at all besides provide a quality product to get the Americans to doubt their election!
Not to be rude but this exact response is why this strategy has been and will continue to be successful.
Americans cannot believe that a foreign government who's fundamental values are counter to theirs would take advantage of their naivety for both financial and geopolitical gain.
I mean they say it overtly: make it subtle so they don't realize it's happening.
I use abductive reasoning to connect different things I see and form a preliminary conclusion/hypothesis based on that. I'm not starting a church or lighting candles.
I'd buy what you're saying if it was nearly anything but servers. It's still not proof, but either the DA is using the wrong word (quite plausible) or it's very fishy.
Because of various implantation details it's inconvenient and expensive to operate servers in China if you don't need to. Even the IoT crap I've bought to disassemble on AliExpress phoned home to us-east-1.
I never called it proof of anything. That was projected on to what I said. I made an assertion and then the predictable Baizuo twist and shout started.
To be fair, this is probably a guy going to jail because he used a text message sending API that used tencent cloud somewhere in their backend or something...
I wish that were true but considering his ties, expertise, and the general theme of his patents I'd say that's a naive interpretation. That said I certainly hope you're right and I only say "naive" to discourage people shrugging it off as a nothing burger.
I've presented multiple sources in this thread for why I make that claim. I don't lack integrity, I lack the typical social conditioning that makes people averse to discussing these sorts of things.
I'm willing and happy (and would prefer) to be completely wrong.
The infiltration related to this specific situations where the data for this company is stored on Chinese servers. That's what we are talking about.
Edit:Saying you are ok with being wrong has no bearing on your comments. It's an admirable attribute but so is telling the truth and not making accusations without evidence
I clarified my usage of the term "infiltration" in response elsewhere in this thread. It's very bizarre that you're harping on that term when, technically speaking, it's accurate (even if my use here is mildly hyperbolic):
> the action of entering or gaining access to an organization or place surreptitiously, especially in order to acquire secret information or cause damage.
Like I explained to you in another response, abductive reasoning makes fair game of the conclusion that, yeah, if election worker v̵o̵t̵e̵r̵ [1] information is stored on the servers of another country (and of all countries, China—not known for its VPS services), it's reasonable to conclude that there's something not right about that.
It might be inconvenient to recognize, but it's not like I'm spouting glue-huffer theories here. It's a finger tip away from smacking you in the face it's so obvious.
[1] Edit: I concede to themitigating that I am, in fact, guilty of the great crime of misattributing the type of information on the server. Disregard everything I say. I am dishonorable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VY_xxL2jL0&t=57s
You don't need to clarify infiltration you just haven't proven it.
"that, yeah, if voter information is stored on the servers of another country"
This was a company that stored HR information for election workers not voter information.
This is the manipulation I'm talking about it and why you have no integrity.
Edit: "...guilty of the great crime of misattributing the type of information " yes lying and it is a great crime depending on what you lie about and why. Lies have cost human lives and started wars and sarcastic apology is the best response you could come up with?
> Update, Oct. 5: After this article was published, the chief executive of Konnech was arrested on suspicion of theft of personal information about poll workers.
That is the most bullshit "update" I have ever seen. NYT shouldn't just "update" that article, they should issue a retraction and a major apology, and fire people involved with the story. Maybe if the update had said this I'd be OK with it:
> Update, Oct. 5: After this article was published, the chief executive of Konnech was arrested on suspicion of theft of personal information about poll workers. Prosecutors asserted that the chief executive had poll worker information stored on servers in the People's Republic of China, which in our original article we disparaged as an "unfounded conspiracy theory", and the statement in our article, "It said that all the data for its American customers were stored on servers in the United States and that it had no ties to the Chinese government." is likely totally false.
In the article, the right-leaning groups (that the Times called 'election deniers', despite not offering evidence) claimed the company stored data in China. That is likely true. Or at least it's true enough that a judge issued a warrant.
Nothing in the article says these groups are claiming this company participated in fraud. Only that they are stealing american data.
The article lays out exactly what True the Vote claimed:
> Ms. Engelbrecht and Mr. Phillips claimed at the conference and in livestreams that they investigated Konnech in early 2021. Eventually, they said, the group’s team gained access to Konnech’s database by guessing the password, which was “password,” according to the online accounts from people who attended the conference. Once inside, they told attendees, the team downloaded personal information on about 1.8 million poll workers.
Based on the case notes, I think this allegation is merited and not a conspiracy theory at all.
This is attacking them on a small part of the allegation. The allegation the NYT claimed is a conspiracy is that the data were stored in China.
If the NYT had an article on how they overstated how many poll workers data were stored, that may be a fairer critique, but one that wouldn't make such a sensational headline.
It is a mistake. They’re supposed to use article structure, careful language, selective statements, hidden sources, and unfounded suasion to hide misinformation and hackery.
>Using threadbare evidence, or none at all, the group suggested that a small American election software company, Konnech, had secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party and had given the Chinese government backdoor access to personal data about two million poll workers in the United States, according to online accounts from several people at the conference.
> In the ensuing weeks, the conspiracy theory grew as it shot around the internet. To believers, the claims showed how China had gained near complete control of America’s elections.
That part is still valid. And really we don't actually know what evidence the DA has or if the scope of the arrest warrant matches the theory. All they've said is that some data was stored in China.
> All they've said is that some data was stored in China.
To be clear, "having data stored in China" is exactly equivalent to "had given the Chinese government backdoor access to personal data" - and that's not some "conspiracy", that's the stated law of China.
Furthermore, the reason that's so important is because "having some data stored in China", if true, means that this quote from the article, "Konnech said none of the accusations were true. It said that all the data for its American customers were stored on servers in the United States and that it had no ties to the Chinese government." would be a complete lie.
Reading that statement by Konnech, I am struck how brazen the NYT was. Given two opposing statements, they simply decided which one debunks the other, and passed it off as fact.
I wonder how many other instances of this there are in their other reporting, where reasonable accusations or suspicions are "debunked" simply by the accused stating "nu-uh".
The article says there's no evidence and at the time there wasn't. In fact, we still don't have any evidence available to the press. An arrest isn't proof of guilt. It's unclear if whoever started the rumor online had insider information that lead the arrest.
I am from the East Lansing area and went to high school in Okemos. I know both communities very well. I've spent 30 years in developer and founder circles and never knew a single person from this company. The company's original headquarters is near my old high school in what was once a lumber yard. They were getting ready to move into an old department store that is owned by the city of East Lansing.
This company was exceedingly good at getting money from both the local economic development people as well as the state. Told someone today that I felt like I was in the middle of a spy novel ;<).
It is also the first time to my knowledge the little village of Okemos was ever mentioned in the old grey lady (aka NYT).
"Konnech was required to keep the data in the United States and only provide access to citizens and permanent residents but instead stored it on servers in the People’s Republic of China."
I think we'll soon learn that his ties to China run far deeper than simply storing data.
You can't just accidentally create resources in one of AWS's mainland China regions. ap-east-1 in Hong Kong, maybe, but the AWS china Beijing and Ningxia regions are not just a misclick away.
Yet my voter records are public with my name, address, and phone number. Curious. Also the DMV sells my information. Also the post office forwards my information to companies who have my previous address when I file a change of address form. Also my property records are public.
I would love if the government gave me the ability to opt out (or better, opt in) to these practices. They are a huge source of data leaks.
35 states do have some kind of program for protecting addresses if you are at risk of stalking, DV etc. See https://www.sos.wa.gov/acp/about.aspx for an example and the 35 state number.
The USPS sent my phone number to scammers as soon as I signed up for SMS package notifications. I'm hoping the FTC cares enough to investigate my report...
those USA records are huge sources for local law enforcement, credit card companies, anyone in consumer credit, private detectives, insurance industry and more.. anyone with property is being tracked since the 1960s at least. You just didnt get the memo.
Just a note to you and the other commenter with a similar comment, they said “counties”, not “countries” and linked to a piece about a county in the US.
Under its $2.9 million, five-year contract with the county, Konnech was supposed to securely maintain the data and that only United States citizens and permanent residents have access to it.
District Attorney investigators found that in contradiction to the contract, information was stored on servers in the People’s Republic of China.
Maybe there are additional facts not claimed in the press release, but at face value the two above statements are not mutually exclusive. If the PRC wanted access and the company was willing, it is hardly necessary for the data to reside in any geographic location.
There are many election contests showing consistent but wide disparity between absentee and in-person voting. Whether it is an issue remains elusive to this day.
Also, probably can do this nationwide if you sell election devices … nationwide.
It's a bit ridiculous that the county would even outsource this function specifically. What's so difficult about payroll for a transient workforce, above and beyond the complexities that a jurisdiction of 10 million people already faces?
I fully support this action, but I also think county bureaucrats and elected officials who allowed this software to be used despite clearly having no ability to audit it, should also be held accountable.
> In this case, the alleged conduct had no impact on the tabulation of votes and did not alter election results
Would be curious how they asserted that. A contractor in the last election dumped ballots in garbage in Pennsylvania. Justice department maintained it didn’t alter election integrity.
Read it. The alleged crime was related to PII of election workers. Not voters. The assertion is that nothing in their investigation indicated trouble with votes which isn't the same as guaranteeing nothing happened.
Are they vindicated if "Selling/Improperly Storing poll worker data" and "Forcing poll workers to change election outcomes" are two wildly separate claims? Or does the former prove the latter in your mind?
That update is glorious. Doesn’t seem like the conspiracy theorists had any actual reason for suspicion of this particular firm other than xenophobia though. I wonder if they caught this guy because the firm conducted an audit in response to the conspiracy theories.
The 'right wing conspiracy theory' that you say this is unrelated to was this:
*Using threadbare evidence, or none at all, the group suggested that a small American election software company, Konnech, had secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party and had given the Chinese government backdoor access to personal data about two million poll workers in the United States, according to online accounts from several people at the conference.*
which is exactly what happened, and thus the arrest - so in this case, the 'theory' was spot on.
Where's your evidence that they had secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party and/or gave them backdoor access, as opposed to, say, hiring a dev team in China on Upwork because they were cheap, and had a poor understanding of compliant data handling?
The article says: "District Attorney investigators found that in contradiction to the contract, information was stored on servers in the People’s Republic of China."
It doesn't say the communist party breached those servers, that there were deliberate ties, etc. There could well be. I'm just not seeing it in the article we're discussing, hence my question to you.
I think you're likely better served by using the word and punishment for treason. Although I admit that word has been casually tossed around for cheap political gain recently and has lost it's severe connotation for many.
>Treason cannot apply due to the way it is narrowly defined by the US Constitution.
So, you don't want to punish them for treason because of how narrowly it's defined under the US Constitution, but you do want to punish them for regicide, which... isn't even a law in the US?
I think the point the parent was making was there is no current law that affords death as a punishment for this crime - but there should be. Or at least that is my take.
yet nobody read that because they were hung up on "regicide", and now all of his posts are [flagged] [dead] even though he has a completely 100% valid point.
Well, yeah. This is a perfect example of how a valid point can be completely undermined by how you communicate it. Those are [flagged][dead] because of the rhetoric used within. There was no attempt to have a nuanced discussion on their part.
I 100% agree the crime is serious and the perpetrator should meet swift justice -- as should anyone interfering with our elections. Including those who accessed voting machines in Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.[1][2]
That said I sincerely hope we have not regressed as a civilizatoin that public execution is making a comeback.
Your overall point is solid, but your last statement and links are up for severe political debate. It's not as much of a solid fact yet as some might believe or want to believe, with a lot of hand-waving in both articles. I think you're better served by removing them.
While I agree death is a bit extreme, we do need to craft a system where knowingly providing data on American Citizens to enemies of this nation carries severe and unfair consequences. The punishment does need to be oversized, to serve as a deterrent.
Do we know if this was deliberate or accidental? If the contract was explicit, and this individual knowingly violated it, then the intent is pretty clear even if the goal was not to aid China but rather to save money or similar.
We see how pitiful punishments are for malfeasant corporate executives - and we see how often they recid or are copied by others cleaver enough to calculate the punishment does not outweigh the crime.
The consequences for giving sensitive citizen data to China, Russia or any other nation should be severe enough to make folks think very hard before trying it.
Our election meddling problem will only grow worse in the future as our adversaries grow more and more sophisticated... best we don't help them along.
>They should be charged with espionage and executed like the Rosenbergs.
Ah, cool, jumping to conclusions and wishing death upon people instead of waiting to see how this plays out. Don't confuse this with me saying that espionage isn't possible here, I'm just saying - cool your jets and breathe before pulling any triggers. Yikes.
is Democracy and the integrity thereof not the single most sacred and important thing everyone cares about with regards to government in the West? that's what everyone says all the time, "we're not a constitutional republic, or if we are I don't really like care or whatever—what matters is, we're a Democracy, Democracy is what matters, Democracy is all that matters."
well okay then, if it's so damn important, what the hell is this complete unwillingness to do everything humanly possible to protect it? you can't have it both ways, if you don't ruthlessly defend the institutions that are supposed to be the cornerstone of contemporary Western society, what do you expect will happen?
foreign powers are all too happy to ruthlessly exploit what we delude ourselves into believing isn't worth defending.
>well okay then, if it's so damn important, what the hell is this complete unwillingness to do everything humanly possible to protect it?
For having chastised people in another post for focusing too much on "regicide" and not on OP's "completely 100% valid point", I am a bit surprised that you're ignoring my own comments, such as:
>Don't confuse this with me saying that espionage isn't possible here
I'm saying, hold the fucking phone before you call for someone's murder, especially before you abdicate for their public dismemberment. Let's see what the facts of the case are before we determine how far to go with punishment (and I say this as someone being fully open to this being an act against the US that should be punished accordingly). At no point have I suggested we take on a "complete unwillingness to do everything humanly possible to protect it".
Is nuance dead? Must things be all or nothing? "KILL THEM NOW, and if you dare disagree with that sentiment then surely you are unwilling to defend the US at all"? Seriously?
> I'm saying, hold the fucking phone before you call for someone's murder
what is a trial
EDIT: where are you from where people get executed for crimes without a trial, why would anyone need to explicitly state that? I'm breathing fine thanks
>where are you from where people get executed for crimes without a trial, why would anyone need to explicitly state that?
In the context of OP repeatedly calling for their dismemberment, I said, "Hold up, let's find out more before we tear his arms off," and then you went on a diatribe about defending the country and suggesting I am unwilling to do so. I'm unsure how to read that other than tacit support for OP's sentiment; it genuinely sounds like you're disagreeing with me.
Once again we find ourselves at the point I made in response to your other comment in this chain about how delivery matters.
Something you didn't mention in your posts, nor asked me if I was in favor of doing, prior to you demanding that I defend the US and implying that I'm unwilling to do so.
I think you need to go outside and take a few deep breathes.
This is the first time I've seen you suggest it, every other post was essentially, "Kill them". Even the post I'm replying to suggests that your mind is made up and you want them dead or - at the very least - miserable as all hell, whatever the reality of the details of the case may be.
Don't suppose you'd be willing to execute them only if they are found guilty at the trial?
At best, you seem to be certain of their guilt. At worst, you seem to be advocating for the kind of trial that will definitely return a guilty verdict.
Either way, cool your jets. You're way too quick to condemn on incomplete information.
Bullshit. If you've already decided that they're guilty and have already decided their fate, you don't really want them to have a trial. Not a fair one at least.
I don’t know if I’d be quite so barbaric. How about civil forfeiture of all of their assets? I’m sure his home was used in the commission of a crime, right?
Though a day in the stocks sure seems attractive too.
The good news about civil forfeiture is that it doesn't even matter if their home was used in the commission of a crime - you can just seize it now and sort out all those pesky details later!
If you think provisioning a server in the wrong country is grounds for the death penalty then I think you might be unsuited to living in a first world country. Have you considered Saudi Arabia or North Korea? You might find those places a better cultural fit for you.
I'm deeply worried about CPP + Tiktok, because it's potentially a huge database of people doing things that they can be blackmailed for. Your resume content is basically public information at this point.
My PII is not public information in the USA, and it should not be in the hands of the CCP. Although it's not the case in my situation, many completed SF86 forms contain information that could be used to blackmail the applicant, such as DUI convictions, mental breakdowns, credit problems, bankruptcy, drug use, etc. The USG collects the information to "protect" the applicant from being exploited by the enemy, but such information could still be embarrassing if publicly disclosed.
Aside from the problems that publicizing information can cause, there's also the risk of a bad actor using the information to fraudulently obtain credit. The SF86 contains everything that anyone would need to obtain credit using somebody else's identity. At a minimum, the information could be used as a form of harassment.
A worst-case real-world example of how such information could cost lives is what the Mossad has been doing with Iranian nuclear scientists over the past two decades.
I'm so very tired of proprietary software made by tiny little outfits being critical to elections.