Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Someone's Calling Shenanigans

This story is interesting to me because I'm sort of a crypto-nerd, and definitely computer scientist, and one of the intersections of those disciplines is voting machines.

On Tuesday, the 22nd, cryptographer Matthew Green tweets about an article about J. Alex Haldeman, a computer science professor and supposedly serious election systems researcher, in NYMag:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/activists-urge-hillary-clinton-to-challenge-election-results.html

The gist is, Haldeman thinks the votes in 3 states are worth re-counting. The clues: Electronic voting machines have been shown repeatedly to be vulnerable, recently there have been known hacks by foreign nationals, and there are some disturbing statistics in the swing states: Counties which used electronic voting were 7% off of counties which didn't.

The next day, Haldeman writes a piece on Medium clarifying his position:

https://medium.com/@jhalderm/want-to-know-if-the-election-was-hacked-look-at-the-ballots-c61a6113b0ba#.6ja3dhg56

It's more measured, essentially saying that he does not believe that the election was hacked, but that we need a recount to have faith in the election (and to know if we *were* hacked.)

Also today, Jill Stein is asking for donations to do a recount. She's doing pretty well so far:

https://jillstein.nationbuilder.com/recount

Exciting times...

P.S. I forgot to mention that Ron Rivest (the "R" in RSA) shows that you only need to count 2.3% of the ballots for confidence:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZM-i8t4pMK0

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