I've a specialist in self service machines and I have a lot of experience creating systems similar to DVS. That generally involves replacing humans with machines.
A lot of people say things about DVS which annoy me because while DVS is a problem in many ways they often chases red herrings which consist of their own lack of an understanding of the system.
One of those claims is that the system is built for fraud. Well it kind of is but not quite in the way people often present which tends to more often be their failure to understand systems like this.
It's more accurate to say that the entire voting system is built for fraud. DVS plays a certain part of that but a lot of it is screwing around with priorities. Using voter privacy as an excuse for example to leave no audit trail and shred the evidence.
From what I'm seeing with the election system, I wouldn't certify the entire system, as a systems engineer. As in a lot of systems though it's not just the system but the people involved. Nothing this is revealing about the election system is revealing any competence from those who are supposed to secure it.
Also optimising to count every vote is another deliberately over played priority same as COVID-19. Everything except election integrity has been made a paramount priority in the system.
Priority abuse, excuses and distractions, appear to be their modus operadi. The same as with Gamestop when Robinhood, the company that owns the football fields said oops that's not supposed to happen and removed the goalposts from one side of the pitch so that only the losing team can score goals but distracted everybody saying they were removing anti-semitism from the pitch as a higher priority.
Priority rape is a common theme in corrupt and ironically, supremacist systems. Supremacists systems the winner is fixed, the game is rigged. They believe victory is their divine right.
Biden supporters put a bunch of supremacists in the oval office.
To a fair degree the counting system is just meant to be an optimisation. To streamline. You're supposed to have parallel processes. It's just adding a slow lane and you can do both.
If you retain the hard copies you can also to a random selection then a manual count. You actually don't need to count all of them to detect issues in the machine. There's a mathematical system people who audit systems like me can use to home in very quickly.
This is more problematic when systems are used not just to count ballots but in producing them. The fractional voting is just a feature and not a concern. You have that from Dr Shiva. They are subordinate to me. I'm more senior than them.
If anything the fractional problem highlights how little people understand about these systems and how difficult it is to truly secure them. In this line of security you don't operate on the basis of believing you can create an impenetrable barrier. Instead you add as much impediment as you can but then you have things like systems that can verify each other. You have fallbacks at each level and layers of contingencies.
The problems with DVS are more deeper than that. When they say they don't get involved in how people run their elections they're not hired to necessarily assist with the cheating because they don't want liability. They're hired to turn a blind eye while others cheat. DVS serves to corrupt countries and this is heavily embedded in their company culture. If you look at their hands off approach they make it clear they do not get involved in election integrity. They provide machines and that's it. They behave the same how as the printer company isn't responsible for what you print out.
If you ask someone at DVS how to cheat the first thing they will say is don't use that fractional voting feature you'll get caught. In fact DVS can assist with cheating simply based on insider knowledge and access.
It's should not be possible to cheat with DVS alone. You can hack in and change the numbers but if the election is properly conducted that would be detected easily. I'm not even seeing the processes being done that would be required to detect that and all kinds of holes in the system.
People are treating DVS like a single point of failure and that should not be possible though I say never say never (as the system becomes more integrated there's a disturbingly larger amount that can be done by fewer people).
It's the same principle as the border wall. It helps but it's useless if you don't man it. If people simply don't bother to check then it does become a single point of failure. It's not enough to say in theory it isn't possible, it has to be established that the procedures that would make it impossible or near enough have taken place. We don't know that at all. There's no point having a car alarm if you never turn it on.
A proper audit will not only tell you if they found fraud or not but also the blind spots. It would involve a full analysis of the system, the process, etc and not only in theory but in practice. They would come back out with a huge list of exploits.
It's swisscheese and fractional voting is a distraction. From what I'm seeing the adjudication process is far more serious as it may allow backfill. Regardless the audit needs to first verify the books match, that what's on paper matches what came out of the machine. If you get beyond that point the audit isn't finished.
There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of ways to cheat. You start of with the easiest checks and through a process of elimination reduce the search space until you're left with the most difficult things which also now reside in a reduced search space.
It's swisscheese and fractional voting is a distraction. From what I'm seeing the adjudication process is far more serious as it may allow backfill. Regardless the audit needs to first verify the books match, that what's on paper matches what came out of the machine. If you get beyond that point the audit isn't finished.
This. You're focused on a specific detail. Personally I would turn that feature off for a market where it's not relevant or perhaps ship a build without it. For a presidential election you would pull out all the stops.
To put it simply, if the system as a whole were properly orchestrated the fractional voting feature would be completely immaterial and impossible to pervert the results. The process would involve doublechecking, cross referencing. You usually have redundancy.
It's similar to running a shop in some ways. You might have your inventory on a spreadsheet but that's backed by the real inventory and you do stock counts to keep the systems aligned. If the voting system were properly setup then it would not simply be a process of counting the votes but it would also be self verifying with processes double checking.
Dr Shiva got one thing right which you might be skirting over. The system is a blackbox on multiple levels. That in itself means you have to have faith in the magic that goes on out of sight. The system in its entirety is unverifiable and unreliable from what I've seen. I wouldn't approve it for production.
When you run a system like a shop or warehouse, etc you don't just focus on the computer system but the system as a whole. How everything works, the people, how they interact with everything, the rules they follow, the whole system. DVS is only a piece of the puzzle and if you only focus on that you may never figure out how they really cheated.
It's not always necessary to figure out how sometimes though. If you've ever worked in gambling you don't necessarily detect cheaters by looking up their sleeves but instead you track who is winning too much (improbably). Shiva has tried to do this but does a bad job sometimes. He is subordinate to me because I have worked with all these systems. He's more of the studying type or someone who buries themselves in books.
I've a specialist in self service machines and I have a lot of experience creating systems similar to DVS. That generally involves replacing humans with machines.
A lot of people say things about DVS which annoy me because while DVS is a problem in many ways they often chases red herrings which consist of their own lack of an understanding of the system.
One of those claims is that the system is built for fraud. Well it kind of is but not quite in the way people often present which tends to more often be their failure to understand systems like this.
It's more accurate to say that the entire voting system is built for fraud. DVS plays a certain part of that but a lot of it is screwing around with priorities. Using voter privacy as an excuse for example to leave no audit trail and shred the evidence.
From what I'm seeing with the election system, I wouldn't certify the entire system, as a systems engineer. As in a lot of systems though it's not just the system but the people involved. Nothing this is revealing about the election system is revealing any competence from those who are supposed to secure it.
Also optimising to count every vote is another deliberately over played priority same as COVID-19. Everything except election integrity has been made a paramount priority in the system.
Priority abuse, excuses and distractions, appear to be their modus operadi. The same as with Gamestop when Robinhood, the company that owns the football fields said oops that's not supposed to happen and removed the goalposts from one side of the pitch so that only the losing team can score goals but distracted everybody saying they were removing anti-semitism from the pitch as a higher priority.
Priority rape is a common theme in corrupt and ironically, supremacist systems. Supremacists systems the winner is fixed, the game is rigged. They believe victory is their divine right.
Biden supporters put a bunch of supremacists in the oval office.
Actually..!
Fractional voting, as displayed by DVS, is for absolutely no other reason than voter fraud.
I don't say this, ever but..
Change my mind!
To a fair degree the counting system is just meant to be an optimisation. To streamline. You're supposed to have parallel processes. It's just adding a slow lane and you can do both.
If you retain the hard copies you can also to a random selection then a manual count. You actually don't need to count all of them to detect issues in the machine. There's a mathematical system people who audit systems like me can use to home in very quickly.
This is more problematic when systems are used not just to count ballots but in producing them. The fractional voting is just a feature and not a concern. You have that from Dr Shiva. They are subordinate to me. I'm more senior than them.
If anything the fractional problem highlights how little people understand about these systems and how difficult it is to truly secure them. In this line of security you don't operate on the basis of believing you can create an impenetrable barrier. Instead you add as much impediment as you can but then you have things like systems that can verify each other. You have fallbacks at each level and layers of contingencies.
The problems with DVS are more deeper than that. When they say they don't get involved in how people run their elections they're not hired to necessarily assist with the cheating because they don't want liability. They're hired to turn a blind eye while others cheat. DVS serves to corrupt countries and this is heavily embedded in their company culture. If you look at their hands off approach they make it clear they do not get involved in election integrity. They provide machines and that's it. They behave the same how as the printer company isn't responsible for what you print out.
If you ask someone at DVS how to cheat the first thing they will say is don't use that fractional voting feature you'll get caught. In fact DVS can assist with cheating simply based on insider knowledge and access.
It's should not be possible to cheat with DVS alone. You can hack in and change the numbers but if the election is properly conducted that would be detected easily. I'm not even seeing the processes being done that would be required to detect that and all kinds of holes in the system.
People are treating DVS like a single point of failure and that should not be possible though I say never say never (as the system becomes more integrated there's a disturbingly larger amount that can be done by fewer people).
It's the same principle as the border wall. It helps but it's useless if you don't man it. If people simply don't bother to check then it does become a single point of failure. It's not enough to say in theory it isn't possible, it has to be established that the procedures that would make it impossible or near enough have taken place. We don't know that at all. There's no point having a car alarm if you never turn it on.
A proper audit will not only tell you if they found fraud or not but also the blind spots. It would involve a full analysis of the system, the process, etc and not only in theory but in practice. They would come back out with a huge list of exploits.
It's swisscheese and fractional voting is a distraction. From what I'm seeing the adjudication process is far more serious as it may allow backfill. Regardless the audit needs to first verify the books match, that what's on paper matches what came out of the machine. If you get beyond that point the audit isn't finished.
There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of ways to cheat. You start of with the easiest checks and through a process of elimination reduce the search space until you're left with the most difficult things which also now reside in a reduced search space.
Man, your job is dull! No wonder you're into muslim porn, eh?!
Which bit is meant to change my mind?
It would've suited me just to hear a valid reason for fractional vote counting, in a voting system of such vast expense.
Cos, as I skim-read all of that, I know that they did use it, despite what they might tell you not to use.
Occurs to me that they did use every means to cheat, in addition to fractional voting.
What do I know? I don't get paid stupid money to develop stupid systems to repress the will of the people.
No. That requires somebody far more 'flexible' than than I might ever be.
This. You're focused on a specific detail. Personally I would turn that feature off for a market where it's not relevant or perhaps ship a build without it. For a presidential election you would pull out all the stops.
To put it simply, if the system as a whole were properly orchestrated the fractional voting feature would be completely immaterial and impossible to pervert the results. The process would involve doublechecking, cross referencing. You usually have redundancy.
It's similar to running a shop in some ways. You might have your inventory on a spreadsheet but that's backed by the real inventory and you do stock counts to keep the systems aligned. If the voting system were properly setup then it would not simply be a process of counting the votes but it would also be self verifying with processes double checking.
Dr Shiva got one thing right which you might be skirting over. The system is a blackbox on multiple levels. That in itself means you have to have faith in the magic that goes on out of sight. The system in its entirety is unverifiable and unreliable from what I've seen. I wouldn't approve it for production.
When you run a system like a shop or warehouse, etc you don't just focus on the computer system but the system as a whole. How everything works, the people, how they interact with everything, the rules they follow, the whole system. DVS is only a piece of the puzzle and if you only focus on that you may never figure out how they really cheated.
It's not always necessary to figure out how sometimes though. If you've ever worked in gambling you don't necessarily detect cheaters by looking up their sleeves but instead you track who is winning too much (improbably). Shiva has tried to do this but does a bad job sometimes. He is subordinate to me because I have worked with all these systems. He's more of the studying type or someone who buries themselves in books.