Dear @HouseDemocrats:

HR
1 requires that the voter “have the option to mark his or her ballot by hand.”

Pls add the following for clarity: “For jurisdictions w/ in person voting, this option shall be provided to the voter at the polling place.” @RepTedLieu @katieporteroc 1/

Without this clarifying language, jurisdictions cld still force all in person voters to use risky touchscreen voting machines called ballot marking devices (BMDs), as long as vote by mail is also an option. That won’t suffice to protect election integrity & faith in elections. 2/
Unlike #HandMarkedPaperBallots (pen and paper), BMDs are vulnerable to electronic failure, screen freezes, miscalibration, disproportionate distribution (causing bottlenecks & long lines in suppressed areas), and hacking. 3/
4/ I also suggest that you supplement HR 1 to specify that BMDs “must not put votes into barcodes or QR codes.” This language is important because barcodes & QR codes are not transparent, further endangering integrity and confidence in elections.
5/ We are only beginning now to understand how these barcodes and QR code’s unnecessarily increase the attack surface for bad actors seeking to interfere in our elections. This is unacceptable & unnecessary.
6/ Sourced thread about concerns involving the zebra technologies integrated barcode reader in ES&S ExpressVote barcode BMDs. https://t.co/gTTZgmUi9U
7/ Even without the barcodes & QR code’s, using BMDs as a primary voting systems is unacceptable. A recent study shows that 93% of inaccuracies in the text portion of machine-marked paper records from BMDs go unnoticed by voters. https://t.co/R3aVXpCOGZ
8/ This is an invitation for fraud especially for down ballot races (eg, for state legislature).
9/ Per the author of the study in post 7, @jhalderm, merely instructing voters to review the printouts didn’t help much. The only thing that did was giving them a pre-filled slate (such as a sample ballot) to compare to the printout. Many/most voters don’t know to do this.
10/ Another suggestion for HR1: supplementing it to require updated paper pollbooks as a backup for electronic pollboooks on Election Day , as recommended by @BrennanCenter.
11/ To the extent HR1 does not already ban remote access and internet connectivity to voting systems, it should be amended to include such a ban. (Good luck to any politicians who oppose this proposed ban.)
12/ To the extent HR1 does not already require robust manual audits for all federal races, it should be supplemented to add that too.
13/ I discuss these recommendations and more (eg, preservation of ballot images and disclosure of vendor ownership) here. There is a synopsis at the end. Thank you for your consideration. #ProtectOurVotes https://t.co/Sm7CKY2dKB
14/ Synopsis:
15/ PS. We must also require reasonably prompt public disclosure of election-system breaches and details thereof unless the government persuades a court that such disclosure would impede an ongoing investigation. #Transparency
16/ PPS. The requisite robust manual election audits must be conducted in public and before certification. See @philipbstark, inventor of Risk Limiting Audits, for further guidance.
17/ September 2020 letter from experts advising that jurisdictions remove wireless modems from voting systems because they connect the ballot scanners and receiving end systems to the internet. https://t.co/JbSBGSxK7o
18/ Note: the GOP blocked the #SAFEAct last year which would have banned this internet connectivity & required robust manual audits for all federal races. I doubt their constituents would let them get away with this again. We have an opportunity here. https://t.co/LDXnPl3Kkx
19/ https://t.co/DXiwOng1nV

More from Jennifer Cohn ✍🏻 📢

More from Politics

My piece in the NY Times today: "the Trump administration is denying applications submitted to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services at a rate 37 percent higher than the Obama administration did in 2016."

Based on this analysis: "Denials for immigration benefits—travel documents, work permits, green cards, worker petitions, etc.—increased 37 percent since FY 2016. On an absolute basis, FY 2018 will see more than about 155,000 more denials than FY 2016."
https://t.co/Bl0naOO0sh


"This increase in denials cannot be credited to an overall rise in applications. In fact, the total number of applications so far this year is 2 percent lower than in 2016. It could be that the higher denial rate is also discouraging some people from applying at all.."

Thanks to @gsiskind for his insightful comments. The increase in denials, he said, is “significant enough to make one think that Congress must have passed legislation changing the requirements. But we know they have not.”

My conclusion:

You May Also Like

So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.