Ballots must be postmarked by Election Day, but many ballots don’t have a postmark at all. ///

What does the law say? That is all that can be decided. If Wisconsin did not make law to cover this problem, that is not the supreme court's problem.

President Trump recently said, if all-mail voting passed, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”  //

The Democrats love the idea of voting by mail because it becomes much easier to steal an election. Add to that the nationwide legalization of ballot harvesting, and it would be the end of the Republican Party.

In 2016, ballot harvesting was legalized in California. A party volunteer collects the paper ballots (absentee ballots) from voters who are unable or do not wish to vote in person and then delivers these ballots to a precinct. The opportunity to commit fraud with this practice is immense. In 2018, Democrats flipped several House seats in what had once been the Republican stronghold of Orange County from red to blue. Then-House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) said “what happened in California defies logic.”

Let's be honest here. It takes more than this: "Paper, pencil, optical scanner is all one needs to run an election."

It takes voters, and precinct workers. The precinct workers need to verify that the voters actually have the right too vote at that polling place, and that they have not voted at some other place, nor more than once this election at the current polling place. Our goofy laws make it hard for these polling place workers to do theri job. A personal appearance used to be goo enough back in the good old days, or if you live in a small rural town like ai do. These polling place workers know most of the voters on a first name basis and recognize them on sight. P{ity the large city polling place worker. He never saw most of the people he must verify, and the laws make it very hard for him to require these potential voters to prove their right to vote. Likewaise, some of these voters have a hard time proving their right to vote because of this lack of aquantance problem as well.

Marking a ballot and scanning it is the easy part. These ballots also need to be counted, tallied, and reported. This requires honest polling place workers. How to we vet them?

Forget the software problem! Even with software, the identification problem still exists. Someone needed to vet the person who wanted to use the software before the software was ever even installed.

In the 2018 midterm elections, West Virginia became the first state in the U.S. to allow select voters to cast their ballot on a mobile phone via a proprietary app called "Voatz." Although there is no public formal description of Voatz's security model, the company claims that election security and integrity are maintained through the use of a permissioned blockchain, biometrics, a mixnet, and hardware-backed key storage modules on the user's device. In this work, we present the first public security analysis of Voatz, based on a reverse engineering of their Android application and the minimal available documentation of the system. We performed a clean-room reimplementation of Voatz's server and present an analysis of the election process as visible from the app itself.

We find that Voatz has vulnerabilities that allow different kinds of adversaries to alter, stop, or expose a user's vote,including a sidechannel attack in which a completely passive network adversary can potentially recover a user's secret ballot. We additionally find that Voatz has a number of privacy issues stemming from their use of third party services for crucial app functionality. Our findings serve as a concrete illustration of the common wisdom against Internet voting,and of the importance of transparency to the legitimacy of elections. //

The company's response is a perfect illustration of why non-computer non-security companies have no idea what they're doing, and should not be trusted with any form of security.

Voting is only a part of self-government. Speaking, listening, and exchanging ideas are also necessary. A caucus does that; a primary doesn’t. //

When we speak of democracy nowadays, we often boil it down to the simple act of casting a ballot. But this second stage of the caucus is where the serious democratic deliberations take place. Democracy is not just winning a plurality. It is the whole idea that a free people can govern themselves. Part of self-government is thinking, discussing, and debating ideas before finally deciding on a course of action. This leads to consensus rather than mere plurality — nomination of the candidate who is the most acceptable to the most people.

This is the caucus’s advantage over the primary. With as many candidates as the Democrats have in 2020, or the Republicans had in 2016, many are bound to end up with less than 15 percent of the vote. The caucus allows voters whose first choice falls short of the threshold to reassess their position and put their vote where it would do the most good, with the viable candidate most to their liking. The delegates selected in that process represent a community, not just a collection of individuals. //

This is another advantage of the Iowa caucus: It asks Iowa Democrats whom the Democratic Party should nominate. Only people who care enough about the party to join it get to have their opinion heard. Every voter who has the right to vote for president may do so in November. But being allowed to vote does not give you the right to say how a group of which you are not a member selects the person to represent them.

A party caucus epitomizes the consultative, community-based democracy that leads to consensus candidates. Voting is a part of self-government, but only a part. Speaking, listening, and exchanging ideas are also necessary to build trust and find agreement. Caucuses do that; primaries don’t.

She's blazing a trail. //

Nancy got flamed over her tweeted claim of an “alarming” incident in Wisconsin.

Here we go:

“It’s beyond alarming that more than 200,000 registered Wisconsin voters will be prohibited from voting. Less than a year from the election, we must ensure [Wisconsin Democrats] have the resources to respond with a massive voter registration effort. Don’t agonize. Organize!” //

Pelosi says these 200,000-plus people “will be prohibited from voting.”

That’s a major overstatement of how this actually works.

Yes, the pruning process — if allowed by the courts — could potentially remove more than 200,000 people from the voting rolls before the upcoming elections. But there is no punitive element that would ban future voting. Everyone can re-register, even on Election Day.

The use of the word “prohibited,” in particular, goes too far, in that it suggests there is no way to vote in the future.

We rate Pelosi’s claim Pants on Fire.

Maybe that’s why she wore black Wednesday — hides the soot.

It is increasingly likely that the New Hampshire community is now too small to meet the legal threshold to be a polling place. That probably won’t change in the weeks leading up to the first-in-the-nation primary.

Someone found Swiss Post's embrace of the idea too odious to bear, and they leaked the source code that Swiss Post had shared under its nondisclosure terms, and then an international team of some of the world's top security experts (including some of our favorites, like Matthew Green) set about analyzing that code, and (as every security expert who doesn't work for an e-voting company has predicted since the beginning of time), they found an incredibly powerful bug that would allow a single untrusted party at Swiss Post to undetectably alter the election results.

And, as everyone who's ever advocated for the right of security researchers to speak in public without permission from the companies whose products they were assessing has predicted since the beginning of time, Swiss Post and Scytl downplayed the importance of this objectively very, very, very important bug. Swiss Post's position is that since the bug only allows elections to be stolen by Swiss Post employees, it's not a big deal, because Swiss Post employees wouldn't steal an election.

But when Swiss Post agreed to run the election, they promised an e-voting system based on "zero knowledge" proofs that would allow voters to trust the outcome of the election without having to trust Swiss Post. Swiss Post is now moving the goalposts, saying that it wouldn't be such a big deal if you had to trust Swiss Post implicitly to trust the outcome of the election. //

We don't accept scientific research unless the people who do it show all their work to everyone, publishing data, protocols and analysis in public forums that everyone can critique, even axe-grinding grudge-holders, because, as with whistleblowers, the people with the motivation to really dig into your work and reveal its deficiencies are often people who don't like you and want you to fail, and if we only accept bad news from people with good intentions, we'll miss some of the most important and urgent warnings about flaws that could steal a whole country's government.