Category: Programming

Election Abnormalities

The election of 2020 is the strangest I’ve ever seen: I stayed up fairly late, seeing Donald Trump in the lead and then woke up to a ‘miraculous’ turnaround setting Biden as the victor… and then reports came out about vote-switching, vans at 3 AM, networking anomalies, and more.

There were legal challenges, which I thought had the feel of being designed to lose — “taking a dive” — and that’s only on Trump’s legal team’s part. The entirety of the Judiciary seemed unconcerned with Justice, culminating when the Supreme Court declined to hear the case with Texas and 20 other States in their original jurisdiction. (This alone would be reason to support judicial reform, as I have thought for decades, but that’s a rant for another time.)

Then came January 6th, the certification of the electors and their votes. What we saw there was disappointing: not only was the judiciary unconcerned with a just election, but the Congress certified these questionable votes — the whole ‘riot’ seeming to be perfectly engineered to give an excuse for doing so, while simultaneously setting the stage for the oppression of patriotic Americans under the guise of fighting “white-nationalism” and “domestic-terrorism”… despite the clear difference between the events at D.C. and the so-called “peaceful-protests” of the last year which left many buildings ash, and destroyed small businesses.

So, this opens up an uncomfortable question: how many of our elections have been subverted? How many policies were snuck in, shoved down our throats by subterfuge? — A friend told me that up in Maryland the first vote with electronic-voting machines had homosexual marriage as one of the items, it passed, but nobody he talked to had voted for it. Even California, via it’s Proposition 8, decided to reject homosexual marriage. (Proposition 8 was thrown out by a single federal judge as ‘unconstitutional’ and the US Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, letting the judge’s pronouncement stand.)

The Design of a Secure Voting Machine

1. No ethernet-, USB-, FireWire, RS-232, parallel or other such ports;
   1. An exception for a single read-only mechanism for tabulation; preferably something standardized but uncommon, like GPIB;
2. No radios: WiFi, Bluetooth, etc;
3. Custom CPU, eliminating all unnecessary opcodes;
4. No Operating System;
5. Use of formally provable software: custom bare-metal vote-counting program;
6. Use of formal proving on the CPU.
7. At least two write-only records for the purpose of auditing.

Auditing

The inclusion of auditing information is essential for rebuilding trust in our elections, and thanks to the miracle of the technology of the 1970s, we can have two audit trails just like grocery stores across the nation: print one copy of the ‘receipt’ for the store internally, and another for the ‘customer’.

Formal Proof

While traditionally the usage of formal proof in large software projects has generally been seen as ‘cost-prohibitive’ by the management in charge of software development, there are some exceptions: NASA’s spacecraft, Aeronautics (Airframes & Air-Traffic Control), and Medical Devices. — Why not the software used in our elections?

The cornerstone of formal proof is the ability to (a) prove that given some precondition, some postcondition must follow; (b) ensure that certain properties are met, typically in service to (a), but sometimes; (3) ensuring the functional correctness of the underlying object, be it code or electronics-systems… twenty or twenty-five years ago doing this in a cost-effective way may have been impractical, but the Department of Defense commissioned the programming language Ada in part to be formally provable given static analyzers. That tooling has been upgraded and incorporated into a toolset operating on a restricted subset of Ada such that you are able to prove the functional-correctness of the code [generally] automatically. — The Department of Defense also commissioned a similar project for hardware, which later became VHDL.

It’s beyond ridiculous that these two technologies haven’t been used to ensure the provable correctness of both the software and hardware involved in handling our elections.

Restricted Hardware

The purpose of restricting hardware via elimination is obvious: it reduces both the opportunity to subvert the system, as well as reduces the amount of time & effort required to verify as correct. — After all, there can be no internet breach if there is no ethernet-port, network-stack, or even the circuitry  to operate it!

GPIB, as mentioned above, is a standard from the 1960/70s and is commonly found in automated test equipment; it should be simple enough to implement in hardware so as to provide read-only access to the votes tallied on the voting machine.

While I have other, more specific, thoughts on the matter, I think this should impress on you not only how feasible a provably correct voting system is, but how the current voting machines are, to put it bluntly, optimized for election fraud.

Now, whether or not you’re a supporter of Trump, whether or not you think he could have done anything to prevent the pandemic outbreak here in the U.S., one thing is clear: we are in a real live Depression. The economists and politicians will deny this, for the obvious reason that because  of the historical and psychological connotations make them fear that the downturn will self-reinforce on a downward spiral, crashing everything if they use the D-word. — And history will remember it as the Trump Depression because, even if everything was beyond his control, he was President when it happened.

A true assessment would likely reveal that 2008–2010 was a Depression, too — and I would argue that we never really recovered from 2008; I remember the job market around then, and it was a slow ramp-up, but that’s when we started to see the “Entry Level” jobs requiring prior experience, that’s when I saw the Computer Science and IT fields really start to require more experience in a technology than that technology had existed… that’s when the corporations made it plain that they not only desired H1Bs but preferred them over the Citizen.

I remember 2011/2012, where it was common to hear people (especially employers) talk about how lucky someone was to have a job — and the mayhem that the Affordable Care Act caused, providing incentive for employers to drop hours rather than keep people full time. I remember job-hunting in 2015/2016/2017 and how job-postings for even the Entry Level jobs had gained requirements for 3-, 5-, 7-, and sometimes even 10-years: something rotten was going on — I believe it’s systemic H1B fraud, such that the HR departments in companies are gathering resumes from applicants to send back home, where their countrymen plagiarize the résumé and then be pushed by advocates in HR — and you would have to be a fool to think the economy was either healthy or strong.

And now we have 2020: the businesses lost number in the tens of thousands, and they AREN’T coming back, despite what overly optimistic politicians claim — and 44 million unemployed out of an employment-population of 150–175 million (it varies due to seasonal employment) yields us an unemployment rate of 25.1–29.3% — and this is before people have gotten desperate.

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It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going to happen: employers are going to inflate requirements, drop wages, cut benefits… and wait until people get desperate. They’ll use the phrase “you’re lucky to have a job!” again, and push for things like unpaid overtime, working off-the-clock, taking advantage of your ‘luck’ and fear of being replaced with someone more desperate and therefore more pliable.

Recently [14-Jul-2020] Ivanka Kushner, President Trump’s daughter, announced a White House campaign “Find Something New” aimed at the unemployed which has been observed to be rather tone-deaf, if you’re feeling charitable this is the sort of cluelessness found in the story of Marie Antoinette where upon hearing the peasants were starving without bread exclaimed “Let them eat cake!”, or if you’re not feeling charitable it’s mean-spirited taunting akin to seeing a homeless man starving on the street and while eating biggest sandwich possible while exclaiming “Be well fed!” and then throwing the sandwich on the ground and grinding it underfoot. (It’s about apprenticeships in the U.S., but that’s putting the cart before the horse given the requirements on jobs.)

Those of us who have been unemployed in the last five years know one thing that Ivanka and Donald Trump likely have absolutely no clue about: how utterly demoralizing and dehumanizing the modern job-hunt has become. Not only do most applications disappear into nothingness, thanks to Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSes) wherein you have to fill in your résumé’s data again and again, but when you finally do get an interview it often ends with someone saying something like “we’ll get back to you, whether or not we go with you or some other candidate”… and that’s the last you ever hear from them, and this happens even for interviews where you do very well.

Now here’s where the generational divide comes in: Boomers will say ‘just walk in, demand to see the hiring manager, look him in the eye and give him a firm handshake!’ oblivious to the fact that a lot of places don’t allow access to the hiring manager and force you to go through the ATS — Generation–X will tell you “it’s a number’s game, just keep applying and move on.” — Millennials know ATSes and how utterly broken they are, acting as a firewall against candidates, the scams corporations pull to hire ever more H1Bs, the ridiculousness of being simultaneously underqualified and overqualified and will offer you “good luck” but have no delusions that the job-seeking is anything close to a fair game.

The answer is clear: in order to secure jobs for the citizens who are out of work, the U.S. must immediately cancel all ‘guest worker’ visas, deport all illegal immigrants, and let the citizens take those jobs — otherwise, if the U.S. will not take care of its own People… what use is it?

And that is why it is imperative that we seek to make the virtue of Justice a goal in government: without Justice, we fall apart — and it is because of injustice that God destroys nations.

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The “Find Something New” Ad.	And CBS’s take.