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Craig explains Voting secrecy and privacy and why online-voting is not ready for prime time and how Mail-in voting is ripe for fraud. 

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We're about to talk about online voting. I know you've heard a lot about the Mail-in voting, right? Both sides of that, as well as the regular voting booths and stuff. But we're going to talk about on-line.

Hey, of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson here on news radio 98.5 AM and AM 560 thanks for joining us today. Make sure you join me on Wednesday mornings as well. With Mr. Matt Gagnon in fact, you can listen to him every morning, Monday to Friday, as he covers all the latest in news here throughout the country, as well as right here in Maine. It's about the only place you can get. The good UpToDate news for Maine is right here. So I'm so glad you have decided to spend a little time with me here on Saturday afternoon.

We're worried about our elections this year and I think for very good reason. Frankly, I'm not that worried about the Russians or the Chinese, because they could certainly sway votes, but how many they're going to sway?

I am worried about some of these big tech companies. I'm very worried about Google. I saw a study that was done on Google, comparing elections here over the last two presidential cycles and how Google seems to have been manipulating the results. We know right now, Google. Is blocking certain conservative speech.

There was a great article that came up this week, that I don't think I shared it with most people. I did send it out to a few people. It might be of interest to most of you on the list, but the article was talking about how conservative media if you can believe this right, conservative media is dominating the social media sites right now.

And we're seeing out of the top 10 pages over on Facebook are on the conservative slash liberal, but classic, liberal side libertarian side of things. So you've got people that are right up on the top, and I'm glad to see that Facebook's top 10 is devoted to calculating who's on which Facebook page.

How many people are talking, what kind of engagement is there? But I'm looking right now of Franklin Graham, Donald Trump, 2020 voters, Ben Shapiro twice. He must have two pages. David Harris, Fox News, Sarah Pailin, Ben Shapiro.

 I know Dan Bongino pops in there and some of the others as well. So there is a lot going on in the online space that is conservative. People are talking about finally, some of the real issues that are out there. Not just, quoting the socialist mantras that we've been hearing for. so long. Not that I have an opinion on the matter, frankly.

Let's talk about what's happening with the elections here from the computer side because I was asked by Matt this past Wednesday morning about online banking. Saying, how can we do online banking? Matt asked why can't we do online voting. That is actually a very good question and what it all boils down to frankly, is secrecy and privacy.

We count on our ballots being secret, no one can coerce us into voting a certain way. Now, maybe somebody can see, Oh, you took a blue card or a red card. That means you are a Democrat or Republican or whatever it might be. So they might go that far, but they don't know who you voted for.

Then in the general election, everybody gets the same card to vote with. They all get the same slate of candidates and then historically, anyways, you go into the voting booth. You close the curtain behind you, and now you spend a few minutes voting.

That is the reason why it's illegal in most jurisdictions for you to take a picture of your ballot. And people have complained about that. There've been court cases saying, Hey, this is my right to free speech look, guy. I voted for the XYZ candidate. The problem with that and the reason it's illegal is that you could be coerced. You might be taking that picture and someone can coerce you and say, you didn't vote for the right people. So I'm going to beat you. Shoot you. Bat you over the head. Burndown your business. The kind of things that demonstrators do. Not rioters, they're not rioters, the demonstrators do. Then you could also have somebody who's saying, okay, great. You voted the right way. Here's your pack of cigarettes, which has happened. A lot in major cities as they have people into the voting booth, or maybe there's some other method of payment, but that's all about secrecy. That's all about privacy.

The banks count on you and me reviewing our bank statements every once in a while, making sure that what we are saying that we are paying is right or it's wrong. The banks even realize that there is a lot of fraud and wast. Even in the system that they have with the checks and balances banks have, they're saying right now, according to the Nielsen report, that credit card fraud costs the world almost $28 billion in 2018. That's real money, that is fraud.

Now, remember that there are credit cards nowadays are coming with those chips in them, finally. I first actually saw them in use when I was over in Europe. It was really strange because everybody just stuck their card in. In Europe, not only have the smart card with the little chip on it, but they have a pin that you have to enter in. So you buy a beer for instance. You put your card in the reader, which they bring to you, they don't take your card away.  Then you put it into the reader and you punch in your pin and now it's paid for, and the bank knows that shoe. They saved themselves some money because they, it wasn't just taken into the back and that magstripe duplicated, and now the bad guys can sell your credit card.

That happened in Merrimack, New Hampshire. I saw some charges that were filed. So I'm not sure if they were convicted or these were certainly the allegations involved, but apparently one of these chain restaurants had the manager and some of the employees doing the naughty. They were duplicating the credit cards.

So banking isn't the same. With banking, it's the opposite. In many ways of confidentiality, the bank knows the transactions you have made. The merchants, know the transactions you have made. You've probably gotten emails from your bank saying, Hey, did you buy this here? There? Did you mean to buy this twice? You got charged twice for the exact same amount, like five minutes apart from each other, is that correct? Or tips, Hey, you left this amount in the tip, was that right or not? So that's the big deal.

The secret ballot once you've dropped that paper ballot into a ballot box. It's mixed together with all the other ballots. It cannot be identified as you, it's very hard for anyone to link a ballot to a specific voter and I think that is a wonderful thing.

There are some secure digital voting systems and they are designed to track a ballot from beginning to end but I think that actually defeats part of the purpose of voting.

I know, I can think of one occasion where I said that I voted one way, but in reality, I've voted in another way and I just didn't want people to know, which way I voted, because I thought I would be pummeled and quite literally. But yeah, if you don't have a secret ballot, that's just not going to happen.

Be very careful with this. Because even the bank systems with all of the encryption they're doing, all of the security they have in place, all of this crypto-technology they're using to track it all. Even all of that isn't safe. So you already know. I don't like mail-in ballots being sent out to a whole of the voters. It's ripe for fraud and we are a long way away before we can count on online voting, being safe.

Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN stick around when we get back, we're going to talk about price gouging and defective products from an online store whose name I think might surprise you.

 Stick around. We'll be right back on WGAN.

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