The Economics of Hacking an Election

This is seriously uninformed article with bad assumptions and assertions.

The first assertion author makes is that attacker is resource limited which is a pointless assertion for stack sponsored entities unless cost of attack is astronomical.

The second point author makes is that US elections are highly decentralize for attacks such as hacking electronic systems, making effective attacks very expensive. Again this is completely wrong assumption for two reasons:

(1) attacker doesn't need to hack all of US precincts. Thanks to thin win margins in elections, you just need to flip only few precincts that have been predicted as "middle". Typically these are just 1-5% of total so cost of attack is actually very low and could be targeted with precision for a desired result.

(2) There are only few brands and systems of voting machines and other electronic systems are actually in use. Again, you don't have to hack all of them. Just hack one or two and they might be good enough to slip 1-5% margin you desire. The connection to Internet is irrelevant. There are well known methods to hide malware in firmware drivers that could have been planted by a state sponsored hacker who obtained job at one of these companies making these machines. These kind of malware would be impossible to detect without very extensive reverse engineering. Think about this for a minute: For a cost of less than a million dollar (i.e. compensation for single hacker) you can flip election of entire country. It makes a huge economic sense to any adversarial government.

Overall, hacking political system has shown to have ROI of 10,000% or more and it should make a perfect economic sense to businesses and external governments. You can literally donate just $100K to political candidate and he would pass a law for you that makes your company 10s of millions for many many years. It never ends to surprise me that political donations by commercial entities and ultra-rich is not considered a crime in US. In most other countries they are known as "bribe". Even better, just flipping few of the precincts you can flip entire election in to your favor and you can do it all even legally by precision targeted social media. It's just amazing power to behold on one of the largest and most powerful country.

Your counterargument misses the point made explicitly within the article:

"They may have vast resources, and in particular they may have more resources than the defenders—but they're still limited. Why? They'll throw enough resources at the problem to solve it, i.e., to hack the election, and use anything left over for the next problem, e.g., hacking the Brexit II referendum… There's always another target."

Too: there may be multiple parties attempting hacks. Getting your opponent to overextend (a war of attrition) is a time-honoured strategy.

All democratic elections are hacked, not in a technical way but in a social way. Take my country India, for example. The winning party in almost all elections till 2014 got just under 40% of the total vote. Minorities form 15-20% of the vote bank and the minority vote is always consolidated, i.e. they vote enmass for a single party (usually for The Indian National Congress (INC)). In other words, anywhere between 15-20% of the 40% mentioned earlier is the minority vote. The majority vote is always divided between the many many warring parties and the minority vote becomes the king/queen maker. No wonder the INC has always danced to the minorities tune.

I guess the majority had had enough and came together for the first time in 2014, resulting in a win for Narendra Modi.

I also guess the same situation happened in USA in 2016. The usually apathic/uninterested majority were frustrated/angered with years of ’minoritism’ and bonded together into a single consolidate vote bank that resulted in Trumps victory.

I think as well this misses the point that an election target can be life or death. If the US elects a Putin-unfriendly government in the near future, one would expect some serious fire-and-brimstones reprisals from the Americans (and European allies) for previous election interference. I’d be amazed if those don’t focus on bringing about regime change in Russia, and it seems unlikely that can happen with the current leadership getting away unscathed.

Whether or not this is a good thing is left as an exercise for the reader.

This is incorrect:

You can literally donate just $100K to political candidate and he would pass a law for you that makes your company 10s of millions for many many years. It never ends to surprise me that political donations by commercial entities and ultra-rich is not considered a crime in US. In most other countries they are known as "bribe".

Companies cannot give money directly to politicians and individuals are limited. https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/limits.php

Political Action Committees can accept money, but must be independent from a candidate.