Exceptionally interesting.
Also, First HN article I've also seen on Drudge. Worlds collide.
How to Hack an Election
81–90 of 96 posts
Re: How to Hack an Election
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Diebold-like machines are not used very much anymore, I think because of all the controversy over how easily they can be hacked. Most of the country uses paper ballots that are counted by machine. Yes, polls can be wrong, but I think exit polls are rarely wrong. Another comment pointed out these can be wrong too though, so this might not be a useful point. Yes, as I mentioned in another comment, if you want to hack a…
> Most of the country uses paper ballots that are counted by machine. I'm not aware of this. Are you sure? Do you have any point of reference?
Local elections where I live (central USA) went from mechanical voting machines to electronic and recently back to paper ballots.
Re: How to Hack an Election
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few reasons I can think of: 1) Hacking voting machines to a significant extent would require a team of people, not just one guy, which dramatically increases the risk of exposure. 2) The reported vote count is usually very close to the predicted vote count, and always very close to exit polling results. The hacked results would need to be very close to the real results, or be combined with control over a huge numbe…
> The reported vote count is usually very close to the predicted vote count, and always very close to exit polling results. Not always. In the 2004 election, Kerry won in exit polls but lost in the official count. The discrepancy was especially large in Ohio--which, had it gone as predicted by exit polls, would have resulted in President Kerry. A few days ago there were big gaps between official and exit poll results…
Here is the senate testimony of a programmer describing how he was paid to write software that would rig the Ohio election in 2000. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcxGGnmRQAs
Re: How to Hack an Election
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still find it odd that we can receive carbon copies of time cards and receipts for ATM visits (..on thermal paper which decays rapidly), yet when it comes to voting for our state elections we have no record of our vote and everything is handed off to 3rd parties with seemingly no provable accountability or transparency. "It's not the votes that count, it's who counts the votes."
Eliminating the ultimate privacy of the voting booth has potentially serious negative consequences, like attempts to influence elections via intimidation or bribery ("Show us your vote for Smith and it's worth $100 to you. If you don't, remember we know where you live...") There are a variety of clever schemes that work around this, but none of them are as simple as you getting to bring home a certified copy of your…
I would sooner welcome a president distributing $6.5 billion dollars ($100 * winning vote count 2012) to normal people than have to suspend rationality and instead have faith in every actor capable of manipulating votes (of which I feel there are many).
If you honestly believe there is nothing any candidate can offer you which is worth more than $100, I propose you should be allowed to take that deal.
( Of course, completely open source hardware and software is the real solution. )
EDIT: I am a little bitter because I'm in a state using machines which don't even keep a paper trail to begin with. https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/
Re: How to Hack an Election
#85Am I the only one who misread this as "How to Hack an Elect_r_on"? :)
Re: How to Hack an Election
#86Somewhat related story: During the Mexican presidential election mentioned in the article, a PhD student at one of the top Computer Science departments in the U.S. got in touch with me (through a shared friend) because he saw I was doing research on Mexican civic tech.
He mentioned that while he was teaching a workshop at his university, two of the workshop participants, who were employees of a powerful Mexican TV network, asked him to help them discredit or deflect the student movement described in the article (the movement was called the "Mexican spring" at the time for their use of social media).
This sounded shady to the student, and he wanted to tell someone, but didn't know who. Ultimately he just avoided the TV folks for the rest of the workshop.
Weeks later, The Guardian published some leaked documents that showed nefarious ties between said TV network and the then candidate.
The student connected with the press then, but the story never came out. Perhaps he got cold feet, or maybe the journalists didn't think it was interesting enough.
Re: How to Hack an Election
#87Capitalism makes centralized democracy untenable, and capitalism is here to stay. So much power is controlled by infrequent elections, so influencing those elections is always worthwhile. Capitalism is an evolutionary force that selects for the most profitable business practices. People who figure out how to profit from influencing our democracies will outcompete those who don't. We can pass new laws, but that's like…
As an alternative, what about moving away from representative democracy (i.e. where you periodically elect someone to make decisions for you by proxy), to a system where you can optionally choose to cast your own vote for particular issues. If we had more lightweight mechanisms for performing trustworthy elections then maybe this would be feasible. I imagine by default though most people wouldn't be bothered to put i…
A system where a delegate would have a number of votes they represent, and in which people could choose to cast their own vote, instead of letting their chosen delegate do it?
This would have a few problems, mainly the secrecy of votes, delegates having unequal voting power and people who didn't vote in the elections.
Re: How to Hack an Election
#88> with a shaved head, goatee, and a tattoo of a QR code containing an encryption key on the back of his head. On his nape are the words “ ” and “ ” stacked atop each other, dark riffs on coding. Jesus, this guy sounds like he walked straight out of a bad cyberpunk story. On the serious side, this gets to me: > Sepúlveda says many of the candidates he helped might not even have known about his role; he says he met onl…
I certainly wouldn't want one, but a neck tattoo is actually pretty amusing, to me anyway...
Re: How to Hack an Election
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brazil use machines that can be very easily hacked. Also, the deviation in the last elections from the mathematically expected was about 4%... But the end results was 51% vs 49% meaning that if the result went as expected, the 49% candidate would have won (with 53%). So, in some situations is not that hard to cheat. EDIT: also even when there is blatant cheating going on, nothing much can be done about it... Example,…
It's true that a 49/51 split makes it easier to cheat undetected. But it also means the public was almost equally in favor of both candidates. When 98% of the electorate get their wish either way, it doesn't seem quite so important who wins.
I think you mean 49%, not 98%.
Re: How to Hack an Election
#90There are many comments here pointing out the (quite reasonable) fact that hacking voting machines on a large scale is likely to be discovered and thus unsuccessful in stealing a U.S. Presidential election.
Even so, the average voter is quite protective of the idea that American elections are structurally fair (a sentiment that is actively inflamed to imposed voter disenfranchisement schemes, like ID requirements).
If the goal is to expose the fundamentally insecure nature of electronic voting in the US (and potential for truly fraudulent election results in tight districts) a complete invalidation of voter ballots [i.e. Big splashy, obviously fraudulent election results] would surely draw enough attention to force some public discussion of investing in secure, auditable voting machines.