The question is, why do we pretend it's not happening until there's a smoking gun?
Consider the U.S. presidential election: The outcome is worth billions each to very many parties worldwide; it's existential to some foreign governments and actors; many in the U.S. have very powerful ideological motives. How much would it cost to hack voting machines? It seems very likely to me that it's happening, though I don't know where or to what extent.
I know I'm not the first to point out this risk, but why should we assume that the reported vote count represents the actual vote? Becasue there is no smoking gun yet? That's like assuming your critical network hasn't been hacked, and doing nothing to protect it, because you haven't seen evidence of an attack yet.
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 number of people in the polling industry. Campaigns also run internal polls, so opponent campaigns might become suspicious if their own polls were not matching the results.
3) Recounts are possible and somewhat common. Therefore hacking could not be used to create a very close result that could trigger a recount, or it would need to be combined with actual ballot theft, or control over the officials doing the recount.
These are not theoretical concerns. See Bush v. Gore in Florida for what might happen if someone tried to hack a close election.
It seems to me that hacking an election would only be feasible in an already close race, would require the cooperation of a number of people with huge risks of exposure, and could still be caught by one of the many safeguards that exist.
Obviously I am only talking about hacking voting machines. It would not surprise me if the tactics in this article were common; using Twitter bots, spying on other campaigns, etc.
It boils down to the fact that most states are red or blue. They are going one way or the other and nothing is going to change that. In the contested states, there are tight votes and there are ones that are "in the bag". in the states with tight elections, it will boil down to a few geographic regions within those states that carry enough weight to swing the entire state one way or the other.
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 in Arizona, favoring Clinton over Sanders.
I wouldn't normally link to Democratic Underground, but this post has a great summary of exit poll discrepancies, voter suppression, and the evidence for election fraud both in the 2004 presidential election and in the current Democratic primary.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511568043
This is a very urgent problem that I think the tech community can help fix. We need open source, auditable voting machines and professionally run elections. Election fraud, or even just the appearance of fraud, is toxic to democracy.
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, during elections for a minor office in one of the smallest Brazillian states (Acre), the number of invalid votes, intentionally blank votes, and voters that didn't show was exact the same, and the total number of votes was higher than the number of voters.
The losing candidate sued, the government argued that "the computer counts, and thus a recount is not a valid request", and FINED the guy that sued.
And the whole argument stopped there.
As someone else points out, you don't need to hack the whole country, just some key locations. Also, you could hack the source; many firewalls from a major vendor had (have?) security holes because someone checked the necessary code into their revision control system. How secure is Diebold or whoever makes the machines?
> The reported vote count is usually very close to the predicted vote count
Suprise results, where the outcome doesn't match the polls, are not that rare. Recently Sanders' win in Michigan is an example. In the UK, in the last parliamentary election, I believe the conservatives did much better than polls predicted.
> always very close to exit polling results
If true, this is a useful check.
> hacking could not be used to create a very close result that could trigger a recount, or it would need to be combined with actual ballot theft
That assumes there are ballots to steal; many voting machines are electronic.
That said, appears like given your points that I agree a better use of the idea would be to insure an election and reduce costs too. Meaning run a real campaign, stay behind, but close enough to not draw attention, which I'm guessing would reduce costs more than enough to cover the added costs of hacking.
1. I have seen video demonstrations wherein one person with opportunistic unsupervised access to a voting machine can hack it to affect every issue on the ballot within five minutes. Given the security at many polling places in the US, this easily extrapolates to one person able to hack all machines at a given polling place prior to election day, and possibly repeat the effort at several other nearby polling places within counties using the same type of machine.
Other hacks target the central tabulators, and don't require touching the voting machines at all. Opportunistic timing to enjoy unsupervised access between the election and results certification is a bit more critical to these.
2. Exit polls have frequently been "adjusted" in the US to more closely match the actual elections results. In the UK, this is called the Shy Tory Factor[0] or Shy Labour Factor, and has existed since 1992. The US has had the Tom Bradley Effect[1] since 1982.
This is usually explained by presuming that the exit polling result is inaccurate. It is never seriously considered in public that vote fraud may be becoming more severe. Yet I saw a statistical analysis of actual voting results, differentiated by the model of voting machine, that showed a clear, obvious bias towards certain choices of specific issues. The poll adjustment factor can easily be explained by the hypothesis that people remain as honest as ever in exit polls, but the voting process itself has become less honest.
3. Recounts will not uncover fraud if the records necessary for the recount are subject to the same controls as the records used for the first official count. If the voting machine does not leave a non-electronic record that can be verified by the voter while they are still at the polling place, a recount will just be run on whatever records exist, which may be falsified.
4. Thanks to the winner-take-all elections in the US, and the availability of previous census and elections data, it is possible to identify specific counties as keystones, wherein efforts to sway the vote locally will have disproportionately effective results.
For instance, you examine the "battleground counties" in the "swing states", and hack the central tabulator in that county to give your favorite candidate a 3% advantage by switching an opposing vote 1.5% of the time. You don't tell your party you're doing it. You don't even tell your dog that you're doing it. You just do it. If your guy loses, well, you tried.
Multiply by dozens of technically competent yet unconnected and independent supporters, and you get a significant extent that does not require any team.
Apparently someone has copies of voter registration forms and just copied the signature and changed party affiliation, nullifying votes (causing voters to receive provisional ballets, which generally are not counted) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1PnM6rf7X8
Here's the Arizona House elections Committee hearing, and a citizen mentions that voter registration documents have been leaked to the web. https://youtu.be/ESyXvGLMIS0?t=58m37s
Eg. Gerrymandering, drastically reducing voting stations (see AZ), goofy voter registration law changes. These issues don't occur in other mature democracies.
We'll get Elysium, not utopia.
Part of the propaganda is to label and marginalize people who point things like this out as conspiracy nuts and mentally unstable.
Why mess around with petty vote fraud when you can just make large donations to both candidates and guarantee the results you want?
Interestingly this exact same argument applies to fraudulent voting. We take no reasonable steps (e.g. requiring ID, same as for buying a beer or a gun) to prevent it, and have no way to detect it if it occurs, yet we assume it doesn't.
Much of the country does require ID: https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state
And requiring ID is not a reasonable step unless you provide a free and easy way to get an ID.
It is largely a question of Cost adjusted by Risk v. Reward.
Running attack ads, social media sockpuppet operations, etc. are legal, effective, and have similar costs. Similarly, you have a nation-wide machine who you endanger when you fuck with the integrity of that machine [i.e. being caught doing anything illegal] already. You've got plenty of options to spend your money on, from the preceding election(s) to seize local and state voting mechanisms to run the game in those states [legally] with tactics that are clearly unethical and immoral [voter suppression, deploying outright lies/euphemisms in the name of controlling the voting population].
These mechanisms are much, much more powerful than "hacking" voting machines due their lack of risk, similar costs, and provide you with a foundation with which to influence future elections. Kansas shifted the vote [~2%] greater than Obama's margin of victory in Florida [.88%] with a single law.
Consider the current situation nationally:
http://www.luc.edu/quinlan/stories/archive/why-attack-ads-wo...
> Although no one jumped from “definitely Bush” to “definitely Kerry,” some students who were leaning toward one candidate did switch to the other side. And in a tightly contested race, like this year’s presidential election, getting even a few people to change their vote can make all the difference in the world.
> They then showed the students one of four political ads and asked them to re-rate their levels of support. Roughly 14 percent of the students said the attack on their candidate made them support him even more, the researchers found. But an equal percentage of students said the advertisement weakened their support and caused them to move closer to the opponent—the one who ran the negative ad.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-democrats-suppress-t...
> In the ongoing fight between Democrats and Republicans over election procedures like voter ID and early voting, the Democrats are supposedly the champions of higher turnout and reducing barriers to participation. But when it comes to scheduling off-cycle elections1 like those taking place today, the Democratic Party is the champion of voter suppression. > Scheduling local elections at odd times appears to be a deliberate strategy aimed at keeping turnout low, which gives more influence to groups like teachers unions that have a direct stake in the election’s outcome.
http://billmoyers.com/2014/10/24/voter-discrimination/
> Governor Chris Christie: Same-Day Voter Registration Is a “Trick” and GOP Needs to Win Gubernatorial Races So They Control “Voting Mechanisms” > Fran Millar: Georgia Senator Complains About Polling Place Being Too Convenient for Black Voters > Doug Preis: An Ohio GOP Chair Says We Shouldn’t Accommodate the “Urban — Read African-American — Voter-Turnout Machine” > Greg Abbott: Texas AG Says Partisan Districting Decisions Are Legal, Even if There Are “Incidental Effects” on Minority Voters > Don Yelton: North Carolina GOP Precinct Chair: Voter ID Law Will “Kick Democrats in the Butt” and Hurt “Lazy Blacks”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/catherine-rampell-vo...
> In the state’s nail-biting gubernatorial race, Republican incumbent Sam Brownback bested his Democratic challenger, Paul Davis, by a mere 33,000 votes out of nearly 850,000 cast. Now, compare that with the estimated effects of Kansas’s new restrictions on voting.
> We know that more than 21,000 people tried to register but failed because they lacked the necessary “documentary proof of citizenship” required by a new Kansas law. The state’s separate, strict voter ID law also had an effect: Applying findings from a recent Government Accountability Office report that examined how the voter ID law affected the state’s turnout in 2012, Weiser estimates that it probably reduced turnout this time around by about 17,000 votes.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/02/02/3745296/major-vo...
> For example, the researchers found that in primary elections, “a strict ID law could be expected to depress Latino turnout by 9.3 points, Black turnout by 8.6 points, and Asian American turnout by 12.5 points.”
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> 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.
I don't agree with Burkman on that. It'd be relatively easy to hack them with a couple guys in a swing state who drops devices at target locations. You can get a partnership with decent security to function in this regard.
http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/04/16/399986...
> When state auditors investigated, though, they didn't find that particular problem. Instead, they found something more disturbing. While using their smartphones, they were able to connect to the voting machines' wireless network, which is used to tally votes. > Other state investigators easily guessed the system's passwords — in one case, it was "abcde" — and were then able to change the vote counts remotely without detection.
> 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 number of people in the polling industry.
This is a larger problem that can only be surmounted in 1-2 swing states in a given election. You can't push the needle more than a few basis points with these tricks or you'll get all sorts of accusations flying, recounts, Bush v. Gore, etc. etc.
Weird statistical outliers simply don't happen often enough at the precinct/county level and the shift in state results are the results of an aggregation of events in multiple precincts. So I highly suspect you could flip one or two precincts this way as well as shift the whole state a few basis points on top of that but if you swing more than 1-1.5% this way I'm pretty sure you'll fail due to recounts and other safeguards.
The target states for this would be the usual "swing states":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele... [ .88% ]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele... [ 2.98% ]
You aren't going to be able to pull this off in Ohio but you could in Florida. You'd also need to be able to predict which states you could swing this way and do so without triggering a recount.
So you push Florida to +.62% Romney and sabotage things when your opponent demands a recount. The risk of detection is really, really high. If detected swinging this one state, you lose the election due to being on trial for criminal conspiray, etc. etc.
Only a fool thinks it not happening everywhere, and one thing I know for sure after reading these forums for a few years now...
HN members are not fools.
> Sepúlveda managed thousands of such fake profiles and used the accounts to shape discussion around topics such as Peña Nieto’s plan to end drug violence, priming the social media pump with views that real users would mimic. For less nuanced work, he had a larger army of 30,000 Twitter bots, automatic posters that could create trends. One conversation he started stoked fear that the more López Obrador rose in the polls, the lower the peso would sink. Sepúlveda knew the currency issue was a major vulnerability; he’d read it in the candidate’s own internal staff memos.
I've been wondering when more sophisticated Twitter sockpuppetry would start having an impact. The media seems generally unprepared for a coordinated campaign of fake tweets from accounts that don't have eggs as their avatar or #freeiphones in their profiles...I don't mean just the trend of "Hey 3 people said something on Twitter so it's a story", but that there's also not enough skepticism paired with efficient ways for sniffing out fakery on social media. I hadn't thought about the problem of a mass army of bots suddenly creating a trending tag.
It reminds me of "The Agency", a story published last year investigating how Russian operatives allegedly used human-controlled Twitter spamming to try to publicize a fake story of a Louisiana chemical plant explosion:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_...
But as sophisticated as that sockpuppet campaign was...it was obviously destined to fail by the fact that an exploding chemical plant is fairly easy to confirm as true or false in real life. Trending opinions about politics don't offer such binary ways of filtering.
After a while you see more arguments along the same line of reasoning, but with more data and less vitriol. You find yourself agreeing more, even if you like the person being disparaged. You may even come around to accept a side of an argument you didn't think much about before.
This is how minds are turned. First the trolls and bots do as they do. Some people catch a whiff and continue the trend. Sometimes as a joke, other times seriously. Even those who pretend to be joking will not long be indistinguishable from the fools who think they are in good company.
Propaganda is not a tidal wave that comes crashing down on established opinions, it is a steady stream that eats at solid rock until it creates a deep gorge you could not have imagined structured in any other way.
Yes. However, they swing things in a single election cycle for marginal supporters of a candidate [which are the folks that really control the outcome in the US. The majority of the states are consistent.].
http://www.luc.edu/quinlan/stories/archive/why-attack-ads-wo...
> Roughly 14 percent of the students said the attack on their candidate made them support him even more, the researchers found. But an equal percentage of students said the advertisement weakened their support and caused them to move closer to the opponent—the one who ran the negative ad.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergan...
> •Just giving medical students pens with a drug's name on them made the students significantly more favorably disposed toward the medication than otherwise, despite their immersion in classes aimed at letting them rationally evaluate drug benefits, found a 2009 Archives of Internal Medicinereport.
> •Remember shaking hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland? Roughly a third of people presented with a fake ad depicting a visit to Disneyland that featured a handshake with Bugs later remembered or knew the meet up with the 'wascally wabbit' had happened to them, according to a 2001 University of Washington study. Even though Bugs is owned by Warner Brothers and verboten at a Disney facility, so it couldn't have happened.
Or the comments and articles about Reddit's launch. Apparently, the idea that someone could use fake users to start a community shocked a few unwary people (and journalists). Despite this being a forum building tactic since the internet begun, and a business tactic (to some degree) for decades or centuries.
Or heck, the 'trolling' and harassment stuff about Twitter and social networks. Old tactics and behaviour, but seemingly not known by the mainstream media till it affected sites their journalists used.
Really, the media is unprepared for a lot of stuff, since they're about two decades behind when it comes to knowing how technology and culture works.
As for when sophisticated Twitter sockpuppetry would start having an impact? It might well already be having one. I mean, similar stuff is endemic on Russian language forums and sites, and hey, governments have access to these techniques and useful software to help carry them out...
Why should they care? The purpose of a news business is to make money. If it works, then it works.
I think the real problem here is the incentive structure for a modern news business, as well as the network effects of sharing, links, etc.
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 inventing a new antibiotic: it works for a while until evolution finds a way.
We must decentralize governance to be free. But how? We can use trade to individually enforce rules. Consider ISIS. ISIS controls territory by paying people to control territory. The money ISIS pays is worthless paper. You and I give that paper value because we accept it for our work. If you want to reduce ISIS's power without anyone's permission, all you have to do is stop accepting any money they've traded for your work.
We now have the ability to build decentralized ledgers of trade that you can consult to do this. Instead of relying on political parties to pursue your policy goals, you'll install an app that cuts people off from your economy when they break your rules. If this is a power that people desire, they must stop accepting anonymous money and only accept money through their policy wallet apps.
We're using bad technology to organize our society and it's giving us political corruption, terrorism, and global warming. It's imperative that we decentralize democracy so we can rid the world of this unnecessary damage.
The only way to get money out of politics is to make sure the people can control money.
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.
This seems like a terrible idea that would fracture the economy in so many different ways.
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 only a few.
It never occurred to me, but it's a novel concept: people campaigning for high office may be unaware of corruption in their own campaign. The idea of a well-intentioned politician with no idea corruption propelled them into office is scarier to me than a knowingly corrupt politician.
I know she is a "leading candidate" and no party affiliation was mentioned but the hacker has in the past supported right-wing candidates and Ted Cruz is also closer to being the annointed one than he was a month ago. It might not be a coincidence that dirty tricks reminiscent of past elections are just starting.
It certainly appears that he is already on someone's payroll. Trump? Maybe, though it would be denied of course. Maybe this is Trump's answer to Cruz's manager.
It appears though that Cruz already has a slimer helping him according to a story I read a few weeks ago.
Maybe it is HRC and she's just trying to gear up for the mud-fest that will surely start once the real campaign kicks off.
[Behind Ted Cruz's Campaign Manager, Scorched Earth and Election Victories - NYTimes](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/us/politics/ted-cruz-campa...)
Just so you know. The Mexican electoral system looks like it was built by paranoiac maniac. It has many locks. Everything is done manually, votes are counted by multiple citizens, they use transparent poll boxes, special election photo ids are issued for every citizen, even the voting lists have photos, people get their thumb marked with ink, the parties are allowed to have representatives at every place, results at every place are signed, they are published at the voting place and also electronically, etc, etc. One million people participate on the election.
It remains an unproven allegation.
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.
I also suspect this guy is underselling his service. The article calls $20k/mth expensive. If your going to significantly affect an election I suspect there could be another zero or more there. And I wonder if he's ever worked for 2 sides simultaneously? Given the ethics involved this wouldn't be a stretch.
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.
American Election Hacker Testifies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzBI33kOiKc
That's a ridiculously good use of money for a corrupt politician.
Also, First HN article I've also seen on Drudge. Worlds collide.
