What would happen if some computer geek hacked an election

[Sperk]

sort of like what happened with the box cutters put on the airplanes. Not an act of terrorism, just someone testing the safety procedures. If someone hacked an election and made it really obvious, like everyone on the ballot got exactly the same votes,or everyone got negative votes, in a way that results were immediately known not to be valid, would that person get in as much trouble as someone who actually attempted to steal an election through the touch screens?

[Don_G]

1. What Do You Mean "If?"

The more accurate questions are: who, when, where and what proof?

[jiacinto]

2. Yes

That person woudl be arrested and thrown in jail.

[RapidCreek]

21. Yep...then he'd/she'd sell the movie rights, get a book deal

fill a numbered account with green back....serve his/her time and live out the rest of his/her life a very very wealthy man/woman.


RC

[ozymandius]

3. I think that this would blow holes in the naysayers' argument.

Even more interesting - if some hacker would make up names like President Bullwinkle and VP Rocky.

In reality - officials could not null the results fast enough.

[Atman]

4. Can't happen

Unless it is from the inside. The hacking is coming in the form of the code loaded into the machines before they are put in use, or via patches on-site. They are not connected to the internet (though they can be, despite Diebold's claims to the contrary), so I don't see how someone could gain access. Plus, there are several different types of machines out there.

I think it would be a brilliant act of "civil disobedience" and probably get the offender a very long vacation at Gitmo. Remember, the AG is the guy who is letting the felon leaker in the WH walk, while Tommy Chong is up the river for a year because he sold a bong. These guys are evil incarnate.

[onebigbadwulf]

5. Already hacked

The elections are already hacked...

1.) -18,000 for GORE

2.) 18,181 for 3 repubs in texas.

3.) Electronic voting companies won't allow investigation


What more evidence do you need?

[jobycom]

14. More than that

Innuendo isn't evidence, no matter how much I might like to believe it, too.

On Gore, I'm convinced the Repubs destroyed 40,000 ballots, but I have no evidence beyond circumstantial.

On the 18,181 for 3 repubs-- districts are chosen to be around the same size, so it's not impossible, since the number would be within a similar range to start with. I can see how it could be a hex code, but I can also see how it could be a coincidence. People match up lottery numbers all the time, and those odds seem much worse.

Electronic voting companies have a lot of reasons to keep their industry secrets secret. First, competition. Second, to prevent someone from learning enough from their code to hack it, third, because they might not want to deal with what they consider to be crackpots. Fourth, because they have somehow gotten a completely loyal staff of thousands to work on codes, build and distribute machines, and deliver this code to thousands of precincts all in one night, without a single disgruntled employee leaking it to the press or law enforcement.

It could be as you say, it's just not as clear as all that.

[BattyDem]

6. It depends ...

if it's a left-wing computer geek, he/she would get life in prison. If it's a right-wing computer geek, he/she would be appointed to a high-ranking position in the Bush administration! :P

[HFishbine]

7. Similar Things Have Been Done Before

People have commited law-breaking acts before to call to public attention things from nuclear power plant security to discrimination in hiring.

Someone who hacked an election would almost certainly go to jail. I would imagine that the success or failure of such an action to demonstrate a flaw in electronic voting would determine the degree, if any, to which a court might consider motive to be a mitigating factor. But, to avoid a cruel irony, it best be done in a state that allows convicted felons to vote.

[LoneStarLiberal]

8. Techies Will Be Demonized, Of Course

America irrespective of party affiliation has a bass-akwards fixation with problems, particularly problems and controversies in technology where expertise on a level that allows you to understand the basics of what is happening is thin.

I'll tell you exactly what I think would happen: Congress would crap a brick, the media would be outraged, the person or persons would immediately be branded terrorists, and America's third most cherished pasttime (anti-intellectualism) will guarantee that the messenger gets drilled while the message is lost.

Techies will be demonized, anyone who can find much less use a command prompt will automatically be under suspicion of high crimes, and while everyone gets good a lathered up for a geek lynching, the REAL problem of cheap donutware (like donuts, it comes with holes in it right out of the box!) will be quietly smoothed over by the responsible parties.

After all, what's going to get more Nielsen points: 23 year old "security expert" charged with Federal election fraud for sniffing Diebold traffic at New York election site or Security community, election ware manufacturers address SSL vulnerability with cooperative patching effort, open platform assurance testing?

[Don_G]

9. Unless The Tech Is A Rethug

BBV is shut down again as of today and Bev can't get straight answeres from anyone yet on why her ISP took the site off-line.

It looks as if someone accessed the e-mail lists and made a spam attack spoofing the IP address so far.

Who's to say Diebold didn't do it or won't get away with something similar in 2004 without having a precinct-by-precinct traceable backup?

[Atman]

10. You can still get the book downloads

http://www.talion.com/blackboxvoting.org.htm

BTW, some people managed to dl all the Diebold manuals and docs before the site was pulled.

[RapidCreek]

22. Not if the candidate who won was Jesus!

He'd/she'd be Americas media darling.

RC

[DBoon]

11. Kevin Mitnick would be president!

Winning by an unheard of 100% of the vote!


Really, at one point famous hacker Kevin Poulsen hacked one of those radio contests to win a porsche. He hacked the phone system to ensure he was to 100th caller.

[Zorra]

12. They cover it up. n/t

[jobycom]

13. Couldn't be done

IF it can be done, it would have to be done by someone able to deliver code to every precinct in the district he wanted to hack, or at least enough to affect the elections, since voting machines are individual units and can't be hacked from a central location-- not even from the precinct where the machines are located. Even if they could be connected to a modem or the Internet, they aren't supposed to be, so someone would have to convince those at the local level to connect them, and that would leave a witness trail. The code would have to be written to fit a dozen or more types of machines, and then distributed to each precinct, then installed in each machine. The machines vary, but most are simple calculator-level machines incapable of handling anything sophisticated, and yet the code would have to be sophisticated enough to pass the two preliminary tests, then the test following the election (poll workers are supposed to make sure the machines are registering votes properly before and after the elections), without being detected. There are a lot of little tests elections supervisors run that are not well publicized that test voting patterns for discrepancies, and the hacker would have to survive those in each precinct. Getting caught in one would ruin his day.

Elections are run by supervisors at the local level, and they tend to be activists for their party, looking out for and convinced the other party will try to cheat. They often dream of being the one to expose the other party as the dirty cheaters they are.

It's harder than it seems when described on paper. It would either take a coordinated, funded effort of the conspiracy level of the old 70s films, or it would be so localized it would be insignificant. We couldn't stop the former even if we knew about it, and the latter wouldn't be any worse than what came before.

I'm not saying it can't or hasn't happened, just that anyone who could carry it off on a large scale would have enough resources to rig an election with or without electronic voting. On a small scale the cheating would be far easier to do the old fashioned way-- stuffing boxes, registering dead folk, etc.

It's not like any other system has been risk free. Ask Landslide Lyndon, or Katherine Harris.

Elections are more often rigged a year before the elections, when the AGs of the states begin purging records, and districts start writing their ballots. You can generally affect an election more by the gender or ethnic makeup of a ballot than by writing a code to sneak into a black box.

Again, I'm not saying it can't, won't or hasn't been done. I'm just saying that if it is done on a large scale, it won't matter if it's paper or chips that are being manipulated, because the person doing it is already above our grasp.

[SharonAnn]

15. You're wrong.

It wouldn't be that hard. There are ways to program stubs into the code and then set them live at a designated opportunity.

And, it would usually be the same company/person/group that sets up all the machines. And it would usually be (at least at first) the bigger, state-wide races that were compromised. Those are the ones that have the most value.

Not really that hard to do. Remember, the compromise is most likely to be from the inside, not the outside.

[jobycom]

19. If it's from the inside, it won't matter if it's electronic or paper

Elections take place at the precinct level, and they involve a handful of officials at each level. ANy code would have to find a way to activate itself after the initial test, then deactivate itself when the units are switched from early voting to election day voting, then reactivate itself for that voting, then deactivate itself again after the voting ended. If the code was activated at a certain vote total, there's no way to predict how many people will vote in a precinct, and that number would vary from precinct to precinct, requiring a different code for each one. If it were turned on and off on certain commands, it would be caught, because the same commands are used to test the machines as to run them live. It can be done, it would just be a lot harder than rigging paper ballots, so returning to paper ballots would be worse.

I've drilled our local elections supervisor in great detail on this, come up with every scenario I could think of, and she had an answer for it. She's a Democrat, and from what I understand she's become a recognized expert in the field from her research. And I couldn't think of a way to rig the machines that wouldn't be caught. So it would have to be an inside job, which would mean that each precinct supervisor would have to be in on it, and that makes no sense because each precinct supervisor is elected, and therefore is of the party that is going to win a district anyway, so they wouldn't have to cheat.

Now the counting machines, that's where a major conspiracy can occur, but even there, there is the possibility to catch them-- at least as strong a possibility as catching a paper ballot cheater. The votes are encoded on a chip that can't be overwritten. The chips are accounted for, so if some are stolen, that would be detected-- making it harder to steal them than to steal paper ballots. The code that read the chips wrong would have to be in the counting machine, so if their is a question of fraud, the chips can be run through a different, clean, machine, in which case the counting error would be caught.

Anybody can cheat with any system, but it's not any easier with electronic voting than with paper voting-- in fact, it's harder. They have easier ways to rig elections. And their are a lot of machines out there, and elections supervisors are paranoid, and are looking for ways that the machines can be hacked, so they try to find the ones least able to be hacked. Cheating occurs when someone like Teresa Lapore sneaks in and chooses machines with built-in errors (which is what happened in Palm Beach-- everyone in the industry knew that butterfly ballots made mistakes likely. And from what I've seen, that's still not enough of an excuse to explain a 633% increase over the previous elections in overvotes in one county), and (probably) alters ballots after they have been cast. Electronic voting makes that a lot harder. Cheating with electronic voting does require someone capable of writing complex code, gaining access, and having enough power to cover it up.

Again, it can happen. I'm glad Bev and others are hammering away at this, finding evey weakness and loophole. The Republicans will cheat, to keep power, and they will rig these machines at the local level (can't be done at the state level unless the local levels are complicit-- they don't have access.) The Democrats will cheat again when they have the power (and I want that prevented just as badly). But the idea that Bush is going to enter a command somewhere and have all the voting machines across America re-elect him is a stretch. Maybe there's a way to affect code with radio frequencies as the votes are being cast (edited; originally said "counted")(not after because the chips can't be altered). That would require some extreme sophistication, and we wouldn't be able to stop that type of conspiracy anyway. That's when we do like Cuba and take to the streets because the vote makes no sense. There are much easier ways to cheat-- starting now, when the AGs are compiling and purging voters rolls.

Now is the time we should be watching the Katherine Harrises in each state, and the Teresa Lapores. Now is the time we need to get involved at the local level, learning what our ballots will look like, learning what the states are doing on voting rolls. Now is the time we need to do our homework on how ballot makeup affects voting outcome. That's where it will come from. Especially after Florida, when they were caught red handed but allowed to get away with it.

Or at the counting machines, when a county like Duval is run by Repubs but has a large Democratic vote. The votes will be rigged there, as they were in 2000, and it won't take advanced programming skills to do it.

[Nottingham]

16. Lets hope he is Democrat!!! and he is really good at it!!!

:bounce:

[bitchkitty]

17. If someone happened to have

a 100% chance of getting away with it, it might be fun! Too risky though.

[Nottingham]

18. Hey what could they do too ya! Send ya to Prison HA HA HA

You just proved the Computer system Sucks :bounce:

[HFishbine]

20. Getting Away with it defeats the purpose

If such an action goes undetected, we're no better off. The whole point of the endeavour, as I see it, would be to allow an election to be certified, then come forward and say, "Yeah, you thought it was a clean election, but here's what happened."

[bitchkitty]

23. I'm sorry, I should

have been more clear. If the person hacking the system could remain anonymous and beyond the reach of any authorities, then he or she would be getting away with it. Obviously the hack would have to be made public, that would be the purpose of it. We don't want to subvert Democracy, just prove a point.

Of course it's all just idle speculation, I would never do anything like that!

[leftchick]

24. what happens if someone fucks with the Dem primary?

That is one question I can't get out of my head.

[Silverhair]

25. I don't trust electronic voting.

Paper ballots even with all their problems, can be saved and recounted. Mass cheating with them is more difficult, although obviously not impossible. "Minor" cheating will only effect close elections. The problems in FL would not have been a problem if the margin had been larger. If either Bush or Gore had managed an extra 1%, there would not have been a challenge. Cheating can be discovered and proven by methods that the ordinary person can understand. Electronic voting is just too difficult to verify in ways that the non-geek can understand and trust.

I am against electronic voting. Maybe I am too old.