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Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
It was just before midnight when Enrique Peña Nieto declared victory as the newly elected president of Mexico. Peña Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a family of mayors and governors. His wife was a telenovela star. He beamed as he was showered with red, green, and white confetti at the Mexico City headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had ruled for more than 70 years before being forced out in 2000. Returning the party to power on that night in July 2012, Peña Nieto vowed to tame drug violence, fight corruption, and open a more transparent era in Mexican politics.
Two thousand miles away, in an apartment in Bogotá's upscale Chicó Navarra neighborhood, Andrés Sepúlveda sat before six computer screens. Sepúlveda is Colombian, bricklike, 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 "</head>" and "<body>" stacked atop each other, dark riffs on coding. He was watching a live feed of Peña Nieto's victory party, waiting for an official declaration of the results.
When Peña Nieto won, Sepúlveda began destroying evidence. He drilled holes in flash drives, hard drives, and cell phones, fried their circuits in a microwave, then broke them to shards with a hammer. He shredded documents and flushed them down the toilet and erased servers in Russia and Ukraine rented anonymously with Bitcoins. He was dismantling what he says was a secret history of one of the dirtiest Latin American campaigns in recent memory.
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mendax on Wednesday March 08 2017, @09:12AM (8 children)
Just another example of how if a jurisdiction wants a clean election, it uses paper to run that election. Not punched cards with their hanging chads, but pieces of paper upon which voters must place an X or fill in a box. But those should not be counted by machines, but instead by people in open rooms where the counting can be monitored and audited by the public. Digital voting machines are more trouble than they're worth in terms of corruption.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @09:57AM (6 children)
That doesn't work either. Ballot boxes can be stuffed full of paper in the time between the closing of polls and the delivery of ballots to counters.
Ballot boxes can be opened, and "audited" with ballots for the opposition tossed in the shredder.
All of these are easier to execute than this piece of fiction passing as journalism.
President Piñata for all his failings is still extremely popular with the Mexican populace.
Most Mexicans on the street will tell you they voted for him because he was better looking than the opposition and the actual issues were too complex and distant for them to really understand.
They way to prevent election fraud is to get the populace to care about the politics behind the candidate. To step up and take a stand and vote for a candidate based on his or her actual history, not what they promise.
This requires education and it doesn't matter what country you're in or from. Education is several lacking when it comes to civics.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Dunbal on Wednesday March 08 2017, @11:06AM (4 children)
Ballot boxes can be stuffed full of paper in the time between the closing of polls and the delivery of ballots to counters.
Yes but you have to bribe more people in a lot more places instead of just running an algorithm. Plus there's a paper trail.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday March 08 2017, @03:06PM (3 children)
Ballot boxes can be stuffed full of paper in the time between the closing of polls and the delivery of ballots to counters.
Yes but you have to bribe more people in a lot more places instead of just running an algorithm. Plus there's a paper trail.
It's much easier to fill them quarter to half full before sealing and delivering them to the polling stations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @04:11PM
All these sort of stuff is standard practice. Perhaps you're just used to easily rigged elections and thus are unaware of how stuff is done in other places.
In my country I think they can only rig it via postal votes and gerrymandering. The rest is because many voters actually vote for them (maybe those voters got bribed for ten bucks or they vote out of tradition or they actually like the policies - agricultural subsidies etc).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:02PM (1 child)
Speaking from a US perspective... do you have any idea what you are talking about? There are procedures in place to stop this.
Specifically, in most polling places there are monitors from both the Democrats and Republicans watching for this kind of abuse; before you go on a rant about how they are conspiring against the common man, this is merely because they are the only ones who care enough to show up. Regular people (including you) can and do volunteer to monitor and to assist in running polling stations. There are also lots more basic-but-effective checks and verifications to ensure widespread fraud doesn't happen. It's like "how can you prevent a Man in the Middle attack on the internet, doesn't my ISP know my password to my bank?" It sounds impossible to prevent, until you learn the procedures how they do it.
Can ballot stuffing happen? Of course it can. But as per the GP post, you need to bribe a lot more people and there is more of a paper trail.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Friday March 10 2017, @06:14AM
Just to add to that, as a longtime pollworker — each team of volunteers consists of a mix of "incompatible" political parties (e.g. 2 Democrats, a Republican & Libertarian) which makes the chances of collusion or bribery minimal at best. That's in addition to the requirement that everything down to the serial numbers on the ballot box lock must be documented both at the beginning & end of the day, every voter is checked & cross-checked by at least two volunteers, and at the end of the day, we lock ourselves in the room, put everything away, and place tamper-proof seals on everything before personally transporting it to the central pickup location.
As I've said many times in the past: the biggest threat isn't voter fraud, it's volunteers making stupid mistakes out of inexperience, stress, or fatigue.
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Wednesday March 08 2017, @11:17AM
. Ballot boxes can be stuffed full of paper in the time between the closing of polls and the delivery of ballots to counters.
Not if each candidate has an observer watching it at all times.
Ballot boxes can be opened, and "audited" with ballots for the opposition tossed in the shredder.
Not if each candidate has an observer watching it at all times.
Stalin (an expert in rigging elections) said it doesn't matter who casts the votes, only who counts them. With paper voting, anyone can audit the election process and anyone likely to win can find a large number of people who are qualified to check. With an electronic system, there are very few people who can audit the system and most of the time the candidates have neither the time nor the money required to do so (especially as many of these systems run a full Linux or Windows system, so a full security audit needs to include an audit of all of that code).
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by gidds on Thursday March 09 2017, @01:31PM
I heartily agree with your sentiment — in fact, I've recently been promoting the idea of paper-based elections elsewhere. We need elections to be trustworthy, and the best way of doing that is keeping them simple enough and verifiable enough that anyone can watch the process and check every aspect for themselves. Computer-based systems are far too complex and have far too many ways they can be subverted.
But the article isn't really talking about that. Unless I missed something, it doesn't mention Sepúlveda hacking the election process itself; instead, his hacking was trying to change voters' minds, not their ballot papers. And that affects the most scrupulous and honest paper-based voting procedure just as much as computer-based ones.
Our world seems to have evolved huge numbers of people and a large body of experience dedicated to changing people's minds about things: products, people, corporations, events, political views, &c. The measures described in the article fill me with horror. But trying to change people's minds is not itself a crime, and I see no easy answers.
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