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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 08 2017, @08:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-happen-here dept.

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/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @04:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @04:11PM (#476495)
    The normal ones are transparent so you still have to bribe the people who are supposed to ensure the boxes are empty.

    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).