Ok so we have a state actor with unlimited resources attempting to manipulate our elections. Our defense consists of programmers and sysadmins working for the local county making sub-40s per year in salary (no offense). The election software is written on Windows 95 running with an Access database backend. I am not kidding.
Of course we've already been hacked. I personally think the 2016 had to be hacked given that no one, even Trump, thought he would get close to winning. I know it sounds like conspiracy theory bullshit, but come on, they already got Hillary's emails from the DNC. How hard could it be to target a certain number of counties in key states?
Certainly there are other techies out there who agree with me?
I'm somewhat of the opinion that something that overt was unnecessary, and so while it definitely could have been, I'm not sure it was.
"<Nation X> directly manipulated votes" is one thing, and very blatantly illegal. "<Nation X> convinced a bunch of people to vote against their interests and divide the US" is another, and while unethical, dishonest, and certainly not good, it's not clear to me that it's actually illegal. Besides, if you convince them once, they'll probably stick with the flawed information and voting pattern, which is a better return on investment.
I'm not from the US though, so... maybe I'm not clear on how easy it would be for people to collaborate and cover something like that up.
Well, nothing in there suggests direct manipulation of voting machines, which was the core point.
I think that somewhat proves my point - it's not clear to me that 'posting comments online' or 'paying news outlets to write specific stories' are or should actually be crimes. More directly stealing documents from election networks is - and was caught.
Guessing or using social engineering to get into a Campaign manager's email account is easier than executing a hack across hundreds of counties in a different country.
Palin's email account was hacked in 2008... do we think that election was hacked as well?
I think it would be more strange if our elections were not hacked--given how lax our election security is, plus how much there is for nefarious actors to gain. Maybe not hacked to the point of outright ballot stuffing, certainly not 100% of polling places are hacked, but I think contemporary election rigging is a more subtle, multi-pronged effort. The baffling way we've structured our elections makes it so only a few key areas need to be the focus of effort for attackers. We've really made it easy for them.
In any case, the likelihood that our democracy is intact and working as intended is virtually zero. There's obviously social engineering in play, if you count that as hacking. I think it counts; it's a way for a small minority to steer democracy in a way contrary to the legitimate wishes of the populace. Combined with other shady techniques, no single cause is enough to say for sure our elections are stolen. But all together I think it qualifies as rigged.
Go vote anyway, though. At least make it more difficult to spoof by increasing legit turnout. I really hope we have good participation this year.
It didn't even need to be all the counties. Just the intersection set of (most vulnerable, least funded, key electoral battlegrounds) to run up the numbers slightly over the state MOE.
Relying on pre-election polling is not a safe way to predict an election outcome, and has been badly wrong on quite a lot of occasions. Relying on pre-election punditry is even worse, since it's not only inadvertently biased but actively spun to promote certain outcomes. And relying on anecdote or acquaintance reports... sample bias aside, if you had friends or coworkers who voted for Trump, would they have admitted that openly?
Slightly better, we can look at exit polling to see how people claim they voted. At a glance, 2016 exit polling suggested far higher totals for Clinton than we saw, which is suspicious. But exit polling has systematic biases, and simple percentages have been increasingly unhelpful for several successive elections. The Kerry v. Bush exit polls, for instance, skewed towards Kerry in 28 states and Bush in 4. [1] In particular, 2016 exit polls massively oversampled college graduates in an election where a major factor was non-college Democrats breaking right. [2] Fortunately, we get enough demographic data on exit polls and vote counts to correct for some of this stuff in hindsight. It's not perfect, but what we find is that corrected exit data looks far more like the actual vote count than naive exit polls did. [3]
If we want to look for evidence of direct vote manipulation, a surprising election outcome isn't sufficient. There are much more specific things we should expect to see. Broadly, I can think of two dichotomies here: digital attacks (probably systematic and likely foreign) vs. physical attacks (probably local and domestic), and widespread versus swing-state manipulation.
For digital attacks of any kind, we'd expect to see a discrepancy in outcomes between networked electronic votes and other (non-networked or analog) votes. Fortunately, Jill Stein's recount initiative offered useful data: we have both paper and digital vote counts in Wisconsin and Michigan. The counts don't match precisely, of course, but studies found no evidence of any skew towards one candidate. Vote totals also don't appear to have had meaningful digital/paper discrepancies or departures from voter roll counts, which precludes other attacks like generating extra votes in red-leaning districts. [4]
For physical-access hacks, hard evidence would be much less obvious but statistical evidence would be much more obvious, unless we invent a conspiracy capable of traceless, coordinated physical action across the country. This is the sort of thing we did see in 2000, with thousands of votes from specific districts and even specific polling places vanishing. But the unexpected Trump vote counts were widespread and geographically consistent. Trump voters overall mirrored normal Republican demographics, but geographic results and exit poll counts alike show that the biggest changes were a rightward shift among white non-college Democrats, who are heavily overrepresented in the states which unexpectedly broke for Trump. Forging this sort of neat demographic shift ought to be basically impossible, because you couldn't plan the appropriate adjustments until after you had nationwide vote counts in hand. [5]
The hard part of manipulating a US election wouldn't be screwing up a few Symantec machines, but doing enough to change the outcomes without leaving extensive evidence of what was done. It's not enough to say that the outcome was a surprise compared to predictions or that Russia has good hackers, we'd at minimum need to see some kind of actual gap between the results and what people put in ballot boxes and told pollsters they'd chosen. I haven't seen anyone make a decent case for that.
I use wax tablets for all sensitive communication, and ensure any wax scrapings are incinerated to prevent the wax displacement hash being brute forced.
Don't be triggered, but I still haven't seen any real evidence of "Russian Hacking" of the Election. Until now it has only been a political game to discredit Wikileaks. You can find some reasonable neutral info on https://original.antiwar.com/
But there were some actual hacking reports like plugging USB-sticks in voting machines. The most recent one I found is an [alleged failed hack in Georgia](http://archive.is/d9d4a). These are all cases that I want to be looked at, but I do not see that in the news.
There are plans by Homelands security to take over the election infrastructure. If you trust them it is ok. If they start to plant their own votes, we may never know. That makes some people afraid that it is the patriot act for elections.
The simple and cheap solution is to have no computer voting without a clear paper backlog and registration. Let's make recounts standard (and put those pensioners to work). No computers, no hackers, no cheaters, no problem.
A more direct problem is corruption due to too much power and money in politics. Organisations like http://represent.us may stop that.
Anyway be friendly to humans that think differently than you, and vote for what you think is best.
<tinfoil hat> I think domestic criminal "Political Interest Groups" may be attempting to hack US elections and are fanning flames on Russia Hacking stories because it makes for useful cover </tinfoil>
It's neither of the above. The goal is not to actually hack a system and change votes(and thus leave a trace) but to cast doubt onto the integrity of the vote as a whole. Thus cuing <tinfoil> any reason to throw out results of an election. I'm not going to speculate on the actors or their motives behind this though, and it could be many layers deep... But I promise you, that's the long play currently underway.
Your source for "reasonable neutral info" is a nonsense conspiracy rag. I clicked on one of the articles and one of the opening sentences included "the Deep State amalgam that includes foreign intelligence agencies as well as Trump’s domestic opponents." It's right wing crap.
To believe there is no such thing as the deep state to me is pretty unbelievable.
You would have to be seriously naive to believe that in such a divided country that everyone who works in the government is completely neutral in their politics and would never act upon them within their positions of power.
I think the lesson from 2016 is that it’s easier and cheaper to use social media advertising and posting to manipulate than actually penetrating digital voting infrastructure.
Not meta enough. The lesson from 2016 is a bullshit social media campaign in Russia is enough to whip US media into spending billions of dollars of air time sowing doubt and confusion about an election result.
Not only were no votes changed by anything Russia did, it is highly dubious that any opinions were changed by what Russia did.
Trolls on the Internet are not, in fact, the most persuasive advertising force by orders of magnitude that the world has ever seen.
Changed directly? No, well maybe no. I would consider the possibility that people otherwise apathetic or independent ran to the nearest ideological corner and stayed there evidence be damned.
A person who might be open to ideas, closed off pulling the lever for someone based on out right lies. Someone who might have stayed home or voted for someone else.
Knowing that the Fancybear APT group broke into the DNC and released a lot of information that clearly swayed people's opinions, I can't think what you said was true.
> Not only were no votes changed by anything Russia did, it is highly dubious that any opinions were changed by what Russia did.
It's clear that concrete actions were manipulated by the Russian campaign, and that false ideas spread by it gained currency. It is pretty clear that it affected opinion, belief, and action, even if not in a way which changed partisan preferences.
> Trolls on the Internet are not, in fact, the most persuasive advertising force by orders of magnitude that the world has ever seen.
Probably not; lots of low budget groups leveraging current events are quite efficient compared to major campaigns, and that's without carefully crafting propaganda without concern for truth and with freedom to misrepresent origin; Russia’s operation may be much more cost effective than major campaigns especially if you consider just the known as spend and not other supporting costs, but that's not unusual.
33 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 93.6 ms ] threadOf course we've already been hacked. I personally think the 2016 had to be hacked given that no one, even Trump, thought he would get close to winning. I know it sounds like conspiracy theory bullshit, but come on, they already got Hillary's emails from the DNC. How hard could it be to target a certain number of counties in key states?
Certainly there are other techies out there who agree with me?
"<Nation X> directly manipulated votes" is one thing, and very blatantly illegal. "<Nation X> convinced a bunch of people to vote against their interests and divide the US" is another, and while unethical, dishonest, and certainly not good, it's not clear to me that it's actually illegal. Besides, if you convince them once, they'll probably stick with the flawed information and voting pattern, which is a better return on investment.
I'm not from the US though, so... maybe I'm not clear on how easy it would be for people to collaborate and cover something like that up.
https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download
I think that somewhat proves my point - it's not clear to me that 'posting comments online' or 'paying news outlets to write specific stories' are or should actually be crimes. More directly stealing documents from election networks is - and was caught.
Palin's email account was hacked in 2008... do we think that election was hacked as well?
In any case, the likelihood that our democracy is intact and working as intended is virtually zero. There's obviously social engineering in play, if you count that as hacking. I think it counts; it's a way for a small minority to steer democracy in a way contrary to the legitimate wishes of the populace. Combined with other shady techniques, no single cause is enough to say for sure our elections are stolen. But all together I think it qualifies as rigged.
Go vote anyway, though. At least make it more difficult to spoof by increasing legit turnout. I really hope we have good participation this year.
That’s the clue you should rethink this.
The devil is in the timing, there.
Relying on pre-election polling is not a safe way to predict an election outcome, and has been badly wrong on quite a lot of occasions. Relying on pre-election punditry is even worse, since it's not only inadvertently biased but actively spun to promote certain outcomes. And relying on anecdote or acquaintance reports... sample bias aside, if you had friends or coworkers who voted for Trump, would they have admitted that openly?
Slightly better, we can look at exit polling to see how people claim they voted. At a glance, 2016 exit polling suggested far higher totals for Clinton than we saw, which is suspicious. But exit polling has systematic biases, and simple percentages have been increasingly unhelpful for several successive elections. The Kerry v. Bush exit polls, for instance, skewed towards Kerry in 28 states and Bush in 4. [1] In particular, 2016 exit polls massively oversampled college graduates in an election where a major factor was non-college Democrats breaking right. [2] Fortunately, we get enough demographic data on exit polls and vote counts to correct for some of this stuff in hindsight. It's not perfect, but what we find is that corrected exit data looks far more like the actual vote count than naive exit polls did. [3]
If we want to look for evidence of direct vote manipulation, a surprising election outcome isn't sufficient. There are much more specific things we should expect to see. Broadly, I can think of two dichotomies here: digital attacks (probably systematic and likely foreign) vs. physical attacks (probably local and domestic), and widespread versus swing-state manipulation.
For digital attacks of any kind, we'd expect to see a discrepancy in outcomes between networked electronic votes and other (non-networked or analog) votes. Fortunately, Jill Stein's recount initiative offered useful data: we have both paper and digital vote counts in Wisconsin and Michigan. The counts don't match precisely, of course, but studies found no evidence of any skew towards one candidate. Vote totals also don't appear to have had meaningful digital/paper discrepancies or departures from voter roll counts, which precludes other attacks like generating extra votes in red-leaning districts. [4]
For physical-access hacks, hard evidence would be much less obvious but statistical evidence would be much more obvious, unless we invent a conspiracy capable of traceless, coordinated physical action across the country. This is the sort of thing we did see in 2000, with thousands of votes from specific districts and even specific polling places vanishing. But the unexpected Trump vote counts were widespread and geographically consistent. Trump voters overall mirrored normal Republican demographics, but geographic results and exit poll counts alike show that the biggest changes were a rightward shift among white non-college Democrats, who are heavily overrepresented in the states which unexpectedly broke for Trump. Forging this sort of neat demographic shift ought to be basically impossible, because you couldn't plan the appropriate adjustments until after you had nationwide vote counts in hand. [5]
The hard part of manipulating a US election wouldn't be screwing up a few Symantec machines, but doing enough to change the outcomes without leaving extensive evidence of what was done. It's not enough to say that the outcome was a surprise compared to predictions or that Russia has good hackers, we'd at minimum need to see some kind of actual gap between the results and what people put in ballot boxes and told pollsters they'd chosen. I haven't seen anyone make a decent case for that.
[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/8&#x...
I use wax tablets for all sensitive communication, and ensure any wax scrapings are incinerated to prevent the wax displacement hash being brute forced.
Don't be triggered, but I still haven't seen any real evidence of "Russian Hacking" of the Election. Until now it has only been a political game to discredit Wikileaks. You can find some reasonable neutral info on https://original.antiwar.com/
But there were some actual hacking reports like plugging USB-sticks in voting machines. The most recent one I found is an [alleged failed hack in Georgia](http://archive.is/d9d4a). These are all cases that I want to be looked at, but I do not see that in the news.
There are plans by Homelands security to take over the election infrastructure. If you trust them it is ok. If they start to plant their own votes, we may never know. That makes some people afraid that it is the patriot act for elections.
The simple and cheap solution is to have no computer voting without a clear paper backlog and registration. Let's make recounts standard (and put those pensioners to work). No computers, no hackers, no cheaters, no problem.
A more direct problem is corruption due to too much power and money in politics. Organisations like http://represent.us may stop that.
Anyway be friendly to humans that think differently than you, and vote for what you think is best.
Read the indictments: https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download
You would have to be seriously naive to believe that in such a divided country that everyone who works in the government is completely neutral in their politics and would never act upon them within their positions of power.
The GOP is rife with documented examples of back room deals that would easily qualify as "deep state" (eg the Iran hostage deal).
However it's the right wing that claim that Trump's enemies are "deep state".
A single person can write code to change ten million votes.
Which would you rather be vulnerable to?
But that really isn’t an option.
My point wasn’t to say ballot-box stuffing was worse than electronic versions of voter fraud. I was disagreeing with the comment:
“No hacker can hack paper.”
Yes. Paper can be hacked. That’s pretty straight forward. We know it’s happened.
This type of puerile language is not conducive to reasonable discussion.
Not only were no votes changed by anything Russia did, it is highly dubious that any opinions were changed by what Russia did.
Trolls on the Internet are not, in fact, the most persuasive advertising force by orders of magnitude that the world has ever seen.
A person who might be open to ideas, closed off pulling the lever for someone based on out right lies. Someone who might have stayed home or voted for someone else.
I think that's a real possibility.
Russian operations stretched far beyond a social media campaign.
Where does it show the votes that were changed?
If you want to punch straw men, go find yourself a farm.
It's clear that concrete actions were manipulated by the Russian campaign, and that false ideas spread by it gained currency. It is pretty clear that it affected opinion, belief, and action, even if not in a way which changed partisan preferences.
> Trolls on the Internet are not, in fact, the most persuasive advertising force by orders of magnitude that the world has ever seen.
Probably not; lots of low budget groups leveraging current events are quite efficient compared to major campaigns, and that's without carefully crafting propaganda without concern for truth and with freedom to misrepresent origin; Russia’s operation may be much more cost effective than major campaigns especially if you consider just the known as spend and not other supporting costs, but that's not unusual.