They're probably going to be similar to the 14k sample he tweeted: a solidified Labour Party getting 50-55% of the votes, and the establishment candidates splitting the rest.
So the bug where the first voting sheet shown to a user was from the same 10% of the photos turned out to be a feature, serving as a CAPTCHA of sorts to weed out the bad actors from the good.
If memory serves, some CAPTCHA techniques include showing two numbers to transcribe, where one’s value is already known. If that number is transcribed incorrectly, then the other number’s result isn’t used, and the CAPTCHA fails. Perhaps a similar technique may have also helped here?
It seems to me that when combating bots or hackers, the wrong approach is to provide immediate negative feedback. Giving an immediate error code lets them know that their current strategy is not working and to try something different.
It seems like a better approach would be to make them think you were accepting the results, when in fact they were going to the bit bucket. Hackers trying to get into your corporate database should be presented with a table full of false (but plausible) data rather than an error. Let them waste time trying to use all those fake SS numbers or account numbers before they figure out they got duped.
It's also evidence of a crime. I wonder how that relates: if you just drop those entries from the database (or from the app prior to entry into the main db) then that seems like destruction of evidence of a crime?
It seems one should record all entries, but only update a canonical db if all entries fail to trip automated tampering detections.
As scary as it can be, but yes. It's similar to strategy games at a point - sometimes it's better to let the enemy push you around for a bit as long as nothing important is damaged. I don't really care if I have to scale up the LBs a bit to handle all of the requests for some time. However, this allows your attacker to commit more of their resources, so you can block and ban more once you react or so you can learn more about their behavior, so you can mislead, slow-lorry and generally mess with them more effectively.
There have also been funny defcon-talks about messing with attackers about this, by returning all kinds of messed up return codes, slow-lorry'ing the bot, ... I'm kind of wondering if you could SSRF (or rather, CSRF) a bot like this by returning a redirect to e.g. the AWS metadata API... could be a fun topic to mess with.
> The original iteration of the service was a mass collaboration platform designed for the digitization of books, particularly those that were too illegible to be scanned by computers. The verification prompts utilized pairs of words from scanned pages, with one known word used as a control for verification, and the second used to crowdsource the reading of an uncertain word.
I think the bug was that your first sheet came from a small set and the people entering bad data would refresh instead of doing the actually random next sheet, so entries for most of the sheets came only from people who had long sessions who were apparently more likely to enter good data.
Yeah looks weird. When I scrolled to a random part, the numbers seemed to line up. They didn’t say things were entirely correct though. Perhaps the data quality is sufficient for a challenge. Odd that the first rows seem more wrong though.
Silly, you don't malcount the actual votes, you brainwash the population and pervert the process until they vote the way you want them to, like in the advanced first world democracies.
That's not the worst case, if wise elite brainwashes (manufactures consent of) the population.
Worse is when the elite is not so wise (sometimes plainly crazy), or the elite loses control to crazy people, adversaries. Or self-induced mass hysteria of the population.
The direct "democracy" that very soon will inevitably be enabled by technology, poses great dangers in the situation where masses are so easily manupulateable, and their collective intelligence seems not raising above individual level, but degrading below it for some reason. Violent chaos, lynch courts, etc.
This would have been a good use for hn style shadow banning. Especially if they didn't publish the current tally, then the original easy to detect bots may have never realized you were on to them
Fantastic story. What an excellent example of democratization from technology. And also a perfect example of how the blade cuts both ways. Digital warriors battling it out in real time and the stakes are enormous. Great respect for Mark and his ingenuity and adaptive responses!!!!
Elupee 75,
To be frank, you did a great job and i am proud of someone from my country pulling this off, but the bitter truth is President Elect Bola Ahmed Tinibu won this election. Peter Obi's youth support is predominantly in the south, and Christian majority parts of the country, he clearly lack support in the Muslim north, where I am from.
I voted for Kwankwaso though.
I was naturally skeptical of the punchng article, so I crosschecked it against OP's CSV. The votes in the article do agree with OP's CSV (although the number of accredited voters differs slightly).
All that said, I don't think that the results for 276 voters in one polling unit in one ward in one local government area in one state is clear evidence that Obi lacks support. If anything, the fact that OP's CSV matches a (potentially biased) news article gives me more faith in OP's tallies and claims.
(Aside: it seems _easier_ to lose an election in your own polling unit, where variance plays a larger part, than it is to lose on a wider scale.)
On the contrary, eletronic voting doesn't create the paper trail necessary to dig up frauds like this. You can simply program or hack the system to report any vote total you want.
First of all, hacking the electronic system is much much harder than hacking the paper process. In the case at hand the paper tallying process was the one hacked.
And second, electronic systems can create a paper trail, just make the electronic machine spit out a paper receipt. Then you have the best of both worlds, you can have instant electronic totals, and then do some random sampling recounts of the receipts to validate the result.
Scaling an attack against paper is incredibly difficult, and requires coordination in a level that is almost sure to trigger the law enforcement much before it can change some national-level numbers.
Scaling an attack against a computer system is almost the same as doing an attack against a computer system. Few attacks don't scale.
But yeah, if you just print the vote and push it into an urn (while the voter can read it), you'll get the best of both worlds.
> I was left with the impression that it is the paper records in this story that led to the unravelling of an attempt to forge the results.
The manual tallying of paper records is what lead to the attempt to forge the results in the first place. If the results were electronically tallied to generate an official result, then they wouldn't need to recount the whole election to verify the result, just doing a statistically significant random sampling of the polls to recount would be enough.
> If the results were electronically tallied to generate an official result
Electronic voting doesn't make bad politicians less bad. In this instance, the bad guys were prepared to deliberately remove CCTV so when they sent their goons out at night to shoot protestors there would be no evidence.
"Electronic tallies" are never going to give a free and fair election if those in power are prepared to go that far. Safer to stick with paper ballots and election observers equipped with Mark I eyeballs.
By looking at the receipts printed by the ballot machines.
Ballot machines print either a final tally at the end of the day, or print every single vote and automatically drop it into a physical ballot, depending on the threat model of the country in question. Either way the you have partial or total recount.
> By looking at the receipts printed by the ballot machines.
Let's the clear, you're not really "recounting" the ballots at that point. If the machine is compromised - and we're discussing a situation in which we know CCTV was removed and people were then shot - you have no real idea if the receipt corresponds to the voter's original intent. Or, indeed, if all the receipts from all the voters make it as far as the recount (?)
> Ballot machines print either a final tally at the end of the day, or print every single vote and automatically drop it into a physical ballot, depending on the threat model of the country in question.
How is reprinting the final automated tally supposed to represent a "recount" of the original automated tally?
> Either way the you have partial or total recount.
You really don't. Bits of paper and Mark I eyeballs all the way.
As Tom Scott puts it, "The key point is not is that paper voting is perfect - it isn't - but attacks against it don't scale well"[0].
> How is reprinting the final automated tally supposed to represent a "recount" of the original automated tally?
If you want to detect tampering in the central totalling, then all you need is the end of day receipt of each ballot. Exactly like in OP's case.
If you want to detect tampering in a ballot, then you manually recount the individual printed paper votes inside that ballot. That is something that you should do to a random sample of ballots, plus ballots with unusual totals.
> As Tom Scott puts it, "The key point is not is that paper voting is perfect - it isn't - but attacks against it don't scale well"[0].
That is simply not true, large scale paper ballot tampering scales very well to the point of turning elections, and is much easier to pull off because it happens in the fringe where no one is looking (while tampering the electronic system would require pulling your heist in the IT room where everyone is looking).
> large scale paper ballot tampering scales very well to the point of turning elections, and is much easier to pull off because it happens in the fringe where no one is looking
In many countries, there are many tens of thousands of individual polling stations. A conspiracy to tamper with enough of them to make a difference isn't going to stay secret for very long because it would have to involve too many people. Tampering with paper ballots just doesn't scale, and in most places, election observers with their old-fashioned Mk I eyeballs are allowed to watch what's going on at every stage.
> (while tampering the electronic system would require pulling your heist in the IT room where everyone is looking)
How would we propose that an average human election observer is supposed to detect whether any particular system involved in electronic voting is - or isn't - in the process of "pulling a heist"?
You introduce technology to increase transparency and fight corruption. You increase transparency by having video recordings of human counting votes linked to the electronic record of the totals.
When you introduce technology to eliminate manual counting and paper trails, then transparency is eliminated and you give a green light to fraud, corruption, very juicy contracts and death.
Pdf is a very unfortunate format. It is proprietary, it is paper-oriented, its almost single goal is to keep precise printing layout. But for the last 30 years world didn't come up with anything that could compete.
> By spot checking just a random 100 votes are correctly tallied
How do you do that? I think the only error you could detect is when the tally has fewer votes for a party than what’s in that sample. If so, a fraudster could report 100 votes for every party, and add the remaining to whatever party they want to win.
You have to design the election system with this in mind.
One such design would be for every vote to have a unique id. When announcing the results, you also publish a list of which vote ids were tallied for which candidate.
Then you have 100 random ids, and the checkers watch those votes all the way from the voter casting them to the final tally.
Oh, and Mark didn't mention that Bola Ahmed Tinubu was indicted for heroin charges in the US in 2003, forfeited $460k & is just too old to run a democracy this size.
Atiku Abubakar (second candidate) was a former VP and the president he served under (Obasanjo) still insists the dude remains a monument to corruption.
There's been a coordinated campaign at all levels to rig this election massively and we saw voter intimidation, manipulation in broad daylight, and the acquiescence of foreign governments to it all.
Tinubu claimed to be making $850k in annual pre-tax bonuses working for Deloitte. Today, Directors at Deloitte make 340k total comp annually, according to Glassdoor, and that's before you factor in inflation. What type of joke is this?
churchill I am not attacking you, I am just drawing your attention to bring solid evidence.
the link you provided, I couldn't find where the article states that Tinibu is accused of Drug trafficking or Shettima Terrorism.
Considering the needlessly passive aggressive tone, I would assume you are a supporter. Maybe it can be more useful conversation if you write your perspective on the matter instead of demanding easy to find articles about the Bola Ahmed Tinubu Heroin Trafficking Indictment?
To explain the $460k he forfeited to the feds for his heroin trafficking indictment [0][1], Tinubu claims to have worked at Deloitte as a consultant & made $850k in pre-tax bonuses a year. Problem is, Deloitte claims he's never worked for them [2] and a director at Deloitte earns $340k, according to Glassdoor [3].
> a director at Deloitte earns $340k, according to Glassdoor
This in no way undermines your post, broadly. But narrowly, these are sales roles. Two people with the same title at Deloitte can make vastly different incomes depending on their production.
Bola Ahmed Tinubu was born 29 March 1952. He is 70.
Joe Biden was Born November 20, 1942. He is 80.
There are plenty of world leaders that are old and I completely agree with you. Why aren’t there upper age limits?
The UK House of Lords, US Congress and US Supreme Court have this problem too.
Until recently, old age was supposed to be a Good Thing in leaders, because experience would (or rather should) provide perspective to go beyond hysterical everyday squabbles and actually produce Laws that could survive in the long run. It would also mean such leaders had gone through challenging jobs, and demonstrated themselves worthy of higher office.
It happens in the US too. Tribalism and ideological clustering are so similar, they are being used interchangeably these days. But in some traditional countries there are literal clans and tribes voting in blocks.
Yep, bloc voting can be habitual or strategic. There's a town in Northern California where the majority of the seats on the council is held by people who all happen to attend the same megachurch.
> it suggests that most people are easily swayed by their local peers.
That feels like a particularly uncharitable interpretation to me.
I think it's more along the lines of that parties and their policies have very different impacts on different regions. So it makes sense to vote on what is beneficial to your region, and a lot of people will agree on that.
So it's not about susceptibility to being "swayed", but genuine policy affecting regions differently.
From the article, it seems like the rush was to collect enough evidence to file a challenge within the legal timeframe. With a challenge filed, it seems like there is a bit more time to verify claims + other evidence. (I know nothing of the system of government there, but) -- it seems like the prudent thing to do would be for the courts to mandate a neutral verification of each of those paper sheets. (ie, 10 trusted representatives from each party re-key the figures manually).
If you want, you have exactly the same issue to solve with Kenya last year.
The pictures of all of the voting sites are available, but the country went to chaos to pick a winner. It is crazy , because on the lower level (in voting offices), the vote process was respected and the numbers are trustworthy, but the higher you go and the more corruption happens, as each aggregation of data removes trust to the system.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadhttps://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/opposition-files-petiti...
Some more background: https://ng.usembassy.gov/nigerias-2023-elections/
Sometimes, one person's bug is another person's feature :)
If memory serves, some CAPTCHA techniques include showing two numbers to transcribe, where one’s value is already known. If that number is transcribed incorrectly, then the other number’s result isn’t used, and the CAPTCHA fails. Perhaps a similar technique may have also helped here?
>Then we started showing some results we knew to the bots - if they entered wrong numbers, we would stop accepting the results.
It seems like a better approach would be to make them think you were accepting the results, when in fact they were going to the bit bucket. Hackers trying to get into your corporate database should be presented with a table full of false (but plausible) data rather than an error. Let them waste time trying to use all those fake SS numbers or account numbers before they figure out they got duped.
Assuming you have the bandwidth to absorb the bot load, which sounded like it was an issue here.
It seems one should record all entries, but only update a canonical db if all entries fail to trip automated tampering detections.
There have also been funny defcon-talks about messing with attackers about this, by returning all kinds of messed up return codes, slow-lorry'ing the bot, ... I'm kind of wondering if you could SSRF (or rather, CSRF) a bot like this by returning a redirect to e.g. the AWS metadata API... could be a fun topic to mess with.
So I give you two words to transcribe to prove you are human. I know one of them and I want to know the other.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA:
> The original iteration of the service was a mass collaboration platform designed for the digitization of books, particularly those that were too illegible to be scanned by computers. The verification prompts utilized pairs of words from scanned pages, with one known word used as a control for verification, and the second used to crowdsource the reading of an uncertain word.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HhV9iJxXTU9liAZPIDoM...
...shows 0s in the first row for all candidate parties. But the corresponding photo shows votes for all three:
https://inec-cvr-cache.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/cached/res...
I hope it's not a mistake and that there's some arcane law/technicality to explain it.
edit: another mistake on row 21, LP should get 25 but it was credited to NNPP:
https://docs.inecelectionresults.net/elections_prod/1292/sta...
Worse is when the elite is not so wise (sometimes plainly crazy), or the elite loses control to crazy people, adversaries. Or self-induced mass hysteria of the population.
The direct "democracy" that very soon will inevitably be enabled by technology, poses great dangers in the situation where masses are so easily manupulateable, and their collective intelligence seems not raising above individual level, but degrading below it for some reason. Violent chaos, lynch courts, etc.
Great story! Looking forward to some follow up
https://punchng.com/nigeriaelections2023-datti-loses-polling...
The crosschecked results are in KADUNA_crosschecked on line 3800. The image is here: https://inec-cvr-cache.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/cached/res...
Accredited voters: 276, Registered voters: 750, APC: 98, LP: 54, PDP: 102, NNPP: 11
All that said, I don't think that the results for 276 voters in one polling unit in one ward in one local government area in one state is clear evidence that Obi lacks support. If anything, the fact that OP's CSV matches a (potentially biased) news article gives me more faith in OP's tallies and claims.
(Aside: it seems _easier_ to lose an election in your own polling unit, where variance plays a larger part, than it is to lose on a wider scale.)
And second, electronic systems can create a paper trail, just make the electronic machine spit out a paper receipt. Then you have the best of both worlds, you can have instant electronic totals, and then do some random sampling recounts of the receipts to validate the result.
Scaling an attack against a computer system is almost the same as doing an attack against a computer system. Few attacks don't scale.
But yeah, if you just print the vote and push it into an urn (while the voter can read it), you'll get the best of both worlds.
Now the person making the vote has to check the receipt matches their input, and they probably don't have a practical form of redress if it doesn't.
If those in power are against change, I wouldn't want to have to put my trust in electronic voting if I was hoping for change.
I was left with the impression that it is the paper records in this story that led to the unravelling of an attempt to forge the results.
Long live paper ballots.
The manual tallying of paper records is what lead to the attempt to forge the results in the first place. If the results were electronically tallied to generate an official result, then they wouldn't need to recount the whole election to verify the result, just doing a statistically significant random sampling of the polls to recount would be enough.
Electronic voting doesn't make bad politicians less bad. In this instance, the bad guys were prepared to deliberately remove CCTV so when they sent their goons out at night to shoot protestors there would be no evidence.
"Electronic tallies" are never going to give a free and fair election if those in power are prepared to go that far. Safer to stick with paper ballots and election observers equipped with Mark I eyeballs.
Ballot machines print either a final tally at the end of the day, or print every single vote and automatically drop it into a physical ballot, depending on the threat model of the country in question. Either way the you have partial or total recount.
Let's the clear, you're not really "recounting" the ballots at that point. If the machine is compromised - and we're discussing a situation in which we know CCTV was removed and people were then shot - you have no real idea if the receipt corresponds to the voter's original intent. Or, indeed, if all the receipts from all the voters make it as far as the recount (?)
> Ballot machines print either a final tally at the end of the day, or print every single vote and automatically drop it into a physical ballot, depending on the threat model of the country in question.
How is reprinting the final automated tally supposed to represent a "recount" of the original automated tally?
> Either way the you have partial or total recount.
You really don't. Bits of paper and Mark I eyeballs all the way.
As Tom Scott puts it, "The key point is not is that paper voting is perfect - it isn't - but attacks against it don't scale well"[0].
[0] Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
If you want to detect tampering in the central totalling, then all you need is the end of day receipt of each ballot. Exactly like in OP's case.
If you want to detect tampering in a ballot, then you manually recount the individual printed paper votes inside that ballot. That is something that you should do to a random sample of ballots, plus ballots with unusual totals.
> As Tom Scott puts it, "The key point is not is that paper voting is perfect - it isn't - but attacks against it don't scale well"[0].
That is simply not true, large scale paper ballot tampering scales very well to the point of turning elections, and is much easier to pull off because it happens in the fringe where no one is looking (while tampering the electronic system would require pulling your heist in the IT room where everyone is looking).
In many countries, there are many tens of thousands of individual polling stations. A conspiracy to tamper with enough of them to make a difference isn't going to stay secret for very long because it would have to involve too many people. Tampering with paper ballots just doesn't scale, and in most places, election observers with their old-fashioned Mk I eyeballs are allowed to watch what's going on at every stage.
> (while tampering the electronic system would require pulling your heist in the IT room where everyone is looking)
How would we propose that an average human election observer is supposed to detect whether any particular system involved in electronic voting is - or isn't - in the process of "pulling a heist"?
When you introduce technology to eliminate manual counting and paper trails, then transparency is eliminated and you give a green light to fraud, corruption, very juicy contracts and death.
I don't understand what you think electronic voting solves...
By spot checking just a random 100 votes are correctly tallied, you can be pretty sure the outcome of the election is legit in a > 10M voter country.
How do you do that? I think the only error you could detect is when the tally has fewer votes for a party than what’s in that sample. If so, a fraudster could report 100 votes for every party, and add the remaining to whatever party they want to win.
One such design would be for every vote to have a unique id. When announcing the results, you also publish a list of which vote ids were tallied for which candidate.
Then you have 100 random ids, and the checkers watch those votes all the way from the voter casting them to the final tally.
Atiku Abubakar (second candidate) was a former VP and the president he served under (Obasanjo) still insists the dude remains a monument to corruption.
There's been a coordinated campaign at all levels to rig this election massively and we saw voter intimidation, manipulation in broad daylight, and the acquiescence of foreign governments to it all.
Google is your friend and you can verify everything I said about:
Tinubu's drug trafficking indictment: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-61732548
> he became an "instant millionaire" while working as an auditor at Deloitte and Touche.
[0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FhhvN-fXEAAOTOK?format=jpg&name=...
Tinubu claimed to be making $850k in annual pre-tax bonuses working for Deloitte. Today, Directors at Deloitte make 340k total comp annually, according to Glassdoor, and that's before you factor in inflation. What type of joke is this?
> While the court confirmed it had cause to believe the money in the bank accounts were the proceeds of drug trafficking
That being said, your comment came off as needlessly aggressive to someone who knows nothing of these people or politics.
https://businessday.ng/news/article/u-s-court-judgement-indi...
Also this appears to be the Indictment document: https://www.scribd.com/document/580028043/Bola-Ahmed-Tinubu-...
Considering the needlessly passive aggressive tone, I would assume you are a supporter. Maybe it can be more useful conversation if you write your perspective on the matter instead of demanding easy to find articles about the Bola Ahmed Tinubu Heroin Trafficking Indictment?
Ahem, somebody tell the U.S. that
From the looks of it, if he runs it, it won't be a democracy
To explain the $460k he forfeited to the feds for his heroin trafficking indictment [0][1], Tinubu claims to have worked at Deloitte as a consultant & made $850k in pre-tax bonuses a year. Problem is, Deloitte claims he's never worked for them [2] and a director at Deloitte earns $340k, according to Glassdoor [3].
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-61732548 [1]: https://www.scribd.com/document/345742027/Bola-Tinubu-Heroin [2]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FhhgxX2WQAAWOVo?format=jpg [3]: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Deloitte-Director-Salaries-...
This in no way undermines your post, broadly. But narrowly, these are sales roles. Two people with the same title at Deloitte can make vastly different incomes depending on their production.
Bola Ahmed Tinubu was born 29 March 1952. He is 70.
Joe Biden was Born November 20, 1942. He is 80.
There are plenty of world leaders that are old and I completely agree with you. Why aren’t there upper age limits? The UK House of Lords, US Congress and US Supreme Court have this problem too.
Assuming the numbers are correct, then it suggests that most people are easily swayed by their local peers.
Is that common in say the USA?
That feels like a particularly uncharitable interpretation to me.
I think it's more along the lines of that parties and their policies have very different impacts on different regions. So it makes sense to vote on what is beneficial to your region, and a lot of people will agree on that.
So it's not about susceptibility to being "swayed", but genuine policy affecting regions differently.
https://www.icirnigeria.org/controversy-as-oxford-terminates...
that quotation is, indeed, fake: https://web.archive.org/web/20220128105324/https://www.polit...
The pictures of all of the voting sites are available, but the country went to chaos to pick a winner. It is crazy , because on the lower level (in voting offices), the vote process was respected and the numbers are trustworthy, but the higher you go and the more corruption happens, as each aggregation of data removes trust to the system.