4 ms·

Ohio has 88 counties, Michigan has 83, etc. You know which ones to target in advance? You can't just bribe the Secretary of State or something, you need to infi

Ohio has 88 counties, Michigan has 83, etc. You know which ones to target in advance? You can't just bribe the Secretary of State or something, you need to infiltrate at a county level and modify the original results or it will be trivial to find out something went wrong.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ryandrake 8y ago
If your only full time job was to guarantee an election win for a candidate, you would know exactly which counties to target nationwide. There are only so many of them and we have these things called computers...
- burkaman 8y ago
  No you wouldn't. Many people have full-time jobs trying to predict elections, and they are not nearly accurate enough to zero in on a small number of essential districts. They don't even do very well on the state level. Also, the election landscape shifts constantly, so you can't do this work very far in advance. How long will it take you to set up a system to "hack" Michigan's paper ballots? Even if you somehow perfectly predict the 12 counties necessary to flip the result a year in advance, which again is impossible, can you really infiltrate those counties thoroughly enough to be undetectable? Edit: "your only full time job was to guarantee an election win for a candidate" What you're describing is a campaign manager. You'll notice that during presidential elections, the candidates always have different theories of the electorate and will pick different places to focus their efforts. So either: the losing campaign is always so massively incompetent that they don't even know which states to target, even though you say predicting counties is pretty easy when "we have computers", or elections are actually quite difficult and unpredictable.
  - everdev 8y ago
    Sure, but I think in this theoretical example of someone trying to manipulate an election, they'd pick the top X swing states, which are pretty well known. Of those, they'd pick the top X most populated cities in each swing state. Again, I have not heard anyone say this happened, but I think it's reasonable to assume that the potential attack surface might be fairly small (a few heavily populated counties in a few states) if someone were to want to try. FiveThirtyEight has county by county election data and it's widely discussed on election nights how certain counties vote heavily R or D. You wouldn't be flipping any counties political preference, just minimizing the win % in urban areas might be enough.
    - burkaman 8y ago
      Now you're trading a prediction problem for an implementation problem as I explained in another comment. A few heavily populated counties is not a small attack surface. You need to hack hundreds of airgapped optical scanners in each state (and they all use different machines), not too much or too little, because then you'll trigger a recount using the real paper ballots. You still need basically perfect prediction to win and stay undetected, and you're up against big election departments with tons of employees and lots of integrity checks.
everdev 8y ago
Gerrymandering is a thing because politicians and those in the election-economy do have this data. I agree it's a big problem to try to rig the vote in each rural county. But, to go into a metropolitan area and boost or suppress the vote would be easier, especially in states that have only a few big cities. For example, a 10% adjustment in Phoenix might be enough to swing Arizona, as it has about 1/4 of the state's population.
- burkaman 8y ago
  The bigger the county, the tougher the job. That's why I'm saying this is so difficult; for a realistic hack you'd want to change as few votes as possible. If you really could predict the whole election in advance, you could pick and choose small counties with defeatable systems. Targeting big cities solves the prediction problem, but makes your hack infeasible. Phoenix is in Maricopa County, which used two different types of voting machines in 2016. One of them is a paper ballot optical scanner, which prints out a paper tally at the end of the day. So you'd need to hack hundreds of these airgapped machines, and predict the results well enough to not trigger a recount with your changes, since there are paper ballots to compare against. I think this is just as impossible as choosing key counties in advance.
  - everdev 8y ago
    I guess I'm not familiar with how votes are tallied. Are results visible to election officials in real time as people cast ballots or only at the end? Wouldn't it be feasible to look at a midterm election or registered voters (say you had a 70/30 D/R split) and pre-set a machine to return a 60/40 result?
    - burkaman 8y ago
      Depends on the system, but Maricopa County used this machine in 2016, where a polling place official only sees a tally at the end: https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/voting-equipment/sequoia/optech-insight/ https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/voting-equipment/se... Your idea is feasible if you can break into a warehouse and hack hundreds of these machines, but do you think it's possible to change ~150,000 votes, resulting in a a 10 point swing from recent polls and exit polls, and remain undetected? Remember you're in a big city with lots of news organizations and big elections departments.

deleted 8y ago

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ryandrake 8y ago

If your only full time job was to guarantee an election win for a candidate, you would know exactly which counties to target nationwide. There are only so many of them and we have these things called computers...

burkaman 8y ago
No you wouldn't. Many people have full-time jobs trying to predict elections, and they are not nearly accurate enough to zero in on a small number of essential districts. They don't even do very well on the state level. Also, the election landscape shifts constantly, so you can't do this work very far in advance. How long will it take you to set up a system to "hack" Michigan's paper ballots? Even if you somehow perfectly predict the 12 counties necessary to flip the result a year in advance, which again is impossible, can you really infiltrate those counties thoroughly enough to be undetectable? Edit: "your only full time job was to guarantee an election win for a candidate" What you're describing is a campaign manager. You'll notice that during presidential elections, the candidates always have different theories of the electorate and will pick different places to focus their efforts. So either: the losing campaign is always so massively incompetent that they don't even know which states to target, even though you say predicting counties is pretty easy when "we have computers", or elections are actually quite difficult and unpredictable.
- everdev 8y ago
  Sure, but I think in this theoretical example of someone trying to manipulate an election, they'd pick the top X swing states, which are pretty well known. Of those, they'd pick the top X most populated cities in each swing state. Again, I have not heard anyone say this happened, but I think it's reasonable to assume that the potential attack surface might be fairly small (a few heavily populated counties in a few states) if someone were to want to try. FiveThirtyEight has county by county election data and it's widely discussed on election nights how certain counties vote heavily R or D. You wouldn't be flipping any counties political preference, just minimizing the win % in urban areas might be enough.
  - burkaman 8y ago
    Now you're trading a prediction problem for an implementation problem as I explained in another comment. A few heavily populated counties is not a small attack surface. You need to hack hundreds of airgapped optical scanners in each state (and they all use different machines), not too much or too little, because then you'll trigger a recount using the real paper ballots. You still need basically perfect prediction to win and stay undetected, and you're up against big election departments with tons of employees and lots of integrity checks.

everdev 8y ago

Gerrymandering is a thing because politicians and those in the election-economy do have this data. I agree it's a big problem to try to rig the vote in each rural county. But, to go into a metropolitan area and boost or suppress the vote would be easier, especially in states that have only a few big cities. For example, a 10% adjustment in Phoenix might be enough to swing Arizona, as it has about 1/4 of the state's population.

burkaman 8y ago
The bigger the county, the tougher the job. That's why I'm saying this is so difficult; for a realistic hack you'd want to change as few votes as possible. If you really could predict the whole election in advance, you could pick and choose small counties with defeatable systems. Targeting big cities solves the prediction problem, but makes your hack infeasible. Phoenix is in Maricopa County, which used two different types of voting machines in 2016. One of them is a paper ballot optical scanner, which prints out a paper tally at the end of the day. So you'd need to hack hundreds of these airgapped machines, and predict the results well enough to not trigger a recount with your changes, since there are paper ballots to compare against. I think this is just as impossible as choosing key counties in advance.
- everdev 8y ago
  I guess I'm not familiar with how votes are tallied. Are results visible to election officials in real time as people cast ballots or only at the end? Wouldn't it be feasible to look at a midterm election or registered voters (say you had a 70/30 D/R split) and pre-set a machine to return a 60/40 result?
  - burkaman 8y ago
    Depends on the system, but Maricopa County used this machine in 2016, where a polling place official only sees a tally at the end: https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/voting-equipment/sequoia/optech-insight/ https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/voting-equipment/se... Your idea is feasible if you can break into a warehouse and hack hundreds of these machines, but do you think it's possible to change ~150,000 votes, resulting in a a 10 point swing from recent polls and exit polls, and remain undetected? Remember you're in a big city with lots of news organizations and big elections departments.