Hacking the Presidential Election

An anonymous reader writes "Security researchers at a recent summit predicted US voters will be targeted by web-based dirty tricks campaigns as the 2008 election gets nearer. Spam, botnets and phishing all provide good opportunities to mislead voters and attack rivals with little risk of being caught, they say."

Comments

What about the voting machines?

[grandpa-geek]

In recent years, a major strategy of Republicans has been vote suppression and non-internet dirty tricks. For example, they have distributed flyers in poor African-American neighborhoods stating that the election was on Wednesday (instead of Tuesday) and that it was illegal -- and grounds for arrest and prosecution -- for anyone with an overdue rent bill to vote. These issues have been widely reported.

However, the bigger, not as well reported, scandal is in the findings of the California Secretary of State. She set up teams to do penetration tests of the all-electronic (DRE) voting machines. Although the vendors later howled about the information given the penetration test teams, the information was similar to what the US Defense Department has been giving its penetration test teams for the last quarter century.

The team that tested the Diebold machine found that a minimally-skilled malicious voter could gain administrative access to the machine and erase all votes cast up to that point in the election. The access required a tool, described as being commonly found in an office, small enough to conceal in the palm of the hand, and such that it would create no suspicion in the minds of polling place officials. The description sounds to me like a paper clip.

In the 2004 general election, the board of elections of a Maryland county normally carried by Democratic candidates reported that up to 5% of their machines (all Diebolds) were suspected of having lost some or all of their recorded votes. Could this have been the same attack described by the California penetration test team? If so, where else was it performed? What other voting machine shenanigans occurred in 2004? How did that influence the outcome in 2004?

There was also a group of statisticians who determined that the 2006 Democratic margin in winning control of the House of Representatives was significantly different from the margin calculated from exit polls. The difference was around 3%, but should have been much smaller, according to well-tested statistical concepts. This could have meant several more Democratic seats in the House. Could this have been the result of voting machine tampering similar to what the California test teams demonstrated?

Could the 2008 election be decided, not by the voters, but by the sophistication of voting machine tamperers?

Re:What about the voting machines?

[grandpa-geek]

"Now I'm no expert, but it seems to me that given a random distribution of voters throughout the day, it should be impossible to reliably skew the results of any particular machine using this method."

It is rare to find a random distribution of voters at a polling place. Neighborhoods tend to have fairly stable distributions of voter outlook, and polling places typically serve voters in a neighborhood or a group of neighborhoods. The 52-48 overall percentage result of an election is the sum of polling places with party ratios such as 50-50, 60-40, 40-60, 80-20, 20-80, 90-10, and 10-90. What tends to move is the party ratio, so for example, if a party is particularly strong in a given election, their 80-20 polling places might go to 90-10, while their opposition's 90-10's will go to 80-20.

A malicious voter going into an 80-20 or 90-10 polling place and deleting votes from a machine is predictably reducing the overall margin of the party having predominance at that polling place.

Re:What about the voting machines?

[sgtrock]

You proceed from false assumptions. The exit polls were quuite simply wrong. To base your argument on that is pretty damning.

Why do you state that the exit polls were wrong? Organizations have been doing them for quite literally, decades. Year after year, election after election, the exit polls matched up quite nicely with the actual voting results. I don't recall seeing any deviation up until the 2000 election, and I've been watching election results in the U.S. since the mid 60s.

Why all of a sudden did the deviations start to occur? If you know of solid evidence that the organizations doing the exit polls suddenly lost their expertise, I'd love to hear it. Failing that, I'm more inclined to accept the exit polls as circumstantial evidence that someone had been tampering with the elections. It seems to me that's a more logical inference to draw.

or maybe the other thing?

[Deanalator]

Maybe these spamnets are actually going to prove useful at getting information out there not suitable for mainstream media. I frequently get political spam about various events going on in the falun gong struggle in china. I would much rather be getting some spammer's political political opinion than the usual phish/pennystock/mortgage/penis type spam that I see every day.

Re:Only about Half of the eligible voters vote.

[Dutch Reagan's Ghost]

Your greatest cynicism is unrealistic. I'm a pollster who spends several hours a week analyzing polling data--believe me, that's a lot more than most "informed" folks--and the biggest issue in this election is unquestionably Iraq War II: Electric Boogaloo. This is a "change" election that will turn on the perceived failures of the Bush administration. The biggest factor is Bush's 30% approval rating and the structural disadvantage it gives Republicans, particularly those who haven't been careful to distance themselves from the war (among the top 3, that's McCain).

God and abortion are important, sure, followed by gays and, more distantly, guns, but these issues are no more prominent now then they have been in the past 20 years. You've also left out three issues that feature even more prominently in the minds of voters: immigration, health care and climate change.

And if you don't think this is an important election, you haven't been paying attention. The next president will manage the disengagement in Iraq (yes, it's inevitable), some sort of health care reform (although a total re-imagining is unlikely), the immigration question, give an up-or-down on a carbon tax/cap and trade scheme, and probably appoint 2 or 3 Supreme Court justices.

In short, your "analysis" is superficial and about 6 years out of date. But I guess I'm the idiot talking politics on Slashdot. So ignore the above--RON PAUL FTW!!!!111

Re:Not a hack, per se . . .

[EQ]

Funny you should mention Romney like that.

I've seen similar stuff about Giuliani and Thompson supporters, re: switching to Romney. Problem for them is that I know one of the names they used, called him up and he had never heard of such a thing. Just another lie planted by the Romney camp.

Its like the "EvangelicalsForMitt" website earlier this year onthe Republican side - they are neither Evangelicals, nor are they "For Mitt". Nothing more than a front for an Atlanta PR firm with Romney ties that feeds the press hack jobs on other Republicans and is covertly fed "opposition research" from the Romney campaign staff. They start spin, rumors and outright lies, and have been alleged to be behind a lot of the disnformation emails going around.

Romney seems to be trying to covertly throw a TON of mud at everyone while keeping himself at arms length. Behind that plastic facade is just another rich guy who thinks he can be plastic enough by faking his beliefs and dragging everyone else down, instead of moving himself up.

He'll be worse than Nixon if he buys his way in.

This comes from the things I learned and people I got to know when I did some legislative work. Politics is damend ugly, but it doesnt have to be. People like Romney and Hillary Clinton make it that way. Idealist will get squashed. Ask Obama who has been on the receiving end of Hillary's corporate hits, and Fred Thompson who is trying to be a small government Federalist in a "Big Government"/Corporatist Republican world.

Robocalls

[MillionthMonkey]

But honestly, we should be asking ourselves if we want people who stoop to such measures to make the policy for our country in the first place. I don't think I'm voting for any of them.

Those calls are designed to piss you off and make you want to stay home. So you look like a robocall success story. Just ignore the calls if you don't know who's making them. If you really want to know who's calling, listen to the entire thing because this information often comes at the end of the call.

Right before the last election people got flooded with robocalls where a dopey cheerful voice would say something like "Hello, I have some questions to ask you about Democratic candidate blah ... blah blah blah... blah blah blah... blah blah blah... paidforbythenationalrepublicancongressionalcommittee". Most people hung up before the end, but they kept getting the call.

Federal law allows political advocacy calls to numbers in the National Do-Not-Call registry, so those people had their lines tied up too. Nationwide, Democrats had narrow losses in seven Congressional districts that had been bombarded by the calls:

"We're just glad it's all over," said Betty Beatty, whose husband, Gale, was teaching a line dancing class at the recreation hall.
"They bugged us with their phone calls something terrible," said Betty, who voted for Buchanan because "with all her calls, Jennings, Jennings, Jennings, I wouldn't have voted for that woman if she were the only one running."
"The campaign was so ugly, so nasty, by the time the election came along I decided I couldn't trust either one of them," said Cheryl Crawford, a La Casa voter who cast a ballot in all the other categories, but left Jennings-Buchanan blank.
Crawford was one of only a handful of voters on Thursday who acknowledged protesting the campaign in the same way.
But most everybody knew somebody who knew somebody who refused to vote in that race.
Some were concerned that they may have missed the ballot line -- easily overlooked, they said, at the top of the second page, just before the gubernatorial candidates.
"I just didn't see it," said Monique Nadeau, who realized her oversight after reading newspaper accounts of the Jennings-Buchanan undervote.
Some residents suggested that the age of many of the voters in the 55-and-over community affected their ability to maneuver the electronic balloting equipment.
But Roger Lumley, who is about to turn 84, insisted that "the machines were very simple. Everything seemed to run smoothly." If people didn't vote in the District 13 race, he said, "I think it was all the backstabbing."
The phone calls were the worst of it, he said, "two and three and more a day -- most of them seeming to start out as an appeal from Jennings but I had a feeling," he said, that some of them were calls from her opponent's organization.
"I think many, many people were simply disgusted by the tone and tactics of the campaign, just turned off by it," said David Surles, a retired engineer who lives in La Casa with his wife, Fran, an on-premises real estate broker.
"One is just as bad as the other" he said, "and I would expect that a lot of people felt that way. Not voting for either one of them was a way of saying, 'Aha, I'll show you.'"

Thirteen percent of the people who actually showed up to vote in that election refused to pull a lever for either candidate in that race, to "protest". Jennings lost by 373 votes.

Re:Only about Half of the eligible voters vote.

[R2.0]

2 Items:

1) "The next president will manage the disengagement in Iraq (yes, it's inevitable)". Nixon was elected in 1968 largely on his promise to get out of Vietnam. He didn't, but still got reelected in '72. The reality is that, when opposition parties are elected in the middle of a war, they get a free pass. They can always say "We didn't start it" and "They left us with a bigger mess than we thought", which gives them the excuse to do dick-all for 4 years and then promise the same thing, only this time REALLY mean it.

2) "some sort of health care reform (although a total re-imagining is unlikely), the immigration question, give an up-or-down on a carbon tax/cap and trade scheme, and probably appoint 2 or 3 Supreme Court justices." Hasn't this been said before every presidential election for the past 20 years? Just because issues are important doesn't mean ther is any real impetus for politicians to solve them. If anything, an issues importance can be counterproductive - it is in the incumbent's interests to do absolutely nothing, because the proponents of the first change made will have their ass handed to tehm. It doesn't matter what the change is - SOMEONE will equate it with starving oldsters and mutilated kittens.

Re:Catch and Release

[jafac]

60 Million Bad Apples.

Just as the guy downthread who tries to argue that Ted Kennedy's drunk driving problem 40 years ago makes everything the Republicans are doing today, all right - there's no excuse for such stupidity.

People will not listen to what they don't want to hear. It's just a sad fact.
And there are two ways to look at anything: From a moral standpoint - these people who bury their head in the sand, have the blood of a half-million innocent Iraqi civilians on their hands. That's the morality of the situation. The torture, the destruction of everything we stand for as Americans, THEIR FAULT. They did it, because they wanted it - because they don't believe in America anymore. They believe in being selfish fascist pigs. They don't really believe in freedom, just using freedom as a word to club other people with.

Now, from an Engineering standpoint, I guess the solution is to just not allow anyone with an IQ less than 130 to vote. Politicians who take bribes or campaign contributions (read: public financed elections... money != speech), are immediately removed from office, and summarily executed. Journalists who lie are slapped.
That would solve a LOT of problems.