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Political Party's Leadership Election Hit By DDoS Attack
New submitter lyran74 writes "Saturday's electronic leadership vote for Canada's New Democratic Party was plagued by delays caused by a botnet DDoS attack, coming from over 10,000 machines. Details are still scarce, but Scytl, who provided electronic voting services, will have to build more robust systems in the future in anticipation of such attacks. Party and company officials say an audit proved the systems and integrity of the vote were not compromised."
Whoever did this, for any reasons whatsoever, is a total douche by destroying the democratic process.
Ya, because audits uncover everything and make me feel all warm and fuzzy!
Unlikely. Quebec was all over the NDP last election.
Unless they changed their minds since Jack's gone.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
... is that the ruling conservative party is already under investigation for illegal election tampering. It would seem to me that the current Canadian government is one of the most corrupt in the western hemisphere at the moment.
Then the integrity of the election is affected even if the integrity of the ballot box is not.
It's like if protesters blocking the streets make some voters "give up" on voting before they arrive at the polls. The ballot box's integrity is intact, but the election loses integrity.
We can only hope that the loss of integrity was spread around evenly so the winners and vote-percentages of the losers are the same as they would have been. We can only hope, we can never know for certain.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
hrm, well they changed their name (in 1961) to the "New Democratic Party" from the "New Party"..they seem to like the "New" name.
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
All this while the august house of Parliament debates in committee if nasty YouTube video is a threat to the democracy.
Money is okay, but please don't annonymously make threats to release the truth, it upsets the process.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/03/27/pol-vic-toews-anonymous.html
The procedure and House affairs committee is looking into threats posted on Youtube where a group called Anonymous promised to release personal information about Toews and his family if he didn't scrap Bill C-30, known as the lawful access or online surveillance bill.
Party names mean very little. When last were the "Republicans" major proponents of a republic?
Hearing NDP all of my life, the "new" part of the name has no literal meaning, it's all just mashed in with the rest and they are simply N-D-P. They are what they are.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Whoever did this is a hero, for demonstrating that the electronic voting process was broken, and in particular for doing a proof of concept attack on a "party leadership" election which doesn't really matter very much.
Believe it or not, despite this being a big political scandal, there is an even bigger one unfolding in Canada. This other one could make Watergate look minor. Actual Watergate criminals have expressed shock at how big RoboCon could be.
Some group conspired during the last Canadian general election to place (hundreds of?) thousands of misleading and/or harrassing phone calls to members of the Liberals and NDP predominantly, to suppress their votes. The Conservative Party was the benefactor of this plot, obtaining a majority government in our Parliament, giving the Prime Minister nearly unchecked power for 5 years. It's been calculated by a professor and independent researcher, LaRue, from Quebec (now living Stateside), that the Robocalls may have affected the outcome in as many as 18 ridings (12 gave the Conservatives a majority).
I've spoken with LaRue, and I trust his findings. His other unreleased allegations are also huge. I'm not exaggerating. I think he's ahead of the RCMP and Elections Canada in their own respective investigations.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
This is the first time they've managed to get anywhere politically. Previously they were just dividing the left wing and handing power to conservatives through several elections, or they were 3rd and 4th rate fiddles to the liberals, the conservatives, and the bloc quebecois (the french separatists).
They've been trying (and until this past election failing) to present themselves as the 'new left' to replace the liberals. Whether this new found success will last past one election is anyones guess.
They didn't change it. They never were the "democratic" party (There've been two of those, both in BC, both short lived and unsuccessful).
In 1958, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (a socialist political party formed in the 1930s) and the Canadian Labour Congress (a union federation) jointly form the National Committee for the New Party to form a new social-democratic political party. The organizations surrounding the committee took up the "New Party" bit and when the party was actually founded in 1961, they decided to just keep the "New" bit as it was already well recognized.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Thomas Mulcair was elected as the new NDP leader on Saturday.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Uh... it does in this case.
They started with I think 6 candidates. A couple dropped out in the first round, some more in the second until it was just two candidates.
Even though everyone knew well in advance who 3 of the candidates were going to be, and you could reasonably guess the top 2, the process is an elimination rounds system until one person got a majority (of party voters).
Basically every couple of hours was another round of voting, and the idea was to engage all the NDP membership even if they didn't want to fly to a convention. Until you actually know who's running, especially in each round, you can't vote effectively in advance. Some people did, not being NDP I'm not sure exactly how that process worked, but the idea was to see how it worked with people voting real time.
Also, it didn't matter if it was gummed up, because the NDP have no political power (the conservatives have a majority), and they won't have to run in an election for at least 3 years so there's there's time to find a better leader if they don't like the one chosen or, lets face it, 3 years is a long time, they may have to do this again several times for any number of reasons.
"Until you actually know who's running, especially in each round, you can't vote effectively in advance. Some people did, not being NDP I'm not sure exactly how that process worked, but the idea was to see how it worked with people voting real time."
Advance voting was done via preferential ballot. You rank everyone in order of preference. If your first place candidate gets eliminated, your vote shifts to the next person still in the running.
It turns out that 85% of the votes cast were advanced ballots, so the people logging in to vote round round by round or who voted in person at the convention had a very limited ability to change the outcome.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Even though they've always been third or fourth place federally, they've still managed to get some things adopted that they implemented in provincial government - healthcare, for example.
They took 1930's poor dirt-farmer Saskatchewan and made it.. well, paved and electrified, at least, in short order.
Funny thing is, cons always run their mouths about NDP being a fiscal disaster if they ever got power, but historically, in provincial governments they've always been the most fiscally sound, rarely running deficits (our 'prudent' cons actually have the worst record). I guess it's that old line about repeating something often enough, sheep will believe it.