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DEFCON Conference To Target Voting Machines (politico.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: Hackers will target American voting machines -- as a public service, to prove how vulnerable they are. When over 25,000 of them descend on Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas at the end of July for DEFCON, the world's largest hacking conference, organizers are planning to have waiting what they call "a village" of different opportunities to test how easily voting machines can be manipulated. Some will let people go after the network software remotely, some will be broken apart to let people dig into the hardware, and some will be set up to see how a prepared hacker could fiddle with individual machines on site in a polling place through a combination of physical and virtual attacks. With all the attention on Russia's apparent attempts to meddle in American elections --
former President Barack Obama and aides have made many accusations toward Moscow, but insisted that there's no evidence of actual vote tampering --
voting machines were an obvious next target, said DEFCON founder Jeff Moss.
Because it's too hard to get an ID?
Indeed, that idea itself is most definitely racist, if you go by a reasonable definition of "racism". It implies that black people are incapable of obtaining a state-issued ID while everyone else who wants to vote has no problem doing it.
Apparently this is solely because they are black. It cannot be because of any concern about poverty because there are lots of poor white people (more in fact). Also, the proposed "solution" is always to abandon any voter ID requirement. To subsidize the small cost of state-issued IDs (the DMV fee/etc) or give them away for free to low-income people is never seriously proposed.
Of course, when the shoe is on the other foot, Dems sqauwk for voter ID:
If you were expecting a principled stance from any politician you are definitely going to be disappointed. They support whatever seems to be in their immediate interests at that particular time, no matter what they perceived to be in their interests in the past. The "Dems" are not unique in this respect. Power plus a lack of any real personal accountability seems to do this to people.
It won't change until we all realize that an honest, trustworthy voting/electoral process is in everyone's interests and that this is not a difficult problem to solve.
Of course, because mandating a separate photo ID for voting only, which expires after a single election, and is only able to be obtained from a limited number of locales, some of which disproportionately placed in affluent neighborhoods is in no way thinly veiled racism.
Thirty four characters live here.
Add to this, closing DMV offices in areas where minorities live. Add to that Kafka-esque requirements for how you document who you are before they give you an ID in the first place. Send people away with no idea for bureaucratic reasons for a couple of times. The obvious question is how big a problem is voter impersonation fraud. And when pressed, officials are only able to come up with a *very* small number of cases.
I'm all for requiring ID, if you make it free and easy to get.
But that's not really what this is about, and claims to the contrary ignore both the factual evidence, as well as the long history in the U.S. of politically motivated hurdles to voting. Only in the USA do we actively make it HARDER for people to cast a ballot.
This is why, in states where they've mandated voter ID, those same legislatures have also closed down DMV offices and cut hours, making it actively harder for people to get that ID. Oh, sure, they're not stopping you from voting, they're simply putting up another hurdle, knowing that some portion of the people it's targeted against will simply decide it's too much hassle.
Empirical evidence has also shown that it's a vanishingly small problem, on the order of magnitude where misprocessed ballots are likely to have more impact on an election. Also, the size and scope of a conspiracy required to mobilize a number of people large enough to have a significant impact, at the direct risk of felony conviction for something that is easily traced to them, is the stuff of ridiculous Hollywood movie plots at best.
On the other hand, there's real reason to be concerned about closed-source systems being used to tabulate votes, especially when in some cases there is no outside paper trail to confirm what the machine is saying. Why bother bribing people to come in person, when I can just have a hacker run a program that adds or alters the counts in the machine?
But widespread hacking seems to me to be a near impossibility, due to the way the US election system is set up. For those outside the country: We don't have a central counting system. It's district-by-district, state-by-state. With different machines, people, safeguards, watchers, etc. Not impermeable, but pretty darn good.
You don't need widespread hacking. You only have to hack certain key swing locations.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In-person voter fraud is shockingly rare. (Some states have mandated picture ID or other forms of identification to vote for years, by the way.) From 2000-2012, there were 2,068 cases of voter fraud. 10 of those were in-person voter fraud.
10.
So, the ostensible goal of most of these voter ID laws, that they need to be in place to stop voter fraud, is really a non-factor. This is a solution in search of a problem.
Then why do it?
Well, for one, it's an appeal to ignorance. "There has to be voter fraud, we don't have any way to stop it!" Except, of course, we do. Even states that don't require picture ID have methods of catching fraudulent ballots.
For another, it's clearly being used as a way to block certain types of voters (poor, minorities) from legally accessing one of their rights. It's not a coincidence that those blocks of voters tend towards voting for the Democratic party.
Now, don't get me wrong. I think it makes sense that everyone should have a picture ID. It's damn useful to be able to prove who you are to the cops, to potential employers, whatever.
But let's make it accessible. Don't close down places that provide picture ID, don't make it harder.
No political party with honest intent should be trying to restrict people from voting.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Still: don't let all this geeky stuff detract from the elephant in the room: buying Facebook personal data in bulk and correlating it with past votes, then sending targeted fake news has done much more in the last big polls
The elephant in the room is that the opposing candidate was Hillary Clinton. The spite candidate prevailed in the primaries on both sides, except on the Republican side it was the voter's spite for their party, and on the Democratic side it was the party's spite for their voters.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!