Sunday 1 October 2017

How would you hack an election?

If I wanted to win an election how would I do it?

In areas where there is no voter id what I need first is a list of past voting records. I need to know who doesn't vote. I need this because I am going to vote for them and I don't want any of them turning up by accident. People who are on the register but cannot vote because they are dead or incapacitated look like great candidates as well BUT these are too easy to check so actually I want to avoid this or someone might detect my fraud quite easily.

Once I have a lost of non-voters who are on the roll and alive and who could vote but never do what do I do next? I go to the polling station on their behalf and vote for them. Remember that they never vote and they are likely not to be recognised. I need to do this in small numbers at all of the polling stations. The more stations the better to spread the load and hide what I am doing. I don't want to do more than 50-100 votes in each of the stations. This means that my voting team needs to be at a maximum of 100 people. I do not want to have the same person voting at a station twice. These teams then move from station to station over the day. I can also do postal votes and absentee votes and these help. This is a big logistical operation but I don't care if I win the prize and control the government. You are talking thousands of operatives but they will target only a few key areas which can be flipped. Only marginals matter.

This is certainly possible for the swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin etc. if I have Russian man-power available but I would need a forward base and a long term plan to get the people in place over time. Combine this with analytics, targeted media a big fake news operation and you can win the election.

How would you recognise this in the results? Can it be detected? The only thing that you see is a higher than expected turnout, unexpected demographic shifts and a high turnout from previous non-voters. But all of this is plausible deniability. There is not way an audit can say that this fraud exists unless you corroborate all of the suspicious votes. This is the perfect undetectable hack. Oddly enough Trump and Brexit both depended on previous non-voters.

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