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Comment by sakopov | Hacker News Reader

Has everyone forgot about Wikileaks and its treasure trove of information about Clinton conspiring with DNC to drop Bernie Sanders out of the race? And that was just one of many things that were leaked. Why bother with malware when you can just dig up dirt on a candidate and release it to public? Don't get me wrong. I know Russia could do the hack but why would you bother with something so high-risk?

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This is a purely political argument that is entirely unrelated to the story, which is about the role computer science plays in the integrity of the ballot and is written by an authority on the topic. Injecting unrelated political drama into threads cruds them up with political arguments, and is a form of trolling. Please resist the urge next time?

Why? To ensure your work pays off. Dirt will get you most of the way but hacking will be a safety net. Really you wouldn't have to infect many machines. The states that were listed (and a few more) you wouldn't need to change much to sway the vote. And if you were only attacking a few dozen machines in each state the risk wouldn't be too high. You do have privacy in the polling booth and from what I've seen most hacks would only really take like a minute.

Not saying they did (I don't even think they did), but giving a reason why they might want to do that. Though I would like to hear the opinion of one of our HN security experts.

Trump was estimated to lose big.

If Latinos actually showed up like expected in Florida and Texas that election would be Clinton easily.

It still blows my mind 95% of Latinos didn't vote against Trump.

Russian hacking the ballot makes sense when your candidate is the dark horse

Perhaps the error is expecting all Latinos to act like a hive mind.

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