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Comment by learc83 | Hacker News Reader

In a close election it's potentially feasible to flip an election by hacking the machines in a few hundred precincts across 2 or 3 states. Still unlikey but potentially feasible given a determined, well funded adversary.

And you wouldn't have to actually flip the election to undermine it's legitimacy.

>In other words. Hacking the election is up there with the us planned 9/11

9/11 happened, so someone planned it. Very few people are worried about the US government hacking voting precincts. They're worried about a foreign government doing it.

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If an election were flipped in such a way, it would be noticeable because the candidate would lose the popular vote (since the popular vote is a robust statistic and can't be flipped without a large number of hacked machines) but would somehow happen to win by a very narrow margin in a few critical swing states.

(Of course the same is true of any other campaign technique, legitimate or illegitimate, that relies on targeting specific precincts.)

And if an election were flipped in such a way, it would turn out to be impossible to verify the results in a recount.

http://time.com/4599886/detroit-voting-machine-failures-were...

> If an election were flipped in such a way, it would be noticeable because the candidate would lose the popular vote (since the popular vote is a robust statistic and can't be flipped without a large number of hacked machines) but would somehow happen to win by a very narrow margin in a few critical swing states.

sooo exactly what happened this election, roughly?

Was this sarcasm?

In case it wasn't, in the last election the candidate that won lost the popular vote by about 3 million votes. But won 3 critical swing states by about 80k votes total.

There was no widespread auditing of the voting machine code after this happened.

Hacking the machines in a few hundred precincts is impossible and not more possible today than it was 10 or 20 years ago.

9/11 happened because someone outside the government planned it and it didn't need that many to work. If the US government was behind it the way the conspiracy theories are told, it would have had to involve tens of thousands of people. Hacking the election to be anything meaningful would require exactly the same thing.

I don't understand what makes you think some massive conspiracy would be required. With a remote exploit you wouldn't need many conspirators at all. And plenty of elections are stolen each year the old-fashioned way with a massive number of conspirators, and ... it works.

Remote how? They aren't connected to the net.

You sure about that? Most of them have WiFi cards in them; they're connected to something, that is likely reachable from the net.

You can also imagine a single person compromising the firmware to be used in the next election to randomly flip enough votes over to a specific side to cause a win. This could be done by either an insider, or an outsider that has managed to hack the voting machine company's network.

Yes i am sure about that.

Why would it require tens of thousands of people?

Again, if an election is close you can flip it with less than 100k votes. And even if you don't flip it, you can cast doubt on it's legitimacy if you leak some information showing what you did.

The machines are generally stored in centralized locations that aren't particularly secure.

If there are exploits that can be ran from a USB drive, one break in and you could hack machines that will be used by tens of thousands of voters.

You could potentially pay off a security guard to let a few people in or just pay someone has access to the stored machines to do it for you.

The CIA could definitely pull this off in another country, not sure why you think a foreign government couldn't do it here.

We managed to load stuxnet onto airgapped embedded computers in a high security nuclear facility. Voting machines are easy compared to that.

I have no idea why you think you need tens of thousands of people to install an exploit on a few thousand centrally stored computers, built and maintained by a few companies.

You make it sound like those hacker movies where the bad guys have free access to networks and no security protocol around this.

Voting machines in the us isn't easy compared to that at all. Irans security protocols are easy.

As long as there is a paper trail you can't just hack the US election EVEN if you got into hacking the machine which is extremely unlikely. Unless you convinced thousands of people to be in on your scheme. It won't happen.

>You make it sound like those hacker movies where the bad guys have free access to networks and no security protocol around this. Voting machines in the us isn't easy compared to that at all. Irans security protocols are easy.

I'm sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about.

>As long as there is a paper trail you can't just hack the US election

What paper trails? There is no paper backup for many of state's election machines, that's the problem.

> 9/11 happened because someone outside the government planned it and it didn't need that many to work. If the US government was behind it the way the conspiracy theories are told, it would have had to involve tens of thousands of people.

Would it?

First off - I don't believe the evidence supports the US government doing it. I'm not saying there aren't any unanswered or uninvestigated questions, only that the evidence we do have and has been investigated doesn't support it being an "inside job". That said...

Why couldn't Bin Laden have been supplied money and plans via say the CIA or something? Obviously covertly, in such a manner that Bin Laden wasn't aware that this was being done on the behest of the CIA. If the money and such were coming from some black-ops line item in the budget, and things were kept extremely tight inside the government agency and abroad, I honestly don't think 10000+ people would be in the know, or need to be used. It could probably be done with fewer than 100 people, and if those 100 people were dedicated enough, they would likely all keep mum about it, especially if the plan succeeded.

Basically, I'm postulating on the fictional idea that there could be a group of people, high up in a government or other quasi-government agency, who are (in effect) led and acting on a hardcore fundamentalist belief system that says that (for whatever reason) the US needs to experience this attack and for it to happen in such a manner to change things. Essentially, an inside rogue terrorist cell. Perhaps it was built up over the decades since the Reagan years (or even further back), with the idea that once large enough, the plan would be carried out in such a way to not implicate them, and ultimately install their guy at the top. Kinda a slow-mo coup or something, with the attack being the illegal precursor to the takeover via legal means (because of terror and fear pushing people to vote in a much different manner - perhaps manipulated as well).

Probable? Not likely, outside of Tom Clancy novel. Possible? Well - perhaps. We've learned of stranger things in history, long after the events have passed.

Ultimately, there's no evidence for any of this being the case, and it's just a fictional possibility. But I don't think it is something that would require 10000+ people to pull off; that's only necessary if the group doing the work needs it done "now" - and isn't willing to wait decades for the final shoe to drop.

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