Evidence Shows Hackers Changed Votes in the 2016 Election but No One Admits It | Hacker News Reader

Evidence Shows Hackers Changed Votes in the 2016 Election but No One Admits It

theroot.com

58 pointsnhoven42 comments

Even stronger evidence shows the Republican Party worked with Russian intelligence to obtain the voter rolls that they used in their micro-targeting ad campaigns, but oddly enough nobody is talking about that. Aaron Nevins literally bragged about recieving stolen property from Russian intelligence and using that to further his political goals of electing republicans.

Thats a big claim. Do you have a source on that?

It's a much smaller claim than the one in the article.

Literally google Aaron Nevins. He openly discusses it.

It's a ridiculous claim. The Republicans and Democrats already had official, above-board access to the electoral roll data, and it's not sufficient for even the most basic campaign let alone micro-targetting. Political parties put a huge amount of effort into augmenting that data with the information they need to actually run their campaign, sometimes literally sending volunteers door-to-door to ask voters. This is how campaigning has worked since before Facebook even existed.

The whole idea that Republicans and Russians conspired to do micro-targetting with voter rolls basically preys on people's cluelessness about how political campaigns work and their willingness to believe anything that involves Trump and Russia stealing the election. The fact that it wouldn't work and makes no sense doesn't matter.

So Georgia rather then let DHS look at their machines decided to delete and wipe them clean? and the backups? Why would they do that unless something was wrong?

The FBI made full images of all Georgia machines.

Source?

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/18/mueller-i...

"The good news is that FBI agents in Atlanta made a mirror image of the server that Lamb breached when they were investigating his intrusion, and the plaintiffs are hoping the judge overseeing their case will rule that they can examine this image. It’s unclear, however, whether the image preserved everything that was on the server and whether the image still exists.

A spokesman for the FBI’s Atlanta office refused to comment on the matter and referred POLITICO to KSU. KSU did not respond."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/10/26/computer-file...

"The FBI is known to have made an exact data image of the server in March when it investigated the security hole. The email that disclosed the server wipe said the state attorney general's office was "reaching out to the FBI to determine whether they still have the image."

Atlanta FBI spokesman Stephen Emmett, responding to AP questions, would not say whether that image still exists. Nor would he say whether agents examined it to determine whether the server's files might have been altered by unauthorized users."

I remain shocked that voting machines are not open source and publicly auditable.

I'm also surprised the NSA isn't specifically tasked with a regular, detailed, high-resources code review of the codebase.

The biggest problem would be open sourcing everything, not just the software that used. The OS, the network configurations/setup, access controls/policies, etc. Even then, without a verifiable and private way of verifying counts, we could never be sure about a vote count.

Do it on an openly observable blockchain so everyone can see what’s going on in realtime

I knew once I posted it that someone would suggest using a block chain.

The problem with the block chain is privacy. Publishing people’s votes can and will have a huge impact on their life. It would also make buying votes much easier.

A block chain solution would have to find a way to ensure that only valid voters can place a vote, ensure that only people that could vote were the only people that placed a vote after the fact, and ensure that none of this can be tied to a real identity. Otherwise, either bad actors could place votes, or a complete voting record for a person is published.

Solve all of the above, and a block chain may be an acceptable way to go, though it would be a waste of energy in my mind compared to a normal database, which could easily be exported with only the vote and signature stating it was a valid and verified vote for a person.

In the end, we have just made something more complicated than a paper ballot, which has been shown to be reasonably secure against foreign and/or national actors attempting to influence an election, except in already corrupt nations, especially those without term limits...

A distributed ledger with an entry for every single voter who gets to move their single “token” from one column to another column with their selection. Roll it up and there’s your result. Enough bits and everyone can have their own token that is unique, anonymous and secure. The argument about corrupt regimes is a nonstarter cause you’ve got bigger problems.

Any government agency tasked with securing the electronic voting systems would be the next government agency accused by the losing side of being under the orders of a foreign power.

Part of the problem is that voting is up to the states, it's not a function of the federal government.

Not entirely. There's the Voting Rights Act, for one thing.

And if hackers can change my vote, that arguably is the same as denying me the right to vote. That could fall within the scope of the Voting Rights Act, and therefore be a Federal matter.

That would happen if the people in charge actually wanted Democracy to work.

In their minds; Democracy is a facade used to convince the American People that they have any say or influence on their government.

Actually; a form of "Security Theater".

Georgia was traditionally a red state so even if the votes were changed it wouldn't have affected the result.

Are any swing states suspected of having their voting system hacked to have changed the final result?

It is weird that the electronic voting system is u likely to get fixed. I guess it will have to get much worse in the future to cause action?

> Georgia was traditionally a red state

Georgia has been becoming progressively less red, and was early on in the 2016 cycle seen as a potentially swingable state.

> I guess it will have to get much worse in the future to cause action?

At least, it will have to not help the party in power in the state.

> Georgia has been becoming progressively less red, and was early on in the 2016 cycle seen as a potentially swingable state.

I'm having a really hard time imagining an EV scenario where Georgia is the deciding state. An election where Clinton takes Georgia is one where she wins by a landslide.

And in the end the results in Georgia were right in line with both those of other states and with the exit polls.

There's no story here and, frankly, it distracts from real issues affecting voters like bogus Voter ID requirements, intentionally understaffing or removing polling places on college campuses, etc.

Under traditional expectations, sure.

We are hackers, and this is a technology problem. Was it flagged because it have overlap with politics?

It gets flagged by users, not moderators.

Flagging is kind of like upvoting. No one person gets to say what ends up on the front page. It's an outcome of group consensus, basically.

I don't ever bother to ask "Why is this being flagged?" because the answer is that the exact reason will vary from person to person, my understanding is that multiple people have to flag it (I don't know how many) to have a noticeable effect, I have no means to determine who flagged it, etc. So I consider it to be unanswerable.

It doesn't just have an overlap with politics, this whole thing's 99% partisan political.

Notice this part? "But the hacker soon discovered that WINvote machines all had the same password. The password, which could not be changed, was (you might want to take a deep breath) “abcde.”" This particular bit's got a lot of attention on Twitter for obvious reasons, and it's sort-of true - you can read the report about it here: https://www.elections.virginia.gov/WebDocs/VotingEquipReport...

There's plenty of other hilariously terrible security issues in that security report, but the particular thing I want you to notice is the date, April 14th 2015. This isn't news - it was discovered over a year before the 2016 presidential election, and it lead to the machines being pulled from service almost immediately. (See e.g. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/17/virginia_nixes_high...). There's no particular reason to believe the other machines are any more secure, since the only reason those were audited was because of an unrelated reliability issue, but those ones had already been pulled before the election.

Despite this warning sign, in the run-up to the election the consensus amongst right-thinking people was that voting machines were essentially unhackable. Tweetstorms like this went viral: https://twitter.com/ashbylaw/status/787352959633981440 (On the WINVote machines, the "multiple interconnected counters" that tweetstorm claims make tampering impossible were editable fields in an Access DB with a short hardcoded password.) Publications like Wired insisted it would require a ludicrously impossible conspiracy: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/wireds-totally-legit-guide-rig...

Why? Trump was pushing the idea of vote hacking, and therefore only Trump-supporting conspiracy nuts would believe it. (A few hardcore infosec folks still understood how insecure the whole thing was, but they kept their mouths shut or were ignored.) It was only once Trump won and his opponents suddenly had a reason to dispute the results that this flipped over, and suddenly it became just as obvious and indisputable that the machines were horribly hackable. The audits and safeguards that Wired treated as infallable instantly became feeble and useless: https://www.wired.com/2016/11/hacked-not-audit-election-rest... The underlying facts about the security of the election and voting machines didn't change - that terrible "abcde" password had been sitting there, public knowledge, since early 2015 - all that changed was the motivation to believe the election had been hacked.

>Russia actually got inside the voting systems of seven states, including 4 of the 5 largest states in terms of electoral votes—California (55) Texas (38) Florida (29) and Illinois (20).

And yet two of those states listed went for Hillary. Maybe the Russians didn't want to be obvious.

Author spends a lot of time on Georgia, with its "D" rated voting system and its 16 electoral votes.

>Georgia’s systems would have been an “ideal” target for Russian hackers because the state doesn’t use a system with a paper trail so there is no way to audit the system.

Let's accept that for the sake of my next question - would a paper trail actually help? Maybe, depending on who gets the paper. Does it mean the voter gets a receipt? That might cause a few problems of its own.

For instance, a group of well-armed people acting as a "voting integrity militia" might decide to inspect people's voting receipts for any "errors." One can only imagine how the article's writer would characterize that.

Now let's pretend some of all of the states admit their systems had been compromised. Should we trust the results of any election, or just the results we don't like? We can reasonably guess the author's answer to that question.

> Maybe the Russians didn't want to be obvious.

If California voted for Trump, that would in fact be obvious...

This is a really weak article that does not support its headline and veers into conspiracy theory territory.

What a waste of time. There's not a shred of evidence in that article.

Georgia Exit polls: Trump 51%, Clinton 46%, Other 3%

Georgia reported results after possible Russian hacking: Trump 51%, Clinton 46%, Other 3%

https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls/georgia...

https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president...

This article asserts that Donald Trump is the Kremlin’s Executive in Charge of U.S. Operations. That makes it very difficult for me to take seriously.

That actually sounds like one of the more plausible assertions

This article is amateur.

> And despite what Donald Trump, the Kremlin’s Executive in Charge of U.S. Operations, would have you believe

It's hard to take an article seriously when it uses a tone like this (even if there is some truth behind it).

I'm amazed you're getting downvoted. I would love to share this article with conservative friends, but potshots like the above make it pointless. If you want to inform anyone other than your own echo chamber, this article is pointless.

There once was a time on HN when it was customary to respond to a comment like this with a referral to Paul Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement, suggesting that it might be better to aim higher than "responding to tone."

It's not just tone though; it's an obvious journalistic bias. It couldn't possibly be _more_ obvious. It's nonsensical to pretend that doesn't affect the author's credibility.

Someone should probably mention that calling the source biased is just circumstantial ad hominem, which is even lower on the pyramid than responding to tone.

>Someone should probably mention that calling the source biased is just circumstantial ad hominem, which is even lower on the pyramid than responding to tone.

Yeah, that gets thrown around a lot by people who like to parrot logical fallacies to sound smarter than they are. In reality credibility matters. A lot. Especially for journalists.

You're trusting this person to report the facts accurately. You're trusting them to report fully and not omit relevant details. You're trusting this person to commit to an investigation which is as impartial as possible.

All of those require trust, and trust is built by credibility, which is built by demonstrating that you do your job well.

So no, of course it doesn't mean that everything else in the article is incorrect. Of course, I never said that (straw man on your part? Thought you may enjoy that.) It _does_ mean that I will take anything I read afterwards with a grain of salt.

I see it as a tradeoff. If someone wears their bias on their sleeve, you know where they're coming from. If not, you have no way of knowing whether you're reading someone who is judiciously adhering to a process that minimizes bias, or whether they are deliberately concealing their bias, or whether they are so deluded that they imagine themselves to have no bias whatsoever, which would be absurd.

Regardless, you're still advocating for a low form of argument.

Well, the article got pulled, so I guess it was a pretty solid warning sign after all:

"Editor’s Note: This story was an opinion piece asserting there was evidence that hackers changed votes in the 2016 election. However, a number of statements in the piece are disputed by experts. As a result, we have pulled it down for editorial review, and will update it once that review is completed."

The editors are operating a full three levels higher (than “responding to tone”) in the hierarchy of disagreement. They’re setting a good example. (Although a bit later than ideal.)

its part of the gawker family so its not surprising that it uses non-professional language

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