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Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Your counterargument misses the point made explicitly within the article:

"They may have vast resources, and in particular they may have more resources than the defenders—but they're still limited. Why? They'll throw enough resources at the problem to solve it, i.e., to hack the election, and use anything left over for the next problem, e.g., hacking the Brexit II referendum… There's always another target."

Too: there may be multiple parties attempting hacks. Getting your opponent to overextend (a war of attrition) is a time-honoured strategy.

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Those are weak arguments. Author basically says hacker doesn't want to hack country A because then he will run out resources to hack country B. Seriously?

As mentioned in comment, hacking election is very cheap. On back of the envelop, I think $1 million should buy you enough ads to precisely target handful of swing precincts that will give you just 1-2% of the boost needed to put you over the thin win margin. If US elections were won by say, 25% win margins then it would become more expensive because it would be hard to scale. But most elections have less than 5% win margins these days and there are very good predictions available on swing districts. If you have access to voter registration database, you can literally target your ad at individual household level. As shown by last 4 major elections, just even flipping less than ten thousand household can achieve victories.

Equivocation of ad placement and hacking is a disingenious tactic, especially here.

This makes it sound like the only people running targeted advertising would be the state-sponsored "hackers", but that isn't the case. Campaigns spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising, including digital, and one side still loses, and not always the side who spends less on advertising.

If you think it's so easy to swing elections with a few hundred thousand dollars of ads, you should definitely go into political strategy and prove it. They'll rain money down on you.

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