Their sworn witness offered stunning testimony–that he’d worked on computer programs to rig U.S. elections, that the programs could deliver 51% of the vote to any candidate you wanted, and that local election officials would never know it happened.
And thus they asked him, so “how could it be detected?”
“You would have to view it either in the source code, or you’d have to have a receipt and then count the hard paper against the actual vote total. Other than that, you won’t see it.”
That’s the bottom line, but if you’d like to hear this professional programmer recount his experiences directly, to the astonishment of a legislative body, here’s video:
If you take the straightforward proposition that 1) historically elections have been tampered with any way they can be, and 2) electronic voter fraud offers an obvious avenue for stealing elections–then, you’d think that the U.S. Congress would have a standing committee, with subpoena power, investigating every election from the last twenty or so years.
Instead, they’re often probe matters so relatively trivial or obscure that most of us don’t even know what matters are being looked into. They generate no significant sound bites for the five o’clock news.
On the other hand, “Congressional Committee concludes that all recent elections have been influenced by computer hacking” would surely catch our attention. We, as a people, seem to be asleep at the switch.
If you needed any more foundation for the belief that stealing elections by computer is very do-able, just watch the brief demo below.
We began our look into the mystery of “Hacking Democracy” with a narrow focus–could savvy computer code-writers flip votes in the electronic world, and thereby flip elections in the real, political one? That simple question seems to generate a simple…Yes!
But we also realize how much broader hacking democracy is.
As this is being written, the news is full of details on possible foreign influence in a recent election cycle, and commentaries have political coloring in all directions.
Yet the issue of Hacking Democracy looms broader than any one election cycle, any political party, any country. Now that the digital age is here, electrons themselves–with skilled human guidance–rise as huge political players.
We hate to sound once again like Latin America owns the problem of corruption, because it’s worldwide of course, but an unusually compelling article found it’s way into our files from the Bloomberg publishing world.
Andrés Sepúlveda, finally in prison in Colombia for some of the crimes of his decade-long career as a professional election hacker in nine Latin countries, went public, his darkly geeky looking face on a magazine cover.
The article’s a good intro to the kinds of political mischief computers can do in the right, should we say wrong, hands.
“He says he wants to tell his story because the public doesn’t grasp the power hackers exert over modern elections or the specialized skills needed to stop them. ‘I worked with presidents, public figures with great power…I have always said that there are two types of politics—what people see and what really makes things happen. I worked in politics that are not seen.’ “
Juan Arrendondo et al, bloomberg. com, March 31, 2016
This Bloomberg Businessweek offering’s important, if you care about fair elections. Any kind of dirty tricks, and often all of them, are launched by these cyber-warriors against political opponents. Where do you draw the line between aggressive electioneering and outright fraud by computer, what do you finally consider an assault on democracy?
Many of Sepúlveda’s examples seem mild, but remember, he did this professionally across important elections full-time, for years. Do we really want “democratic” outcomes to hinge on who can use computers more subversively, who can steal more data, can tell more lies disguised as chatter on Social Media?
‘My job was to do actions of dirty war and psychological operations, black propaganda, rumors—the whole dark side of politics that nobody knows exists but everyone can see…’He wrote a software program, now called Social Media Predator, to manage and direct a virtual army of fake Twitter accounts. The software let him quickly change names, profile pictures, and biographies to fit any need. Eventually, he discovered, he could manipulate the public debate as easily as moving pieces on a chessboard—or, as he puts it, ‘When I realized that people believe what the Internet says more than reality, I discovered that I had the power to make people believe almost anything.’
(The night before) election night (in Mexico in 2012), he had computers call tens of thousands of voters with prerecorded phone messages at 3 a.m. in the critical swing state of Jalisco.
Juan Arrendondo et al, bloomberg. com, March 31, 2016
Those calls in the middle of the night irritated voters, as they were intended to, and drove them towards his local candidate, an ally of presidential candidate Pena Nieto.
The article stresses that Juan didn’t always win, but his batting average was pretty good. As Nieto celebrated his upcoming six years at the helm in Mexico on election night, Sepúlveda could of course take no public bow.
But he could bask in the private feeling, ‘I got that guy elected.’
Do we really want to let computers not only count our elections, but run them as well?