Reply #17: How to steal an election by hacking the vote [View All]

[LiberalFighter]

How to steal an election by hacking the vote Read more about the methods -- 7 pages and download the pdf file for permanent access.

Election security experts break down voting fraud types into two main categories, based on how many bad apples it takes to swing an election: retail fraud and wholesale fraud. Retail fraud is the kind of election fraud that's most familiar to us, because it has been around for the longest time. In general, retail fraud involves multiple bad apples at the precinct level, carrying out any number of bad acts involving multiple voters and voting machines. Some examples of retail fraud are ballot stuffing, restricting polling place access by means of intimidation, vandalizing individual machines to make them unusable, counterfeiting ballots, and so on.

Wholesale fraud is relatively new, and it involves a single bad apple who can affect an election's outcome at the precinct, county, and state levels. (Actually, by this definition, wholesale fraud is as old as the poll tax. But let's stick to wholesale fraud involving electronic voting machines for now.) So with wholesale fraud, one bad apple can affect different barrels of various sizes, depending where in the election process she's placed.

The table below breaks down the newer types of fraud that electronic voting machines have made available to election thieves:
Wholesale and retail fraud
Wholesale
Detectable
• Altering the vote tabulation process
• Altering the record of tabulated results
Undetectable
• Altering the vote tabulation process
• Altering the vote recording process
• Altering the record of votes

Retail
Detectable
• Multiple voting
• Deleting votes
• Disabling a machine
• Invalidating all the votes on a machine
Undetectable
• Altering the vote recording process
• Altering the record of votes

//snip//

The scariest part of Table 2's list of e-voting fraud types is the box where the "Undetectable" row and the "Wholesale" column intersect. Undetectable wholesale fraud is the ultimate apocalyptic scenario for security analysts, and for democracy—it's the briefcase nuke in downtown Manhattan, or the human-transmissible bird flu strain in the international terminal of LAX.