How could votes be rigged in 1st world countries today?

[Deleted]

With the EU vote result coming up and the inevitable claims of some foul play we should have a look at how the vote could be swayed.

In the UK people need to register to vote. Voting is done with a paper slip where you cross the box against the option you choose. The paper slip itself has a number and barcode which the poll station staff mark off against your details. There are also postal votes which you can fill in and send away prior to voting day.

Postal votes have come in for criticism as an avenue for fraud.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...oner-says.html

“The ease of postal vote fraud and the difficulty of policing it led to such a great upsurge in personation that, in the Birmingham case, the number of false votes was virtually half of all votes recorded as having been cast for the winning candidates.”

In 2005 Mr Mawrey found six Labour councillors in Birmingham guilty of “massive, systematic and organised” postal voting fraud to win two wards during local elections.

He said that the scale of fraud would disgrace a “banana republic”, and heard evidence that thousands of postal votes had been stolen to be changed or filled in by Labour supporters.

In 2009 a former Tory candidate and five others were jailed for using “ghost” voters to win a local council ballot.
They pointed out that at a number of houses up to 19 names – all Asian – had registered in the run-up to the election at the same address, then opted to vote by post.

While some people are saying you should use a pen instead of the provided pencil. The article says brexit conspiracy but these concerns have already been voiced in past elections.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news...voters-8266688



In America they have electronic voting systems which have raised concerns on vote count manipulation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...110103220.html

The documentary's basic theme is that elections can be stolen by people able to manipulate the vote-recording software in electronic balloting machines. That should not shock anyone who has touched a computer. Given the increasing use of electronic voting machines -- they are counting about 80 percent of the votes cast today, according to the documentary -- it's no stretch to imagine that they could be worked to subvert democracy.

Could be. But "Hacking Democracy" doesn't actually show democracy's corruption. The documentary merely suggests the possibilities and tallies the suspicions, leaving viewers to come to the obvious conclusion.

[Tijuana]

With the EU vote result coming up and the inevitable claims of some foul play we should have a look at how the vote could be swayed.

In the UK people need to register to vote. Voting is done with a paper slip where you cross the box against the option you choose. The paper slip itself has a number and barcode which the poll station staff mark off against your details. There are also postal votes which you can fill in and send away prior to voting day.

Postal votes have come in for criticism as an avenue for fraud.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...oner-says.html




While some people are saying you should use a pen instead of the provided pencil. The article says brexit conspiracy but these concerns have already been voiced in past elections.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news...voters-8266688



In America they have electronic voting systems which have raised concerns on vote count manipulation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...110103220.html

Are you going to offer anything up here? I don't see where the discussion is supposed to start.

[I Push Buttons]

Disenfranchisement.

[Independent voter]

A lot of people suspect electronic ballots, they think hackers could alter the vote or something.

I've never been a fan of paper ballots either, I think they can be tampered with as well.

In the end you just have to have some level of trust, I think. There are places in the world were people have zero trust in their government.

[cubby]

Proprietary software in the voting machines. Like we have now in the United States.

[Deleted]

Updating my thread to reflect recent news.
The US looks like it has bigger vote fraud problems than the UK. This is an issue which crosses the parties from Al gores loss back in the 2000s to the questionable activities we have at the moment. This brings with it discontent in the voters who think candidates may have won unfairly.

Is there any reason not to go back to paper ballots with party members overseeing the counts?

[Templar 331]

Alex Jones is your source of information? Right.........

But to add to the subject, paper ballots could just as easily be tampered with.

[Kapadons]

Ask Hillary. She got it down cold

[PACOX]

Assuming that no fuckery goes on with elections is how an election could actually be rigged and by that point it would be too late to do much about it. As long as people are looking out for it, voter fraud will remain inconsequential. Most "fraud" is human error or some independently acting person being a dumbass and trying to block people from voting.

I worried about 20 years from now when the people who remember having to demand fair voting practices (during the 1950/60s) have died off, leaving a bunch of people take voting for granted and don't question voting practices

[Deleted]

Alex Jones is your source of information? Right.........

This isn't a left or right issue and there are variety of sources for example the Hacking Democracy film focused on Bush winning the election with suspect votes.

But to add to the subject, paper ballots could just as easily be tampered with.

I would imagine paper votes would take a lot more effort than a couple of people tinkering with a few machines.

[Healing Rain]

When you have the "president" of the United States and his wife campaigning for a felon, you know something is wrong.

[Templar 331]

This isn't a left or right issue and there are variety of sources for example the Hacking Democracy film focused on Bush winning the election with suspect votes.

My point with Jones is that his credibility is so sketchy that if he said the sky was blue I'd have to go outside to check. As for the documentary I'm not familiar with it. If it is credible then I have no problem with it.

I would imagine paper votes would take a lot more effort than a couple of people tinkering with a few machines.

Depends on how tech savvy you are or how many people are in on the paper tinkering. Either way could be done.

- - - Updated - - -

When you have the "president" of the United States and his wife campaigning for a felon, you know something is wrong.

Why do you have President in quotation marks? And as far as I know Hillary hasn't been convicted of anything.

[Gracin]

When you have the "president" of the United States and his wife campaigning for a felon, you know something is wrong.

Wait, did I miss where she was convicted of anything, let alone a felony?

[aviger]

In the US thanks to the stupid way voting works even IF someone faked millions of votes the electoral college still does the final cut.
Frankly voting is semi useless in the US in the end.

[zenkai]

I think all ballots should be on paper and signed, so if there is ever a recount needed you have them, they can be scanned electronically. Hell fill it out electronically and sign it.

[satimy]

They don't test for election fraud

[May90]

I think all ballots should be on paper and signed, so if there is ever a recount needed you have them, they can be scanned electronically. Hell fill it out electronically and sign it.

21st century. Simple system: online voting, with entering all the relevant information. After you've voted, you gain a unique electronic certificate; you can see your vote on the official election website. If you see that someone stole your identity and voted for you, you go to the police, show them your certificate along with ID, and they change your vote to the right one, while initiating an investigation. This system is almost impenetrable for a fraud, as everyone can track their vote in real time and quickly notice if something is funky.

[Actarius]

So there are a handful of issues with voter fraud outright: if you get caught your life is over. This, alone, is enough of a deterrent for most people. It's why people don't randomly murder, steal, and rape. Sure, there are scumbags, but those crimes, in some twisted way, provide some tangible benefit for the perpetrator. Very few people would be interested in risking everything to have a meager impact on the election.

You might be able to vote 10 times depending on how far away precincts are and how much time you have. No state has ever been close enough to swing the election either way with less than like 5k votes. "Tipping point states" aren't usually close anyway.

Now I'm naturally excluding 2000 from my analysis, since it was contested and no formal recount was ever made. But that state was won by 500~ votes.

So in order to influence an election, you'd need around 20-30k people all willing to vote several times. You'd need to keep all of them quiet, and you'd need to live in the tipping point state, and live spread out enough from each other not to arose suspicion. Accomplish all of that, and you've swung the election. Now what happens when the "Tipping point state" is protected by other states? I.e. flipping that state doesn't change the election? Now you need to repeat the above, in each state that protects the "tipping point". As an example, if everyone voted today, Trump would need to organize this in Ohio, Arizona, Iowa, North Carolina, Florida, Nevada, and Pennsylvania(the heavily protected tipping point). He'd need to fraud a few million votes to flip the election in his favor.


Now, you're probably thinking of going right to the source of votes, okay! Paper ballots. There are a few ways to fraud paper ballots, varying by location. Most precincts with paper ballots use machines to count the votes, if the machine cannot, then the vote isn't counted. Alternatively very few precincts hand count, and those that do take "sets" of like 100 votes, and are counted 3 times, by 3 different people, and once in agreement, those votes are registered as "good".

To fraud paper ballots, you need to get the other counters to agree to fraud ballots, no way around it. At this point you have the same issue as above, convincing people to risk everything.

To fraud the counting machines, which are not connected to the internet to avoid hacking, requires you to hack them at the physical location. You're not getting anymore than 1-2 machines unless you're a worker, so you need to get selected as a poll worker. Then you need to go to the counting machines and compromise them right there. You need to understand how they work before hand, in order to have ready to go software to overwrite existing software. Now, most places with paper ballots allow you to scan your ballot before leaving to make sure your vote is properly counted, so you need to make sure the recorded vote is different than the displayed vote.

Now, you still run into the above issues. Each state has thousands of precincts. You need to predict the states that need compromised, get your volunteers in as poll workers, and either agree to miscount votes, or to compromise each machine (which there can be dozens of at larger precincts). All of this without attracting suspicion.


If you want to fraud electronic votes, this is just as hard as the paper ballot counting machines. You need the pre-existing software, you need access to all machines, you need other poll workers to be in the loop, and you cannot arose suspicion.


This is obviously a gross oversimplification, and there are even more complexities than I have suggested, but, outside of very tight elections, our democracy is safe from being compromised.

Fraud can happen on small scale. Someone filling out a mail-in ballot for someone else, someone purposely voting 3-4 times, a poll worker miscalibrating a machine to benefit their candidate (which doesn't really work because voters will either, click where they should to get the right vote, or complain to poll workers who will fix it), or a group of friends all getting selected to run a polling place and messing with machines/ballots.

To do it on such a large scale, to change an election, is just unfeasible.

[Nasukkin]

Electronic voting can be rigged. There are more than a couple posts on thedailywtf.com documenting some of the actual, real-world shortcomings of electronic ballots resulting from software engineering malpractice/incompetance. You'd think that a voting machine should be simple: you select an option and the number of that votes for that option increases by 1, like strawpoll. Insight provided by engineers who have worked on these systems agree that's how it should work, but that things are often made to work in other ways which could actually cause an individual's vote to be misappropriated. In other words, electronic voting applications are buggy.

But even assuming that electronic votes were secure (a big, super-generous assumption), there are potential problems when it comes to aggregating the data. For example, what if Russia launches another major cyber attack against US-based internet providers and cripples the ballot system and causes whole districts votes to not aggregate into the final calculation, how would we proceed? Ideally, voting stations could serialize their saved data onto physical medium and transport them to a centralized location for network-free aggregation, but that's making unfair assumptions about how well these systems are programmed to handle such a case.

Yet another problem with voting in America specifically is that there is no universally agreed upon system or interface for collecting votes. Different states do things in different ways. For example, in 2000, I voted in California. My voting was done by electronic machine. This machine had a rotary dial which you turned to make your selections, and a button to confirm each selection. In the same year for the same general election, Florida performed its voting by punching holes in physical pieces of paper. These two systems were very different. In Florida, their physical ballot system became a nation-wide controversy as it was contested whether some votes were legitimate. It was argued that sometimes the holes punched in individual ballots may have left parts of the chad behind and resulted in miscounted votes. This margin of error may have improperly given Bush the victory of the Presidential Election. Had Floridians had alternative, more modern or simpler ways to vote in those districts, the incidents following 9/11 may have been handled by a completely different President.

Finally, paper ballots are flawed, and for completely different reasons. As stated above, paper ballots can be flawed in their design, resulting in difficulty of use and/or misappropriation of individual votes. This is a difficult problem to solve; people with disabilities still need to be able to vote, but how do you accomplish that with paper or punch-out ballots? It might not be so simple. Also, there is the physical nature of these ballots. An accident--an electrical fire, for example--might toast an entire district's votes, literally. This is very bad; it means that either those individuals had been disenfranchised by an Act Of God, or that the entire state or possibly the entire nation needs to wait possibly weeks for the district to be allowed to re-vote. Neither scenario is ideal. In fact, both are a massive pain in the ass.

The fact of the matter is, even in first-world countries, voting is hardly a foolproof thing. There are still points of failure. There shouldn't be such points of failure, but there are. We live in an age where we should have fixed these things, but... we just haven't, sadly.

[AwkwardSquirtle]

This seems relevant.