so the narrative used to be that russians scanned and probed voter databases but there were no intrusions.

now the narrative is that russians scanned and probed voter databases, actually hacked inside some, but didnt change any information.

it took over a year for this info to come out. the only reason we even know the states that were targeted is because someone leaked the nsa report (reality winner) and is now facing trial for it. dhs refuses to give congress information about electoral systems being penetrated before the 2016 election.

im sure we all see where this is headed.

and even tho they keep saying that no info was changed...dhs never performed forensic scans to confirm that and doesnt ever plan on doing so. so i have no idea why people keep running with that assertion.
http://www.businessinsider.com/dhs-is-refusing-to-investigate-hack-of-voting-machines-2017-6

pretty sure we are gonna find out that the 2016 election was stolen in broad daylight and this version of our government gives not one damn fuck.

full story:
--------
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/russians-penetrated-u-s-voter-systems-says-top-u-s-n845721?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma

Russians penetrated U.S. voter systems, says top

The U.S. official in charge of protecting American elections from hacking says the Russians successfully penetrated the voter registration rolls of several U.S. states prior to the 2016 presidential election.

In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Jeanette Manfra, the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said she couldn't talk about classified information publicly, but in 2016, "We saw a targeting of 21 states and an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated."

Jeh Johnson, who was DHS secretary during the Russian intrusions, said, "2016 was a wake-up call and now it's incumbent upon states and the Feds to do something about it before our democracy is attacked again."

"We were able to determine that the scanning and probing of voter registration databases was coming from the Russian government."

NBC News reported in Sept. 2016 that more than 20 states had been targeted by the Russians.

There is no evidence that any of the registration rolls were altered in any fashion, according to U.S. officials.

In a new NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll, 79 percent of the respondents said they were somewhat or very concerned that the country's voting system might be vulnerable to computer hackers.

In January 2017, just weeks before leaving his post, Johnson declared the nation's electoral systems part of the nation's federally protected "critical infrastructure," a designation that applies to entities like the power grid that could be attacked. It made protecting the electoral systems an official duty of DHS.

But Johnson told NBC News he is now worried that since the 2016 election a lot of states have done little to nothing "to actually harden their cybersecurity."

Manfra said she didn't agree with Johnson's assessment. "I would say they have all taken it seriously."

NBC News reached out to the 21 states that were targeted. Five states, including Texas and California, said they were never attacked.

Manfra said she stands by the list, but also called it a "snapshot in time with the visibility that the department had at that time."

Many of the states complained the federal government did not provide specific threat details, saying that information was classified and state officials did not have proper clearances. Manfra told us those clearances are now being processed

Other states that NBC contacted said they were still waiting for cybersecurity help from the federal government. Manfra said there was no waiting list and that DHS will get to everyone.

Some state officials had opposed Johnson's designation of electoral systems as critical infrastructure, viewing it a federal intrusion. Johnson said that any state officials who don't believe the federal government should be providing help are being "naïve" and "irresponsible to the people that supposed to serve."

I think it is very unlikely that Trump and them colluded to the degree of literally messing with votes and voter information.
But they are afraid that dealing with anything Russia/election related will be acknowledging that Trump's victory was tainted somehow.

_______________________________________

>I think it is very unlikely that Trump and them colluded to
>the degree of literally messing with votes and voter
>information.

maybe the campaign didnt know the extent of it...but you think russian hackers wouldnt change some voter information and knock some eligible people off the rolls?

the only reason the trump campaign made that last minute dash to wisconsin, michigan, and pa at the end of the campaign was because paul manafort (who had left the campaign months before) contacted them and told them to go there. that doesnt raise an eyebrow with you?

Russian "interference" but no hacking into the voting itself. Then all of a sudden voter turnout in battleground states decreases in cities with large black populations with the perfect cover that they just weren't interested because Obama wasn't running. Our cultural biases(crazy white people) make it sooo easy for outside actors to get away with something like this. They just had to throw out a few thousand ballots here and there in areas that are the easiest to exploit.

there was all of this news about record registration and early voting levels for latinos in arizona and florida too (to the point that clinton felt she could actually flip arizona). but on election night...they stayed home? that always sounded like bullshit.

along with the 'hidden trump voter' narrative where trump voters werent responding to polls but were going to show up to vote in full force. even tho the number of people in the 'undecided' category in these polls (which they would have picked if they felt ashamed to say they were voting for trump) was in line with 'normal' elections of the past.

even still...that may explain why pre-election polls could have been fucked up. but nobody has offered a good explanation for why post-election exit polls were so fucked up (especially in those rust belt states).
https://www.inc.com/paul-grossinger/does-the-statistically-significant-difference-between-exit-polls-and-vote-totals.html

if you read a lot of stories about the behind-the-scenes trump campaign on election night...there is one key detail in just about all of them that goes largely unnoticed. they all say trump thought he was gonna lose because the early exit poll numbers and turnout said so.

even in this story where an abc producer was sneaking exit poll data to the trump campaign...he was saying trump was in for a loss!
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/06/abc-data-trump-campaign-reprimand-284327

trump was down by 5 to 8 points in 8 of 11 battleground states and somehow made a miraculous comeback lmao.

the fact that republican legislatures and secretaries of state have been so dead set against tossing touchscreen voting machines out and going to straight paper ballots should be a red flag to everyone.

is that voter fraud occurred. Point blank. Period. This narrative that people being interviewed anonymously after they vote would be "ashamed" to admit who they voted for is the silliest shit I've ever heard. It's much different than not wanting to admit it to your coworkers, friends, or spouse.

I've just been in sales/business for too long to accept lies I'm told when I've had exposure to so much shady human behavior in person and understanding the psychology of how human minds work.

all of this sounds logical

Are the threat and I don't believe their ideology is democratic or conservative

______________________________________

Everything looks like Oprah kissing Harvey Weinstein these days

the head of diebold even said he would deliver ohio to george w bush in 2000 (which he did).

Serious question and not trying to talk conspiracies just facts about people like Bush

______________________________________

Everything looks like Oprah kissing Harvey Weinstein these days

An 11-year-old changed election results on a replica Florida state website in under 10 minutes

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/an-11-year-old-changed-election-results-on-a-replica-florida-state-website-in-under-10-minutes

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/21/i-just-hacked-a-state-election-17-not-a-good-hacker-219374

I Just Hacked a State Election. I’m 17. And I’m Not Even a Very Good Hacker.
It took a lot less than you'd think for myself and my fellow teens to steal the midterms.

By RIVER O'CONNOR August 21, 2018

It took me around 10 minutes to crash the upcoming midterm elections. Once I accessed the shockingly simple and vulnerable set of tables that make up the state election board’s database, I was able to shut down the website that would tally the votes, bringing the election to a screeching halt. The data were lost completely. And just like that, tens of thousands of votes vanished into thin air, throwing an entire election, and potentially control of the House or Senate—not to mention our already shaky confidence in the democratic process itself—into even more confusion, doubt, and finger-pointing.

I’m 17. And I’m not even a very good hacker.

I’ve attended the hacking convention DEF CON in Las Vegas for over five years now, since I was 11 years old. While I have a good conceptual understanding of how cyberspace and the internet work, I’ve taken only a single Python programming class in middle school. When I found out that the Democratic National Committee was co-sponsoring a security competition for kids and teens, however, my interest in politics fed into curiosity about how easy it might be to mess with a U.S. election. Despite that limited experience, I understood immediately when I got to Las Vegas this year why the professionals tend to refer to state election security as “child’s play.”

The Voting Machine Village at DEF CON, the aforementioned competition where attendees tackled vulnerabilities in state voting machines and databases, raised plenty of eyebrows among election boards and voting machine manufacturers alike. It’s a hard pill to swallow for the public, too: No one wants to believe that—after waiting in a lengthy line, taking time off from work or finding a babysitter in order to vote—their ballot could be thrown away, or even worse, altered.

Consequently, people started to take notice as reports came in from both the intelligence community and organizations like the DNC about the ease with which a foreign power could potentially do such a thing. Since electronic voting was introduced in the early 2000s, leaders in both Washington and our state capitals have repeatedly failed to keep up with rapid advances in information technology and cybersecurity.

The replica state election websites used in this year’s competition were built on MySQL, a database management system that stores data in simple tables containing columns and rows. By inputting a command into the search bar to see all the website’s tables, I could then see all of its data, including vote tallies, candidate names and tables of basic website functions. Once someone has that kind of access, they can do plenty of damage. First, the organizers instructed us to double candidates’ vote tallies. Then, with the assistance of volunteers, some of us easily changed the names of candidates or even their parties, or inflated the vote tallies to ridiculously high, Putinesque numbers.

The entirety of the hacking came down to entering no more than two lines of code: the first to display all columns and rows for the site, the second to alter the vote tally. Of the few dozen participants, most completed the very simple hack assigned by the instructors. About a quarter figured out how to rename or delete other candidates and their parties from the list.

But even after doing something as relatively tame, from a computer science perspective, as messing around with a few numbers, I wanted to see how much damage I could do without the competition’s instructions or staff assistance. First, I wrote down the IP address of the server hosting the competition, no different than the first step a foreign agent would take. Then, I accessed the DEF CON-hosted website from a secure Wi-Fi spot and Googled a list of common MySQL commands. The whole thing, from search to shutdown, took me less than five minutes.

To take down the entire website, all I needed to do was enter a command to drop the table—to remove it from the database entirely, in other words. This caused the page to return an execution error, which took a reset of the website’s host server to fix. Essentially, I had crashed the website, similar to the denial of service attacks more familiar to the public, but more direct and even more effective.

This is where the staff got a little bit confused, as the instructions had told us only how to change the number of votes. I had to crash the website again, right in front of them, before they believed I had anything to do with it.

The fact that someone as untrained as myself could theoretically bring an election to a screeching halt with nothing but a quick Google search should be a wake-up call. While inflating Gary Johnson’s vote tally to over 90 billion is good for a laugh, a more malicious agent—not to mention a team of well-funded and highly skilled hackers—could do real damage. A close congressional race could be flipped by the addition of a few hundred extra votes, the installation of malware, stolen security credentials, or the shutdown of a website during the final tally, like my escapade last week. The possibility, or even the likelihood, of such an event is precisely why the chief security officer of the Democratic National Committee, Bob Lord, interviewed me and my fellow competition participants to see what kind of defense those without experience could potentially develop.

I didn’t quite know what to expect when I started the competition, but I know it shouldn’t have been that easy. Someone with my skills wouldn’t have stood a chance against a professionally protected website. Anyone with a Wi-Fi-enabled device could theoretically have done what I did to the mock election database.

Unfortunately, the people who have the power to do something about this issue are in denial. But that doesn’t change the facts on the ground. America is supposed to set a world standard for free and open elections—the idea of “one person, one vote” is part of our identity. The failure to address such a widespread and well-documented effort by foreign powers to compromise that principle puts our democracy, and our position of leadership, at risk.

I’m still not particularly interested in a tech career, but one day I hope to be in a position to prevent something like this from happening in real life. After the competition, both the staff and the competitors agreed—we need a tech-literate government with the resources and the will to secure our elections. Or at least one that can stop a 17-year-old with basic command line skills and 10 free minutes between classes from electing Gary Johnson president-for-life.

River O’Connor is a senior at the Ocean Research College Academy in Everett, Wash.

https://www.propublica.org/article/defcon-teen-did-not-hack-a-state-election

No, a Teen Did Not Hack a State Election

Hacking conference organizers said kids had hacked “exact clones” of state election reporting websites, but that didn’t happen.
by Lilia Chang Aug. 24, 12:20 p.m. EDT

ELECTIONLAND
Monitoring Access to the Vote in Real Time

Headlines from Def Con, a hacking conference held this month in Las Vegas, might have left some thinking that infiltrating state election websites and affecting the 2018 midterm results would be child’s play.

Articles reported that teenage hackers at the event were able to “crash the upcoming midterm elections” and that it had taken “an 11-year-old hacker just 10 minutes to change election results.” A first-person account by a 17-year-old in Politico Magazine described how he shut down a website that would tally votes in November, “bringing the election to a screeching halt.”

But now, elections experts are raising concerns that misunderstandings about the event — many of them stoked by its organizers — have left people with a distorted sense of its implications.

In a website published before r00tz Asylum, the youth section of Def Con, organizers indicated that students would attempt to hack exact duplicates of state election websites, referring to them as “replicas” or “exact clones.” (The language was scaled back after the conference to simply say “clones.”)



Instead, students were working with look-alikes created for the event that had vulnerabilities they were coached to find. Organizers provided them with cheat sheets, and adults walked the students through the challenges they would encounter.

Josh Franklin, an elections expert formerly at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and a speaker at Def Con, called the websites “fake.”

“When I learned that they were not using exact copies and pains hadn’t been taken to more properly replicate the underlying infrastructure, I was definitely saddened,” Franklin said.

Franklin and David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, also pointed out that while state election websites report voting results, they do not actually tabulate votes. This information is kept separately and would not be affected if hackers got into sites that display vote totals.

“It would be lunacy to directly connect the election management system, of which the tabulation system is a part of, to the internet,” Franklin said.

Jake Braun, the co-organizer of the event, defended the attention-grabbing way it was framed, saying the security issues of election websites haven’t gotten enough attention. Those questioning the technical details of the mock sites and whether their vulnerabilities were realistic are missing the point, he insisted.



There’s No Evidence Our Election Was Rigged
We had more than 1,000 people watching the vote on Election Day. If millions of people voted illegally, we would have seen some sign of it.
“We want elections officials to start putting together communications redundancy plans so they have protocol in place to communicate with voters and the media and so on if this happens on election day,” he said.

Braun provided ProPublica with a report that r00tz plans to circulate more widely that explains the technical underpinnings of the mock websites. They were designed to be vulnerable to a SQL injection attack, a common hack, the report says.

Franklin acknowledged that some state election reporting sites do indeed have this vulnerability, but he said that states have been aware of it for months and are in the process of protecting against it.

Becker said the details spelled out in the r00tz report would have been helpful to have from the start.

“We have to be really careful about adding to the hysteria about our election system not working or being too vulnerable because that’s exactly what someone like President Putin wants,” Becker said. Instead, Becker said that “we should find real vulnerabilities and address them as elections officials are working really hard to do.”

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