[logfromblammo]

Of course there was fraud. We know better than most how easily a box can get pwned when the attacker has unsupervised physical access for a few minutes, and the manufacturer gives short shrift to security and practices security through obscurity--such as by keeping the source tightly closed.

The question is whether Trump supporters were better at cheating than Clinton supporters, or better at covering their tracks. Even if nobody suspected fraud, we should still be doing randomized checks for it, in a transparent, publicly-auditable way.

My hypothesis is that voting fraud is endemic, but that it only rarely influences the results of any election. I suspect that most of it is done by crackers for hire or by people already heavily invested in politics who happen to have the necessary skills.

It just seems like such a simple, boring, and yet insanely high-risk hack that no one would bother doing it just for the giggles of getting Ivanna Tinkle elected as county dogcatcher. Also, in order to pull off a significant advantage, you would need a conspiracy of multiple actors in several different counties, and the more participants you have, the less likely it is you will be able to keep it secret.

Tyler Durden (of Fight Club) could silently steal an election with a vote fraud conspiracy, but no actual, living person could--not until all the votes are cast on network-connected machines, anyway.

[pmoriarty]

"no actual, living person could"

It doesn't have to be one person. It could be multiple teams of people.

They don't have to intervene all over the country, either. They could make a huge difference by affecting a relatively small number of votes in a handful of battleground states where the race is very close.

In the case of Bush v Gore, it would have been sufficient to make a difference in only one state.

[logfromblammo]

Tyler Durden had multiple Fight Clubs, all of whom were completely loyal, anonymous, and committed to operational security. That's why I said he'd be the only one able to do it.

For real people, the more people you add for operations, the more you have to add for security and cleanup. Beyond a certain point, you just can't keep everybody quiet without extreme measures, which are themselves likely to be noticed.

Secret conspiracies have to be small, otherwise someone eventually gets disgruntled or has an attack of conscience and spills the beans.

Even large, public conspiracies, like the classified documents protection system, eventually develop leaks, and it is already really expensive to operate before accounting for cleanup up after spies or whistleblowers.

So if we ever reach the point where five people or less could remotely rig the vote for every county in Florida, I have to not only assume that it is being done every election, but also that multiple groups may be stepping on each other's toes while doing it. Previously, the traditional ways of rigging the vote are right out in the open. You get people likely to vote against you stricken from the voter register. You enter fake ballots in the name of someone not likely to vote, such as the recently deceased. You sabotage polling places in urban areas such that voter throughput is reduced, and lines grow around the block. You get local cops out on the streets, giving out traffic citations to selected people that may be on their way to vote. I have even seen sudden construction activity on election day obstructing the sole entrance to a polling place.

Those are nasty, but at least people can seek redress for the misbehavior that they can see.