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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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I presume vast majority of the "cyber attacks" are the kind where the attacker doesn't care is the target the election official's laptop or their dishwasher (both can join the botnet for reasons not related to election at all).

Theoretically, hacking an digitized election system enables interference in the election outcome despite the paper ballots. If precincts use computerized system to track who is in the rolls, you can DDoS the precincts with unfavorable demographics; as queues mount, some of the voters will be turned off. If you want to stuff ballot boxes without too many accomplices among election officials, hack the system to see who did not vote, plant a false vote and flip the variable next to non-voter name claiming they voted. After the election, if done successfully, the numbers will match and the fraud will be difficult to reveal.

The problem is, there has not been news about computer problems during Romanian elections. The version that circulated around reddit was about governing socialist party making a miscalculation: they instructed the mid-level party bosses to campaign for Georgescu in order to split the votes of the opposition, hoping to face an easy opponent in the run-off. They didn't realize Georgescu was popular for unrelated reasons, and overshot. All of this is naturally internet rumors.

I am not Romanian, but we do have paper ballots in Slovakia. And I theorized with my friends for how to possibly influence elections and it seems impossible to me. Some counterpoints to yours based on my own experience in voting comittee:

If you want to stuff ballot boxes without too many accomplices among election officials, hack the system to see who did not vote, plant a false vote and flip the variable next to non-voter name claiming they voted.

This is impossible. The elections are very decentralized, where election rooms are mostly at schools in specific classrooms with election committee consisting of people from various political parties. All eligible voters are automatically registered against their residency and are assigned their specific voting room. All voting is paper based and ballots are handed out against signature. All voting is limited to one day, often Saturday or Sunday with voting rooms closing at 10PM.

What happens next is that all ballots are manually counted with all voting committee members present and having full access to ballots to check them and count them on their own. Final tally is then phoned to central committee, ballot box is then sealed with signatures of all local voting committee participants and relocated by policemen. All participants can take photo of the final tally and they can find it on official government website after elections to check if there was something shady going on.

I am not sure if you are US citizen, but I cannot stress how fucking ridiculous and unsafe your elections are. I dare you to find some way of how to falsify Slovak parliamentary elections just to understand how stupid the voting in US is. The only thing I thought of was some psyop - like planting some free ballot boxes somewhere or maybe bribing some people to declare their own tally did not match in order to attack trust in the voting mechanism or maybe arson of couple of ballot boxes during election day. But I could not think of much more than that.