Election "Counterhacking"?
Some of the resistance to anti-election-fraud efforts in America comes from the fact that the possibilities of fraud seem rather vague and hypothetical. You can speculate on how an election may have been rigged, but most people won't take this seriously without some indisputable proof.
Bureau of Public Secrets's diary :: ::
But an even more important reason is that this is currently a very partisan issue. Ideally, one might imagine that just about everybody would be in favor of ensuring that elections were honest. But like most of us, the conservative-leaning portion of the country tends to follow the natural human tendency to believe what is most comfortable for them. Since most serious election-fraud accusations are against the Republicans, it is easy for the latter to justify their indifference by saying that it's all just sour grapes from the Democrats. Even if some Republican voters secretly suspect that some of their leaders may have cheated, they are not likely to be very worried about it. The Democrats (and Greens, etc.) have less trouble imagining that there may have been large-scale fraud since they have already been hit by many other types of cheating (e.g. the various maneuvers that prevented or discouraged people from voting in Florida and Ohio).
But what if anti-Republican elements were to start hacking the voting machines?
Black Box Voting (
http://www.blackboxvoting.org ) and others (e.g.
http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/... ) have shown how easily these machines can be hacked. Even if those investigators do not themselves engage in any "counterhacking," there are thousands of other highly computer-savvy people out there. Many of them are liberals or radicals (in addition to anti-Bush conservatives like Chuck Herrin). What if some of them decided to fight fire with fire? They might not have the same degree of access as the voting-machine companies, but they might nevertheless be able to get enough access to affect some election results.
But here is the key point: Even if counterhacking operations proved difficult to carry out, the mere rumor of the possible threat of such operations might provoke more bipartisan demands for electoral reform. Republican voters have already been conditioned to believe that liberals are capable of every sort of iniquity. As soon as word began to get around that an unknown but possibly large number of liberal techies were planning to hack the next election, they would go into a panic. Suddenly THEY TOO WOULD BE DEMANDING ELECTION-FRAUD INVESTIGATIONS AND REFORMS.
One can envisage various possible scenarios:
a) "Good guys" hack vote counts just as the bad guys have been doing, but so subtlely that no one notices.
b) Good guys hack vote counts, but the results are unexpected enough that suspicions begin to be aroused.
c) Good guys hack vote counts in such an intentionally glaring manner (e.g. a tossup race is won by a 70-30% margin) that the hacking is obvious to everyone, though it may not be discoverable just how it has been done. (The famous "glitch" in Mahoning County, Ohio, where a machine recorded minus 25,000,000 votes for Kerry may have been some "good guy" hacker's attempt to send such a message to the public.)
d) Good guys and bad guys hack and counterhack in the same election. As each side strives to counteract the other, the irregularities become more and more evident.
e) As the battle enlarges, sooner or later someone is caught red-handed. It hardly matters whether it's one of the good guys or one of the bad guys -- in either case, the subsequent much-publicized investigation would involve plenty of revelations of election-fraud methods. It might even be possible for someone to throw an election and then anonymously reveal afterwards how it was done.
f) Meanwhile, intriguing thrillers could be written based on such scenarios (including dramatic exposure of corrupt politicians, entertaining plot twists as rival hackers discover each other and attempt to counterhack each other, mysterious "suicides" of antifraud investigators who get too close to the truth, etc.), thereby spreading the "meme," the notion that such things are possible, thereby accelerating public awareness of the problem.
Actual vote-hacking is of course illegal. But discussing it hypothetically is quite legal. I feel free to mention these possible scenarios because I myself have no intention of engaging in any type of election fraud, and would not have the dimmest idea of how to do so even if I wanted to. As a matter of fact, as anyone can see from my published writings (e.g.
http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/joyrev2.htm#electoralpolitics ), I am very dubious about electoral politics. Although I sympathize with those striving to elect progressive representatives, I think that more radical, participatory, grassroots-type actions are usually more effective in promoting social change. I am simply presenting these ideas for whatever they may be worth to those of you who are more engaged on this terrain -- as one possible method of publicizing the problem so that it will be corrected.
Is such election "counterhacking" feasible? Would it be justifiable? Would it be advisable?
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