2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumHow to Hack an Election
Andrés Sepúlveda rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a decade. He tells his story for the first time.
By Jordan Robertson, Michael Riley, and Andrew Willis | March 31, 2016
Photographs by Juan Arredondo
From Bloomberg Businessweek
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/
It was just before midnight when Enrique Peña Nieto declared victory as the newly elected president of Mexico. Peña Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a family of mayors and governors. His wife was a telenovela star. He beamed as he was showered with red, green, and white confetti at the Mexico City headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had ruled for more than 70 years before being forced out in 2000. Returning the party to power on that night in July 2012, Peña Nieto vowed to tame drug violence, fight corruption, and open a more transparent era in Mexican politics.
Two thousand miles away, in an apartment in Bogotás upscale Chicó Navarra neighborhood, Andrés Sepúlveda sat before six computer screens. Sepúlveda is Colombian, bricklike, with a shaved head, goatee, and a tattoo of a QR code containing an encryption key on the back of his head. On his nape are the words </head> and <body> stacked atop each other, dark riffs on coding. He was watching a live feed of Peña Nietos victory party, waiting for an official declaration of the results.
When Peña Nieto won, Sepúlveda began destroying evidence. He drilled holes in flash drives, hard drives, and cell phones, fried their circuits in a microwave, then broke them to shards with a hammer. He shredded documents and flushed them down the toilet and erased servers in Russia and Ukraine rented anonymously with Bitcoins. He was dismantling what he says was a secret history of one of the dirtiest Latin American campaigns in recent memory.
....snip
brooklynite
(94,520 posts)...First, NO ELECTED OFFICIAL, CANDIDATE, PARTY LEADER or CAMPAIGN MANAGER that I've talk to (and I know a lot), including those who have lost elections, attribute the lost to voting machine hacks.
...Second, the conspiracy involved would involve dozens if not hundreds of people: politicians, business executives, engineers, programmers, etc. ALL of which have kept quiet for over 10 years.
..Third, if you assume voting machines are hackable in sufficient quantity to make a difference, you would expect to see a favor ability pattern. Instead, you have three wins for the Republcians (2004, 2010, 2014) and three wins for the Democrats (2006, 2008, 2012).
peace13
(11,076 posts)She only stayed in the position a short while and did not resolve the problem before resigning to run for another office.
brooklynite
(94,520 posts)...and my contacts in Ohio are particularly good. The former Party Chair doesn't think it happened. A former US Congressman who lost in 2010 doesn't think it happened.
peace13
(11,076 posts)It really doesn't matter what we say here.