‘How to steal an election’ report in PDF
Regarding the upcoming U. S. elections, the good news for most Americans is that in just over a week, the season of often-nasty and increasingly personal political campaign advertising will finally end. All that will be left when polls close on the evening of November 7 is counting the votes.
However, that may itself be a source of further divisiveness and potential scandal, according to a 27-page report titled “How to steal an election by hacking the vote” [PDF: 3MB] published and being freely distributed by Ars Technica, a technology trends website. It warns that security flaws in a number of electronic voting solutions now make it increasingly possible to hijack an election. Author Ken Fisher explains that “I’m not in any way encouraging anyone to actually go out and steal an election. This article is intended solely as a guide to the kinds of information and techniques that election thieves already have available, and not as an incitement to or an aid for committing crimes.”
According to the website, after it initially offered the report only to subscribers to its premium service, “we received a flood of requests that we release a free copy of the article’s PDF … [and] suggested that the PDF should be emailed to elected officials, especially congresspersons and Secretaries of State, as a kind of wake-up call for how insecure our elections are.”
The site notes that its intentions are non-political:
“Please remember, election fraud is a bipartisan issue. Both parties have stolen elections in the past, and regardless of what you may think of one party or the other as we head into the hotly contested November mid-terms, the fate of our American tradition of self-rule is at stake.”
