Obviously, setting votes to a billion in each precinct would probably raise a few red flags. So that’s not feasible. But what is?
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Anti-Trumpism has spent a lot of time exhorting people to vote. Voter suppression aside, there is an expectation that voter turnout will be higher in some demographics
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That sets our baseline. Right there we’ve got an outlier to work with. That means that it’s fair game to do whatever you want if you have access over the final vote tallies.
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So if I were to hack the vote—and I pause here to inform my monitors that I have no such plan—I would begin by manipulating votes within this bubble of extra voters.
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To put it another way, suppose Smallville has a pretty consistent turnout for midterm elections of between 13 and 17% of voters. But this year, thanks to civic engagement, they get 22%. That’s at least 5% of all eligible voters you can fuck with, or a full ~33% of votes
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Now, we assume the extra votes will be more heavily distributed against Trump, right? But what if they’re not? What if we make them not? How can we even tell?
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Our alternative hypothesis is that we’re going to see a change in distribution. But what if we don’t? The best we can do is fail to reject the null hypothesis. So if I were hacking votes, in a contested or pro-Trump precinct, I’d make the votes look distributed like 2016.
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And if you do this there is *absolutely no way to catch it*
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Not through statistical means, at least. Your priors are too damn strong.
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The best way to get away with things is to go unnoticed. And the best way to go unnoticed is to have no meaningful change that can be detected. This means that a ton of votes don’t need to be swapped. Just a handful per precinct.
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When we think of election impropriety we think of dictators stuffing the ballot box to get 99% of the votes. It’s much more damaging, tho, if you can ensure that a 3 pt margin remains a 3 pt margin.
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This is the subject of the latest episode of the podcast Gaslit Nation (Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Kendzior). Well worth listening to, if scary af.
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Oh, sorry, that’s Andrea Chalupa. Too late + migraine.
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