Hacking an Election

by Dagfari

Working in Elections Manitoba has given me time to think - after all, it's Government work, eh?

Manitoba's election system is designed to provide secure paper voting with easy computer enumeration and vote counting and a thick paper trail.  There are, however, multiple possible ways for a candidate to rig an election - at least for him.  I'll be showing you one of them.

In case you aren't familiar with how provincial elections work in Canada, here's how.  Each party fields a candidate to each electoral division.  Thirty-three days before the actual election, the current legislative assembly issues a writ.  Then, for two weeks, enumeration takes place, with people going door-to-door collecting names of eligible voters and marking them down.  The names are entered into the database and handled with computers from this point on.

Each Returning Office (RO) serves one electoral division, and each division is further broken down into various voting areas of about equal population.  For example, the "Fort Whyte" division is broken down into a total of 65 voting areas.  Each area consists of between 200 and 350 voters; each area has its own voting place where the actual voting occurs.

A week before elections take place advance polls begin, and the next week, Election Day.  But a certain candidate, Mr. Theoretically Corrupt, has already guaranteed himself a seat in the next legislative assembly!  (Oh noes!)

Technology

The enumeration software here for Elections Manitoba is called VES, the Voter Enumeration System.

It's a Microsoft Access program, secured for multiple users with passwords.  If you have access to the Master computer for the returning office serving that division, you have direct access to that database which, if you can edit directly, you can add voters to with no security check.

I'm sure we all know the old adage about "When an unauthorized user has physical access, you lose all security."  The bonus is this: at least in my RO, the Master was routinely used as an extra data entry terminal.  However, this sort of direct access is entirely unnecessary for a candidate to steal the election, as we'll see...

The Snatch

When the writ is signed, the Corrupt Candidate's goons get jobs as enumerators for his division.  As enumerators, they are given everything they need - a badge, a pen, and a carbon copy pad of forms to fill out with each person's address, name, phone number, and other information.

There are no checks on whether the information filled out by each enumerator is necessarily true, and so it becomes a numbers game - 65 goons (one for each voting area) fill out an extra 20 names each.  For some bonus, one could add names to vacant houses or add people in such a way that will not be detected with a casual observation of the list - like matching last names with people still at the address, or looking up names of dead relatives.

That's an extra 1,300 votes for the candidate, and that is likely enough to turn the election towards whoever is willing to do it.  On voting day, those goons step into the lines at three separate voting places and work their way through each voting area.

Of course, this only gains the party the candidate is a part of one seat in the assembly, hardly enough to form a government or wrest power away from a majority.

However, if the corrupt candidate was running against someone important the premier of the province, for instance - or if all candidates from one party were this corrupt, then it could cause a lot of hassle/panic/disaster.

Conclusion

Thankfully, Canadian Elections' decentralized structure makes this sort of election-rigging hard and costly to do by itself, and there is always the risk that the voters' count would be noticed.

It's possible for the candidate's goons to fill in names for those houses that don't have any people living in them, or houses that are under construction, but that may take away from the total number of bonus votes.

As it is though, once a name is enumerated, the voter is considered to be "in the system" and identified.  All each goon needs to identify himself is something that has both his fake name and the fake-or-not address on it.  Drivers' licenses are good, but for election-stealing purposes mail is better and easier to forge.

But of course, this is all for informational and analytical purposes only.  Any use of this information or any other information available in an illegal or dishonest manner is no fault of mine and not something I condone as the writer.

Please, do not steal Manitoba's Elections, money, software, or anything else.  Thanks.