gus gorman takes on the election

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2024-10-27 18:00:05

Imagine you are Gus Gordon, and you live in the United States – a country which uses the Electoral College for their national election process – while each state or province may award electors based on the popular vote (either and all-or-nothing approach, or proportionally), a pure “most votes” count does not necessarily indicate a national winner. Oh – and you are a systems programmer for the company that builds and distributes all of the electronic voting machines for the country. These machines print a Scantron-like paper slip with the voter’s choices marked as “filled-in”, and candidates they did not vote for left “empty”. How might you be able to “put your finger on the scale” to increase the likelihood of your preferred national candidate to win an election? 41 years ago, you successfully captured all of the truncated fractions of a cent “lost” on dollars-and-cents transactions at a previous employer and were able to buy yourself a fancy sports car (which, unfortunately, is what alerted your employer to your fraud). Now, though, you have decided to give one last hoorah to your career – one which will never be caught, yet you will know you did – you will not make the mistake Stanley Motss did. How would you go about perpetrating the greatest fraud in history?

The problem with systematized fraud like this, is that it needs to be subtle – which translates into needing to be extremely spread-out. It also needs to be “unverifiable” – sans some kind of exhaustive, public (and published) source code review, discovering the fraud needs to statistically “impossible”. So here is how I would do it – if I were both so inclined and in a position to “pull it off” (which, thankfully for all of you, I am not).