Things that made you laugh today (Political Version)

[Taernath]

That's a good argument against it. Companies do lose information to leaks all the time, and that's problematic. Making people's votes public would be devastating. But you'd think something like that also would've happened with the IRS database with all the e-filing or a big bank with everyone's financial records, liquidity, investments, etc, by now too, so maybe it's just a matter of the right security. That's information that nefarious parties absolutely would have an interest in, so why hasn't it happened?.

Because things like Equifax are mostly financial crime. It's easier for a criminal to just sit on the info and make fraudulent credit card applications rather than put together some kind of blackmail folder.

I don't buy the widespread attack and fraud theory, from either foreign or domestic sources. That stuff could be put together in the current system if such an entity were so inclined. Preventing that isn't much harder than the two step authentication most sites are starting to require now. Cast your vote, great. Don't have your specific cell phone on you to confirm that the vote was cast by you? No dice. Go find a physical polling station.

I disagree that it could be done now. In my state (AZ) you can vote in person or mail-in. So either our Russian friends need to pull an Invasion of the Body Snatchers and replace the surly Boomers at hundreds of polling stations, or they commit widespread mail fraud, both of which I imagine are virtually impossible to do without being noticed.

Edit to add: And don't even get me started on the disaffected teens you just mentioned. Why aren't they hacking the banks to put money in their accounts so they can buy more ..whatever...skinny jeans and goth eyeliner? The answer is because the security is too tight and the penalties are too strict. I would imagine trying to rig an election comes with...well even greater consequences than financial crimes. Treason or what have you.

You don't need to hack into a website to shut something down. I mentioned them mostly because of the DDoS attacks they do. Doing it to the federal government would probably be more difficult than Sony, but our online voting website is all hypothetical at this point so we don't know its capabilities.