Reply #4: What we take for granted [View All]

[badc0der]

“You don’t need a statistician to calculate the probability that organized fraud so massive could be pulled off without some evidence of the conspiracy leaking out.”

This is the one passage in the article that struck me. I think it sums up nicely what most of us “get” that the mainstream doesn’t. Which is that massive is not the right word to describe the conspiracy needed to pull this off. To that end I have put together a list of the conspirators you would need to pull this off.

1 experienced hacker/cracker. Based on how long it took me to write a patcher for GEMS I would estimate that it would take this person about a week to complete a hack for each of the tabulators in use. Alternatively you could have one person in a position to ask for this that wouldn’t attract suspicion (e.g. ES&S executive).

1 telco employee. Pulling phone numbers for phone lines ordered by “*.elections” should take a few minutes if the telco has their database setup properly. Alternatively you could have one person in a position to ask for this list without attracting suspicion (e.g. high level NEMA person).

1 financier. Based on my estimate of the number of “interesting” counties (around 500) I expect enough equipment to complete the whole operation in less than ten minutes would cost between $50,000 and $100,000. The final conspirator needs to be able to front this amount of money (in addition to whatever the other two demand to keep quite) and be disappear for 10 minutes on election night.

That’s it. 3 people easily could do it, no “massive” conspiracy required.