Electronic Voting, Spring 2020Apr 15 notes and discussion
Part of
the CS:4980:0004 Electronic Voting Notes
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This is the text of a talk I delivered before the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council. If you prefer the YouTube version, it is available, but you can probably read it much faster than the 51 minutes of the video. It's not all about me, but rather, this is what a non-governmental observer could tell about what happened from the perspective of Iowa City in early 2017. The Mueller Report largely backs up what I said back then, and provides more than ample evidence, although some of it is blacked out in the public release.
Pages 36-50 of the Mueller Report dig into the question of foreign interference in the election of 2016, focusing on Russia and the machinery of elections, mostly state voter registration databases. The pages discussed here cover Part I, Section III of the report, with 3 subsections:
A) GRU hacking of the Clinton Campaign. Skim this. A worthwhile point to remember here is that campaign computers are not part of the election administration, but they contain huge amounts of critical information. For example, campaigns routinely buy (for a very low cost) lists of all registered voters for use in their data mining and advertising targeting. Those lists contain all of the information that a crook would need to do something like forging a change-of-address notice or filing an absentee ballot request.
B) Dissemination of the hacked materials through Wikileaks and other channels. Skim this, if you wish, it's not a central issue.
C) Additional GRU cyberoperations. This ends with discussions of attacks on state election offices and some of the vendors.
Beware, it's easy to get lost and distracted in the Mueller Report. Subsection D and section IV focus on issues that are outside the scope of a computer-science class. While the question of collusion between various US actors and foreign agents may be of great importance politically, it's not the subject of this course. On the other hand, the vulnerability of the computer systems that are part of our election machinery is within bounds.