Wi-Fi sniffers strapped to drones: odd plan to stop election fraud

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/wi-fi-sniffers-strapped-to-drones-mike-lindells-odd-plan-to-stop-election-fraud/

by sunbum • 3 years ago

36 124 3 years ago

arstechnica.com

HumblyTossed• 3 years ago

These people are so fucking stupid. There's just no being nice about it. They are void of any intelligence whatsoever.

Mike61• 3 years ago

I agree ... I am now a little more stupid for just thinking about this ...

orangepurple4• 3 years ago

These dummies think a wifi scanner will pick up anything useful and that they can somehow keep drones floating over concrete buildings where wireless signals are highly attenuated, voting takes place and afterwards, around 24-36 hours, and what if there is a cellular modem inside? It won't be picked up by some wifi SSID sniffer. And SSIDs don't have to be broadcast by APs. Total fools.

sjsdaiuasgdia9• 3 years ago

This opens up another grift opportunity - drones that can do in-flight battery swaps for these drones!

Call Lindell, see if he has any money left.

taylodl• 3 years ago

I call it negative intelligence - people who are so stupid they make everybody around them more stupid.

predictabl32• 3 years ago

Honestly the real conspiracy is that Lindell and other dipshits are making legitimate concerns about voting machines impossible to talk about.

brk• 3 years ago

I can't wait to show up to the next election with some ESP32's configured to create networks like "Diebold System 1" or "Vote Reorganizer".

astrodust2• 3 years ago

"ccp-electioncontrol-b490"

bdcravens2• 3 years ago

For several months, I renamed my phone to "Pfizer 5G Transmitter" so it'd show up when I turned my hotspot on.

kotaKat• 3 years ago

Oh, cool! Free drones with (probably) Rapsberry Pis attached! I'll bring my net when I go vote.

datavirtue2• 3 years ago

I will LMAO if I see a drone hovering over my polling place. I might even be moved to tears if it's clutching a pillow.

caboteria• 3 years ago

Hopefully we'll be able to sign up and have them send us one for free so we can use it for things other than monitoring our local polling place.

whoitwas• 3 years ago

Why's the drone required?

wedowhatwedo• 3 years ago

It's not but I'm sure some very smart business person knew Mike Lindell was gullible and would fall for something crazy like this.

A box in the corner doesn't make for good TV. Drones flying around sure does.

splintercell3• 3 years ago

Why would election centers allow a box to be kept in the room?

What might work better is people walking around with a backpack wearing Pineapple.

https://youtu.be/EbetD2LMbeQ

stantaylor• 3 years ago

Why drones? was my first thought as well. I think your answer is as good as any. Mike Lindell is an idiot.

predictabl32• 3 years ago

Even better when you label the "wifi montiroing device" as "WMD" and strap it to a drone.

Also, why do I even know this? What is life anymore? Haha.

fuzzylightbulb• 3 years ago

I bet they are using crypto and AI, too, for the cyber. It's buzzwords all the way down. Grifters gonna grift...

georgeplusplus6• 3 years ago

> Why's the drone required?

Id assume its illegal to put a sniffer into a polling place.

What makes the plan stupid is believing you can capture a supposedly covert intermittent low energy signal using a drone that can only hover about 10 minutes at a time.

tfandango• 3 years ago

Standing next to a building doesn't sound as good, marketing. Stuff like this actually makes me really sad because people should not really be this gullible.

JessMee• 3 years ago

It isn't, really. My impression is that anyone could just sit in a parked vehicle with one of these and track what info is available. But they're not flashy enough by themselves. The drones are the sizzle that sells the steak.

joezydeco• 3 years ago

A lot of local election laws prohibit electioneering or any kind of campaigning or observation within X number of feet of a polling place.

I'm guessing putting a drone a hundred feet or so above a polling place somehow allows line of sight while still staying out of the restricted zone?

lockhouse8• 3 years ago

Or we could just offer secure voter IDs to everyone that is legally eligible to vote free of charge.

It could be like selective service. Sign up after your eighteenth birthday to vote.

Also, use scantron style ballots that use computers to automate vote counting but not vote casting, with members of all major political parties monitoring polling stations and vote counting to ensure everything is above board.

CyberDildonics6• 3 years ago

Or we could just offer secure voter IDs to everyone that is legally eligible to vote free of charge.

This exists, it's called registering with your address and then going to your local polling place.

Voter fraud is essentially a nonexistent problem.

codr72• 3 years ago

One day you're going to look back at this comment and it will feel about as comfortable as Gate's yapping about 640k being enough for anyone.

ausbah2• 3 years ago

but why, voter fraud isn’t a problem in the US. trying to sate the lies of one political party won’t “prove them wrong” either, they’ll just fine new things to cry foul about somehow

gustavus• 3 years ago

Yes but it might make their claims ring more hollow. The purpose isn't to convince the diehard zealots, it's to convince the people that might be on the fence and could see it go either way.

Maybe Joe down the street isn't very much into politics, but he's been hearing all about these electronic voting machines being the source of fraud, and he know it sounds unreasonable, but it does introduce some doubt, especially when he finds out that no one knows what's in them and that people can access em "over the internets", it's enough out of his wheelhouse to get him wondering.

georgeplusplus6• 3 years ago

>>> "voter fraud isn’t a problem in the US"

Playing devils advocate here, how do you know that?

This whole argument dont look under the rug because if the rug isnt dirty then theyll shift their attention to under the couch seems afoul.

Y-bar• 3 years ago

Sign up after your eighteenth birthday to vote.

Offer may differ for some communities, certain may experience having to sign up two counties over, in the basement, on the second Wednesday every odd month, behind a locked door with a sign "Beware of the leopard".

Better if everyone just gets enrolled by default.

saveferris4• 3 years ago

There is a lot of things wrong with this but I have said that in order to get your tax refund you have to show proof you registered to vote. I'd like to say proof that you voted but that may be a step too far...

Agree, it should be easier not harder to register and to vote

splintercell3• 3 years ago

Better if everyone just gets enrolled by default.

But the whole point is that non-citizens are voting or multiple voting or non-resident voting is occurring.

The question is, how do you know that the person who is in the line to vote is the person who he says he is. Sure the name John Doe is on the list, but is the person standing in front of you is John Doe or not, how do you establish that?

lockhouse8• 3 years ago

What if national voter IDs were available at your local post office or military recruiting station? The availability and hours would be much better than most DMVs or welfare offices.

echelon2• 3 years ago

Or we could just offer secure voter IDs to everyone that is legally eligible to vote free of charge.

The opposition argues that this is discriminatory and would favor richer voters.

If I understand their argument correctly, there is a non-zero cost to going to obtain these forms of identification that disproportionately impact the poor. You have to take off work, commute (potentially without a car or bus), pay a fee, be capable of understanding the instructions, etc.

Also, use scantron style ballots that use computers to automate vote counting but not vote casting, with members of all major political parties monitoring polling stations and vote counting to ensure everything is above board.

The state of Georgia switched to these! They're awesome.

You digitally record your vote and get a printout with your selections. The printout becomes your ballot, and you're able to verify it before submitting it. The choices are super legible in big fonts.

There's a big QR code in the corner that an automated scanner can use to read the values, but a human can manually verify the printed names and ballot initiatives.

The printed ballots look like this:

https://cdt.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/imagecast-x-ballo...

mcculley3• 3 years ago

This seems worse than scantron to me. An unaided human cannot read the QR code to verify it.

tzs2• 3 years ago

The opposition argues that this is discriminatory and would favor richer voters

Not quite. They argue that the kind of voter ID requirements that are being passed in several states are discriminatory because they are not free of charge. Some are free of any direct fees, but the indirect costs are often substantial, for the reasons you note:

If I understand their argument correctly, there is a non-zero cost to going to obtain these forms of identification that disproportionately impact the poor. You have to take off work, commute (potentially without a car or bus), pay a fee, be capable of understanding the instructions, etc.

Worse, some states that have passed such laws have also simultaneously taken steps to increase those indirect costs. E.g., under the guise of budget cutting reducing the number of offices that issue state IDs, and reducing the hours during which the remaining offices processes ID applications. The offices that get closed are disproportionately the ones that are nearest to the most minority and poor voters, who also happen to the the voters who are most likely to not already have the ID, and the reduced hours usually mean no evening or weekend hours meaning many have to take unpaid time off work to go apply for ID.

I forget which state it was, but in a lawsuit over their new ID law plaintiffs found a list the committee that drafted the law made which listed a bunch of different possible forms of ID that people had, and for each also listed for each what percent of voters had it and their party and racial demographics, sorted by how much that ID would favor white people of the majority party in that state, and the final approved IDs in the law were all the ones the ones that favored white majority party voters.

Here are a ton of references, many of which contain a zillion links to even more research on this:

https://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AMERI...

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jul/11/eric-holde...

https://www.aclu.org/documents/oppose-voter-id-legislation-f...

https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/2018/Minority_Voting_Access...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a...

https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/4/7157037/us-voter-id-req...

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/07/644648955/for-older-voters-ge...

https://rewirenewsgroup.com/2014/10/16/well-actually-pretty-...

https://www.theregreview.org/2019/01/08/shapiro-moran-burden...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/heres-h...

https://scholars.org/contribution/high-cost-free-photo-voter...

https://now.tufts.edu/2018/01/23/proving-voter-id-laws-discr...

tomjen32• 3 years ago

You have to go vote anyway, right?

Since rich people tend to make more money per hour, that is discriminatory to them too.

Honestly if there is one thing the US doesn't need it is more uninformed voters. I would love if one could require a test for civics or something before you could vote. Not discriminating anyone, no grandfather clauses.

saveferris4• 3 years ago

One of the interesting by products of all of this is that elections are getting less secure instead of more secure. After all these allegations came out and if you dug into how elections are run, they are pretty secure - not perfect of course. Now, you have states opting out of things like the registry that can detect if a voter votes in more than one state. So, it will be harder to catch a person voting in more than one state now. I guess that only applies to presidential elections where that would be illegal but I am sure people have voted in more than one local election too and they should not have.

I live in Illinois and I don't know if it is free or not but you can get a sate ID here that is not a drivers license and use that to register to vote.

A national version could make sense. Since the more voters there are only helps one party, we'll never see anything like that on a national level no matter how much sense it makes.

schemathings• 3 years ago

Slight tweak - you're eligible to vote in the primaries if you'll be 18 by the general election.

tzs2• 3 years ago

Also, use scantron style ballots that use computers to automate vote counting but not vote casting, with members of all major political parties monitoring polling stations and vote counting to ensure everything is above board.

That's almost the right way to do it. Just add some additional data printed on the ballots in a special ink that is normally invisible, and provide voters with a special marker to fill in the bubbles that reacts with the special ink to make it visible, use some clever cryptographic techniques to figure out what should be printed with that special ink, and you get this [1].

With that, people who just want to vote and trust that others will deal with auditing and counting go into the booth, fill in the bubbles for their candidates, drop the ballot in the collection box, and then just wait for the machine count to see who won, just like now.

But after the election all the cast ballots can be published allowing anyone to check the count.

Individual voters who noted a code that was on their ballot can check the published ballots and verify that their ballot was counted correctly (but they cannot prove to a third party that they voted for a particular candidate).

This system also allows a voter before voting to verify that the ballots have been correctly printed.

Voting systems with those properties are called end-to-end (E2E) verifiable voting systems [2], and there have been several proposals for such systems, including many that like Scantegrity do not rely on electronic voting machines.

Here is the original paper on this (PDF and HTML), and a paper proving that it is coercion-resistant [3][4][5]:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...

[3] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...

[4] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...

[5] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf

tomjen32• 3 years ago

Its and interesting idea, but what do you do when Joes says his vote was miscounted?

Can you prove him wrong? Can he prove it?

Because if not, it all seems pointless to me.

bediger4000• 3 years ago

This sounds close to what Colorado does. Ballots are hand marked and human readable, but machine counted. Risk limiting audits are performed for (I think) every election above small town level.

Ballots are mailed to every eligible voter, but you can go vote if you really like your precinct.

ThinkingGuy• 3 years ago

I guess nobody's told him about MAC address randomization.

(not that gathering SSIDs and MACs from random people in the vicinity who happen to have Wi-Fi on their devices has any value in detecting election fraud, anyway)

neilv• 3 years ago

Are the nutty people and manipulators discrediting legitimate concerns about electronic voting machines?

I think it would be better if they limited their sabotage to UFOs, and french fries, and other things less fundamental to our society.

orangepurple4• 3 years ago

UFO news happens when some really bad domestic corruption stories are in danger of getting into the news cycle

mcculley3• 3 years ago

I enjoy this meta conspiracy theory.

djkivi• 3 years ago

Don't forget about Titanic news...

linuxftw4• 3 years ago

I don't believe the elections have any amount of integrity in the US. The system of controls in place are laughable at best. When the physical recount doesn't match the voting day totals, the original totals are kept (see Jill Stein vs Hillary in 2016). It's just pathetic all the way around.

That said, Mike Lindell is a fraud charlatan. The fact that Trump hitched his wagon, directly or indirectly, to clowns like him shows how weak of a statesman he really is. I agreed with many of Trump's policies, but his ability to execute is pitiful.

sjsdaiuasgdia9• 3 years ago

Manual recounts tend to be full of error opportunities, so that policy is pretty sensible to me. Maybe if you did a large number of manual recounts and took an average or the most common value or something, it might work. A single manual recount is not deserving of any trust whatsoever.

Manual recounts are a safety blanket for people who haven't thought through what it costs and what it actually gets you.

linuxftw4• 3 years ago

We're not talking about a discrepancy of 1 or 2 votes. We're talking hundreds of votes.

coolhand2120• 3 years ago

I’m not into Lindell or whatever is going on here, but that said closed source voting machines that are not open for audit and have remote access setup really do not sound like the ideal platform for trust. Really if you wanted people to distrust these machines I couldn’t think of a more perfect solution for distrust than that.

2devnull2• 3 years ago

And then sue anybody who questions the machines security.

rtkwe• 3 years ago

Loads of people raise concerns about electronic voting machines without getting sued, it's making wild direct claims that they're switching votes while writing in internal emails you know it's false that gets you in trouble...

mindslight10• 3 years ago

One of the biggest problems with these nutjob movements is that they're playing off very real problems to fuel their circuses. Proprietary untrustable voting machines have always been a major problem. You used to be able to bring this up, and since it wasn't a partisan issue, people would at least hear you out even though they understood little about the technicals. But these days if you talk about it to most people or without including a bunch of nuanced disclaimers, you're pigeonholed as if you're part of this mentally ill cult. So reasonable opposition/criticism gets pushed into this shitty position of just having to support the status quo, despite seeing its glaring problems and injustices.

appplication• 3 years ago

This statement is basically a metaphor for really any political issue. Modern political discourse is about picking sides and entrenching defenses rather than developing reasonable, nuanced takes on individual issues.

friend_and_foe2• 3 years ago

Well the only choice you have is to not play that game. Opposition to valid criticism will take advantage of this and put the quacks front and center. The only choice we have is to ignore the quacks and call out anyone trying to equate us with them.

HWR_14• 3 years ago

While open-source would be great, in reality who is going to be verifying the binaries on every machine? Human readable paper ballots backed by audits are the gold standard.

orangepurple4• 3 years ago

Why bother performing election fraud using an online process? Just discard user inputs, use preloaded historical local voter registration data by age cohort, multiply the curve by some coefficients to make it plausible, and report that as the result. If the coefficients are known, a recount can "independently" be designed to come up with the same numbers. No network access is needed to produce completely controlled results. The network access thing is a red herring. There are more sophisticated ways to generate the numbers the powers that be want without raising eyebrows.

ceejayoz4• 3 years ago

This can be surprisingly hard to get right. Look at the chart in https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/10/11/russian-... for an example. Humans are bad at making up numbers.

sharikous• 3 years ago

Making open source, transparent, auditable, voting machines that can be trusted to be secure and are more efficient than physical counting is a very interesting challenge.

A challenge that I am sure politicians are not very interested in solving.

Why spending so much to gain the trust of your citizens if most people know nothing about cryptography anyway?

mikey_p• 3 years ago

This demonstrates such a poor misunderstanding of how elections and elections equipment work, that this can only be assumed to be a fundraising stunt.

I've been a poll worker in Ohio off and on for 3 years, and at no point does any polling location send any voting data over any network of any kind. There's literally nothing to hook a router or access point up to that contains any votes.

* At least in my county, the electronic pollbooks in each voting location ARE networked to the other pollbooks in that location so that we can see WHO voted, etc. but this is just the pollbooks, which is necessary to prevent folks from voting twice by trying to check in at a different pollbook. Each electronic pollbook is also backed up by a paper pollbook, and we reconcile all the totals several times a day to make sure that we have an accurate count of how many ballots have been issued and how many ballots are in the ballot box.

sleepybrett• 3 years ago

Hidden wireless (5g! Get cancer while you vote!) modems implanted in voting machines in secret by kim jun un and the illuminati! /heavy on the sarcasm

monkeydreams• 3 years ago

I suspect that the point of this technology is to experience false positives, thereby sowing further discord and distrust. They will find signals everywhere, if they are even indeed interested in bothering to filter for them, and will claim this is evidence that the next election is being stolen.

bdcravens2• 3 years ago

Is he giving this contract to the Cyber Ninjas too?

mikestew• 3 years ago

So...make sure all of my voting machines are hard-wired Cat6 to a router that has no radio transmitters? I mean, how hard did they think about...oh...nevermind.

I sometimes wish I had the lack of integrity to look for opportunities like this and exploit them. Sell snake oil to those who are actively looking for snake oil. OTOH, a life lived with some degree of integrity (hey, I'm not perfect) has served me well enough so far.

footlose_3815• 3 years ago

Why is anyone giving this guy oxygen. He's been laughed off the natural stage for years.

Wi-Fi sniffers strapped to drones: odd plan to stop election fraud

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