Oh goodness, y’all.
In a grandiose lesson about knocking on wood, not counting chickens before eggs are hatched, ETCETERA, in tonight’s council meeting our illustrious EA Isabel informed the group that the heretofore scandal-free AMS elections were, in fact, scandalicious.
Ladies and gentlemen: it appears we got hacked.
For big fat details in all their glory, you can read the full text of the Elections Fraud Report. A quick summary follows, however, for you kids on the go.
- Mark Latham, Voter Funded Media guru, was analyzing data for his own purposes & discovered an apparent irregularity; he notified Isabel, who alerted the proper authorities.
- There are 731 “Suspect Votes” which were identified as being from the same IP address & voting in a four-hour bloc (a very large number of votes in a very short amount of time).
- An independent party, Forensic Data Recovery (FDR), has been hired to investigate this occurrence and see if their are other instances of voter fraud in the elections.
- These 731 votes affect ONLY the following races:
- the single passing referendum (tuition policy = LOWER PLZ)
- UBC Senate
- VFM
- OH FUCK WHAT
It’s still uncertain how the suspicious activity happened, whether or not saved votes were overwritten or the fraudulent votes were independent, etc. etc. Is it possible that previous races were affected? oh yes. Is it possible that there is undetectable fraud happening in our elections? Well, in the words of Speaker Dave:
We said they were a hacker. We didn’t say they were a super-smart hacker.
Sleep soundly, voters. Oh, and the UBC Votes team (AUS, EUS, HKUS, & SUS) will not be using this online voting system, they will use WebVote. And you, O Computer Elite of the Cloning Powers, we have but one request for you:
Mad props for use of the hackers poster!
*ahem*