Before Argentine Congress, Macri's e-ballots shown to be vulnerable to hacking via smartphone.

[forest444]

Testifying before a select committee in the Argentine Lower House of Congress, the Chamber of Deputies, programming specialist Javier Smaldone demonstrated that the "Unique Electronic Ballot" proposed by President Mauricio Macri can be easily hacked by any basic smartphone currently on the market.

Using his own Samsung Galaxy phone with a basic Android operating system (the most common type currently sold in Argentina), Smaldone demonstrated how a sample electronic ballot sheet provided by the Interior Ministry can be easily read by merely waving a smartphone across the ballot - even through clothing.

Doing so, Smaldone demonstrated, automatically uploads the entire ballot and a voter's choice in each race, requiring only a simple application.

The Unique Electronic Ballot (Boleta Única Electrónica) is the centerpiece of a electoral reform package sponsored by Macri. Introduced in June, the bill calls for replacing the existing paper ballots currently in use in most provinces with a fully electronic system before the 2017 mid-term elections. Electronic voting in Argentina was first used in Salta Province in 2009, and extended to the Buenos Aires mayoral election last year.

The Macri administration touts electronic voting as a way to achieve greater “transparency and agility” during the vote count. Proposals for electronic voting came under fire last year, however, after a Buenos Aires IT security professional (Joaquín Sorianello) discovered and reported vulnerabilities in the electronic system used in the Buenos Aires mayoral elections (which the ruling party candidate narrowly won).

Once the vulnerabilities - including exposed SSL keys and ways to forge ballots with multiple votes - were reported to the manufacturer of the voting machines ("Magic Software Argentina&quot and the media, Macri - who was mayor at the time - ordered Sorianello detained and his computers and electronic devices impounded.

According to testimony by local cybersecurity expert Alfredo Ortega, the servers controlling the Buenos Aires mayoral vote were also reportedly hacked from sites in New Jersey and Texas. The effects of this action on the final result, Ortega reminded lawmakers, will never be known with any degree of certainty.

At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://www.politicargentina.com/notas/201608/15766-un-especialista-mostro-en-el-congreso-una-de-las-fallas-de-la-boleta-electronica.html&prev=search

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Smaldone's demonstration. It's in Spanish; but it speaks for itself.[/center]

[Judi Lynn]

1. Oh, wow. Sure hope there's some group with power in this world which is actually clean!

This dirty stuff has gone much, much further than anyone could have dreamed.

So we see some of the hacking came from both the North East, and the South of the US of A. Yep.

Everything seems in order, right?

It's time the world experienced some clean intervention. Things have gotten wildly dirty in a very short period of time.

What a shame.

Thank you so much for this information, forest444. This is really big.

[forest444]

2. He's Argentina's Dubya, you might say.

An incompetent fascist given to electoral, tax, and securities fraud - complete with his own "Karl Rove" (Durán Barba).

You might remember that part of me was holding out a little hope in the beginning that Macri would restrain himself - if for no other reason than for his electoral chances and presidential legacy.

But then, why would he need to worry about such things when he's got black box voting on his side. Hence this "electoral reform" package, and ballots than can be remotely altered with a cheap phone and the right app.

Thank you for your input, Judi. I suspect our friend Macri will give us cause to come back to this topic from time to time.