How to Rig an Election in the Digital Age: Any Computer Programmer Can Do It

Andrés Sepúlveda learned much more than all of the dirty tricks that are afforded by the digital age.  He learned how the electorate makes decisions in the digital world.

For decades, Latin American elections were rigged, not won, and the methods were pretty straightforward. Local fixers would hand out everything from small appliances to cash in exchange for votes. But in the 1990s, electoral reforms swept the region. Voters were issued tamper-proof ID cards, and nonpartisan institutes ran the elections in several countries. The modern campaign, at least a version North Americans might recognize, had arrived in Latin America.

Rendón had already begun a successful career based partly, according to his critics—and more than one lawsuit—on a mastery of dirty tricks and rumormongering. (In 2014, El Salvador’s then-President Carlos Mauricio Funes accused Rendón of orchestrating dirty war campaigns throughout Latin America. Rendón sued in Florida for defamation, but the court dismissed the case on the grounds that Funes couldn’t be sued for his official acts.) The son of democracy activists, he studied psychology and worked in advertising before advising presidential candidates in his native Venezuela. After accusing then-President Chávez of vote rigging in 2004, he left and never went back.

Sepúlveda’s first hacking job, he says, was breaking into an Uribe rival’s website, stealing a database of e-mail addresses, and spamming the accounts with disinformation. He was paid $15,000 in cash for a month’s work, five times as much as he made in his previous job designing websites.

Sepúlveda was dazzled by Rendón, who owned a fleet of luxury cars, wore big flashy watches, and spent thousands on tailored coats. Like Sepúlveda, he was a perfectionist. His staff was expected to arrive early and work late. “I was very young,” Sepúlveda says. “I did what I liked, I was paid well and traveled. It was the perfect job.” But more than anything, their right-wing politics aligned. Sepúlveda says he saw Rendón as a genius and a mentor. A devout Buddhist and practitioner of martial arts, according to his own website, Rendón cultivated an image of mystery and menace, wearing only all-black in public, including the occasional samurai robe. On his website he calls himself the political consultant who is the “best paid, feared the most, attacked the most, and also the most demanded and most efficient.” Sepúlveda would have a hand in that.

Rendón, says Sepúlveda, saw that hackers could be completely integrated into a modern political operation, running attack ads, researching the opposition, and finding ways to suppress a foe’s turnout. As for Sepúlveda, his insight was to understand that voters trusted what they thought were spontaneous expressions of real people on social media more than they did experts on television and in newspapers. He knew that accounts could be faked and social media trends fabricated, all relatively cheaply. He wrote a software program, now called Social Media Predator, to manage and direct a virtual army of fake Twitter accounts. The software let him quickly change names, profile pictures, and biographies to fit any need. Eventually, he discovered, he could manipulate the public debate as easily as moving pieces on a chessboard—or, as he puts it, “When I realized that people believe what the Internet says more than reality, I discovered that I had the power to make people believe almost anything.”

Although the United States has never uncovered an election rigger with the stature of Andrés Sepúlveda, there have been more than a few charges of election fraud.  Arizona’s Secretary of State, Michele Regan pointed out how easy it is.

Regan issued a press release that the voter data base was hacked in the in the March 22, 2016 Arizona primary. Because Arizona is a closed primary state, those who aren’t previously registered as Democrat, Republican, or Green are prohibited from voting in primary elections.  The databases was hacked and voter registration was changed from one of the of the approved parties to independent that invalidated thousands of votes.  She confirmed this in a press conference.

This was something that I know happens, and I know it happened to people in this room. It’s not hearsay. It happened to someone in my own office. One of my employees was registered as a particular party, went to go vote, and I don’t want to divulge his personal details, but it happened to him.

In 2000 Clinton Curtis, an American attorney, computer programmer and ex-employee of NASA and ExxonMobil, became a whistleblower exposing Republican Congressman Tom Feeney, and Feeney and Yang Enterprises who requested Curtis’s assistance in a scheme to steal votes by inserting fraudulent code into touch screen voting systems.

Testifying under oath Curtis told the U.S. House Judiciary Members in Ohio that rigging an election to guarantee an outcome is easy, “any computer programmer can do it.”

If rigging elections in the digital world can range from simple hacking of databases and entering fraudulent code in voting equipment to the sophisticated activities developed by Andrés Sepúlveda, then what are the chances that future elections will be free of fraud?  Slim to none would probably be the best answer at this time.

To read more about election fraud in the U.S. and Andrés Sepúlveda story, see Bloomberg, U.S. Uncut, and ActivistPost.