Tits or GTFO
It was famous from the hacker Rules of the Internet, and Nader recognized it immediately. Because so few females were ever admitted to the hacker clubs, Rule #31 required a physical display of feminine attributes, either by live video or a screenshot, as a way of weeding out imposters. Below it was a poster of a brightly colored circuit breaker. “We call it the Secret Switch,” the young man said. “The Holy Grail of campaign IT.”
“So you’ve found it?” Nader asked, humoring him. “The Secret Switch?”
“Ask Navid.”
And so he did.
“This is like totally secret, man,” Navid said, drumming his fingers on his glass desktop. “Granger and my guys are the only ones who have any idea what we are doing. Jourdain and Turpin are clueless. Everything’s on a need-to-know basis. Hence, the SCIF and the air gap on all our programming machines. So are you need-to-know?”
“That’s what Granger says.”
“Really? Maybe you don’t realize where this is leading. How do I know I can trust you and your guy?”
“Get out your dak-tagh.”
“My what?”
“Your dak-tagh. Let us cut palms together and see who is loyal.”
“Man, like, what are you talking about?”
“Klingon! When Martok first arrives on Deep Space Nine at the head of the Klingon invasion of Cardassia, he gets out his warrior knife and slits his palm and gets Captain Sisko and Major Kira to do the same. If they bleed real blood, they are not changelings and aren’t out to betray him.
“It was on last night,” he added sheepishly.
Navid burst out laughing. “That’s good. Hahahahaha…. Here we do a hash,” he said, referring to an encrypted version of a plaintext word. He sent a page to the printer and swiveled around to snatch it before it flew onto the floor. He glanced at it, bug-eyed, and handed it to Nader, It read:
11dac30c3ead3482f98ccf70675810c7
It was a rite of passage among the black hats, the hacktivists who graduated from 4chan to Anonymous to jail time or the FBI, or who just kept their heads down and scrubbed their online profiles, scrupulously practicing electronic hygiene. This particular hash was famous, so it wasn’t much of a test. Nader glanced at it, then airplaned the sheet back onto Navid’s paperless desk.
“Parmy,” he said.
Navid grinned wildly, and they bumped fists. “You’re in.”
He pulled up a PowerPoint and sent it to a monitor embedded in the glass window that gave onto the staff pool, and the surrounding glass darkened. The first slide was familiar: It showed the red/blue breakdown of the 2016 presidential election, county by county, with narrow blue streaks along the East and West Coasts and around a few major cities submerged in a vast red sea.
“It looks like a blow-out for Trump, but actually the election was decided by 77,000 votes in just three states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It’s very easy to imagine things having turned out very differently. In 2020, they will.”
“You don’t know that,” Nader objected.
“Oh, but I do,” Navid said.
He put up a map that differentiated the states by the type of voting machines they used. Forty-three states would be using voting machines that were no longer manufactured. And while all but ten of them had said they intended to replace the old machines, only a handful actually appropriated the funds to do so. “So, for the most part, we will be dealing with the old machines. But who cares! Old technologies, known vulnerabilities. New machines, new vulnerabilities. Hahahahaha.”
Nader could feel his eyes growing wider and his jaw dropping. “You’re going to hack the election.” It was a statement, not a question.
“No, no, no, no, no,” Navid said. “We are going to exploit vulnerabilities. Plural. Call it boutique exploits, custom-tailored for each situation. Not a silver bullet but a hail of silver bullets. A Gatling gun of silver bullets. A nuclear war of silver bullets! Hahahahaha.”
The next map color-coded the states and counties in various shades of reds, pinks, purples, and blues.
“Now here’s the bad news: Our national election infrastructure is actually a patchwork of several thousand networks, so there really isn’t a national election infrastructure you can hack. It’s all done at the state and county level. And each one has a different system. Like ten thousand of them. Complicated, right?
“But that’s also the good news, for us at least. Some of these systems are relatively strong. Those are in red. Some are pathetically weak, wide open to script kiddies, blue. But red or blue, none of them are safe. Give me enough time and resources, I guarantee you we can flip the secret switch, in and out with no fingerprints. Hahahahaha.”
There were so many exploits, so many entry points, the hardest thing was deciding which one to attack. And not all of the vulnerabilities involved the machines. Many were baked into the behavioral pattern of hard-core Democrat voters, poll watchers, and election judges.
“Take Florida, for example. All across the state, even in Republican counties, you’ve got Democrat snowbirds who will be showing up to vote after they have cast absentee ballots in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Maryland.”
“Aren’t they afraid of getting caught?” Nader said.
“Are you kidding? We made sure the state legislature never appropriated the funds the governor earmarked to link up to the ERIC system, which would allow the county boards to check their poll books against other states for duplicate votes. Besides, even if they made a positive match, they’d have to convene a grand jury and investigate each case individually. So no one ever gets prosecuted. I mean, like, never.
“Plus, you still have counties that use the old Direct Record Electronic or DRE machines. Why? Because they’ve got to facilitate voting for people with disabilities who can’t fill out a paper ballot, so it’s back to the old touch screens. The touch screens! Hahahahaha. Don’t you love the ADA? Those Edsels are so easy to penetrate that a pair of eleven-year-olds at DEF CON broke into them in about ten minutes. A pro can do it in less than a minute. Then you just upload your time bomb to the PCMCIA card and the on-board tabulator, and away you go. Good old-fashioned black box voting. No paper trail. Nothing. At one minute past eight, your results become the machine’s results, and it daisy-chains to the whole precinct. You want fifty-four to forty-six? That’s what you get. You want razor thin? Whatever! Once the results are uploaded or the PCMCIA card is taken out, the code erases itself without a trace. You’ve got DREs in some of our target counties in Florida, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and a handful of other states as well. I mean, like, we own the DREs. We could stop right there and win the election. But why stop when you’re having fun! Hahahahaha.
“Some of the DRE machines have been upgraded to generate a paper ballot that theoretically can be audited. When the voter presses the button to cast his finished ballot, our patch kicks in and alters the result, so the paper ballot shows the altered vote, not the original one. When the votes are tallied from the machine onto the removable PCMCIA card and uploaded onto the GEMS server, it’s our vote count that shows up. And if anyone ever cares to check, the paper ballots will match.
“Our best friends are the IT guys who work in all these election boards. They are absolutely convinced their systems are secure. Why? Because they designed them! They maintain them! Nobody can hack them! They are invincible! Hahahahaha.
“Take optical scanners. All the so-called experts are convinced that optical scanners are secure. Unlike the DREs, you fill in a paper ballot by hand, it gets scanned and tabulated and drops into a sealed box where it’s preserved for an eventual recount. So we can’t remotely generate the paper ballots or alter them. But for all the counties that have adopted them, only a handful do anything more than token audits to reconcile the paper ballots with the tabulated vote count announced on election night. Most of them just sample on
e percent of the precincts, running the paper ballots through the tabulators again. Thanks to us, they get the same results.
“When an election is decided within the margin of error, as it was in 2016, either candidate plausibly can win. But if he or she wins by three or four percent—way beyond the legal limit for a recount—who’s going to pay to make copies of all those paper ballots and the personnel to count them by hand? And even if they do, it will take days. And by that time, the whole nation will have known who the next president is, and if you tell them they were wrong and it’s actually the other guy, you’ll have chaos. Riots! Blood in the streets! And I haven’t even mentioned SQL injection into the manufacturer’s FTP sites to alter the patches they send out to their clients. Or the fact that the tabulators don’t actually count the paper ballots, but the image files. Can’t you see, our elections are secure! Look at the Iowa caucuses! What can possibly go wrong! Hahahahaha….”
“This is illegal, right?” Nader said.
“Dude, are you kidding? By the time you get home tonight, you will have broken some law. Probably more.”
McKenzie’s Maryland district habitually went Democrat. The redistricting commission predicted that even with the influx of new Republican voters, it would still elect a Democrat with 60.7 percent of the vote. Forget Aguilar’s campaign, his appeal to Hispanics, or his internal polls.
“Polls are notoriously wrong,” Navid said. “That’s the line to take. You want to program a result close to the original projections, then point to the redistricting commission. No surprise here, big margin, move along. With the way Aguilar’s spending money on media buys, he probably won’t have enough to pay for a recount. And even if he did, what would he find? We will arrange to lose enough of the paper ballots to cast doubt onto the accuracy of any recount. Chaos, man. Chaos! Hahahahaha!”
18
McKenzie stayed behind after the campaign meeting waiting for Nader. The word from his pollster that afternoon had been bleak. Even Nash, the ever-upbeat campaign consultant, was advising desperate measures, things he had never done to win an election. They needed to fund a massive get-out-the-vote drive, focusing on places like Takoma Park and Bethesda and downtown Rockville—their strongholds. They needed to saturate the airwaves, radio and TV, with attack ads and with their closing argument, back-to-back if possible. McKenzie needed to be at every street festival, even the Great Frederick Fair, the heart of the heart of Yahoo Land. (There are more Democrats in Frederick than you think, Nash said.) They also needed phone banks to call the snowbirds and explain to them that they could request an absentee ballot from the State Board of Elections on the Friday before Election Day, as long as they postmarked it by Election Day. Under Maryland law, they had the right to vote if they were still a resident of the state. No need to put a fine point on it. Let them decide where duty lies, Nash said.
The latest Quinnipiac poll had them down 44–52 with only 4 percent undecided. It was going to be a tough climb, but it was still possible, Nash said. As early voting began in more than a dozen states, Trump’s unfavorables, which had been running well over 50 percent for most of the campaign, dipped down below 50 percent for the first time. The race was tightening as voters began to pay attention, some of them for the first time.
Kwanda Armstrong, their comms director, planned to unleash a barrage of targeted Facebook and YouTube ads. She had a team of volunteers and paid IT guys, separate from Nader’s operation, putting together truly nasty videos and memes disparaging their opponent and his barrio allure. Nash believed they could socially engineer hard-core deplorables who normally would vote Republican to split their ticket or at the very least not vote for Aguilar. Identifying these targets was a piece of cake.
What truly shocked him, though, was the disconnect between the mainstream media, who were screaming at Trump, and the mood on the street, where no one seemed to care. It had become a thing in black neighborhoods for young men to strut around with Keep America Great caps. At the Rockville street fair, when Aguilar supporters swarmed his booth with garish posters of newborn babies torn from the womb, he fully expected his supporters to come to the rescue and push them back. But no one came. Where were the outraged soccer moms? The college kids? The feminists and queers? Had they all gone into hiding? Didn’t they care about protecting a woman’s right to choose? He had always thought he had his finger on the pulse of his district, but now he was beginning to wonder.
“So what about Granger’s guy?” he asked, when Nader finally showed up.
The DCCC director had tucked him into one of the sound-proofed cubicles members used for fundraising calls. Nader closed the door, put a finger to his lips, and spread open the black Faraday pouch Navid had given him. He placed his phone inside and mimed for McKenzie to do the same. The Congressman made his sour face.
“What’s the deal?” he said.
“It’s necessary, Congressman. No discussions in the open.”
When the phones had been locked down, Nader started to explain. “It’s a piece of cake for a malicious hacker to inject a Remote Access Trojan into your phone. We call them RATs. You won’t notice it, but your phone will become like an FBI wiretap, even when it’s turned off. These pouches cut the signal. It’s like the SCIF in the Capitol Building where everyone went to read the unredacted Mueller Report.”
“Nobody read the Mueller Report,” McKenzie said.
“Okay, the impeachment transcripts. Whatever. You get what I mean.”
“So does Granger’s guy have some kind of golden key?”
“I think he does, Congressman. Perhaps, many of them. Mrs. T is going to win the presidential, and you are going to be re-elected, within one-tenth of a percentage point of the projections in the GRAC.”
That was the Governor’s Redistricting Advisory Commission, the group that designed the new districts after the court mandate that struck down the gerrymander. Their statisticians looked at historical voting patterns and demographics and came up with precinct by precinct, street by street, even block by block vote tallies, and crunched the numbers to generate projections for the district as a whole.
“That was sixty-one to thirty-nine Democrat, give or take a few tenths. That’s pretty much what the polls are now showing—for my opponent.”
“Yeah, well. As Navid says, screw the polls. Nobody believes them anyhow. The GRAC projections are solid stuff. Just rely on them, and you’ll be good.”
McKenzie sat on a corner of the desk and pressed his jaw into his fist. Where was the limit of plausible deniability, he wondered. Were you aware, Congressman, that Granger and his IT team were actively plotting a criminal conspiracy to hijack the elections? No, sir. I saw no indication of that at the time. Really? Really. I know of no specific act. Better to keep it that way.
“What do we need to do?” he said finally.
“Didn’t sound to me like you have to do anything, sir. Granger has selected you for the program.”
“The program?”
“That’s what they’re calling it. The ‘secret switch.’”
“The what?”
“Actually, you don’t need to know that, Congressman.”
McKenzie looked at him skeptically.
“Unless you want to,” he said quickly. “Do you want to know?”
McKenzie let the words hang out there between them like a smoke ring.
“I suppose not,” he said finally. “But if they do this, we win?”
“That’s right. We win.”
19
The last week of the campaign passed in a blur. The national media, of course, was fixated on the presidential race. Fox News carried live coverage of the Trump rallies, sometimes three or four per day, while the rest of the national media tracked Mrs. T. and Senator Bellinger as they drilled down on core Democratic audiences in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa, Florida, and Minnesota. They weren’t making the same m
istake Hillary Clinton had made in 2016. They were out there, campaigning. Hardball, all the way.
The McKenzie-Aguilar match-up was turning out to be the third most expensive congressional race in the country, with total spending by the campaigns and outside groups topping $15 million. Billionaire Republican donor Sheldon Adelson had jumped on board the Aguilar bandwagon, with a $2.5 million donation to his Super Pac, Americans for the Dream. Silicon Valley Democrat Tom Steyer and financier George Soros matched him, with $1.25 million each to McKenzie’s Super Pac, Progress Maryland. The airwaves were awash with attack ads. It was unclear if they were having any impact on actual voters.
McKenzie followed the counsel of Morton Nash, his campaign consultant, and reluctantly put in an appearance at the Great Frederick Fair, where the biggest attractions were funnel cake and the afternoon tractor pull. The gigantic monster trucks were so loud you couldn’t even hear yourself think. This is what the yahoos did in their spare time. Really? Watch jacked up monster trucks and Mad Max hot rods square off with iron sleds the size of railroad cars, plows dug into the dirt? He hung back in his campaign booth, where unfortunately he could see Aguilar, or catch glimpses of him at least, greeting voters two hundred feet across the walkway.
To get out, he had to pass in front of the Republican booth, so he got Jenn to marshal their volunteers, forming a protective phalanx around him. The last thing he wanted was another public confrontation with Aguilar.
“Congressman, git on in ‘ere!” he heard from the last Quonset hut of the permanent fairgrounds.
It turned out to be Tim May, co-host of Mid Maryland Live on WFMD, the local news talk station, conservative, of course. May was broadcasting live from the Great Frederick Fair and waved McKenzie over as he shouted into his microphone.
“And lookie here who we just spotted walkin’ by. It’s Congressman Hugh McKenzie, Democratic from Merrie-land’s Eighth Con-gressional Dis-strict! Welcome, Congressman! Come on in ‘ere! Don’t walk away now, he’ah?”
The Election Heist Page 8