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uticusyesterday at 4:02 PM2 repliesview on HN

In terms of "safety" this leak is a drop in the bucket. The greater concern would be that election systems are involved. If election information is unintentionally readable, it is also therefore potentially alterable.


Replies

pibakeryesterday at 10:11 PM

As far as I know Canada uses paper ballots and count the votes in front of witnesses at polling places. I doubt you can sabotage the system by just meddling electronic records.

1atticeyesterday at 5:34 PM

It doesn't work that way -- it's not an open DB endpoint with misconfigured permissions, or something like that.

Up here there is a custom of sharing essentially a dump of the elector's table with every political party in the early days of an election.

This dump is seeded with some fake data before being released to a single political party, so if said party gets up to shenanigans, we know about it. These of course do nothing to prevent privacy violations, only to detect and punish them after the fact.

Personally I think this is a dated system from a bygone era, as there is obvious risk of permanent harm via election fraud in an environment where politics actors are highly motivated. If you believe Canada is an evil woke empire from which you must protect your sons, you will likely not care about Canadian electoral law.

Electorate data should be maintained by the political parties themselves, and guarded like nukes. New political parties should put in the hoofwork to build their own damn lists.