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Continuing my theme of thinking American election processes remain sketchy, the House just passed the SAVE act, ostensibly to prevent non-citizen voting. We all know how the battlelines are going to be drawn on that with the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth about how all of the totally legitimate citizens wouldn't actually be able to show that they're citizens and would be unfairly disenfranchised, and honestly, I suppose that's right to some extent. What's way more annoying is the drumbeat of people that say this is already illegal and doesn't happen. In a piqued fit of curiosity, I thought I'd take a look at what exactly California's process is for making sure only citizens are able to vote. Here's their registration application. It includes something a bit odd, checkboxes to simply indicate that you don't have a driver's license or social security number.
Well, if you check those boxes, there isn't really going to be sufficient unique identifiers to be crosschecked with a database to verify citizenship. Surely that disclaimer means you'd need to bring proof when you vote though, right? Well, here's what they say you need:
Really? You can register with nothing that would identify you as a citizen, then show up to vote and identify yourself with the mailer you got when you signed up to vote. I have no idea how this process would stop a non-citizen from voting even in theory. Am I missing something? This seems like you can just straightforwardly vote in California as a non-citizen and the only thing that would stop you is a fit of conscience about checking the box that says you're a citizen. Are other states doing better at actually verifying the citizenship of voters? I would guess that some are and some aren't, but the claim that verifying citizenship would prevent quite a few people from voting kind of suggests that there isn't currently much of a process to do so.
Yeah, sometimes security really is that bad.
For a less serious example, "somebody" walked into the phone store, asked for a replacement SIM for my account (providing the phone number and possibly my name, but no other information), and walked out a few minutes later with the old SIM deactivated and the new card in their possession. That person was me, but they had no way of knowing that because they never asked or checked.
I think elections should at least be protected against that level of fraud.
This is why SMS is not a recommended second authentication factor for high-security or high-profile accounts: this can and has been abused before, many times.
Funny story, some folks were robbing carrier stores in order to use SMS OTP.
The way it worked was that some dudes would come in and make a loud ruckus about smashing and stealing things, and while everyone was paying attention to that, someone would grab the admin tablet and run off with it to remap phone numbers.
Beautiful piece of criminal work tbqh -- why bother social engineering or anything else when you can just hire the lowest-skill-imaginable dudes to create a distraction and just take the tablet.
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