A researcher has found four algorithms embedded into the New York State voter roll database that can alter data, have been used to generate spurious votes, and are not available to County board of elections.
As anyone who knows anything about IT security, there is no way to save that database, it must be deleted and rebuilt from scratch. This is the only way to be sure. It also means that no election using that database can ever be trusted again, forever.
What the heck are we supposed to take from this article...
So this guy clearly doesn't have access to any of the code, and he's trying to reverse engineer what he thinks specific algorithm's are doing... Okay, that's pretty difficult at the best of times... What do we actually have here?
They don't really "hide their previous existence", they just made a new number. Cool, what do these new numbers actually being used for?
Wait, what partition? We were talking about the new decimal numbers that associate with each CID. Now we are talking about partions of those numbers. How did those partitions get created? Apparently, we're taking a set of those new decimals, and doing a modulus calculation of 7 repunits... for what reason?
Okay it sorts the results. Great. Why?
And what do you mean by interlaces? Are we saying the results of each modulus are then sorted into this pile of numbers you didn't state came from? Or are you saying that the results of each modulus are segregated in this "deck"?
And what the hell does any of this actually tell us?
So these new numbers are re-assigned to the CID's. Great. For what purpose?
I'm sure they are. No random number generator is able to generate truly random numbers. Many simple ones apply some complicated mathematics to the current date-time value when the computer is asked to execute the random number generation. All random number generators on a computer are deterministic... because computers are deterministic.
Great. So after all that we still have no idea why this code fires the way it does, or for what purpose.
So, if my CID is ABC12345, it gets turned into .12345, then converted into an integer of 12345, then mod'd by 1, 11, 111, 1111, 11111, 111111, and 1111111, giving me: {0, 3, 24, 124, 1234, 12345, 12345} ... and from that point on his explanation starts to become incoherent. All I know is that these numbers may be sorted among other blocks of moduluses. I'm going to just assume for simplicity, that u/AntonioOfVenice also participated in this vote with me, and has a CID of EFG90210. Preforming all the same steps I have my set of mods, and now his set of mods which are: {0, 10, 78, 219, 1322, 90210, 90210}. So then putting all the numbers in descending order (removing repeated numbers because it's probably designed in some way to prevent multiple entries): {90210, 12345, 1322, 1234, 219, 124, 78, 24, 3, 10, 0}... and then somehow these numbers are re-organized in some way to be re-assigned back to the original CID's. Which still doesn't tell me anything. That missing "how are they assigned part" is pretty important.
No shit they don't fucking know. They're county officials. Their probably scared of fractions! I'll ask the elected official that is a former defense attorney, I'm sure he's well versed in programming and computational mathematics!
This is an "algorithm" you've reverse engineered that is probably comprised of several other functions, or is some sort of random number generator of some kind, that is apparently a subfunction of something else. Most of the software developers aren't going to know what the fuck you are talking about until they start looking into the code.
OP, this could be easily corrected by using any number of random number generator methods. If there's anything even wrong, which I still don't know. The data itself is fine, and does not need to be re-collected.
Worst case scenario, where we assume the author's rambling hypothesis, some individual CID's are tagged. Cool: remove the tags, re-assign new CID's. You don't need to delete any actual data record of a voter.
Well, a repunit isn't either division or modulus division.
How many times a number can be divided sounds like modulus division.