Calling It In
The German election software had a problem. When the Chaos Computer Club started investigating, they found the user manual sitting publicly online, complete with credentials for the manufacturer’s internal systems. The update server passwords were exposed. The connection for election night results was pre-configured in the software, with a password—at least in Hesse—that said test.
And the software generated sample result files that revealed exactly what real files needed to look like. Together, these weren’t theoretical vulnerabilities. Someone with basic technical skill could forge election results across the entire country.
The government’s federal elections director had insisted just months earlier that elections in Germany couldn’t be hacked, that the system was secured against all manipulation. Now it turned out it was held together with test
as a password and credentials scattered across the internet. Municipalities were running software they didn’t really understand, deploying systems they hadn’t vetted, trusting black boxes out of necessity.
The election was three weeks away when this came out. The official response was honest and a little absurd: if the software didn’t work, they’d fall back to phones. Election officials would call in results the way it was done before the internet existed. No encryption, no networks, just voices on a telephone line.
So that’s what happened. Germany, the technological center of Europe, counted its federal election by telephone. People calling in numbers, reaching back decades for something more trustworthy than the systems they’d built. It wasn’t efficient and it wasn’t elegant. But it worked.
There’s something darkly funny about that—a nation so technologically advanced that it had to choose the analog solution. And something unsettling too. You don’t really think about how much faith you’ve placed in systems until you’re forced to stop trusting them and go backward instead.