Student hacks online school government election

A student running for class president of Berkley High School in California hacked into the email accounts of his fellow students in order to swing the school’s first ever online election his way.

The unnamed student, and a friend, managed to cast hundreds of fake online votes for himself after gaining access to the district-issued online email accounts of 500 Berkley students, the Westport News reported. Suspicion was aroused when the presidential wannabe began receiving hundreds of votes the day before the election was to end.

The school's director of student activities, John Villavicencio, became investigated the situation and discovered the hack which compromised some students' names and ID numbers. All the votes were cast from the same computer and were inputted in alphabetical order.

The election, which was the first to be held strictly online used a Google form accessible to each student through their Gmail account. Gaining access to the forms was made simpler due to the fact that the default password for the Gmail accounts included the students ID number.

The student was disqualified from the election.