Student president-elect rigged his win by cribbing coeds’ keystrokes

A former Cal State San Marcos student purloined classmates’ passwords to cast ballots for him and friends.

During his sentencing in federal court to a year in the slammer, “it was Matthew Weaver’s decision to try to cover up the largest student identity theft in the university’s 24-year history that seemed to irritate the judge the most.”

The plan to steal the election took months.

“On Weaver’s computer, authorities found a PowerPoint presentation from early 2012, proposing that he run for campus president and that four of his fraternity brothers run for the four vice president spots in the student government. The presentation noted that the president’s job came with an $8,000 stipend and the vice presidents each got a $7,000 stipend.”

He researched hacking strategies with computer queries such as “how to rig an election” and “jail time for keylogger.”

A month before the March election, Weaver purchased three hardware keyloggers — devices that secretly record a computer user’s keystrokes.

He installed keyloggers on 19 school computers, stole passwords from 745 students and cast ballots from the accounts of more than 630 of those victims.

“The plot unraveled in March 2012, the last day of the four-day voting period, when computer technicians noticed odd activity on one of the college lab computers.”

“The user logged into the account of a university official and read an email from a student complaining that the system would not let her vote. Weaver had already cast a ballot from the student’s account, which was why she couldn’t vote.”

The technicians had Weaver arrested.

After a brief jail stay, Weaver and a friend tried to frame other students by posting fake conversations on fake Facebook pages between real campus coeds to make it look like those students had conspired to frame him.

“The conversations on those bogus pages were sent to reporters at U-T San Diego, 10News and the campus newspaper but none took the bait.”