Matthew Weaver, a 22-year old former student at Cal State San Marcos near San Diego, and the former editor of the school newspaper, has been sentenced to a year in jail for rigging the student body election so he and his friends would win.

And he was really dumb about it, too. A campus poilice officer caught him using a key logger on a school computer to steal screennames and passwords 745 students. He used those to cast

630 votes for himself and used the other 145 hacked accounts to vote for his friends who were also on the ballot.

The election results were invalidated and a new election held. Had Weaver won the election, he would have received  an $8,000 stipend and oversight of a $30,000 Associated Students Inc. budget. The FBI took over the investigation and discovered that Weaver had purchased three keyloggers (Want on?, They’re on Amazon, which is basically a treasure trove for the NSA). Agents searched his personal laptop and discovered

he’d searched for “how to rig an election” and “jail time for keylogger.”

By the way Matthew Weaver is on the dean’s list.

After his arrest, Weaver used “phenomenally bad judgment” by trying to cover up the crime by hacking different online accounts and making it seem like others were to blame, U.S. District Judge Larry Burns told ABC News. “The first offense was compounded by a like-minded offense and that’s really troubling to me,” said Burns.

Weaver plead guilty in March to wire fraud, unauthorized access of a computer, and identity theft. He was sentenced to a year in jail. He should have gotten more.

HT: LAist.com