My friend, a voting rights activist, is not a blogger, but she wrote this, and I am publishing it with her permission:
Those of us who have been concerned about the integrity of this Presidential election, and all elections since 2002, woke up this morning to the excitement of MSM reports of the suspicions about the 2016 Presidential election. Then, awhile later, The Washington Post weighed in with the discouraging news that we didn’t yet have enough "good evidence” to warrant an audit of 3-4 states:
Before the election, when Democrats were dismissing the idea of rigging an election when it was raised (repeatedly) by Trump and his allies, we outlined just how difficult such a proposal would be. For one thing, one would need to know in advance where to rig the vote to have the most effect. For example: In 2000, you would have needed to know that the margins in Florida were razor thin, and to have put just enough resources into the state to tip the scales without tipping your hand. That sort of prognostication is far, far easier in retrospect
WashPo quoted J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society in the article.
Halderman had written
his own article in which he answered the concern the WashPo expressed:
How might a foreign government hack America’s voting machines to change the outcome of a presidential election? Here’s one possible scenario. First, the attackers would probe election offices well in advance in order to find ways to break into their computers. Closer to the election, when it was clear from polling data which states would have close electoral margins, the attackers might spread malware into voting machines in some of these states, rigging the machines to shift a few percent of the vote to favor their desired candidate. This malware would likely be designed to remain inactive during pre-election tests, do its dirty business during the election, then erase itself when the polls close. A skilled attacker’s work might leave no visible signs — though the country might be surprised when results in several close states were off from pre-election polls.
Could anyone be brazen enough to try such an attack? A few years ago, I might have said that sounds like science fiction, but 2016 has seen unprecedented cyberattacks aimed at interfering with the election….In 2014, during the presidential
election in Ukraine, attackers linked to Russia sabotaged the country’s vote-counting infrastructure and, according to published reports, Ukrainian officials succeeded only at the last minute in defusing vote-stealing malware that was primed to cause the wrong winner to be announced.
How quickly we forget. How about that letter from 16 high-level former and current government officials warning of Russian interference with the election? But the WashPo goes on to quote Halderman:
Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not. I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked.
And it failed to quote the rest of the paragraph:
But I don’t believe that either one of these seemingly unlikely explanations is overwhelmingly more likely than the other. The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the available physical evidence — paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, nobody is ever going to examine that evidence unless candidates in those states act now, in the next several days, to petition for recounts.
It’s hard to believe we’re still at the starting gate 12 years later after so many have written on the myriad ways the voting machines can be manipulated (for example
A Brief History of Computerized Election Fraud in America by Victoria Collier in
Harper's; the 2004 Election Stolen? by Robert Kennedy Jr in
Rolling Stone) and so many computer experts have expressed their
concerns. What kind of evidence would satisfy
The Washington Post?
Does anyone remember the Congressional testimony by Clinton Eugene Curtis that he made the software (probably used to rig the 2004 election.) He explains in detail being hired by Congressman Tom Feeney in 2000 to build a prototype software package that would secretly rig an election to sway the result 51 / 49 to a specified side to flip flop the election in favor of who they want to win. This is worth watching:
www.youtube.com/…
Apparently that wasn’t enough evidence for the Congress to investigate the state of our voting apparatus further.
The point should be that if we’d like to call ourselves a democracy we must be able to trust that the vote is accurate. Why isn’t that a good enough reason to double check outcomes when there is so much logical reason for suspicion? Let’s take Donald Trump at his word for once and judge for ourselves if he lied yet again or find out that the vote was rigged.
