Propaganda campaign to affect people’s opinions is not a “roundabout way,” it’s the standard way to affect the election outcome.
Also, it’s the only way to affect the election and still have the election result be considered legitimate. If electronic voting machines were found to be hacked, the election result may be thrown out. But illegal campaign spending rarely results in the election result itself be questioned.
How would you know if they had? There’s no definitive, guaranteed-to-be-correct tally of how people voted in the voting booth; so we have nothing to compare the results to.
One conspiracy theory I’ve heard from anti-Trumpsters is that ballots in MI, OH, PA, etc were indeed changed. Supposedly, there are 10,000s of ballots where every Democratic down-ballot candidate was voted for on the ballot except the presidential choice, i.e. , Hillary.
This is supposedly evidence the the Russians hacked the ballots and deleted votes for Hillary–because why would people vote for all the state and local candidates but not vote for the president?
Anyway, that’s one of the theories out there. And, this knowledge is too explosive to be made public.
Notice: Tin foil hat not included.
Someone under immunity could testify that it was done, and say how it was done. Then, depending on how it was done, it may he possible for a forensic examination of the machines to confirm the testimony.
I’m not saying that I expect that to happen, just that it’s not impossible that tampering could be exposed.
A person testifying under immunity could still be lying. If the voting machines could be tampered with before the election to affect the count, they could be tampered with now to look like they were tampered with then.
I suppose there’s no way to be 100% sure, but I think we could do a lot better than we do now. The ballots could be done on paper, or issue a paper receipt that the voter could check. Keep those ballots after the election. Store them in boxes with tamper-evident seals. Count some random selection of them by hand (or in a different type of machine) and see if the counts agree. Let either party challenge particular precincts for a verified recount if they suspect something is wrong.
Or maybe it’s all fearmongering. Maybe our election systems are as robust as they need to be, but it’s in some people’s interest to cast doubt. Either way, it’s disappointing. Seems that, as good as we are at calculating and tabulating other things, there ought to be agreement that we should have the most accurate and secure election counts possible.
I’ll add that I think it’s unlikely that direct manipulation occurred.
First, because the decentralization and multiplicity of voting methods makes it difficult to do on a large enough scale; second, because the obvious and proven propaganda campaign wouldn’t have been necessary if direct manipulation was possible.
I agree.
Given everything else we’ve seen, I think it’s very likely they picked several key districts, and put their thumb on the scale.
Yeah, agreed. You wouldn’t need to move many votes to do that. And I recall reading a couple years ago about the sorry state of some of the voting machines. Some of them used Microsoft Access to record votes. Access is a fine tool for some things. I made my living as an Access developer for a number of years. But what it’s not is very secure or auditable. There’s no native transaction logging, for one thing. So the bad guys could theoretically get into the machine and tweak a bunch of votes. Examination might be able to determine that the bad guys got in, but they’d pretty much be up shit creek in trying to sort out what the impact to the votes was. Then, too, the machines are scattered around a zillion districts, in custody of a collection of disparate voting authorities with their own political goals, and have been used for local and statewide races since then, so good luck finding and collecting the ones that were compromised almost two years ago.
Why tamper when they’re already having such success with the propaganda campaign? The Russians have lots of people and resources to throw at the problem. Why not do both the propaganda campaign and vote tampering? While we’re all focused on the noisy problem (propaganda), no one is digging in to the real problem (tampering).
I mean, hypothetically. Again, I haven’t seen anything that convinces me that the Russians did tamper with votes. I just wouldn’t be surprised if they did. I’d only be surprised and impressed if US investigators found conclusive evidence of it.
Even if direct manipulation were possible, the propaganda campaign is necessary, to serve as a plausible excuse for Trump’s win. It’s not enough to manipulate the results, you also have to convince enough people that the result are legitimate.
In this excerpt from the Helsinki Fiasco Trump says
For once I agree with the incontinent sociopath’s words! Of course he didn’t actually intend to say anything intelligent — it just never occurred to his feeble brain that ‘it’ must have an antecedent and, in context and stipulating that we treat his utterance as English-language, the “witch-hunt” can ONLY refer to the Congressional hearing itself.
(Back the video up to 5:04 to watch how Trump deftly passes Putin’s gift ball to Melania so she can give it to Barron.)
Well, we do know that until 2006 one of the top manufacturers of voting machines used PCAnywhere to remote login to their machines, which (PCAnywhere) was subsequently found to have a serious security flaw which allowed machines with the software to be taken over.
The company claimed to remove PCAnywhere from their machines, but never revealed what replaced it. I would assume the need to remote in the machines was still needed.
Go back to paper ballots until voting machines can be secured.
I think at least one country in Europe did exactly that.
Nah. Let’s do it by show of hands. Satellites can pick it up.
No need for hands. The satellites can read/control your mind already.
Hands are too hard. Can I just raise one finger?
You mean this tinfoil hat is no good??
It hides that mess you made of your hair.
That’s easy advice for us to give from Canada, where we usually only vote in one election at a time.
Lot harder to implement in the US, where on one trip to the polls you might be voting for a president, a US senator, a US representative, a governor, a state senator, a state representative, a mayor, a city councilor, a judge… Automation becomes a lot more necessary.
Paper ballots can be scanned very easily. In Washington State we have complicated ballots, but they’re all paper (and all via mail—no trips to the polling place)