This question was asked in a YouGov poll a few months ago. I’m curious where the SDMB fits in.
TBH I wouldn’t put it past them to try, but is that the actual assertion? Most of what I’ve heard has more to do with propaganda than directly changing votes.
Well, whatever. I think most people here know they were using different techniques.
I keep remembering every single website leading up to the 2016 election telling me it was impossible to tamper with the vote tallies directly.
Not impossible but highly unlikely.
I don’t know how I could possibly know it was definitely not true, but I chose that anyway because there’s no evidence that it happened. I wish you would have written that instead – “there is no known evidence that the Russians changed vote tallies”. That’s an assertion I could get behind. However, there’s only a small step from that to “definitely not true”, so close enough.
ETA: What does “somewhat true” mean? Not just here, but in any factual context? What a weird choice.
It’s impossible for then to tamper with vote tallies, since official tallies are made by both Democratic and Republican election officials. Ant irregularities will be immediately spotted.
It might be theoretical possible to program a voting machine to do a miscount, but the machines are difficult to access by unauthorized people. You couldn’t reprogram enough to make a difference, even if your tampering went unnoticed.
For the Russians, it was too much work for too little chance of success.
No.
But that is exactly the type of big hammer, direct action, easily foiled plan I would expect Trump to dream up through lack of imagination.
US voting machines are a hodgepodge of vendors and systems, some of which have been shown to have remarkably lax security controls. I think it is possible that votes may have been tampered with. However, I’ve seen no reporting or evidence to suggest that. So I voted “probably not true”. I don’t rule it out. But I don’t have any reason to think it happened.
Probably not true. How many times did I have to counter the conspiracy theorists in 2004 who were convinced that Dievold rigged the voting machines to guarantee a Bush victory?
Russia certainly attempted to ratfuck the election but it wasn’t through messing with the vote tallies.
Not the vote tallies, but the minds of some gullible voters. All they had to do was post on facebook that Hillary eats puppies, and some people would believe it and vote against her. If enough of that happened, Trump would win some states with a razor-thin majority… which is exactly what happened. They didn’t need to tamper with voting machines.
I voted probably not true. With the hodgepodge of different voting systems in this country it would probably be very difficult, maybe impossible, to subvert enough of them to make a difference without leaving some bit of evidence somewhere.
That said, I think it’s very possible that they screwed with voter registration databases, and that could theoretically affect the outcome without directly subverting the count. We know that they broke into some of them.
No.
They chose the much easier route, create division via Facebook and Twitter.
I voted probably not true, at least not in any meaningful way. I think it would have been extremely dangerous for Russia or any foreign power to hack into voting systems at a time when most political prediction models had Hillary Clinton winning the race. There would have been certain retribution.
But regardless of who is president, I certainly think it’s within the realm of the possible to hack into voting systems to demonstrate what can be done, for the same reasons that foreign hackers ‘test’ power grids. Electronic warfare is warfare in another form. Warfare often involves the projection and demonstration of power in non-combat situations or in situations in which hostilities haven’t commenced. Hacking into voting databases, removing the names of voters, changing party affiliations, changing their information so that they can’t verify their identity and thus, can’t vote…sure, I could see that. Not on a scale that would actually change an election, but on a scale that could show us that it could be done.
Honestly, directly changing vote totals would be the stupid way to affect an election.
No member of the general public can provide one of those answers based on the evidence. It’s a poll constructed to push people to make a guess or express their unsubstantiated beliefs.
Why, has anyone (beyond nutpicking level, that is) suggested that they might have?
Have foreign citizens and/or governments tampered in US elections? Damn betcha! So have we for that matter.
Did Russia make a concerted and directed effort on behalf of Donald Trump and did that lead to his victory? Did someone from there actually find a way to rig the numbers? I seriously doubt it. I am beginning to think anything in the universe is possible but this strikes me as so unlikely that I would actually be shocked if it was true.
Moderator Note
Thread relocated from IMHO to Elections.
It would be if we – if the results didn’t polarize us and we decided to retaliate.
But what if the results did polarize us and we ended up fighting each other and couldn’t agree on a response, or couldn’t even agree on who was responsible despite knowing what our intelligence services tell us?
For the record, I don’t believe that Russia went that far in 2016, because I think they assumed Hillary would win and they wouldn’t have dared to invite that kind of retaliation - and we absolutely could find ways to hurt Russia. We already were hurting them, which is why they tinkered with our political system, but chose the less incendiary way to do it.
However, not that their asset is in the White House, and probably more assets are in various positions of power, who knows? Maybe they could push the envelope a little more.