According to YouGov:
That seems a good bit “beyond nutpicking level” to me.
Some reason you didn’t provide a link?
It’s something that they probably have tried to do. Whether or not they were successful, I don’t know. The Russians don’t believe in democracy any more than Republicans do. I’d be willing to bet they’ve surveyed many specific polling sites and looked for weaknesses in the system. They’ve very likely hacked into Diebold and found all the chinks in the armor. Thus far, they’ve gotten their candidates elected in the US and Brexit passed in the UK with Facebook bots but who’s to say they aren’t preparing for a more ambitious assault on western democracy?
This, pretty much. It’s pretty damned clear that they actively worked to meddle in the election, in a variety of ways. It’s also clear that certain of their activities (social media trolling, hacking emails) were successful. I don’t know of any evidence that they actually succeeded in hacking into voting systems and changing tallies. So many of our systems are antiquated and / or vulnerable, that I wouldn’t be surprised if it could be done by hackers, but again, I don’t know that there’s any solid evidence that this actually happened.
At the time of the election I saw some evidence that the standard American redshift - the phenomenon by which official vote tallies show considerably higher Republican vote share than do exit polls - was more pronounced in areas with touch screen voting machines that don’t leave paper records. There’s also a long history of these machines being hacked quite trivially, often in very short time frames by relatively inexperienced hackers, they generally have extremely poor security. Also, the corporate history of America’s voting corporations is one of extreme corruption and shadiness. So the failings of voting machines might have influenced the election. I seem to recall that the voting machines in Detroit broke down on election night, leading to a large number of votes not being counted, and that this area was ordered excluded from the recount by the governor.
On the other hand I’m not aware of anything linking any of this to the Russians.
Both of these, really. I wouldn’t completely discount a probe somewhere just to see if they actually could pull it off technically. But large-scale tampering? No.
Because he did, in the OP.
The sad thing is, this redshift has become accepted. Every single election, you see long voting lines in Democratic strongholds while Republican areas have much shorter waits. Virtually every anomaly that is reported about voting machines is an error that benefits Republicans. For several years, Republicans have whipped up hysteria about “illegals” voting, so they make draconian voting requirements that- oh isn’t that convenient- disproportionately impact Democratic-leaning voters.
It’s not actually that hard to tamper with vote totals, at least in some places using some systems. But it is hard to do it without leaving behind telltale traces, and those haven’t been detected. I think it’s most likely that they looked into the possibility, and maybe even successfully broke into some systems, but that they weren’t yet ready to be caught at doing it, and so didn’t do anything.
They’d have more luck doing things like tampering with the voter registration databases, but they might not have done that, either, because they had useful idiots in place who were able to and did do it much more easily and effectively.
You don’t think that might have more to do with your media choices rather than reality?
Yes, what I voted. They certainly tried, but apparently they did not succeed in a significant fashion, if at all.
Their propaganda did succeed, however.
They did try.
This
I can’t believe that they would not have tried to at least try the locks on our doors to our democracy.
I know that some of our doors are not well secured, and that even children can get into them.
I also know that there is no paper trail or accountability in many of the machines, meaning that we would never know if they were hacked, certainly not by who or for what benefit.
Did they alter vote tallies? I do not know the answer to that. What I do know is that there were efforts made to make sure that we would not know the answer to that.
I’d be much less concerned if the US govt was taking the matter of ballot security seriously, but they certainly are not. If all voting machines left an easily human readable paper trail, I’d be more comfortable with it.
It goes to voter confidence. The republicans will pass laws that they are aware will act as barriers to many of their citizens to vote due to their fears of in person voter fraud, but they will not pass any that will preserve the integrity of the actual voting machines and tallying equipment.
Now, we don’t know if in person fraud is actually a real thing or not, when it is pointed out that it is very rare, republicans point out that that’s only the ones that we have caught, presenting no evidence whatsoever, but use that as a justification to tighten up Voter ID laws even further.
Given that it takes a person quite a bit of time and effort and risk in order to cast a single second vote, but that person could alter all the votes in the machine, I would put a much higher priority towards securing the vote, rather than securing the voter.
I think that the very real potential for these machines to be hacked, and the lack of accountability in being able to detect tampering, should prompt anyone who is interested in providing voter confidence to work towards making sure that all voting leaves an auditable paper trail.
Did we get hacked in 2016? Probably not enough to actually affect the outcome.
Will we get hacked in 2020? Probably, unless we take measures to defend ourselves.
Polls like this generally just reflect virtue signalling. Each side answers whatever they feel is most likely to make their side look good and the opposite side look bad. The same process that causes high numbers of Republicans to say that Obama was born in Kenya and that the Democrats trafficked busloads of illegals to vote for Hillary.
I doubt it. There are irregularities in places like Georgia that need to be investigated.
If Russia did tamper with the election, I"m guessing they’d do it by altering/deleting voter registration data in blue counties so people were rejected at the polls rather than by flipping votes.
According to the senate, they had the ability to do that but didn’t.
I don’t recall where I read it, but I read that they definitely tried to hack voting machines.
And if they discovered Ohio, Kentucky, & Texas, they could have done it without leaving a paper trail, & thus possibly without getting caught. All of those states went for Trump. So while we can’t prove they did, they probably did. I guess you can call that “somewhat true.”
Based on what? Wishful thinking?
Several US states have electronic systems designed to be rigged with no paper trail. The Electoral College makes it so you can steal a presidential election by flipping a few states. Do you think no one in Russia can do research?
Hella yes.
Certainly not. America is capable of electing the wrong person without external influence.