“The Clinton team” didn’t call for an investigation, Jill Stein did. (With the aid of a considerable sum of money from crowdsourced donations, most of which probably did come from people who voted for Clinton, but Clinton’s official campaign team had nothing to do with it and have in fact said that they didn’t call for a recount themselves because they didn’t think there was credible evidence of fraud.)
And Marc Elias went out of his way to make the point that although they are “participating” in the recount, they do not “support” the recount. Meaning, they’ll participate to make sure it’s done fairly and whatnot - but they’d probably rather it wasn’t happening in the first place since they know how it will turn out.
Montgomery County, PA (where I live) is delaying certification till Dec. 12 because of the efforts of the Jill Stein campaign. I assume it’s due to some legal requirement that was triggered by the petitions, but IANAL so I can’t say for sure.
http://www.montcopa.org/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/3516
The Pennsylvania recount effort looks pretty hopeless. It looks like there’s two ways to force a recount: showing evidence of fraud or petitions from voters in individual districts. Since they can’t show evidence of fraud they are going the petition route and they have a pretty pitiful number f petitions put in. The deadline is today so they are going to have to file a lawsuit to extend it. I have a hard time believing a judge is going to grant this just to salve the Green Party’s concerns.
Apparently it’s been extended at least in one major county. See my post above yours.
Is delaying certification the same thing as extending the petition deadline? I wouldn’t think so.
I’m not sure, but it apparently allows them time to request a recount from the Court
of Common Pleas. Whether or not any additional petitions will be accepted, I can’t say
Now Bucks County Also.
Does anyone know what Jill Stein’s official reasoning for wanting a recount is? Did she ever explain why she was pursuing it? Or was it just a pure money-grab from optimistic Dems?
The Green Party’s given reason is to protect the integrity of the vote. The claim, as I understand it, is that these three states were chosen because they show statistical anomalies in their deviation from the outcomes predicted by polling. She has stated that she’s not trying to overturn the election (after all, the official party line is that Clinton = Trump) but it strikes me as too coincidental that overturning these three would change the outcome of the election.
The legal reasoning in the PA affadavits concerns the vulnerability of the electronic machines used and their lack of verifiability.
I don’t know & don’t really care. Haven’t loved the Greens since 2000. I can understand the Clinton team wanting to observe–but the margins, however small, are larger than any ever changed by a recount. So I don’t see any chance the Electoral votes will change.
But Your Guy has made this story All About Him–with his dimwitted Tweets about those millions of illegal votes keeping him from winning the popular vote. More people wanted Hillary to be President than wanted him. However, the rules in effect mean Trump will be inaugurated President.
Yeah, that logic sucks. PA polls missed by 3 points, MI polls missed by 3.4 points, and WI was off by 7.3 points, while OH was off by 4.5 points and IA was off by 6.5 points. Minnesota didn’t have enough polling for RCP to post an average, but the last 5 polls were HRC +10, +8, +0, +7 and +6, and she ended up only winning by 1.5%. Maine CD2 was also very lightly polled, but a huge miss. If she was really worried about deviation from polling, PA and MI probably aren’t all that high on that list.
I’ve never really thought of Trump as “my guy” (I was more of a Ted Cruz fan), although I admit it’s fun to see how far out of joint he gets liberals’ noses, but I’m right there with you on his “dimwitted Tweets”. Whoever took Trump’s Twitter account away from him for the last few weeks of the campaign should have held onto it for the next four years. Many of his tweets are painfully embarrassing for the person that’s supposed to be leading the country.
It is rather funny. Clinton setup a server of her own to do government business and that server was a security nightmare and no one cares. The server being insecure is documented, for example it was running a known to be broken version of SSL and had Dameware (a remote control software package) on a public IP. There are additional issues with Clintons setup that don’t even require hacking any server*.
On the other hand, the polls were wrong and some computer guy says that something could have happened and suddenly it is a big deal even though there is absolutely no evidence that anything happened.
Could the machines be hacked? Certainly. Everything can be hacked. Nothing is secure. (Lesson #1 that no one seems to understand)
Now, how likely is it that the machines were hacked. Lets take a look. The machines in PA are from the 1980s. To penetrate these, you have to know the OS and have a way of installing code. That is probably not a trivial thing to do on a large scale as the machines are not networked. The PA folks have a physical security plan in place that seems reasonable (here). So, for PA, you have to have know how to hack a machine from the 1980s, have physical access to the machine and have time to install the hack on thousands of machines. That seems pretty damned unlikely.
In Wisconsin, they use multiple brands of voting machines. One would expect that the code base is different on each type of machine (a guess, but probably a solid one). Though this guyseems to think that Wisconsin doesn’t use machines for Presidential votes. I need to check on that when I am not quite so tired. In any case, hacking seems quite hard.
I won’t bother looking further as the hacking angle seems quite unlikely and I am updating a bunch of servers and want to get to sleep. I might look into it a bit further tomorrow.
Slee
- One thing about the whole Clinton email mess that just about everyone misses is that Clinton used her personal cell phone in foreign countries. If you control the network you control the users data. It is trivial to setup a span port on a router and copy all the traffic from a cell tower to a storage device. Since foreign governments would know Clintons schedule and whereabouts, setting up span ports on the proper equipment is trivial. You can capture all of it and do whatever you want with it later.
Regarding hacking. I wonder if the software in those machines is ever updated? If so, how?
My guess would be that it’s done from some kind of memory card, either applied to each individual machine or to a central server that they’re networked with. The updates would come from the manufacturer or some other company the state has a support contract with.
How secure is the provider of those updates? One infected update master is all it would take.
As a real world example, Stuxnet spread several ways, including infected USB drives.
Also keep in mind that an election can be hacked in other ways. The Green’s filing for Wisconsin mentions absentee ballot fraud, and it’s known that Russia at least attempted to penetrate at least some states’ voter registration databases and may have succeeded in places.
I’m not claiming that rigging occurred, just that I’m not as sanquine about the possibility as some. I doubt that Stein will find much of anything, but I can’t totally dismiss the possibility.
(post shortened)
Before every election the machines would have to be programmed with the new candidates, and any new election measures. And the old names would be removed, of course. Program updates could/would be done at the same time.
Observers from any political party, and impartial observers, would be present when the voting machines are being programed.
I’ve been told that any lines of code which instruct the machine to alter the voting results would still be present in the program. Most of which could only be read, and understood, by trained programmers. Unless other lines of code removed the result-altering code, but the code removing the result-altering would still be present. That would lead to more questions by the experts.
The code for removing the result altering code could remove itself.
There is one way that such code might be exposed. Machines that weren’t put into service on election day, and haven’t been turned on since, would still contain the code. The drives (or static ram, etc.) would have to be examined without turning on the machines, perhaps by inserting them as a non-booting drive in another machine.
This is all purely theoretical of course, there’s no real evidence that anything like this occurred, but it points out the vulnerabilities in the way we count votes.
Just so the thread is up to date:
The Wisconsin recount is occuring but Stein lost a lawsuit to force all precincts to do a hand recount, so some of the recount will be done using the optical readers.
Michigan’s recount is initially approved but Trump’s lawyers are attempting to block it at the elections committee level and the Attorney General has filed a lawsuit with the state Supreme Court.
And it looks like Pennsylvania is not happening:
That’s just Montgomery County, not the whole state. My understanding is that a small number of precints will be recounted in Philly (just the ones that were able to file at least 3 affadavits from voters). I don’t know what’s happening in other areas of the state.
I don’t think so, think it’s over. From the article I linked: