But then those dastardly Russian Spies will get to the elderly ladies. Each mustachio-twirling Lothario will have his orders direct from the Kremlin *, buy a bunch of flowers, a dinner and a condom for each gal.
This explains all the nonsense about who can use what bathroom!
Interesting article suggesting that the motive was not to elect Trump but to access evidence of vote fraud, which could then be leaked to undermine (expected-winner) Clinton.
Apparently this woman hated Trump, showing once again that Reality has a liberal bias.
and the future humans running it are starting to throw out hints on purpose. Hopefully, not because the whole thing is shutting down soon.
Good for a click, but not a strong argument. The author reasons that since Russia couldn’t affect the results, the only remaining motive was to identify widespread fraud. But he presents a false choice. In fact, Russia’s MO has been to simply meddle with voting systems to create doubt and sow illegitimacy or to find minor errors or problems to cast doubt on the vote.
Agreed. Had HRC pulled out a win, you can rest assured that Team Trump would have been bellowing non-stop and at a high volume about how the whole thing was “RIGGED”. (*They were already flying that flag before / and after / unexpectedly winning.) They would have demanded investigations, and a Republican congress would have eagerly complied. Eventually the NSA report would have surfaced, and they would have gleefully danced around shouting “SEE! SEE! RIGGED!”
I don’t think he presented this false choice, and in fact puts forth something along the lines of your suggestion (which is what’s also being suggested by many other people) in the fifth paragraph.
Nonetheless, he also suggested that it might be a spying operation, which is a possibility that I’ve not seen elsewhere.
He writes: “VR doesn’t actually make voting machines. It makes electronic poll books that make paper voter rolls unnecessary. They allow an election worker to check a voter’s personal data against the rolls and issue a ballot. By messing with such a system, hackers could produce confusion, making it difficult for voter names to be verified. They could even enable ineligible people to vote – but for such a ploy to work, there would need to be large numbers of such ineligible people available for a massive fraud operation on voting day.”
He’s clearly missing the point. The goal isn’t to affect the outcome. The goal is to effect the perceived legitimacy and security of the system.
Right. But the force of that observation turns entirely on his casting doubt on other possible motivations. So it’s not worth much.
Computer: end program.
You’re focusing on the wrong sentence. Look at the prior one.
Not so. If you want to prove that this is the true reason, then you need to disprove the other possible motivations. If you’re just pointing to an intriguing possibility, then that’s of interest regardless of whether you can cast doubt on all others. Just as the other possibilities don’t become “not worth much” just because you can’t disprove this one.
I don’t think that proves your reading or overrides his clearly erroneous final sentence of that paragraph, but I think any further parsing is not getting us anywhere.
It’s only intriguing if it’s based on something. Otherwise it’s just speculation designed to get clicks. Since the only thing raising this above speculation is bad arguments as to the plausible motives, I don’t see why you’re intrigued by it on its merits, though I see why it would be intriguing for other reasons.
I found this paragraph interesting:
It sounds like this may have been some sort of practice run for somehow manipulating absentee balloting. I say “practice run” because American Samoa has no electoral votes so this couldn’t have possibly affected the election.
Then again it may have been, as others have said, part of an overall attempt at making us question the legitimacy of our voting systems.
The final sentence of that paragraph is not erroneous. It is true that “They could even enable ineligible people to vote – but for such a ploy to work, there would need to be large numbers of such ineligible people available for a massive fraud operation on voting day.” The point you keep making is that there are other possible reasons for them to hack that system, and that’s true, but this article discussed several possibilities, including this one. The fact that there might be other reasons doesn’t make discussion of this one “clearly erroneous”.
It’s valid speculation. All other reasons are also speculation at this point, so this is just smore peculation about a speculative subject. There’s no reason to object to this particular speculation on its merits, though I see why people might object to it for other reasons.
You’re not understanding my argument. I’m saying he’s attempting to discount other explanations of motive, including in that paragraph, but his reasons for discounting them aren’t persuasive–namely, because you don’t actually need to affect real voters for an effort to discount the legitimacy of the election to be successful. If you don’t think he’s trying to cast doubt on those explanations, then you’re entitled to your reading of the piece and we just disagree on that point of interpretation.
There’s no sound reason to treat all possible explanations as equally baseless speculation, when some of the explanations are actually plausible and consistent with other evidence we have. The IC seems to agree that Russia was attempting to inject uncertainty and illegitimacy with efforts that were not designed to affect any actual results. There’s evidence for that, including what they’ve done in other countries. What there is no evidence for is that Russia thought Hillary might be committing massive electoral fraud and they were hoping to catch her. Treating the two explanations equally is bizarre.
Again, you’re conflating two possible explanations, offered in different sentences.
In one sentence he suggested that they might have been motivated by a desire to create confusion, making it difficult for voter names to be verified. He did not cast doubt on that. In the next sentence he suggested they could even have been trying to enable ineligible people to vote, and went on to cast doubt on that specific suggestion.
What there’s really no sound reason to do is to assume that everything the Russians did in regards to the election had one singular purpose. If the Russians have any sort of intelligence at all it would make sense if they were aware of the fact that there were many things they could do to affect the election, in various different ways.
Goals can be good, better, best. Screw around with the election, muddy the waters and arouse suspicion about the legitimacy of government, period. Good. Screw around in such a way as to seriously undermine HRC as an effective president and potential adversary (plus, Vlad the Imploder totally hates her guts…), better. Propaganda and disinformation that drives a wedge between the Bernie people and HRC, Trump wins and the Prime Minister of Exxon becomes SecState? Manna from Hell, don’t get any bester than that!
I’ll let the NSA, CIA, FBI and other organizations investigate before I reach a conclusion. However Russia did hack into our voting systems, that is proven. Whether that led to changing tallies, eliminating/altering registrations, etc. I don’t know for sure.
Another scenario that fits is that we see the results of a tentative effort to gain more information about a prospective action that never actually “jelled”. Perhaps the success of the propaganda campaign to split any union of Bernie/Hillary made that less interesting?
Hacking, sure, but what’s their plan? Russians don’t take a data dump, son, without a plan.
That’s a pretty interesting document at that link; I had fun poking around it.
One thing I noticed that was 1 in every 6 Republicans also think that “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President”.