What Trump claimed in 2016 was not vote changing but that millions of illegal aliens had voted. He never gave the slightest evidence for this, of course. Certainly in Georgia, the Dominion machines changed no votes, as Giuliano and Powell claimed. Although they never made any such claim when they were standing in front of a judge.
I’m surprised that Trump has never made any claims this year (AFAIK) of illegal aliens voting.
Cybersecurity experts have been yelling about those dangers for decades, long before 2016 and Russian interference, and while it’s slowly getting better, there’s a broad consensus among those same experts that governments aren’t doing enough. Here’s an article from NPR from election day that talks about the remaining vulnerabilities:
But a hard truth remains: many of the same vulnerabilities exposed in Russia’s attack on the 2016 election have not disappeared. In the wake of discoveries about that episode, security experts recommended the U.S. spend billions of dollars to improve systems across the nation. Congress allocated just a fraction of that.
…
But some security experts such as Prof. Philip Stark of the University of California at Berkeley still aren’t satisfied. Stark is frustrated that in many jurisdictions, including the entire state of Georgia, officials replaced their paperless machines with machines that print out a piece of paper that allows the voter to verify their selections before the ballot is counted.
This gives the voter the ability to vote using the machine, but then also to check to make sure their vote was recorded accurately.
The problem is, research suggests only a small number of voters actually check the paper the machine prints out, making it questionable at best whether an attack that changes voter selections actually would be caught by this method.
“We really need systems where, if they malfunction, they always generate public evidence that can be used to show that they malfunctioned,” Stark says. "And conversely, if the outcome is right, despite whatever malfunctions might have occurred, there ought to be a way for election officials to demonstrate that. "
…
The way officials can demonstrate that, Stark says, is through public auditing, a process that not every state uses. Even among the states that do some sort of audit, only a few do what are considered the “gold standard” of post-election audits, called risk limiting audits.
…
The bottom line: your 2020 vote is almost certainly safe, but some security experts won’t be fully satisfied until the majority of votes are hand-marked, and the auditing process is advanced and rigorous enough to validate the results.
We’re not disagreeing in substance, but I agree with the sentiment of the OP. If NPR is highlighting flaws in the election process on the day of the election, why are we now, only a few months later, so darn confident that none of those vulnerabilities resulted in any compromise? This is dangerous thinking, IMHO. I guarantee you most security experts aren’t as convinced that elections are a “solved problem” as Chris Krebs seemed to be on November 12th, and I’m sure they’re continuing to work to make sure 2024 even more secure. But between now and then, there’s a non-zero chance that they’ll learn something about the 2020 election that will cause us to reflect on our confidence in its execution.
For what it’s worth, many, many more votes were hand-marked this time compared to previous elections, which is where the security experts want us to go. As I mentioned, NJ went almost all mail-in, so almost all hand marked. Other states had huge increases in mail-in ballots as well.
I think that a lot of people saw what happened in 2016 and said: “Not next time”. Most were just people quietly doing their jobs in various election departments and then they were done.
That’s true. But the fact remains, on Nov 2nd security experts who were concerned about election security were being taken very seriously (despite the improvements in paper trails), but on Nov 4th, in an effort to repudiate Trump’s false claims, everyone seems to be happily ignoring those same experts who are (likely) still concerned.
There was a very stark shift in attitudes almost overnight
In truth, the election wasn’t THAT secure. There just wasn’t a lot of fraud, but that’s not the same thing as being secure. No one robbed my house last night, but my house is not actually very secure; its security system is just a couple of simple locks any competent thief could easily defeat.
The U.S. system is a hodgepodge of election systems of varying levels of security, and a genuinely dedicated bad actor could absolutely defeat one or more of them. Voter fraud could, in fact, tilt millions and millions of votes. There is simply no evidence that either of those things happened, and it is very unlikely they actually ever would.
To tackle the latter, voter fraud is not and never has been a real concern on a large scale. The idea that millions of people cast fake votes for Joe Biden is preposterous. It doesn’t make any rational sense for a sane person to commit voter fraud for much the same reason it only barely makes sense to vote at all; as an individual, the likelihood I can affect anything with one or two votes is next to zero, but if in doing so I commit a crime I am assuming an extremely significant risk for no benefit. There is no reason to commit voter fraud unless I can be totally assured that millions of other people are committed to doing so and they’re mostly committing it in concert with me. Voter fraud is, economically speaking, nuts. It doesn’t happen en masse.
Election hacking in a much more realistic threat, and could happen. But there isn’t any evidence it did. You’ll note Trumpists went to some lengths to prove it COULD happen, but that no more proves it DID happen than me proving the lock on my door can be picked proves someone actually did burgle my house yesterday.
Even then, though, it’s unlikely. While elections in the USA can be hacked, they have to be hacked one state at a time, and it’d be a huge effort that would almost certainly require a really immense conspiracy running through the department of state and one or more local election commissions; even hacking a single medium sized state would be one of the biggest criminal conspiracies of modern times, and I just do not understand how it could be kept a secret for long. It’s not that the election security is really all that great, it’s just that the nature of state and local governments, and the complexity of these things, means you would inevitably be exposed.
I’m genuinely curious…using what method(s) could this happen? Your entire post argues against the likelihood of voter fraud (with which I totally agree), yet you state that it could happen. How?
One concern after 2016 was that Russian hackers may have identified how to throw the entire election by focusing on a few weakly secured counties in the minimum number of states possible. Here’s a scenario:
Russia installs spyware into the voter reporting systems to get early results, say from mail-in ballots. They combine these inputs along with polling data and previous election results to predict the outcome on a state-by-state, county-by-county basis. They then calculate the minimum number of votes required to flip the outcome of the whole election – in 2016 that was apparently as few as 107,000.
They combine that information with conventional intelligence methods to determine which counties in the states they need to flip have the weakest voting machine security, the most bribable election workers, or the most gullible voters. The rest is fairly straightforward hacking, fraud, or psyops.
This is still a massive undertaking and there’s no evidence that it happened, but in a close election it wouldn’t take a whole lot of weak links to net a big payoff or someone.
Cite? There was certainly some pro left wing disinformation sowing discord but that was mostly directed at BLM and Sanders supporters, in the hopes of turning them against Clinton from the left. But I don’t recall any that was directed towards getting Clinton elected.
Your overall point is granted – and I definitely had to make sure to note that there were other sources of misinformation besides the Russian ones. Further, the qualifier I used was merely “some”, though perhaps I did not take sufficient care to avoid an apparent assertation of parity between pro-Trump and pro-Hillary disinformation. Nevertheless:
… we confirm that fake news was both widely shared and heavily tilted in favor of Donald Trump. Our database contains 115 pro-Trump fake stories that were shared on Facebook a total of 30 million times, and 41 pro-Clinton fake stories shared a total of 7.6 million times.
(Fifth paragraph, pg 2)
OK I think the area misunderstanding was in the first part of the sentence where you described “misinformation campaigns” with the purpose of “sowing discord”. Disinformation in general is a problem on social media and comes from all sides on all topics, but the pro-Clinton disinformation was, to my understanding, mostly random pro Clinton individuals who had the goal of getting her elected which in my opinion is a whole 'nother animal from the organized operation chaos campaign run by Putin.
By millions of people committing voter fraud. It is a thing that could, in theory, be done. It is incredibly unlikely millions would, though, because there is no rational reason for a person to do it.
OK, thanks. I misunderstood your earlier statement to mean that some smaller percentage of voter fraud could change the outcome of million of votes.
But as you have stated, there’s no reason for one person to attempt to commit fraud, much less millions of people.
The narrative changed because of the claims of fraud by Trump, but I don’t see that they changed the factual claims behind them. Saying we’re worried about fraud and saying that this election was the most secure one in US history aren’t contradictory at all.
It would make sense that, if you’re more worried about fraud, you would try to make things more secure–while also being worried that said measures wouldn’t be good enough. You can’t know until the election actually happens how good your preparations were.
The beauty the challenges by Trump is that we got more investigation that we normally would have, and thus more reason to be confident that no fraud happened that would have changed the outcome of the election. If not even those who wanted to allege fraud could find any evidence to present, that’s pretty blasted good.
He would have had to admit he did a shitty job over the last four years keeping them out / deporting them.
It should feel like Y2K all over again. It was a serious concern that a lot of people across the country put a lot of effort into, but without any centralized plan or organization. The risks of not acting were also potentially extreme, but unknown and often over or misstated.
For those that didn’t directly interact with it, Y2K seemed like a total nothing. And it is true that was highly unlikely that planes would fall out of the skies or power plants explode, but it did have effects. The first were actually felt pretty early. An industrial company disposed of some materials that were erroneously marked as expiring in 1900 instead of 2000. Some accounting issues, including delayed checks. Some law enforcement databases that incorrectly identified teens as in their 80s. Most minor, none life threatening. But of course this was after all the work done to prevent issues. You could have seen some real chaos in a lot of areas if no action was taken.
Similarly, I remember a bunch of concern about systems without abilities to audit and that may not be hardened from 2004. And there was a lot of criticism of the lack of federal support and guidance for securing the election infrastructure. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, just that all the states were on their own.
I would also point out that fraud and hacking are never 100% preventable. There was fraud this election. It was small, unconnected and mostly in favor of the incumbent, but it did happen.
How could millions of people, in theory, commit voter fraud? What is your theory?
I haven’t done a comprehensive study of voting regulations in all 50 states, so I’m only speaking of mine, but…
You have to register to vote in order to vote. I’ve always had to prove who I was in order to register to vote, they don’t just take your word for.
You can request an absentee ballot, but that’s your one and only ballot. Now, if you mess it up, you could probably take it to a local election precinct and get a clean one, but if you do that you need to give the old one back.
If you request an absentee ballot and decide to vote in person, you have to turn in your blank absentee ballot. If you don’t bring it to the polling place, you will be given a provisional ballot that is only counted once the deadline for mail-in ballots has passed and yours isn’t among them. Because each registered voter only gets one ballot.
You could always impersonate another registered voter and request an absentee ballot in their name or show up at the polling place and vote their ballot. That’s why there is a signature and signature match procedure.
The bad actors trying to destroy faith in the election system act like people routinely try to vote other peoples ballots, but there’s no evidence that they do and quite a bit that they don’t.
First and foremost, you’d have to be 100% sure that the voter you’re impersonating will not try to vote. And if you look at all the tales of election fraud and possible fraud, you just don’t hear about people showing up at the polls only to find their ballot has been voted. I think one woman in AZ showed up at the polls only to be told her ballot had been voted absentee and she claimed (verbally) that she didn’t vote it, but she refused to sign an affidavit to that effect or otherwise put the claim in writing.
I’ve heard liars talking about election fraud claiming that thousands of voters showed up at the polls only to be told their ballot had been voted, and they were told to fill out provisional ballots.
That’s a flat out lie. If you showed up to vote and your ballot had already been voted, that would be a very big deal, and one not resolved by a provisional ballot. People get provisional ballots when they don’t understand how absentee ballots work, and request one just in case but decide to vote in person.
Seriously, this “millions of people could commit election fraud if they wanted” is a serious claim and one I strongly disagree with. If you think that is possible, please tell me how.
I’m not saying no one every requested a ballot by impersonating a registered voter that they knew wouldn’t be voting, but that it’s a crime that requires a) knowing of such a person and having an opportunity to request their ballot. b) willingness to commit a felony just to vote twice instead of once, an act that doesn’t stand a chance of having any sort of real world effect in a national election.
I just think it’s incredibly rare, if it happens at all.
There are a few such cases, but as you say, rare. There was one in Pennsylvania in the recent election where some guy tried to vote his recently-deceased mother’s ballot. There was another case in Colorado in either 2018 or 2016 where a guy tried to vote his estranged wife’s ballot.
Honestly, anyone who questions the integrity of the election system really ought to volunteer to work an election or two. You will quickly understand how ludicrous it is to think it is a process that can be easily manipulated by in-person or mail-in voting.
The integrity of our elections is safeguarded by the commitment of thousands of individuals, mostly volunteers, who take their duties and responsibilities very seriously. Is there an occasional bad apple? Sure. But their ability to effect changes significant enough to sway an election is extremely limited, and very likely to be discovered.
I believe the type of hacking that most election officials were concerned about had to do with bad actors making changes to voter rolls such that the election would be thrown into chaos. Changes such as a number in a voter’s street address or changing the spelling of a name (John to Jon, e.g.) so a signature wouldn’t match. Again, if the Russians (or Chinese or North Koreans) had done this, it would have been obvious to election officials that it was happening, – but only when votes began to be tallied. It might have created some real problems for both in-person and mail-in voters. It appears this did not happen due to the hyper-vigilance of all the individuals responsible for running their elections. @Strassia and @Ann_Hedonia put it exceedingly well.
Go volunteer. Truly, I believe you will gain an appreciation and trust in your election system that you didn’t have before.
I hear this a lot from people. (Not from you, your POV here is clear.) And it drives me absolutely crazy.
I was at a medical-software firm at the time. Some of our systems were record-keeping, patient accounts and appointment management and prescription transmission and historical files and so on. But we also had a medical-device arm, with firmware running heart monitors and automatic IV dose pushers and all kinds of things.
And the reason regular people think Y2K was a nothingburger was because we busted our humps for eighteen months leading up to the changeover, and on the date itself I was one of many people sitting at our desks for twelve solid hours of local midnights monitoring every available piece of telemetry so we could jump on any failure we’d missed in the run-up to the event.
The fact that nothing major happened didn’t mean it was never an issue, it means that thousands of us did our jobs correctly.