Hasn’t seen an audit, either. Because there wasn’t one.
Headline overstates his actual words.
You know, there’s little evidence that the Rosenberg spy ring, or other Soviet spy rings, speeded up the USSR’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. (Klaus Fuchs’ espionage in Britain was somewhat more helpful to them, but not decisive.) But that did not mean that Soviet espionage was unimportant. The vital fact about espionage is that it is tried, not whether it succeeds or not. That, among other things, is being lost in the way the investigations in Washington are proceeding.
There’s been a slow but orderly retreat from the initially cautious analysis of Russia’s success in disrupting last year’s election. We know the FBI director acted on information he knew was false, that Obama and Biden decided that speaking up publicly would actually aid the Russians (thanks, McConnell!), and that Russia attempted to hack at least thirty-nine state election systems - systems we know are comically insecure - with varying degrees of infiltration. The “vote tallies were not affected” line is the last order keeping events from devolving into a total rout.
(Of course we also have the current PotUS on tape requesting assistance from the Russians in hacking his opponent’s emails, but apparently that doesn’t matter.)
“I know of no evidence that, through cyber intrusions, votes were altered or suppressed in some way,” Johnson said in an open session of the House Intelligence Committee.
The value of an auditable paper trail is not just legal or protecting the franchise. It also provides a historical record. This is important because the US has managed to arrange a presidential election every four years since it started. That’s an impressive set of data points. Keeping good, reliable records of what happens is important to hitting that data point going forward.
You don’t need to change a vote tally when you prevent targeted voters from casting a ballot.
The only reason they’re asking someone who has been completely out of the loop for 5 months is to get an answer like that. It’s like asking a retired police chief about the current state of a high-profile bank robbery investigation.
(And note, btw, that he’s very narrowly limiting his answer to affecting “vote tallies” through “cyber intrusion”. If voter rolls were altered, that wouldn’t be a direct effect on vote tallies, and if a tally were altered by malware installed by local officials – knowingly or otherwise – that might not meet the definition of “cyber intrusion.”)
There are structural dis-incentives. You could have voted for Hillary by several million more votes in California and it wouldn’t have mattered because of how electoral college votes were allocated. Indeed, with 10% of the US population, CA only gets two senators and is routinely snubbed by provincial agendas. Wyoming enjoys something like a 40-times multiplier of its statistical importance. The GOP gets this.
Since that’s never been an accusation, this is a straw man intended to distract.
Exactly! If you change or mess with the voter roles, you don’t need to change any votes that have been cast. I don’t know why this keeps getting repeated from both sides, as well as nimrods in the news media. Saying they didn’t change the tally doesn’t make it any better, and doesn’t change how bad this situation is that a foreign country can get into 21 states…or 39 states and fuck with our elections!!!
And of course you never have evidence until after you do an investigation.
Very carefully narrowed answers indeed!
So the US voting system was so porous and badly monitored that Russian government hackers penetrated 39 states’ systems (that we know of so far), but now we’re saying that the Russians didn’t change vote tallies? Exactly how do we know that? Now we’re super cyber sleuths but in November we were bumbling fools? Come on… just admit it… the Russians may well have changed vote tallies. It’s the 500 pound gorilla in the room no one wants to talk about.
Because to acknowledge that the election results might have been tampered with would raise questions about the legitimacy of the election and thus the legitimacy of the resulting government and none of those you mentioned want to have to face handeling the difficult and terrible implications those questions would entail.
This is exactly like the the whole RWNM talking about lack of evidence of “collusion” between the Russians and OSG. Its not about “collusion”, its about interference, of which there is currently no doubt. Hackers don’t need to change the actual vote tallies, or even change the voter rolls themselves. Its pretty clear though they used those voter rolls to very specifically target a section of the voting population and influence their decision. Targeting a lukewarm H supporter with fake news or “troll” opinions and pushing him/her to vote for Stein is a victory, let alone pushing them all the way into the OSG camp.
Its NOT about changing the tally of actual votes cast. Its NOT about changing the voter rolls. It IS about using the data in the voter rolls to target misinformation at vulnerable voters.
Yeah I’m guessing their main influence was to encourage Donald, egotistically and financially.
By the way, this is why that news about the exposure of profile data on pretty much the whole voting public is such a big deal. Gone are the days when the sexy foreign bot just wanted your money; now it wants you to betray the interests of your country.
Just that Ex-DHS chief says so doesn’t mean it is so. It could just mean that Putin has been more skillful, more stealth, and effective in his meddling with American politics. What makes Putin’s plan works so well is the reasonably large population of stupid Americans who have now known as Trump’s supporters. They are indeed Putin’s foot soldiers fighting against the very things that secure their livelihood in the free world.
There’s NO f*cking WAY that an idiot, a snake oil salesman, a fraud, a belligerent assh0le like Trump could be elected to the POTUS in a healthy, normal, intelligent, sane, free, and uncontaminated democracy. Trump himself is an evidence of a failed democracy and Trump’s own actions, behaviors, and attitudes are the evidence of Putin’s dirty hands in American politics and America’s future!
Exactly. And the media, even TPM, is playing into that.