I also wonder whether VR systems is used for maintaining voter registration records, and whether their mismanagement might be the source of all the righty-tighty moaning about fraud.
(Speaking of which, I see NC’s ex-governor is raising that boogeyman again. In spite of Near-zero evidence.)
Did you see the story on twitter about fake news tweets right after the attacks by supposed grieving, worried relatives in London (I haven’t heard from my little brother! My boyfriend is missing!) that turned out to be posted by alt-right/nationalists jerks?
Scum.
This is where I was afraid the evidence would lead. 
That’s beyond disgusting.
Say it’s not true, Rick Scott?!
More reasons to boycott FLA.
Please, please, please, let this be true.
Whoa!
That gave me goosebumps!
They helped Trump win, so they’re obviously doing the Lord’s work. There’s nothing to be done.
Why isn’t the NSA looking into Hillary’s use of a private email server?
THIS is one of the reasons I get so royally pissed when some people say want Clinton to just move along, get over it, go away, etc. The 2016 election was a perfect storm of many things happening and this is one of them. I’m not saying this was the only reason Dems lost but we need to prepare for the midterms with cybercrimes in mind.
Most of my time as a liberal Democrat has been spent spewing vitriol at warmongering Republicans and sell out Democrats, but I have to say, as far as Russia is concerned, hawkishness is warranted I’m afraid. This is an act of war. Democrats should openly declare that the Cold War never ended and we never won it, make those Reagan worshiping traitors choose a side.
Exactly. As those numbers rolled in that night, a few of us here on these threads said we don’t trust those numbers. I still don’t. Though I know it won’t happen, as a citizen I still demand a do-over – and no GOP candidate on the ballot due to their highly questionable behavior over the last year right up until the second I post this comment.
Nope me neither and I want a do-over too. I have been concerned over the election since we first found out that Russia was connected to Wikileaks way back when.
I knew it didn’t stop there or with the propaganda either. Not when hacking evoting machines is so damned easy, I’m told.
The first order of business ought to be a vote by mail system in every state. No more machines. paper ballots that come to your address and either get mailed back or dropped into special voting collection boxes by election day.
It’s safe, simple, and above all check-able. We’ve been doing it this way in WA for several cycles with NO problems.
It’s not minimizing to say that they might not have changed results (or even attempted to). In the language Mr. Marshall has been using recently, this story is not smoke. This story is the fire. Whether the GRU attempted to alter the results of the election is at the same time critical to the overall story and immaterial to this specific one. They penetrated US voting systems and have given the American people concrete cause to very directly doubt the veracity of the election results. That’s a core deliverable in and of itself. We must seek further evidence that the GRU did attempt to alter the voting results (I would have, wouldn’t you?), but even if we do not find any, this story is already self-contained fire. It does not need further speculation or evidence to be directly and critically damaging.
I think this is a subtle but important point. We need to be thinking about multiple stories simultaneously, and we need to recognize that some of them already lay bare and raw in front of us.
Like x infinity.
Why can’t we just have paper ballots again. Is it really that important to announce the results 1 minute after the polls close?
Woman Charged With Leaking Top-Secret NSA Report on Russian Hacking to Media
I agree with you.
There is plenty to make every voter question the veracity of the election outcome whether or not I’m totally right about the votes being rigged.
It’s more than enough.
Damn.
Hope the ACLU steps right up for her.
There’s no doubt in my mind that they would change the results if they could, but often times, you can get a similar result to your intended goal just by pretending you succeeded. Con jobs often rely on making people believe they stole something, even if they were not able to breach the defenses. We don’t know all the facts yet. We know they tried to breach and they certainly compromised systems to some extent based on the information in this article, but we don’t know if they penetrated all the way to the voting machines themselves. In my opinion, we shouldn’t be crediting the Russians with “hacking” the election results before the facts come out clearly demonstrating that they did.
I think it is deplorable for our election systems to be dependent on private, proprietary systems (often without paper trails) and that is something we should address. But if it comes out down the line that though they did penetrate the systems, they weren’t able to change anything, then these cries of “Russia hacked the election!” can more easily be dumped in the “FAKE NEWS!” bucket, undercutting the severity of the actual damage done. That’s the primary point I was trying to make.