"…but the intelligence community has not been given permission to respond in kind.”
And that is the most insidious, insane thing I’ll probably read all day. They say democracy dies in darkness. It also dies from inaction when real threats arise.
Those Congressional committees need to get answers as to why this administration doesn’t see fit to do something to secure our upcoming elections, why it hasn’t been green-lighted, and find a way to hold them accountable.
We deserve so much better than this.
It has been 17 years since the stolen election of 2000, and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have addressed the problem. We need national voting standards with verifiable and recountable ballots for every election.
The reality is that no American can have any trust or confidence in official vote tallies.
We deserved so much better than that.
And the lesson Republicans learned from stealing the 2000 election was that it was possible – and more importantly, that they can get away with it.
I’m not sure the Democratic Party actually learned anything from it.
Republicans are not going to investigate or prosecute other Republicans until there’s a clear electoral benefit for doing so.
Most Republican voters are also Trump voters, and polls show they remain so. Therefore, I’m not expecting any true Republican turncoats. We’ll hear a bit of grumbling at most and then they’ll go right back to playing reverse Robin Hood.
That’s a no-brainer. I can’t understand any state having a voting system with no paper trail whatsoever. That makes no sense. But it has to go beyond that. A paper trail based on a hacked system doesn’t do anyone any good.
One thing I recall were the experiments done by people tasked to break into the counters that take the ballots. I think it was through a U of M or MIT study or something. (I’ll look it up later). They were able to change the vote somehow electronically. One doesn’t expect that kind of thing to happen at the polling stations. One expects that kind of thing to happen either before or after the votes are cast in order to rig a machine (and thereby rig the vote count). For that, one needs to be circumspect about who oversees those machines, who has access to them, and how they’re secured. I worry about shit like that. Every election I read about missing machines now, missing ballots found stolen in some dump site or the trunk of a car, or machines that didn’t initially work but were reconfigured. That’s when shit probably happens. But because I’m a luddite, I’m sure there are many other ways some enterprising political saboteur could engage in shaninigans if they were so motivated.
Has this kind of shit always happened when we had the old fashioned levers to cast our votes in days past? I never heard of voting problems due to technical problems when I was a kid, or even a young adult, like I do today.
Paranoia is a very healthy condition when Republicans rule.
The best proof someone’s a brainwashed Trumpladyte is that they have no fear of Russia… their paranoia has been both engineered and manipulated by alt-real rightwing media to be wholly bent against liberal and progressive Americans.
These Russian retrogarchs (can I coin that?) are the enemy of that enemy, so apparently they are their friends.
There’s the rub and the reason… our right wing has been re-programmed to hate fellow Americans of a different ideology rather than hate foreign agents with pernicious intent.
Until we are willing to call it what it is… mass brainwashing of a specific and susceptible slice of our population, we just kick the can down the road some more.
Hate speech is not free speech and never was, and until we are willing to confront it publicly and call foul on the pretense that it is free speech, and deliniate boundaries that really work for The People and not their oppressors, we will continue to enrich the rich who profit from our divisions, and disable the common people who should be the real beneficiaries.
There will only be an “electoral benefit” when the elections are “stolen” from a Gooper. But then they will investigate Dems, never themselves.
Show us the evidence on the Russian meddling and Putin’s involvement with Trump.
Show the people Trump’s tax returns and his full balance sheet…the liability side showing who and where is business is financed (Russian Oligarchs and their state controlled bank I bet)
Show us the evidence on how we are safe guarding our voting system from another Russian fix.
No one has confidence in Trump or the Republican Communist party controlled House, Senate, and Supreme Court - Trump is more focused on his war with the Media and his religious war with Islam…he’s not even talking about our real #1 enemy that is Russia and their dictator Putin. In fact, Trump seems to emulate Putin in many many ways.
From the article:
Thomas said any hacking would require hacking of computer software systems connected to the optical scan machines, and that would have to be done on a county-by-county basis. “That would be very, very difficult,” he said.
Forget county-by-county…All it took in Michigan was 10,000 votes lost generally in the vote count from Wayne County and the surrounding older metro Detroit area, where other known voting problems already existed due to broken down equipment, voter-suppression with long lines and not enough workable optical scanners to go around, and denial of a vote count due to the Michigan Constitution according to an ultimate court ruling that halted the recount this last election.
Here’a an older article from 2010 with the same Professor from U of M, Alex Halderman, looking at vulnerabilities in online voting"
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/10/25/voting.system.flaws/index.html
If we can do this shit to ourselves, imagine what the Russians could do. OK, now I’m being paranoid…
Every passing day, with Cuck Kushner regularly providing national security secrets and highly classified information via secure encrypted channels, the tentacles of Russia’s intelligence services are becoming more firmly entrenched in America’s election system.
What is stated in this article implies something I have been trying to get people to take notice of. What do you think would be the result of the russians managing to shift the election to a democratic blow-out? The aim is to instill despair. Confidence is also important on the right, and they will respond, I think, more violently.
Or they do the same stuff over again and there IS a Democratic blow-out because of the Trump and Republicans behavior. Would there be confidence? Same result. So far it IS WORKING.
Why doesn’t Kobach and his election investigation crew contact the Russians directly for the voter info they want?
Wait until that fucking Oompa Loompa meets privately with Putin at the G20. He won’t need a surrogate, even his son-in-law, to pass on national security secrets to the Russian Federation. He’ll just do it himself in order to curry favor with his new and dear friend, as a sign of his good faith, and obvious hero-worship.
I sure hope our intelligence services have their best long-range lenses focused on that meeting, and whatever other gizmos and gadgets they use. Seriously. Its feasible he could give away our nuclear launch codes at that meeting. He’s that crazy, unprincipled and witless…or maybe it’ll be troops movements, or some other top secret, highly confidential shit, if that meeting is allowed to convene. Lavrov sure was appreciative of that Orange Clown flapping his lips in boast. Kislyak and Lavrov didn’t even have to offer false encouragement to get him to spill the beans…He just offered them that shit on a silver platter. Fucking Dumbass.
“One thing I recall were the experiments done by people tasked to break into the counters that take the ballots.”
I’m pretty sure you are referring to the work done by Alex Halderman at U of Michigan, the guy referenced in this article. He is definitely the go-to guy when it comes to serious discussions of election machine hacking and so I was very happy to see him quoted in this article by Thielman and his previous one too.
I want to note that Thielman seems to be an excellent addition for TPM. The focus on election machine hacking in particular is critical and too-often neglected. Personally, I am always interested in getting to the bottom of the issue but don’t want to waste my time reading untrustworthy conspiracy theory account of the issue. If this is going to be Thielman’s focus—great! I think he is going to help TPM take another big step forward.
@srfromgr
Here’s hoping his various cognitive deficits will limit the amount of useful information he can convey to Vlad. Of course there’s always the chance of thumb drive concealed in the fruit basket.
If you notice, I referenced three other articles that involve that same professor from U of M. He is a main advocate of reviewing and revamping our election machinery so that malware and other forms of shit-sniffing by anyone trying to mess with our elections, becomes more protected.
I didn’t realize until after I wrote my post that the author of the article and I were basically talking about the same person. And yes, this guy is off to a good start. This needs more urgent attention as Congress willfully ignores what eventually will have to be done to rectify the deficiencies.
You joke…and I know, its easy to do because I do it myself, but I’m dead serious. We need protection from our own fucking Pr*sident in this case, giving away state secrets he barely understands himself. All it will take from Putin is a request.
Did the strengthened sanctions that Congress put on Russia recently need his approval and signature? Did they get it? I hadn’t seen a follow up to that.
“[A]t a time when repairing voting infrastructure could not be more urgent . . .” this is happening: “House Republicans Want to Eliminate Federal Election Assistance Agency” http://www.govexec.com/…/house-republicans-want-eli…/139123/ Guess it makes about as much sense as everything else they’re doing.
Like hacking a voting machine manufacturer, for instance.
Most of our voting machines are built on 1990s platforms. And local constituencies often don’t change the factory preset passwords. A Princeton prof hacked a machine in 7 minutes, and his students demonstrated how machines could be reprogrammed to play video games.