I’ll say this again and again and again. For the first time in well over 30 years of voting in my precinct, the scanners at my polling place went down moments before 6am opening. By 8am they were still down. We filled out our ballets and placed them in the box beneath the scanner with the promise they would be scanned as soon as they were up again. When I asked the poll workers, they were baffled as the trial run the night before ran smoothly.
Were Voting Machines Actually Breached? DHS Would Rather WE Not Know
Until a system to verify every vote is enacted I’ll assume they WERE breached, especially when DHS says we don’t need to check them.
This is all such bullshit.
It would seem that a next step for the russians would be to hand the democrats a 25% margin of victory, which would feed into the paranoia on the right. I think things would start to get violent.
If one were trying to rig the outcome of a Presidential election, as the Trump-Pence campaign was, hacking the voting machines would be the most logical place to effect it.
Of course machines were hacked. This is all so infuriating. Russia is going to hack and manipulate everything but stop short of hacking machines and changing vote tallies? Wake up!
Easy fix. The Dems need to contract China to hack the voting systems in D’s favor. Watch how fast it will turn from a total non-issue to a critical problem for the GOP.
We wouldn’t be having this discussion if we just ridded ourselves of touch-screen voting machines.
I would rather have election results slightly delayed, just to have the added assurance that the final tally was accurate.
Optical scanners provide the speed of automatic counting along with the backup of a piece of paper that can be re-scanned in the event of a data breach or a malfunction.
No matter the outcome of an examinations of voting machines, 1/2 the country would be calling foul and questioning the findings. Is the real reason for not examining the machines a fear that it would show that enough were hacked in critical locations that it really did make a difference? Then what? Our country and our systems are not set up to correct such a criminal intrusion and security breach. The country would be split with many calling for new elections and others saying no, we must leave things in place. And with an illegitimate president and his party in power fighting to keep that power, well there’s a Constitutional crisis for ya. DHS, NSA, the FEC don’t want to open up the possibility of such chaos.
But - this is too big an issue, too much of a possibility or even likelihood. It does too much damage to simply ignore and insist all is well. Secure, verifiable systems that we can be confident about need to be installed and used everywhere, whether state election authorities want them or not.
It’s been shown time and again (ever since the team at Princeton demonstrated in '06) how vulnerable the machines are. And save for the level of viciousness of Rethugliklan partisans nothing has changed.
Remember when the representative from Diebold maintained it was to difficult to provide voters with a receipt documenting their ballot? And how his argument imploded when someone pointed out that ATMs print receipts by the zillions everyday?
Yeah, me neither.
I’d sure like to see Mueller have the authority to do a recount in Pennsylvania, Hillary led in most polls by 4-5 points right up to the voting day in Pennsylvania. There’s a big advantage of Democratic voters in that state:
Total Democrats: 4,157,140
Total Republicans: 3,244,123
No affiliation: 709,574
All other voters: 458,608
Total all voters: 8,569,445
There was more online registration activity and party switching than normal. Sure, it could be easily explained due the the nature of the candidates, still, a closer look sure would be nice. From Pennlive on Oct. 13th, 2016:
As of the close of online voter registration Tuesday, 899,394 people registered or made a change in address, name or party since the online launch Aug. 27, 2015, Murren said. Here are some stats for the period since Jan, 1:
New voter applications: 574,377 Online users: 775,497 - 361,608 Democrats, 291,930 Republicans, 121,970 other. New voters registering: 491,074 Changes in registration: 284,423
If the election had not worked out for the 1% class, there would be a wide and very thorough investigation…of fake news illegal immigrant voting. When that whole fake Trump news turns up empty, then they would move to investigate the Russians rigging the machines and system in key states…they’d correct that so next time the Trump 1% class wins at all cost.
The US Democracy is dead…Trump and Putin are loving it.
Can’t stand the truth!
Then you haven’t been paying attention to Republican voter suppression efforts for the last decade or so.
This lack of investigation coupled with the Trump / Kobach voter suppression initiative is very concerning. Please contact your state voting authorities to ask that they NOT turn their voter rolls over to Trump.
And for Democracy’s sake, insist on a paper trail in your state’s voting system.
I’ve asked this question many times since the NSA report was leaked: If Putin made such a commitment to target voting machines, do you think he would’ve done so if he didn’t believe he had a decent chance to succeed? By success, I mean the ultimate outcome: changing vote tallies, removing likely Democratic voters from the voter rolls, preventing votes in Democratic precincts from being counted and added to the tally.
Our voting systems are so decentralized and antiquated, and the election system so politicized that a clever bad actor like Putin would have a pretty good chance to sneak in and disrupt things.
Well done, Sam Thielman. This kind of investigative journalism is why (among other reasons) I’m thrilled to support TPM with my dollars.
Given the fragile state of our democracy, I can imagine why even well-meaning officials would not be eager to publicly investigate whether voting machines were hacked in the last election. We are already on a rough road and it’s only going to get worse. But, there’s no reason not to throw a ton of federal money at establishing standards and hardening systems.
Feel that this is worth knowing. The GOP has claimed that machines were not breached. There seems to be enough worry and reporting that it is more possible than though. An examination seems to be in order. If for no other reason than establish ways that this can not be repeated. I have to imagine they are under some directive as well to do nothing that looks to undermine Trump’s win.