To Know If the Election Was Hacked, Look at the Ballots
medium.com
medium.com
It might sound flippant, but I wouldn't be too surprised if the masterful politicians (in the USA or abroad) wouldn't consider illegal hacking just because it's too risky. Better to use shady-yet-legal tactics to shift opinions. The whole "fake news" issue seems like it could be a very smart campaign in this regard.
If fake memes are wrecking your country maybe it's not the memes that are the problem?
Please define
> protection from propaganda, PR and psychological tricks
Yes, we here in Europe are blessed to represent the epitome of rational thought immune to all kinds of manipulation and fear-mongering. Alt-Right populism like the Front National, the Alternative für Deutschland and the UK Independence Party has no success here at all!
But, it was a sarcastic post
- "Metro Wisconsin, where Clinton did well, uses paper; rural Wisc, where she collapsed like everywhere, is electronic. https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#year/2016/state/55" https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/801217804783394816
- Remember it's not just Wisconsin here. 1. Michigan only uses optical scan. http://www.michigan.gov/sos/0,1607,7-127-1633_8716_45458---,... 2. The margin in PA is 65k votes. 65k. https://twitter.com/ForecasterEnten/status/80121914932638515... retweeted by @Nate_Cohn
- To follow: some _very_ quick analysis which suggests the claim here of rigged results in Wisconsin is probably BS: http://nym.ag/2gI6YLP
- Run a regression on Wisc. counties with >=50K people, and you find that Clinton improved more in counties with only paper ballots. HOWEVER: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/801221546685661184/...
- ...the effect COMPLETELY DISAPPEARS once you control for race and education levels, the key factors in predicting vote shifts this year. https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/801221907609579520/...
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/demographics-not-hacking...
Edit: actually there was already at least one major discussion about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13019333, so technically we ought to be marking all these as dupes. But we'll leave this one open for now.
The moderation test in cases where there's an ongoing story and many follow-up posts is: have one major thread and bury the rest as dupes unless there's significant new information.
I like the type of machines we have in Connecticut. There is a paper ballot that is filled out and then scanned optically. We get a paper ballot that acts as an audit trail. There is always the possibility that the optical scanner contains a bug or something, but the 2000 election showed that even mechanical machines have flaws if not maintained.
I would not prefer the touch screen voting machines as there are always reports of the machines switching the vote. It just seems like more can go wrong with those machines.
The larger the election, the more manual counters you will have. Which means the more people you would have to influence in order to rig an election.
Widespread vote manipulation of electronic systems much, much easier to keep a secret.
What do you mean? Doesn't it just requiere to perform a few divisions?
I don't understand what you mean. Why specifically can't we use the technology he describes?
> Have you ever tried to inpelement a modified d'hont method manually?
Where in the U.S. is that method used?
Reason - we haven't solved basic issue of endpoint security yet!
There is always that aspect of it, it someone can get a hold of a box of ballots and somehow slip those into the process, it would be easy to circumvent any machine that relies on a paper audit trail.
A double entry system where you get your paper ballot optically scanned and you also place your vote into a independent system maybe even an electronic one could provide a better check against having just one system as a point of failure?
Is one threat greater than the other? I actually think the threat of vote payment is lower due to the the high risk of the illegal act being exposed. But this is strictly intuition and I have no actual knowledge of the matter.
Edit: in the article, they describe a receipt method that matches your description. But the voter doesn't retain it.
The only serious argument I heard was that it would be very complicated and expensive to hack so many local voting systems. However, certainly state-sponsored - and maybe other - attackers have the resources to do it, they can greatly reduce the cost by targeting only necessary systems (e.g. just a few voting systems in each swing state), they probably can find more ways to economize on a brute force attack, and most importantly: For them the massive return on investment - controlling who is the next President of the U.S., and possibly undermine confidence in U.S. political institutions - makes it worthwhile. It's arguably worth it to hack the machines, leave evidence, and not change the result
I worry that in their rush to refute Trump's allegations of rigging, the experts opened the door to attackers by preemptively blocking investigations; they are now politically very difficult, they will cost the experts' reputations, and they may cause more uncertainty among the public than they resolve.
The best security I can think of is deterrence: If they get caught, the attacker might be inviting a war with the U.S. But do Russia and China really feel threatened?
> There’s no question that this is possible for technically sophisticated attackers. (If my Ph.D. students and I were criminals, I’m sure we could pull it off.) If anyone reasonably skilled is sufficiently motivated and willing to face the risk of getting caught, it’s happened already.
Surely there's someone on 4chan who ticks those boxes. The motivation doesn't even have to be pure vandalism: it would be a very effective way to call attention to the vulnerabilities in the system.
Absolutely. Regardless of how likely or unlikely manipulation is, an independent group should be able to request an audit.
If for not other reason than she could be silenced by a tacitly threatening to endless prosecute and summon before congress on some unrelated matter if she makes any trouble.
A very good point.
So, despite all the flaws that you point out, why are these legal but a mobile app is not?
Here in Czech Republic we receive voting tickets by mail about a week before election and have to physically put them into a box behing a curtain in a voting room. I also see weakness here, and don't understand why we receive voting tickets by mail, because it allows you family relatives filter your tickets. Better system would be if the voting tickets were available only in the voting room.
Still it is better than web app. There are more security concerns with online voting, you can read more about it here: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/15417/online-go...
I vote with a mail in ballot. My signature is checked by a human being (I know as a family member was audited when their signature differed from historical).
Couldn't web-based replace paper-based mail-in ballots?
With an on-file signature that generates a "voting token" that could be mailed to me for goodness sake, I don't see why mailing in a piece of paper with ink on it is a necessary step.
I can recognize two problems with these.
a) vote buying, b) vote stealing.
Risk for vote buying is similar for both methods but electronic voting has in my opinion higher vote stealing risk as it is easier to implement on large scale.
I think both methods are suspicious and I am not in favour of them, but as usage of mail-in voting is not widespread, it does not involve too big risk.
Contrary electronic voting may become very popular and problems will be magnified.
Mail-ins are already problematic in that regards.
And voting through a web app is wrong on so many levels:
- "Electronic voting": Electronic voting machines already have a bad enough track record. If nothing else, it makes large-scale attacks easier. Voters have to trust the ballot operators (different from home banking, where (a) you can choose your bank and (b) manual banking wouldn't be better either).
- "Electronic voting, at home": Assuming [1], it wouldn't be coercion resistant, wouldn't be independently verifiable, couldn't guarantee vote secrecy to voters and be susceptible to ballot stuffing, open against technical attacks (eg. as simple as DDOS, or malware).
- "Electronic voting, at home, in a web app": No local (non-attacker-controlled) code means you must trust server completely. And its basically impossible to really isolate the voting from everything else.
All these problems for what? Paper ballots really aren't so bad. Especially if you eliminate two of the obvious problems US elections have: get rid of voter registration, and move votes to sundays.
[1] Assuming you don't use a cryptographic voting scheme; these have their own problems. It's an entire field of research that just can't be summarized in an HN post, but key problems are: a) impossible to understand by voters, b) some desirable properties are mutually exclusive, c) computationally prohibitively expensive (even with state level resources), d) some problems aren't technical in nature and can't be solved technically (think coercion).
Most banking -- "home" or multi-millions -- is done electronically. It's safer.
Banking is a completely different problem. The secrecy requirements are different - in fact, audit trails of all individual transactions are expected. Big transactions are typically individually reviewed by humans. People/organizations can choose their bank. There are multiple banks -> no single target. Transactions can be traced and rolled back, so coercion is less of a problem. Risk is mostly financial.
Do any of those exist? Is this possible in practice, in this decade?
I'm neutral on web voting, because I basically agree with all the observations you make. But I think it's important to look at things from the individual perspective as well. Voting by mail seems like the best option to me at present.
As an aside, all these discussions miss something significant: even if you can vote with ease, it's too damn complicated. Most people just don't have the time or knowledge to properly evaluate all the various ballot initiatives at the local and state level in many jurisdictions, nor are most people able to properly evaluate candidates for all the various offices in local elections. Frankly I don't think people should even be allowed to vote for offices like judgeships and public prosecutors, since almost nobody has the education required to assess any of the candidates properly and almost invariably end up choosing whoever happens to be the most photogenic candidate instead.
The government mails a form to the address you registered when signing up as a voter. You complete a legal statement with a fairly high penalty for being caught lying. Then you return this legal statement.
There are security issues with this process, but for the most part it's no worse than how humans vote otherwise, and careful message encapsulation designs can make the /cost/ of manipulating individual votes in transit high while making the actual voting form 'anonymous'.
Online voting would only be more secure than this if the message were signed, and audit-able by both the signer and the recipient. This is possible, but it also complicates external review since they would also need to validate the identity of the signer.
At a very minimum a record of /who/ voted (and presumably when) would need to be known as a result of validating voter registration.
Vote tabulation could be separated if the registration validation stage fed a stripped (and trusted by the org) packet of cast votes.
However this presumes that you believe in the security of the /entire/ computing stack from base firmware up through the OS and counting applications. Auditing that is a LOT harder than humans tracking paper; we've had centuries to figure out how to do that in fair ways.
1. Internet voting is not compatible with democracy
2. No amount of technology can change this
3. Whom you voted for ought to be secret
4. Who voted should not be secret -- it should be known as widely as possible
5. And who counts the votes, and how, certainly ought not be secret
Here's one way that a crypto-voting protocol might give you this right. It provides for a separate ballot for each race, and each ballot has a perforation down the middle so you can separate it into two halves. The candidates are randomly ordered, with their names on the left-hand side of the perforation and your vote on the right-hand side. When you vote, the machine tears off the left-hand side and returns it to you, while it scans in the right-hand side, and then locks it in a secure box for auditing. Then your vote is recorded in a public database with your name and which-number you voted for, but the correspondence between that number and that name is only privately recorded on the half of the ballot that you retain. So you can verify that the database says 3 and that was the Green Party candidate who you voted for; but nobody else who sees the 3 on the web site knows directly what it means.
The protocol might then do two more things with this two-sided randomized ballot:
(1) Create plausible deniability. This is done by putting other left-hand-sides of other torn ballots into the voting booth, for you to choose from. Even if your boss demands that you vote Libertarian and goes so far as to hire goons who mug you for your piece of paper on your way out, that boss cannot prove that you didn't just take a left-hand-side from the voting booth which "proves" that you voted Libertarian, even though you voted Green. Suddenly the only people who can buy votes are state-level conspiracies who can put cameras in the polling stations etc. It may sound weird that you're making it hard for someone to sell their own votes, but it makes it hard also for anyone else to thereby buy them.
(2) Create confidence in the two-sided ballot. The biggest point of lost confidence in the two-sided ballot is that when you see 3, you think that you know who you voted for, but who's to say that these numbers match up with the votes that are stored in encrypted form on the ballot? You will want to therefore let someone decrypt a ballot or two at their leisure, to build up this confidence. However if you do, the thing is decrypted and no longer suitable for voting, so it must be immediately destroyed. So that's the end result; you have this thing called the Checker which issues a network request to the election authority asking for a ballot to be decrypted; when it is, its right-hand side is simultaneously shredded. It tells you the order that's on the left-hand side; you verify that against the actual left-hand side. Boom, there is no longer any tampering with the mapping between names and encrypted data, at least not on a large scale, by anyone who is not the central election authority themselves. If there is, people will hopefully notice and complain loudly.
Electronic voting and their associated processes are complex and verifiable by only a small portion of the population (those who are both smart enough and technically skilled enough to dive into the code). Even then very few people have the skills to determine if hacking or other forms of tampering take place.
As a technologist there's too much incentive for a bad actor to tamper with electronic voting and it is too difficult to check if tampering has occurred.
https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6344_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412281...
You can't have a bank account without ID, you can't even cash a check without ID. You can't get Medicaid or food stamps without ID. You can't even enter the White House without ID. Yet allowing people to vote without any means of verifying who they say they are? That's ludicrous. Every single state with voter ID laws has provisions for those that can't afford it.
So why oppose voter ID?
Requiring an id to vote might make some sense, but what doesn't make sense is making the id difficult or impossible to get (see Texas and North Carolina for examples). So much effort is being poured into voter id laws, but none is being put into getting citizens the "correct" id to vote with. Why is that? (I may be wrong here and maybe you have more info, if you do please provide links that show where the people proposing voter ids have also made it easy to get an id)
What other purpose aside from government sanctioned suppression would getting rid of the provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 requiring states to get federal approval before changing their voting laws serve? From what I understand, the justices that voted to get rid of the provisions did so because there was lack of data suggesting that there were issues at the ballot for people of color. But where is the information and data that supports the massive amounts of voter fraud that was heavily talked up before the vote?
If it was me making these decisions: I'd verify each person against a national fingerprint and facial database before even letting them fill in the ballot form and only accepting their vote if the verification was positive.
That is the core difference.
Without personally identifiable votes, we have no way to assure the voter their vote record cast matches their intent as they have no trusted way to evaluate that record.
When we press a butyon, or touch a screen, we have to trust the feedback we get. When we make a physical mark, the chain of trust is complete.
The problem is the machine can literally do anything and then just tell us what we want to know is true without it actually being true.
Electronic records are a forced vote by untrusted proxy.
Financials are personally identifiable and multiple parties are involved, which catches this problem nicely. That is why they work as well as they do.
The problem with home electronic voting, other than hacks, is that a voter can be coerced into voting for someone that they don't want. So the Estonian system has it that you can vote multiple times and only the last vote counts, you can also vote in person using paper and that trumps electronic voting.
Cryptographically signed voting enables vote selling only in the same sense that requiring voters to present ID at the polling place already enables it.
Tracking down every single vote against you, or just a large batch of them for retaliation? If it's the former, I can't really see the purpose. If it's the latter, you can do that today, people don't usually make a secret about who they vehemently hate in the presidential elections on facebook.
Full disclaimer, I am a systems engineer :p
One of us has a misaligned Overton window.
Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not. I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked. But I don’t believe that either one of these seemingly unlikely explanations is overwhelmingly more likely than the other. The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the available physical evidence — paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
He goes on to give an overview of voting machines' vulnerability and methods for resolving the problem.
Also to say paper ballots cannot be tampered seems silly . Unless we know the exact procedure and check points in which they are handled, how they are stored and secured even after the win for case of recount (especially if tampering happens afterward and recount is the plan to which the coin lands on the other side). Hell maybe even down to the specific type of paper a ballot is printed with. And I like what someone else said, scan them in as well... have machine and human come to the same total.
I expected the guy to have proof considering the hype around this, but I do appreciate he said it is unlikely the election was hacked...as if just to quiet those twitter echo chambers.
An election tech worker or contractor with an agenda, could easily achieve the same results without having to go to the great lengths of breaking into the network using malware etc.
Paperless touch screen voting there me and we have no idea who won any election.
Completely unacceptable.
The record of that intent consists of smudges on dirty touch screens.
We could come close to at least questioning with aggressive exit polling, but the real problem is no voter using those devices can ever understand their vote cast.
They walked in and did something. That's all they really know.
And with that said, I don't think it's fair to ,
I don't think it's fair to say that the intent of the voters is unclear unless you're wanting to entirely throw out the results of the electronically collected and processed votes as completely invalid. That seems extreme to me.
Fact is, no voter in that state can actually tell you how their vote was recorded.
That's reality. How can we trust the election then?
If you're unwilling to trust a computer system counts in a non-corrupted fashion, I'd be surprised to learn you use them for anything at all. Heck, who knows how the messages you're typing in here are showing up for me? Who is to say there isn't a middle man re-interpreting everything you type? How can you have any confidence in any system, unless you wrote it yourself? And deployed yourself, and completely control 100% of the system it's deployed on.
Hyperbole, sure, but why trust any system if not your vote recording system? I'd like to think (and again, I have no research to back this) that these are maintained by relatively "non-partisan groups," and that they are audited to evaluate for any sort of corruption or tampering. But even if they aren't, I don't think that paper ballot systems are any more so. The qualifications to be a ballot worker in my area seems to be that you've reached the age of retirement and are white, which could very easily bias the vote here. Should I not trust my results?
First, the voter does know their vote record reflects their intent. They can't actually know that with a paperless touch screen.
Second, we do have the ballots and various things can be done to resolve an election, and they can be done in court, by humans. Trust can be established there too.
Now, we don't always need that, but it's extremely important that we have it, or the systems simply will be gamed. I would. What's to really catch me?
You bring up a great secondary point. Why trust computers at all?
In this case, both you and I have a dialog, and it needs to be sane. The machines could be coughing up a lot of garbage, but we both know they don't as the chat is coherent.
WHile this ambiguity has always existed with computers, most use cases get past it in similar fashion. Banking, by the way, resolves down to personally identifiable records, or at the least an account known by someone, and distributed copies of said records too.
All of that must make sense, or there are problems. It's subtle, but we catch a lot of trouble this way.
Voting is an edge case, and it's extreme as well as important, and a significant issue when it's not trusted.
Billions and Trillions of dollars can be impacted by votes. To think we aren't seeing manipulation is crazy.
In the case of SC, we don't actually have the means to catch this being done!
The niche case of voting breaks down to anonymity being coupled with no public record of the vote and this ambiguity of input.
In my State, Oregon, we use a hybrid. Voters do cast paper ballots and have plenty of time to do so. Individually, we can understand our votes are accurate.
They are verified by signature, which preserves the secrecy of the voters. It's damn tough to get data out of that part of the system specific to a voter.
We then publish voting and validity status for everyone too. So individually, and collectively, we can understand the votes are valid and will be counted.
For those who check, they can remedy things too.
Then, counting is done electronically coupled with blind audits done by hand.
This question is of paramount importance: How can you have any confidence in any system, unless you wrote it yourself? And deployed yourself, and completely control 100% of the system it's deployed on.
For most use cases, it's not an issue for reasons I've given. Votes are an edge case we do not bump into very often.
And that status makes this a difficult discussion.
Couple it with the strong incentives to control elections, and it's not something we should take lightly, and given we have plenty of time tested, cost effective, reasonable means to do this, we hardly require that risk be taken.
That it is consistently taken is a bother to me. There is no reason for it.
My point isn't to do that. My point is doing that is entirely warranted!
My secondary point is we should fix this. SC is currently worst case as far as trustworthy elections go. No one should have any confidence at all.
Where that is true, can we reasonably expect no corruption or manipulation has happened?
Is that still true when it's basically impossible to find out?
Man, those guys know how to spin the outcome.
You can down vote all you want. Game recognises game. You don't have to support someone for that.
This reveals partisan hacks on both sides of the aisle.
"I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters and to all of the people of the United States that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election, if I win,"
http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/20/politics/donald-trump-i-will-t...
Absolutely no one should doubt that Russia, and many other nations, have the capability to do what people are suggesting might have happened. The only question is whether they did, which would be almost unprecedented: the undermining of a mature democracy's electoral process by a foreign power would be a singular event. (Though, both the USA and Russia have done similar-ish things in the past, but often against immature democracies.)
Russia has shown interest in destabilizing the USA's electoral system throughout the year. The only question is just how far they are willing to go. We have the capability to determine whether they did this time. We should exercise that capability: if we don't, it will encourage our enemies (and our friends!) to do so in the future, regardless of what happened in 2016.
Huh? Then why spend money on it?
If I told you there was voter fraud, but it was so small it didn't have a snowball's chance of changing the results even in a very close election, would you spend thousands legislating ironclad voting id laws?
I think either (1) there is a chance this changes the outcome or (2) this has a too low ROI to bother.
Either way, we'll still have to mitigate fraud/hacking in 2020.
A) We would have "real-world" attack data to shape defenses against; and
B) It would be a lot easier to make the case for resources to better secure the voting apparatus.
Luckily, this would only likely cost seven figures.
Well, the GOP has spent a great deal of political capital in several states insisting on rigorous ID requirements while claiming that voting by undocumented immigrants is a huge problem, and it's an article of faith on the right wing that vast numbers of foreigners are voting in US elections despite a dearth of evidence. Of course, these rigorous ID requirements (in combination with other policies) also have a significant tendency to disenfranchise legitimate voters, and many on the left argue that this is the real intention.
Myself, I think voter ID is a good thing because it increases public confidence in elections - but that ID has to be easy for lawful voters to get and keep, and the Democratic party made a strategic mistake by opposing such laws strenuously while having no contingency plan to make sure that their supporters could maximize their chances of voting if direct opposition to voter ID laws failed. Voter ID laws are frequently unfair but you're better off having ID than getting locked out of the democratic process.
If the Democratic party had invested more effort in helping people get ID than in fighting the ID requirements, they might have held the White House. The left suffers from a chronic weakness of being unable to set priorities; the obsession with fairness above all other considerations is incompatible with effective decision-making. This is why no country organizes its military forces democratically.
And mature or immature, I do not want anyone meddling anywhere at all. If you can do it to somebody then be ready to be on receiving end because you are not on any moral high ground. I could not see how Russia could've gotten hold of voting systems. This is also why I do not like closed source code being used for purposes like these. Is the code even audited? If "Russia" was able to successfully meddle, that only shows how poor USA is at securing its own infrastructure. Please defer from producing another Iraq WMD evidences at any case.
That also gives me the right to call for other countries not to interfere in American electoral processes.
You don't seem to have followed this story. The whole point is that we have a very realistic possibility that Trump's unexpected win was due to manipulation of electronic polling machines. Possibly by Russia.
To be specific, Clinton was projected to win Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. If she had, she would have won the election. Instead Trump won all three by around 1% each. Across those states, Trump did about 7% better in precincts that used electronic voting than in ones that didn't. A recount of the ballots cast can tell us whether he really earned those votes, or the machines were manipulated.
This kind of manipulation of electronic voting is well within the abilities of US security experts. It is also within the abilities of countries like Russia. Russia had an obvious preference, and has demonstrated the willingness to use cyber attacks to manipulate elections.
Russian hacking of the US electoral system is a far, far greater threat to American democracy than Trump being President.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/demographics-not-hacking...
Both accept that it is possible for the Russians to hack the election. Both state that it is reasonable that Trump actually won. Both agree that the only way to be sure is to conduct an audit.
They do differ. The medium article digs into depth on the technical details of how doable the hack is. The 538 article digs into depth on the quality of the statistical evidence.
They come to opposite conclusions. The medium article concludes that we should audit because eventually someone will try to manipulate the election. 538 is more concerned with raising public concern about fairness. I am more concerned with actual fairness than perception, so I agree with the medium article.
No, we really don't.
For this rather wild speculation to have happened:
* The Russians would have had to know exactly which counties would be swing counties, in at least three different states, two of which nobody imagined Trump even had a chance in, in an election year when the best pollsters and analysts in the United States were caught completely flatfooted by the results all over the country.
* They'd have to be lucky enough to pick swing counties that use electronic voting. For example, in Wisconsin there's a mix of electronic and paper ballots across the state.
* And they'd have to know exactly what the vote counts would be weeks in advance so they could slip in ju-u-u-u-ust enough extra votes to give Trump a razor-thin margin of victory.
Look, I realize the election results were traumatic to lots of people, but if you cling to conspiracy theories to avoid dealing with that you're going to spend a long time in the wilderness. I'd advise you instead to work on persuading more people that your political program is the right one. It'll work better in the long run.
If Florida (where Trump's winning margin is less than 130,000 votes, which is less than 1.3% of the votes cast in that state) and its 29 electoral votes were declared for Clinton, that would put the two candidates in a dead heat, with 261 electoral college votes each.
Counting Michigan, Trump has 306 electoral votes. If you take away the 29 from Florida, he has 277, which is still greater than the 270 needed.
If Clinton wins Michigan, then the Florida result (i.e. that single state) affects the outcome of the election.
you just need a little "adjustments" to the elections results in several counties in a few (like about 3 this time) states. Which is easy given at how many places the voting is done using [really unsecure] electronic machines.
>Russia has shown interest in destabilizing the USA's electoral system throughout the year. The only question is just how far they are willing to go.
Seems like you think that there is really such a question :) Well, do you think Russia values integrity of US elections more than integrity of Russia's elections? And do you have any idea about integrity of Russia's elections ? :)
what is the risk? US hacking Russia's elections in response? :) Sanctions? You may have noticed that hacking each other computers is considered on practice (not in the public speeches :) a fair game, kind of a quiet Cold War these days - everybody does it to everybody else and everybody keeps it quiet, be it failures or successes, for exactly that reason of not wanting to make public the fact of doing it themselves.
Specifically in this case the fallout from US government officially establishing/confirming/proving that Russia hacked the US elections would probably be more devastating to the US government agencies and to overall societal trust into the US democratic institutions than to Russia. So Russia has no downside here really either way. Such logic fits pretty nicely to the opportunistic approach (tightly coupled with absolute absence of any moral objections (bombing hospitals and other civilians in Aleppo as part of advancing the Russian interests in Syria for example)) that has already been demonstrated on many occasions by the current Russian regime.
Even without actual hacking, just by supporting and promulgating the rumors and conspiracy theories about the hacking, Russia already deals [risk-free] a lot of damage here, in particular to the societal trust, - with discussions like this one being probably a sign and/or part of that damage.
Well, no, I guess it isn't really that puzzling. Someone lost an election and is upset about it.
Second, none of this has anything to do with the article we're commenting on. Injecting volatile political arguments into unrelated threads is a form of trolling
Please don't gaslight. The Democrats were saying it literally weeks ago, when Trump was being vague about accepting the results.
> Injecting volatile political arguments into unrelated threads is a form of trolling
We are discussing a claim that the election was rigged, but we're not allowed to argue about claims that the election was rigged?
Making it more transparent would probably not be a good thing.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13024781 and marked it off-topic.
It's been so interesting to see this turn of narrative after months "questioning the outcome of an election is undermining democracy." I wonder what happened between Sept-Oct and now that changed all that?
But since you asked, yes, I do think these "concerns" about Russian hacking of the US electoral process are stupid and a thinly veiled attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the next President (which according to the rhetoric of many on left over the fall, is undermining to democracy itself).
If (and only if) one party has actual evidence or data of rigging, it wouldn't be hypocritical for them to challenge the results after not taking Donald's whining during the campaign seriously.
But it's academic, the results shouldn't be overturned. Even if it was found legitimate to give Hillary the win, it would make a martyr out of Donald and his movement would gain traction for 4 more years. The next 4 years are going to be ugly either because Donald is president or because half the country believes a conspiracy gave it to Hillary.
One party or the other is going to be punished in 4 years. Better it should be Donald, let him fail and have his movement get put behind us for good.
If there's no paper trail, then there's nothing we can do. We can't overturn results just because some mathematicians think they look funny.
I was once involved in fighting a referendum. The local government demonstrably cheated, publishing information about the proposal that was clearly and significantly false. But I was advised by an attorney that in the end, they're never going to undo an election, so we shouldn't waste our time and money fighting.
Publishing false information isn't sufficient to overturn an election, but proving that the vote count itself is incorrect is another matter. It's possible that we're such an incompetent democracy that accurate vote counts are irrelevant, but I hope that's not the case.
But please don't gaslight about why Russia is the name that keeps coming up in these discussions. We have numerous unrelated (sometimes competing) sources attributing the DNC hack to Russia.
There is no evidence of hacking, their is evidence of potential hacking which can be confirmed by looking at the paper trail.
Only once the hacking theory is confirmed, will anybody need to look into the how, and the who.
If you call the police to your house saying you've been robbed, they don't immediately go out trying to find out who robbed you. They need to look at the scene. Did somebody actually break in? Or is it a fake call? How did they break in, what did they actually take, how do we think they did it, then using the knowledge they have gained from the crime, they can come up with theories of who might have done it. Same goes here.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13025174 and marked it off-topic.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13024781 and marked it off-topic.
Then I read this:
> Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not. I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked.
And yes, throwaway account because HN tends to get very uncivil about this subject.
> "I think she should have won" or "the polls all said.."
Those aren't his arguments.