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Comment by dkural | Hacker News Reader

The NSA disagrees with you. Voting software suppliers and local election officials were targeted, not just DNC emails.

https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/top-secret-nsa-report-de...

I do agree with you that without firm evidence & legal framework, the government should not victimize private business interests.

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According to this article, voting machines were targeted, but it seems very unclear as to whether or not those attempts were successful or had any effect on anything at all. Previous reports have all concluded that no votes were actually affected by hacking, and this article strives to imply that votes were affected but has no facts to back that up.

I would assume that attempts to gather information on and hack into voting machines happen all the time, by both state actors and private individuals. They key is whether or not such attempts are successful.

In many cases, we have no way to know whether they were successful, because voting machines are still being used that keep no auditable paper trail.

https://www.verifiedvoting.org/

Hacking the election doesn't mean having to actually flip votes, though the Russians clearly tried to do that and we don't know if they were successful. What is clear is that they tried to infiltrate election machines and the companies that produced them, on a grand scale. What is also clear is they waged a very successful propaganda campaign that pushed fake news stories, primarily through social media. Votes could have been effected by the former and almost certainly by the latter. Again, as the article points out below you wouldn't have to flip votes to effect outcomes, simply keeping people from voting could be enough, especially in a close election.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-electi...

And the NSA is trustworthy. Okay then.

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