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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"The 2 ways Russia may have helped Trump steal the election aren't what you think"
This article is the best summary I've read so far which lays out how far and extensive Russian hacking of the election went.I've long dismissed the idea that actual votes were changed on election night since Republicans have already formalized voter suppression into law. A Russian oligarch purchasing state election software and compromised registration voter rolls ensure you're ahead of the game. "Voter suppression" was also an electoral strategy by Bannon and Cambridge Analytica, in tandem with the Kremlin's hacking of DNC political machinery.
In other words, if you can alter state voter rolls and suppress the vote through nefarious means, you don't need to change actual votes on election night since you've already compromised and manipulated the electoral process for a particular desired outcome.
The real scandal is how Republicans and their allies have managed to get away with this for long. Their intent is to contract the franchise, since the large tent of the Democratic Base is larger thus a serious threat, and unfortunately also easy to fracture.
"Fridays indictment confirmed that hacking these voter databases was a key goal for the Russians. The criminal charges said the Russian spies obtained the personal data of some 500,000 American voters in a state that news reports have identified as Illinois. (State officials there had already acknowledged they were hacked but claimed a smaller scale of about 200,000 voters.)"
Some experts have pointed out that deleting or altering the registration files of voters could not only prevent some people from casting their ballots on Election Day but could also lead to mayhem such as long lines at polling places, causing some to give up and leave without casting their ballots. Unlike using a computer to change election tallies, there is no way to even investigate how many voters are lost in such a scenario.
This is how one actually hacks an election. One doesnt change the vote count. One alters the voter registration rolls so that when you present your ID to vote, your name is not there, or your address is wrong, etc. And then a huge line forms and hundreds of people dont vote.
Link to tweet
The theft of Democratic analytics.
The indictment doesnt suggest the data was altered, nor according to experts would that have accomplished much. But the access could have been critical for revealing either to the Russians, who we now know were mounting their own extensive social media campaign to aid Trump, or to any GOP campaign officials colluding with Team Putin where to focus attention to counter the Democrats.
Remember, one of the great mysteries of the Trump-Russia scandal has been how did the so-called Russian trolls creating divisive Facebook postings on race or immigration, or boosting Trump or third-party candidates like Jill Stein who took votes away from Clinton know which states to target? Or perhaps more damning, did the Russians successfully convey some of the purloined analytics to the Trump campaign so it could adjust its strategy?
This was a highly sophisticated effort to ensure the election of Donald Trump ( or harm a potential Hillary presidency). It is like nothing we have ever seen in American politics.
This was not your run of the mill swiftboating a la Dukakis and Kerry, it was a concerted effort by rich powerful interests - the real oligarchs - to revert geopolitics to pre FDR/WW2 days - A reversion to an old world order which suits Vladimir Putin fine.
Putin wants to break up Western Alliances and create multipolarity. It would reduce the world to Russia's size - a country that can't even manage the GDP of California. Sure sanctions are partly responsible for this, but it is also the fault of Putin who suppressed any chance of Russia emerging as a powerful, prosperous democracy. Indeed, this is by design.
As Dr. Yevgenia Alba , editor in chief of The New Times, a political alt-weekly in Russia, remarked:
"[The] political regime in Russia is transforming from a personalist authoritarian regime, with a leader on top and running the show, toward a corporatist type of regime," ....For the first time, the political police have become power itself, its essence and its being. Stability is guaranteed by political-police operatives, technocrats in the bureaucracy, and violence as the primary method of governance. http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/publications/issue-briefs/the-direction-of-russian-politics-and-the-putin-factor
No country can thrive in these conditions and if the leader of such a country has dreams of being a global powerhouse, destroying alliances which pose a challenge to his supremacy would be his number 1 aim.
The wide reach of Russia's efforts to manipulate America's electoral processes, in conjunction with Republican complicity, shows how much was at stake and the numerous obstacles the Dem candidate faced. Popular narratives that 2016 was "easily winnable" are false and diminish the seriousness of Kremlin interference and Republican corruption/complicity.
niyad
(113,239 posts)JHan
(10,173 posts)Cha
(297,123 posts)Hekate
(90,633 posts)TygrBright
(20,756 posts)Which, alas, means they'll get pushed aside and ignored in favor of one-syllable-word "talking points" media bytes.
sadly,
Bright
JHan
(10,173 posts)and we can't have that I guess.
uponit7771
(90,335 posts)emulatorloo
(44,109 posts)brush
(53,764 posts)needed in three states, some 70k, was just enough to swing the Electoral College to trump.
There had to be some calculation there to get just enough votes for trump to "win".
Vote suppression and hacking into voter registration rolls undoubted helped but we know from history that the repugs work as many dirty trick angles they can think of to win which is why I wouldn't dismiss such a tempting target as easily hacked voting machines, or better yet, easily hacked vote counting.
Solomon
(12,310 posts)to prove no votes were changed? I think they used every tool they could including switching or suppressing a few votes in three key states. They knew they couldn't get the majority win, but they figured out how to manufacture an electoral win.
edhopper
(33,561 posts)is so afraid to question the results.
They act as if questioning the integity of the election is worse than the integrity actually being trashed.
brer cat
(24,555 posts)But terribly depressing.
Cha
(297,123 posts)Mahalo, JHan, for all the work you put into it!
Hekate
(90,633 posts)Hortensis
(58,785 posts)Our biggest problem by far isn't Putin or the Koch types, it's the electorate. Electronic theft would mean partisan craziness and fecklessness were less than 2016 suggests. It would be a clear, measurable cause that everyone could understand from an external enemy that most would unite against.
A president who was not only not legally elected but put in power as an act of warfare by a foreign nation could also conceivably force legal fixes, such as new elections, currently totally unheard of and without mechanism. If Trump wasn't elected, neither was Pence. What about the rest of the successors? Were the Republican majorities in congress created by election warfare?
It would create new awareness of the dangers of a repeat on November 6. And it would, of course, also force all states to go to new, secure, auditable voting systems.