What if...the Russians hack voting machines for Trump?

[DrDoug]

I like our system here in Oregon; they mail you your ballot and the voter's pamphlet with details about the races at the fed, state, district, county, city levels, you have a couple of weeks to fill it out and mail it on your dime, drop it off in county drop boxes the towns have or drop it off at the county clerks office yourself. I just drop ours off at a drop box and that's it. We have a paper trail, ballots go to residences and you get to vote in the privacy of your home and at your convenience.

No lines, no political games... vote and done, as it should be.

 

[compuwiz1]

How far was Reagan down in the polls before his landslide victory?
I do not support or endorse either candidate, but I have a sense outside of the polls. I think we can all agree that this is an election season where impossibles became reality. Conventional political wisdom does not apply in this election cycle.
Here is what I know:
Trump has the support of people who do not support Hillary, and then I'm going to name the huge voting block that want nothing to do with her, or have endorsed Trump. In small groups, none of them would be problematic for Clinton. When you add them all in, they represent a substantial number.

Police
ICE
Border Patrol
Catholics
Evangelicals
Sheriffs Society
Military
Veterans
Certain Unions
Gun owners
Amish...just went in for Trump

Rallies:
Then we can go on about rally sizes, but Bernie also had bulging rallies. Hillary seems to have very low attendance and not as much enthusiasm as we've seen at Trump and Bernie rallies. I suspect rally sizes don't equate to votes.

Social Media:
Trump page likes: 11,612,647
Hillary page likes: 7,322,681

Then there is the voter turn out issue:

Democrat turnout was less in the primaries, where Republican turnout was sharply increased.

Media exposure:
Trump has taken every opportunity to appear on programs, where Hillary seems to duck. The media, for positive, or negative, has given Trump a slew of coverage, compared to Clinton. The alphabet networks, as I call them...ABC, CBS, NBC, etc., are clearly in the Clinton tank. That's visible to anyone with a functioning brain. The polls are naturally going to reflect the network views and they will solicit the kind of , responses they want, almost subconsciously. Ideology is like a magnet, where we are naturally attracted to what suits us, while naturally repelling what doesn't. These things do not require much cerebral participation, as they are paradigm driven.

This election is no time to be on auto pilot. Vote!

 

[FerrelGeek]

We had something similar in OH before the electronic machines were introduced. Didn't have a counting machine, but a stub was torn off your ballot and put in a folder; your ballot was put in an envelope and placed in a locked container - all under the supervision of a polling official. The ballots were filli in the bubble, like on a standardized test. At the end of the day, the precinct captains (one from each party) would take the sealed ballots to where they were officially opened and fed through the scanner. I'm all for going back to something like this.

I agree I've been using one or another version of this since I cast my first vote its been 29 years. They are fast, simple and leave a paper trail.
I'm amazed when I hear people pulling switches, using punch cards, weird butterfly ballots, touch screens. These all sound very odd to me.
I pick up a heavy stock paper, complete an arrow that points to what I want to vote for and put it into a counting machine while an election person watches.

 

[boomerang]

How do you hack a voting machine? Look and see. The key states are known and the key counties and/or voting districts are known. Those are the machines you target. See the video below.

The information at the following link concerns me. Mr. Soros get his rocks off on manipulating currencies and nations. He likes to exercise his power to his benefit and to reshape the world to his vision of what he'd like it to be.

So rather than start a thread entitled 'What if... George Soros hacks voting machines for Hillary', I'll put it here.

Soros-Connected Company Provides Voting Machines In 16 States

 

[Paratus]

Some folks keep making the comparison that if they have to show certain forms of IDs to buy a gun why shouldn't everyone have to do so to vote.

I say why stop there. (I mean it makes no sense to treat different rights the same but this is P&N so....)

Which of these should we do?

• Voting is available 6 days a week all year just like gun stores
• Guns and Ammo are only legally sold on Election Day

 

[sdifox]

How do you hack a voting machine? Look and see. The key states are known and the key counties and/or voting districts are known. Those are the machines you target. See the video below.

The information at the following link concerns me. Mr. Soros get his rocks off on manipulating currencies and nations. He likes to exercise his power to his benefit and to reshape the world to his vision of what he'd like it to be.

So rather than start a thread entitled 'What if... George Soros hacks voting machines for Hillary', I'll put it here.

Soros-Connected Company Provides Voting Machines In 16 States

The paper ballots are the votes. count manually if you suspect tampering...

 

[sdifox]

Some folks keep making the comparison that if they have to show certain forms of IDs to buy a gun why shouldn't everyone have to do so to vote.

I say why stop there. (I mean it makes no sense to treat different rights the same but this is P&N so....)

Which of these should we do?

• Voting is available 6 days a week all year just like gun stores
• Guns and Ammo are only legally sold on Election Day

up here you can show up with a friend with id and they can vouch for you. You the fill out a form and swear you are who you say you are and voila. SOP is you need two pieces of id that combined show your name photo and addr. This gets matched to voter registration. The list of acceptable documents is pretty long.

http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&document=index&lang=e

 

[boomerang]

The paper ballts are the votes. count manually if you suspect tampering...

Who does the counting?

 

[sdifox]

Who does the counting?

Election officials. In front of cameras. With you standing there if you wish. Or run them through several freshly vetted machines and compare results.

 

[glenn1]

No one is complaining about voter ID laws that let everyone vote. It is the voter ID laws that have been restrictive and have been rejected repeatedly by the courts (all the way up to and including the supreme court) that are the problem. Just because democrats are against unconstitutional poll tax (or similar methods of putting up substantial roadblocks for people to vote) doesn't mean they are against ID laws themselves. Please learn the difference.

I and basically everyone else is all for picture IDs if they are free, readily available (without driving hundreds of miles for those without cars), obtainable on the day of voting (again without waiting hours in line when the poor already have to take off work without pay), have waivers (for those who can't get to the polls with picture IDs like military out of country who need to mail in ballots), etc.

Picture IDs won't solve anything other than make you feel good. But there is no problem with the concept of picture IDs themselves. It is the barriers of paying for these IDs or making it very difficult for large groups of people to obtain the IDs that is the problem.

Think of the flip side, imagine your state created a new voter ID law that required all voters to get an ID in an Islamic inner city no-go zone at 3 am five hours drive from where you live. Would you get that voter ID?

Others have repeatedly objected to just what you said. In a thread where basically everything you mentioned (and some other potential solutions to boot) was agreed to by Voter ID supporters it was still rejected by those who oppose it. Indeed, Fskimospy pointedly said that he supported giving everyone free IDs but we should not under any circumstances actually ask to see them at polls to identify voters.

Anyway, voter ID isn't the point of this thread, but my point stands. Unless you're going to comprehensively fix all vectors of fraud related to elections from each actor and stage of the process, you might as well not even doing anything at all. "Fixing" one vulnerability just to leave others wide open is both stupid and counterproductive. Especially if the lack of interest in closing vectors is solely because one party thinks it helps them not to do so. Some vectors are indeed direct dependencies on another vector, for example Voter ID be the basis (along with other tools) for stopping people from voting in multiple jurisdictions (such as snowbirds voting absentee in their northern home state and in-person in Florida where they're spending the cold months).

 

[cbrunny]

I'm pretty sure a 97% popular vote in favour of Trump will raise some flags. That's Putin's "rig" number, so its easy to look for.

 

[boomerang]

Election officials. In front of cameras. With you standing there if you wish. Or run them through several freshly vetted machines and compare results.

It's not that simple. Poll watchers must be registered ahead of time and there is not always somebody representing both major political parties. As far as freshly vetted voting machines, look at the video in my earlier post.

 

[sdifox]

It's not that simple. Poll watchers must be registered ahead of time and there is not always somebody representing both major political parties. As far as freshly vetted voting machines, look at the video in my earlier post.

Huh? Election dates are fixed no? You can stagger verification time so the parties can have people present. And the whole process is recorded from multiple angles. Anything is better than that Florida hanging chit fiasco.

You are saying you cannot verify if a machine is inaccurate if you make up a set of say 100 ballots with x distribution decided on the spot and fed through the machine randomly? couple that with multi machine check and it will be pretty hard to escape detection.

 

[sdifox]

Others have repeatedly objected to just what you said. In a thread where basically everything you mentioned (and some other potential solutions to boot) was agreed to by Voter ID supporters it was still rejected by those who oppose it. Indeed, Fskimospy pointedly said that he supported giving everyone free IDs but we should not under any circumstances actually ask to see them at polls to identify voters.

Anyway, voter ID isn't the point of this thread, but my point stands. Unless you're going to comprehensively fix all vectors of fraud related to elections from each actor and stage of the process, you might as well not even doing anything at all. "Fixing" one vulnerability just to leave others wide open is both stupid and counterproductive. Especially if the lack of interest in closing vectors is solely because one party thinks it helps them not to do so. Some vectors are indeed direct dependencies on another vector, for example Voter ID be the basis (along with other tools) for stopping people from voting in multiple jurisdictions (such as snowbirds voting absentee in their northern home state and in-person in Florida where they're spending the cold months).

Attacking the voting machine is far more efficient then trying to fake voters. I do think voters should present ID but that should not be used as vote suppression mechanism.

 

[Perknose]

This election is no time to be on auto pilot. Vote!

Well agreed, Steve!

One fact(oid) you didn't take note of was that, although more 'Pubs than Dems voted in their respective primaries, significantly more voters chose Hillary Clinton in her primary than chose Donald Trump in his.

Overall vote
Republicans 20,375,925
Democrats 15,070,178

By candidate
Clinton 8,668,136
Trump 7,548,429
Sanders 6,131,951
Cruz 5,484,494
Rubio 3,394,134
Kasich 2,725,327
Carson 677,307
Bush 249,894
O'Malley 94,692

Now, this is a factoid for various obvious reasons, including but not limited to Trump having many more opponents. But so are many of the stats you put forth in your post. But the fact(oid) remains that more than a million more Dems voted for Clinton than 'Pubs voted for Trump, and all this while more than 5 million more 'Pubs voted overall.

Clearly, as you can see (gestures authoritatively with his yardstick towards the blackboard), the answer here is 42!

 

[yllus]

It's as near to impossible to hack voting machines as humanly possible today. One enormous reason for that: The machines aren't networked to the Internet. The vetting process is incredibly thorough as well:

Vox.com - I’m a Republican election lawyer. Here's why the election can’t be rigged.

...

Next, our elections are conducted on equipment that has been tested, in a public proceeding, that is observed by party and candidate representatives. Following testing, voting equipment is locked and tamper-sealed, and then keys to the voting equipment are locked and sealed separately.

On top of that, voting machines are equipped with multiple interconnected counters — one that advances with every vote that is recorded on a machine across every election it services, and another election-specific counter that advances with each new vote in an election. These counters advance together and, combined with records of how many people voted in each election, make it impossible to add or remove votes secretly. Counter numbers are recorded each time the machine doors are opened, and candidate and party representatives get to observe and cross-check those counters — at testing, before polls open, and after they close.

...

So the election is not rigged. In fact, it’s anti-rigged. To rig an election, you would need 1) technological capabilities that exist only in Mission Impossible movies, plus 2) the cooperation of the Republicans and Democrats who are serving as the polling place’s election officials, plus 3) the blind eyes of the partisan poll watchers who are standing over their shoulders, plus 4) the cooperation of another set of Republicans and Democrats — the officials at the post-elections canvass, plus 5) the blind eyes of the canvass watchers, too.

Then you’d still have to Jedi-mind trick lawyers, political operatives, and state election administrators, all of whom scrub precinct-level returns for aberrant election results and scrutinize any polling place result that is not in line with what they would have expected based on current political dynamics and historical election results.

...​

 

[sontakke]

Well agreed, Steve!

One fact(oid) you didn't take note of was that, although more 'Pubs than Dems voted in their respective primaries, significantly more voters chose Hillary Clinton in her primary than chose Donald Trump in his.

Overall vote
Republicans 20,375,925
Democrats 15,070,178

By candidate
Clinton 8,668,136
Trump 7,548,429
Sanders 6,131,951
Cruz 5,484,494
Rubio 3,394,134
Kasich 2,725,327
Carson 677,307
Bush 249,894
O'Malley 94,692

Now, this is a factoid for various obvious reasons, including but not limited to Trump having many more opponents. But so are many of the stats you put forth in your post. But the fact(oid) remains that more than a million more Dems voted for Clinton than 'Pubs voted for Trump, and all this while more than 5 million more 'Pubs voted overall.

Clearly, as you can see (gestures authoritatively with his yardstick towards the blackboard), the answer here is 42!

What are these numbers? Trump got over 14 millions.

 

[Perknose]

What are these numbers? Trump got over 14 millions.

Came from my Google search. Oops. Actual results only reinforce my point:

Trump -- 14,015,993

Clinton -- 16,914,722

 

[momeNt]

I can guarantee that there will not be a recount based on either outcome, Trump, or Hillary. There have been numerous articles published by left media stating that any evidence of voter fraud is faked by Russians, that firmly solidifies how the left would feel if Trump won the presidency, and even if Russia posted "PROOF" of how they tampered with the election, we already know it is fake, the election is secure, get over it.

 

[Mandres]

Who does the counting?

I do.
If you're interested in having a grown-up conversation ask me anything about it. But posting nonsensical conspiracy-theory articles undermines the public's confidence in a system that is, in my opinion, well designed and robust. So stop it.

 

[boomerang]

I do.
If you're interested in having a grown-up conversation ask me anything about it. But posting nonsensical conspiracy-theory articles undermines the public's confidence in a system that is, in my opinion, well designed and robust. So stop it.

OK, where do you count (just the state would be fine unless you want to be more specific) and what is your job title? An additional question in this round would be were you taught to question authority or were you taught to blindly follow authority?

Those questions will set the tone for any additional questions I may have.

 

[MongGrel]

How far was Reagan down in the polls before his landslide victory?
I do not support or endorse either candidate, but I have a sense outside of the polls. I think we can all agree that this is an election season where impossibles became reality. Conventional political wisdom does not apply in this election cycle.
Here is what I know:
Trump has the support of people who do not support Hillary, and then I'm going to name the huge voting block that want nothing to do with her, or have endorsed Trump. In small groups, none of them would be problematic for Clinton. When you add them all in, they represent a substantial number.

Police
ICE
Border Patrol
Catholics
Evangelicals
Sheriffs Society
Military
Veterans
Certain Unions
Gun owners
Amish...just went in for Trump

Rallies:
Then we can go on about rally sizes, but Bernie also had bulging rallies. Hillary seems to have very low attendance and not as much enthusiasm as we've seen at Trump and Bernie rallies. I suspect rally sizes don't equate to votes.

Social Media:
Trump page likes: 11,612,647
Hillary page likes: 7,322,681

Then there is the voter turn out issue:

Democrat turnout was less in the primaries, where Republican turnout was sharply increased.

Media exposure:
Trump has taken every opportunity to appear on programs, where Hillary seems to duck. The media, for positive, or negative, has given Trump a slew of coverage, compared to Clinton. The alphabet networks, as I call them...ABC, CBS, NBC, etc., are clearly in the Clinton tank. That's visible to anyone with a functioning brain. The polls are naturally going to reflect the network views and they will solicit the kind of , responses they want, almost subconsciously. Ideology is like a magnet, where we are naturally attracted to what suits us, while naturally repelling what doesn't. These things do not require much cerebral participation, as they are paradigm driven.

This election is no time to be on auto pilot. Vote!

I seem to remember a certain Catholic Dinner fund raiser just a few days ago Trump was actually getting booed pretty heavily.

He even was sitting right beside a Cardinal.

A lot of the ones you listed in general are BS, of course anyone in ICE will love Trump just for job security.

I'm no even sure if I have seen rump visit anything remotely Evangelical related in a while, other than the his rallies.

But of course those include Neo Nazis etc, it's just his thing.

Those fringe elements just seem to show up when stumping for the Alt Right I suppose.

 

[woolfe9998]

Not having equipment connected to the internet helps. But, how do I as a voter know that the machine hasn't already compromised weeks, months, or years ago? The easiest way is to mass hack would be to have the code already in the computer for whatever outcome you want it to be. As far as I know, manufacturers have refused to let the public see the code for possible manipulations. So, barring that, we have to rely on very thorough testing.

Has the machine been thoroughly tested? Repeatedly? Does the expected output ALWAYS match the input? Has it been tested with malicious code in mind? For example, it would be simple to write code that only changes the results on Nov 8, 2016 and people testing it on Oct 20, 2016 will never see the improper results (think of the VW scandal where they wrote code to check for emissions testing and it behaved differently in that testing). Has the machine been tested with various set dates? Has the machine been tested in normal situations and edge-cases? Has the machine's image been stored and checked that it doesn't change? Is the machine properly wiped before actual data is entered (so that test data is gone and any data that someone at 3 am on Sunday may have entered is gone) and is the wiped state checked that it matches a pure, pristine state?

Then what about the data coming to the tabulations supervisor? Is that data from a webpage, email, or phone that could easily be spoofed? Or is it sent in multiple different verifiable paths and checked for consistency when you receive all copies? What about the machines/people that collected that individual data? How were those tested?

I'm no election expert, I'm just brainstorming things that as a voter I'd like to know are being done.

My point was that since direct physical access is needed to tamper with the machines, it is nigh impossible to do this on a mass scale. Anything is theoretically possible on a smaller scale. But to really rig an election on a national scale, you'd have to hack thousands of machines by gaining direct access to all them, and they'd be in many different locations across the country. To pull something like that off successfully is possibly even less likely than the Bush administration having perpetrated the attacks of 9/11 and gotten away with it.

 

[glenn1]

My point was that since direct physical access is needed to tamper with the machines, it is nigh impossible to do this on a mass scale. Anything is theoretically possible on a smaller scale. But to really rig an election on a national scale, you'd have to hack thousands of machines by gaining direct access to all them, and they'd be in many different locations across the country. To pull something like that off successfully is possibly even less likely than the Bush administration having perpetrated the attacks of 9/11 and gotten away with it.

Why would you presume you needed any certain critical mass of machines to be successful? That would depend entirely on the margin you needed to overcome. You could have changed the results of the 2000 election with access to just one voting machine in Florida. And probably a handful of machines in the 1960 election. The Electoral College system is almost ideal for this purpose because polling can tell you with a high degree of precision exactly where you need to focus your energies, it's not like you have to randomly pick the correct machine out of 100s of thousands of possibilities.

Plus you don't even need to flip the election to be successful, you just need to discredit the process. Clinton will already be a historically disliked President, throw in an election win tainted by allegations of election fraud and you can deny her much of the little political capital she already would have possessed and thus ability to implement much of her agenda.

 

[woolfe9998]

Why would you presume you needed any certain critical mass of machines to be successful? That would depend entirely on the margin you needed to overcome. You could have changed the results of the 2000 election with access to just one voting machine in Florida. And probably a handful of machines in the 1960 election. The Electoral College system is almost ideal for this purpose because polling can tell you with a high degree of precision exactly where you need to focus your energies, it's not like you have to randomly pick the correct machine out of 100s of thousands of possibilities.

Plus you don't even need to flip the election to be successful, you just need to discredit the process. Clinton will already be a historically disliked President, throw in an election win tainted by allegations of election fraud and you can deny her much of the little political capital she already would have possessed and thus ability to implement much of her agenda.

Florida in 2000 was a rare case. How often do you expect a state with that much population to come to a 400 vote margin? Yet even in that case, the tamperers would have to predict where they need to tamper and how much because they wouldn't know in advance exactly what the unrigged outcome would be, precinct by precinct. The closest example comes from fiction, the TV show "Scandal" where supposedly they rig an election by tampering with voting machines in one key bellwether county in Ohio. Yet they never explain how they knew in advance they would win by tampering with just that one precinct in that one state. Because it's TV and it doesn't have to make sense. Reality has to make sense.

Moreover, Trump is alleging rigging in an election cycle where his opponent has a 6-7 point lead in the popular vote, according to aggregated polling, and will very likely show a final election result in that range. Pulling something like that off would be a neat trick indeed.

Sure, you can try to de-legitmize Clinton by making a dishonest claim that the election was rigged. You could also incite people to riot and rebel. And many other horrible things. If you have no conscience.

But that isn't the point under discussion here. The point is the credibility of the accusation of rigging to begin with. There simply is none because rigging on this scale is close to impossible even in theory. And that holds even before we address the obvious, that there is no actual empirical evidence of any such thing going on here or in past elections, not on the required scale.