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Were voting machines hacked? No. Was damaging information about a candidate made public? Yes. Does the substance of that information matter at all, or simply

by PKop 10y ago

Were voting machines hacked? No. Was damaging information about a candidate made public? Yes. Does the substance of that information matter at all, or simply that it was released? "Hacked the election" is ridiculous. As if these people[0], or any other midwest-Obama-voter-turned-Trump voter needed WikiLeaks to tell them they were unhappy with the way things were going, had economic anxiety, and didn't see anyone but Trump speaking to their concerns, or simply didn't vote. What Vladimir Putin or Julian Assange wanted, never factored into their decision. No evidence that Russia was WikiLeaks source has ever been presented, has it? We certainly DID learn from WikiLeaks that the DNC and media "fixed" the debates to favor Hillary Clinton though[1], but where's the outrage at that? [0] https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/trump-politics-and-option-pricing-or-why-trump-voters-are-not-idiots-1e364a4ed940 https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/trump-politics-and-option-p... [1] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/donna-brazile-finally-admits-giving-debate-questions-clinton-article-1.3002221 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/donna-brazile-final...

Avenger42 10y ago
> Were voting machines hacked? No. It's been more than 10 years since researchers showed that voting machines were hackable, and I have yet to see any visible progress down the path of "make voting machines less hackable / more transparent". All it would honestly take is a requirement that all voting machines print out a receipt of the vote. Then you could drop that into a box on your way out, and someone counts those votes to make sure they line up with what the database says the final vote was.
- tempay 10y ago
  > All it would honestly take is a requirement that all voting machines print out a receipt of the vote. I'm not sure if this would actually help, what should happen in the event that somebody claims the printed ticket disagrees with their vote? Especially considering the vote itself should remain secret in many countries.
  - Avenger42 10y ago
    I'm not sure how it works elsewhere (I'm in Texas), but when I voted in November, they gave me a 4-digit number to enter when I first walked up to the machine. If I told them "this receipt doesn't match the ballot I cast", I suppose they could type my 4-digit number into the computer and say "delete this ballot", feed the receipt into a shredder, and then give me a new 4-digit number to try again. They wouldn't need to see what my receipt says to do that.
    - smitherfield 10y ago
      But you could very easily forge a receipt to commit fraud,* so there would have to be some kind of biometric or cryptographic security. *Possibly in conjunction with targeting precincts that heavily favor one party, or individual voters registered with a specific party.
      - mox1 10y ago
        Yes, you probably could. Local person votes twice, 5 people commit fraud type stuff is incredibly hard to prevent and probably happens every election. As long as it requires X people to move X votes fraudulently, I would say we are going to be OK. Can you move a local election in a small town via this method? Probably, but our election system has defense in depth (recounts, election judges, polling, every-knows-everyone, voting receipts, etc. etc) so this isn't exactly easy. It becomes a problem when 1-10 people can change the outcome of a district+ size voting block. "Hacking a voting machine" falls into this category. If 1-10 people can change a Red state to Blue via any method, that is what we should be concerned about. Again, defense in depth applies here. They would have to do many things perfectly AND get lucky for this to even be a possibility (no recounts, no voting machine inspection, no election judges intuition, etc. etc. etc.) If my crazy uncle wants to vote twice, eh go ahead. Its difficult to do, takes a medium amount of effort and might work or might not.
  - myers 10y ago
    2 out of 10 voters use machines that don't have a paper trail like you suggest. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/paperless-pennsylvania-can-swing-state-verify-2016-vote-n660266 http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/paperless-pennsylvania-c...
- trendia 10y ago
  You'd have to guarantee that every person who votes puts their receipt in a box. An even easier way is that you fill out a paper ballot and place it into a machine. The machine counts scans the ballot and counts it, but the ballot is still retained for handcounting if necessary.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  > that voting machines were hackable, After CIA and NSA leaks we found pretty much anything with a chip and an OS is hackable. The question is what can one do with that info. Initially after elections I understood "election was hacked" to mean there is clear evidence of FSB or GRU intelligence officers hiding around the bushes in Wisconsin with laptops and usb keys, taking out guards and rooting voting machine. We haven't seen a single instance of that. DNC, and Hillary's questionably illegal server were hacked. Probably by any state actor who wasn't a complete dummy. But that's pretty far from what the initial implications where. I am still waiting for some solid "Russians hacked our election" evidence. Thought this was finally it. But there is more waiting needed it seems... This is a bit like the WMD story and Iraq war. Still waiting to find that large WMD warehouse to justify trillions spend on that war...
  - VLM 10y ago
    "in Wisconsin" Wisconsin has unhackable optical scantron 80s/90s voting technology. Its unhackable because the votes are electronically counted and reported after the polls close in minutes, hours at most, then the physical paper ballots can be slowly and methodically counted and compared to the electronic counts. You could probably stick an eprom in there that reports 2e32-1 votes for Hillary or whatever, but that "hacked" result isn't going to last more than an hour, maybe a day at most.
  - darpa_escapee 10y ago
    > Initially after elections I understood "election was hacked" to mean there is clear evidence of FSB or GRU intelligence officers hiding around the bushes in Wisconsin with laptops and usb keys, taking out guards and rooting voting machine. We haven't seen a single instance of that. You may have understood it to be that way, but it was not portrayed in that light. It was hacked in the same sense as "growth hacking" and hacking of non-voting machines.
- ascorbic 10y ago
  I don't get why the US has to make it so complicated. The UK has a similar first past the post system. All votes are crosses on paper ballots, counted by hand overnight. Works fine.
  - cderwin 10y ago
    This is how we do it in New Hampshire. It works fine here too. Perhaps the problem is scale? New Hampshire is one of the smaller states, and the UK is obviously quite a bit less populous than the US. Or perhas it's just a need for instant gratification. There's a reason New Hampshire was one of the last states to be called this year.
    - ascorbic 10y ago
      Shouldn't really make a difference. Just add more counters. Counting votes is perfectly parallelizable.
    - paulddraper 10y ago
      (1) Resources ought to scale with size. (2) I would imagine that you'd go with the database on election night, but in days following, verify the paper votes as convenient.
    - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
      I'm sure you used to count votes manually before computers existed.
- contravariant 10y ago
  Actually the biggest problem at this point is that measures to detect hacking of any kind are severely lacking. >All it would honestly take is a requirement that all voting machines print out a receipt of the vote. Then you could drop that into a box on your way out, and someone counts those votes to make sure they line up with what the database says the final vote was. That would work, but sounds like a very expensive way to achieve the same level of functionality as a red pencil.
lawless123 10y ago
>Were voting machines hacked? No. Almost Nobody has been saying they have,(it's becoming a strawman), most of the hacking accusations have been about emails and potential collusion between those hackers and the Trump admin
- benchaney 10y ago
  That isn't what a strawman is.
  - qrybam 10y ago
    s/strawman/red herring/
- PKop 10y ago
  The point is, the narrative is not even addressing that sort of issue because there is no evidence that any machines were successfully hacked. Yet the phrase "hacked the election" is thrown about intentionally to muddy the issue. To fool the low information voter who may conclude that Russia, in cahoots with Donald Trump, changed vote tallies. This is much stronger propaganda than explaining what actually happened: Wikileaks exposed a few (not all that many, but some) shady actions on the part of the DNC, the media, as well as shining some light on HRC's true views on issues (having a "private" and "public" position, corporate speeches, Clinton Foundation donations, etc.) All in all, not that big of a deal. To the degree it is, how is it anyone's fault but HRC and her campaign? Why is dirty laundry the fault of her political opponent? Why is leaking information that maybe damaging to a candidate described as "hacking the election"? Can you provide me with any evidence of collusion between anyone from Russia and Trump?
  - tdb7893 10y ago
    I think the main thing is the hacking was done to effect the election and it was at least moderately successful in that goal. Regardless of everything else that alone seems worrying to me
    - 10y ago
josteink 10y ago
> We certainly DID learn from WikiLeaks that the DNC and media "fixed" the debates to favor Hillary Clinton though[1], but where's the outrage at that? Don't be silly. Why should the people in power punish themselves just because they happened to get caught? They always externalize blame, no matter how irrational. Look what happened with Snowden: it's the leaker who is the problem, not the leaked material. How many people have been fired over that incident? And how many people have been assigned to hunt him down? I bet you the latter number is higher. The DNC has no such issues though. The leaker was identified and according to various internet sources later found murdered[1]. Guess if anyone is currently investigating that... [1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-10/wikileaks-assange-hints-murdered-dnc-staffer-was-email-leaker-offers-20k-reward-info http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-10/wikileaks-assange-h...
- kombucha2 10y ago
  Why post anything from ZeroHedge? Really.... edit: the author is Tyler Durden ;)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- skolos 10y ago
  Isn't zerohedge a known Russian and Chinese propaganda outlet?
  - josteink 10y ago
    I have no idea. It's mentioned lots of places though. I just chose one more or less at random: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dnc+leaker+murdered&t=ffip&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dnc+leaker+murdered&t=ffip&ia=web Irrespective of the accuracy of that report, the rest of my comment still holds though. People in power aren't going to punish themselves.
guelo 10y ago
The wikileaks stuff did have some effect, but not as much as Comey's last minute lie about finding a laptop full of Hillary emails. Russian hacking was more influential in the congressional elections where "Guccifer 2.0" worked directly with Republican congressional campaigns providing them internal DCCC info.
- davidf18 10y ago
  > "...but not as much as Comey's last minute lie about finding a laptop full of Hillary emails." Comey did find emails on a laptop confiscating during an investigation of Anthony Weiner because Weiner was texting/sexting a 15-year-old. Weiner was the husband of a chief Hilary Lieutenant and there were email exchanges between her and Clinton. There were missing emails because Clinton had destroyed 30,000 emails that the FBI had asked her to turn over to them. When Secretary of State, instead of using the official government email server which was necessary not only for security/hacking reasons but because by law a record of correspondence needed to be stored on government servers for future Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, used a private email server in her home. She did this precisely so that her emails could be hidden from FOIA. When requested by the FBI to turn over her emails, Clinton had 30,000 of them destroyed. The Democrats never, never should have had as a candidate someone who would feel they were above the law and set up her own home email server. To me, it is simply baffling that they would ever nominate such a person and shows a profound lack of judgment on the part of DNC leadership and the Democratic elites. Nothing Trump or the Russians or whomever has ever done comes close to the seriousness of using a home email server for Secretary of State emails. Of all people, HN readers should understand that.
coolsdude2282 10y ago
I am a midwest Obama voter who voted for Trump. I don't like anything about him in all honestly. I voted quite literally because of Assange. I followed each leak that was dropped religiously and had a lot of fun bonding with others who searched through them on various reddit boards uncovering information. All this is to say that generalizations like the one you made are almost never correct, and never tell the whole story. I voted for Bernie in the primary. Acting like the subcategory I'm in doesn't exist and only furthers misunderstanding of the various complex social systems that were at play in this election creating the outcome.
- icantdrive55 10y ago
  Yea, for myself it was a combination of things for they way I voted. Those leaks played a part. They were like advertising--we all say we are immune to. I disliked Trump, and his family, but agreed with 90% percent of that 100 day pledge. Actually, the only reason I read that pledge is after all the leaked emails, and it wasen't just one. The emails just showed me how devious some politicians/their staff are. I would have voted for Sander's if he wasen't blackballed.(evidence in emails--which made me more leary of Hillary) I was so torn, and read many of those emails. The last day I could vote by mail, I left the decision up to the last hour. All the emails, promises, personalities ran through my mind. I didn't like the guy, nor felt he could do what he claimed, but just couldn't vote for her. The Clinton foundation, her condensing attitude, her staffs devious plot to destroy Sanders, all of it combined made me vote for that guy. The emails made a difference. I think Russia looked at it was psychological warfare. They knew most politicians knew squat about the Internet. They knew American politicians looked at the Internet/Technolgy as a toy. Hillary was actually smart in having her own servers, but her staff was sloppy. It was all so innocent, and fun a few months ago. Trump is telling Russia to find her lost emails--crazy? Anyways I made a mistake, and hope I'm around to vote in three plus years.
- divbit 10y ago
  This is how I see it: Post-primaries, I think Hillary was a much better candidate. However a large number of liberals chose to campaign for her by just straight up calling the other side racists, while ignoring her flaws / blaming them on Russians. (We are all flawed, just accept it and don't blame it on others, otherwise you might just come across as narcissistic). In the case this was done in a false-flag fashion, then the democrats didn't catch it / didn't do the obvious thing to combat it. I mean come on guys. It is likely true that there 'are' lots of racist / deplorable voters however it is analogous to this: If I were fat, I would probably not like people yelling "hey fattie! / run forrest run" at me while I am out jogging trying to improve myself. In the end, although I did not vote for Trump, (and am not fat), it did kind of seem to me that Democrats / liberals during this election, came across (regardless of whether they actually are, which I strongly doubt) as the gang from globo-gym, and I can just picture an image of a White Goodman (Ben Stiller's character) calling the other side 'deplorable.' (To Hillary's credit she seemed very apologetic during the second of the three debates) Add to this exchanges like the one between Podesta / Assange [1] which just served to reinforce this image, and you have a recipe for the election upset which happened. I am sure at the end of the day there will be some voters you cannot reach, but I imagine, if you just use basic human empathy, it will reach a whole lot of people. The moral of this story, for either side, should be: 1. Don't treat the other side poorly / call them names. Instead, use reasoning about policies, compassion, and acceptance of your own flaws to win voters. 2. Be wary of possible false-flag tactics- no one has brought up evidence that this happened, but I wouldn't be at all surprised. 3. Don't rely solely on things like this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11/09/clintons-data-driven-campaign-relied-heavily-on-an-algorithm-named-ada-what-didnt-she-see/?utm_term=.48d681866948 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11... humans are not machines to feed variables and get out votes- use actual compassion / empathy/ and talk to people. Or maybe, smarter, don't rely solely on your super algorithm sauce - obviously data analysis will help, but it shouldn't be the whole picture. [1] http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/301069-podesta-fires-back-at-assange-over-leaked-emails-risotto http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/301069-podesta-fires...
seppin 10y ago
Russia can only do what they can do, that's not the scandal. If you have members of the Trump campaign openly working together with them, they need to go to jail.
frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
>We certainly DID learn from WikiLeaks that the DNC and media "fixed" the debates to favor Hillary Clinton though[1], but where's the outrage at that? Um... everywhere among bernie supporters? If you haven't seen outrage about the dem primary debates from the left you haven't been looking. More importantly though, this seems to be a total deflection mechanism. Why deflect to that issue when we've got a much bigger one right here?
VLM 10y ago
The election was hacked because implying there was no outside force would imply there was an internal problem. An internal problem such as an unelectable candidate being selected by a faulty biased selection process. Or the legacy regional alliances being shattered. Perhaps long cherished beliefs and ideals and slogans are simply obsolete, dead in the voting marketplace. Or the impact of demographic trends. Or simple utter gross incompetence of individual party leadership. Extremely painful questions need to be asked if the loss was not due to Russian Hacking. Therefore the powers that be, declare the only problem with the election at any level was Russian Hacking. Its a thought crime directly attacking the existing party leadership to consider is could be anything else. Would you go up against the DNC? They own TV and radio and newspapers and many websites, you'd be a fool to do anything but nod your head in agreement and repeat after them that the DNC did nothing wrong and the only problem was Russian Hacking. You're not going to see the R party disagreeing, other than trolling and LOLz, because a profoundly dysfunctional D party directly benefits them next time. Imagine the R party perspective, sure guys, do the same thing that didn't work plus more WW3 warmongering against Russia, how could the R party not win against that again? Don't hurt anyone's feelings, whatever you do, blame the Russian Hackers.
- boomboomsubban 10y ago
  The "election" was unambiguously hacked, you can argue that the democrats are blaming it more than is reasonable, but it happened. Basically the only thing getting a budget increase this year looks to be the military. War isn't started over stern reprimands, increasing military spending and increasing our ties to Russia seem to be the more likely sign of an upcoming war.

by PKop 10y ago

Avenger42 10y ago

> Were voting machines hacked? No. It's been more than 10 years since researchers showed that voting machines were hackable, and I have yet to see any visible progress down the path of "make voting machines less hackable / more transparent". All it would honestly take is a requirement that all voting machines print out a receipt of the vote. Then you could drop that into a box on your way out, and someone counts those votes to make sure they line up with what the database says the final vote was.

tempay 10y ago
> All it would honestly take is a requirement that all voting machines print out a receipt of the vote. I'm not sure if this would actually help, what should happen in the event that somebody claims the printed ticket disagrees with their vote? Especially considering the vote itself should remain secret in many countries.
- Avenger42 10y ago
  I'm not sure how it works elsewhere (I'm in Texas), but when I voted in November, they gave me a 4-digit number to enter when I first walked up to the machine. If I told them "this receipt doesn't match the ballot I cast", I suppose they could type my 4-digit number into the computer and say "delete this ballot", feed the receipt into a shredder, and then give me a new 4-digit number to try again. They wouldn't need to see what my receipt says to do that.
  - smitherfield 10y ago
    But you could very easily forge a receipt to commit fraud,* so there would have to be some kind of biometric or cryptographic security. *Possibly in conjunction with targeting precincts that heavily favor one party, or individual voters registered with a specific party.
    - mox1 10y ago
      Yes, you probably could. Local person votes twice, 5 people commit fraud type stuff is incredibly hard to prevent and probably happens every election. As long as it requires X people to move X votes fraudulently, I would say we are going to be OK. Can you move a local election in a small town via this method? Probably, but our election system has defense in depth (recounts, election judges, polling, every-knows-everyone, voting receipts, etc. etc) so this isn't exactly easy. It becomes a problem when 1-10 people can change the outcome of a district+ size voting block. "Hacking a voting machine" falls into this category. If 1-10 people can change a Red state to Blue via any method, that is what we should be concerned about. Again, defense in depth applies here. They would have to do many things perfectly AND get lucky for this to even be a possibility (no recounts, no voting machine inspection, no election judges intuition, etc. etc. etc.) If my crazy uncle wants to vote twice, eh go ahead. Its difficult to do, takes a medium amount of effort and might work or might not.
- myers 10y ago
  2 out of 10 voters use machines that don't have a paper trail like you suggest. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/paperless-pennsylvania-can-swing-state-verify-2016-vote-n660266 http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/paperless-pennsylvania-c...
trendia 10y ago
You'd have to guarantee that every person who votes puts their receipt in a box. An even easier way is that you fill out a paper ballot and place it into a machine. The machine counts scans the ballot and counts it, but the ballot is still retained for handcounting if necessary.
rdtsc 10y ago
> that voting machines were hackable, After CIA and NSA leaks we found pretty much anything with a chip and an OS is hackable. The question is what can one do with that info. Initially after elections I understood "election was hacked" to mean there is clear evidence of FSB or GRU intelligence officers hiding around the bushes in Wisconsin with laptops and usb keys, taking out guards and rooting voting machine. We haven't seen a single instance of that. DNC, and Hillary's questionably illegal server were hacked. Probably by any state actor who wasn't a complete dummy. But that's pretty far from what the initial implications where. I am still waiting for some solid "Russians hacked our election" evidence. Thought this was finally it. But there is more waiting needed it seems... This is a bit like the WMD story and Iraq war. Still waiting to find that large WMD warehouse to justify trillions spend on that war...
- VLM 10y ago
  "in Wisconsin" Wisconsin has unhackable optical scantron 80s/90s voting technology. Its unhackable because the votes are electronically counted and reported after the polls close in minutes, hours at most, then the physical paper ballots can be slowly and methodically counted and compared to the electronic counts. You could probably stick an eprom in there that reports 2e32-1 votes for Hillary or whatever, but that "hacked" result isn't going to last more than an hour, maybe a day at most.
- darpa_escapee 10y ago
  > Initially after elections I understood "election was hacked" to mean there is clear evidence of FSB or GRU intelligence officers hiding around the bushes in Wisconsin with laptops and usb keys, taking out guards and rooting voting machine. We haven't seen a single instance of that. You may have understood it to be that way, but it was not portrayed in that light. It was hacked in the same sense as "growth hacking" and hacking of non-voting machines.
ascorbic 10y ago
I don't get why the US has to make it so complicated. The UK has a similar first past the post system. All votes are crosses on paper ballots, counted by hand overnight. Works fine.
- cderwin 10y ago
  This is how we do it in New Hampshire. It works fine here too. Perhaps the problem is scale? New Hampshire is one of the smaller states, and the UK is obviously quite a bit less populous than the US. Or perhas it's just a need for instant gratification. There's a reason New Hampshire was one of the last states to be called this year.
  - ascorbic 10y ago
    Shouldn't really make a difference. Just add more counters. Counting votes is perfectly parallelizable.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    (1) Resources ought to scale with size. (2) I would imagine that you'd go with the database on election night, but in days following, verify the paper votes as convenient.
  - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
    I'm sure you used to count votes manually before computers existed.
contravariant 10y ago
Actually the biggest problem at this point is that measures to detect hacking of any kind are severely lacking. >All it would honestly take is a requirement that all voting machines print out a receipt of the vote. Then you could drop that into a box on your way out, and someone counts those votes to make sure they line up with what the database says the final vote was. That would work, but sounds like a very expensive way to achieve the same level of functionality as a red pencil.

lawless123 10y ago

>Were voting machines hacked? No. Almost Nobody has been saying they have,(it's becoming a strawman), most of the hacking accusations have been about emails and potential collusion between those hackers and the Trump admin

benchaney 10y ago
That isn't what a strawman is.
- qrybam 10y ago
  s/strawman/red herring/
PKop 10y ago
The point is, the narrative is not even addressing that sort of issue because there is no evidence that any machines were successfully hacked. Yet the phrase "hacked the election" is thrown about intentionally to muddy the issue. To fool the low information voter who may conclude that Russia, in cahoots with Donald Trump, changed vote tallies. This is much stronger propaganda than explaining what actually happened: Wikileaks exposed a few (not all that many, but some) shady actions on the part of the DNC, the media, as well as shining some light on HRC's true views on issues (having a "private" and "public" position, corporate speeches, Clinton Foundation donations, etc.) All in all, not that big of a deal. To the degree it is, how is it anyone's fault but HRC and her campaign? Why is dirty laundry the fault of her political opponent? Why is leaking information that maybe damaging to a candidate described as "hacking the election"? Can you provide me with any evidence of collusion between anyone from Russia and Trump?
- tdb7893 10y ago
  I think the main thing is the hacking was done to effect the election and it was at least moderately successful in that goal. Regardless of everything else that alone seems worrying to me
  - 10y ago

josteink 10y ago

> We certainly DID learn from WikiLeaks that the DNC and media "fixed" the debates to favor Hillary Clinton though[1], but where's the outrage at that? Don't be silly. Why should the people in power punish themselves just because they happened to get caught? They always externalize blame, no matter how irrational. Look what happened with Snowden: it's the leaker who is the problem, not the leaked material. How many people have been fired over that incident? And how many people have been assigned to hunt him down? I bet you the latter number is higher. The DNC has no such issues though. The leaker was identified and according to various internet sources later found murdered[1]. Guess if anyone is currently investigating that... [1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-10/wikileaks-assange-hints-murdered-dnc-staffer-was-email-leaker-offers-20k-reward-info http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-10/wikileaks-assange-h...

kombucha2 10y ago
Why post anything from ZeroHedge? Really.... edit: the author is Tyler Durden ;)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
skolos 10y ago
Isn't zerohedge a known Russian and Chinese propaganda outlet?
- josteink 10y ago
  I have no idea. It's mentioned lots of places though. I just chose one more or less at random: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dnc+leaker+murdered&t=ffip&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dnc+leaker+murdered&t=ffip&ia=web Irrespective of the accuracy of that report, the rest of my comment still holds though. People in power aren't going to punish themselves.

guelo 10y ago

The wikileaks stuff did have some effect, but not as much as Comey's last minute lie about finding a laptop full of Hillary emails. Russian hacking was more influential in the congressional elections where "Guccifer 2.0" worked directly with Republican congressional campaigns providing them internal DCCC info.

davidf18 10y ago
> "...but not as much as Comey's last minute lie about finding a laptop full of Hillary emails." Comey did find emails on a laptop confiscating during an investigation of Anthony Weiner because Weiner was texting/sexting a 15-year-old. Weiner was the husband of a chief Hilary Lieutenant and there were email exchanges between her and Clinton. There were missing emails because Clinton had destroyed 30,000 emails that the FBI had asked her to turn over to them. When Secretary of State, instead of using the official government email server which was necessary not only for security/hacking reasons but because by law a record of correspondence needed to be stored on government servers for future Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, used a private email server in her home. She did this precisely so that her emails could be hidden from FOIA. When requested by the FBI to turn over her emails, Clinton had 30,000 of them destroyed. The Democrats never, never should have had as a candidate someone who would feel they were above the law and set up her own home email server. To me, it is simply baffling that they would ever nominate such a person and shows a profound lack of judgment on the part of DNC leadership and the Democratic elites. Nothing Trump or the Russians or whomever has ever done comes close to the seriousness of using a home email server for Secretary of State emails. Of all people, HN readers should understand that.

coolsdude2282 10y ago

I am a midwest Obama voter who voted for Trump. I don't like anything about him in all honestly. I voted quite literally because of Assange. I followed each leak that was dropped religiously and had a lot of fun bonding with others who searched through them on various reddit boards uncovering information. All this is to say that generalizations like the one you made are almost never correct, and never tell the whole story. I voted for Bernie in the primary. Acting like the subcategory I'm in doesn't exist and only furthers misunderstanding of the various complex social systems that were at play in this election creating the outcome.

icantdrive55 10y ago
Yea, for myself it was a combination of things for they way I voted. Those leaks played a part. They were like advertising--we all say we are immune to. I disliked Trump, and his family, but agreed with 90% percent of that 100 day pledge. Actually, the only reason I read that pledge is after all the leaked emails, and it wasen't just one. The emails just showed me how devious some politicians/their staff are. I would have voted for Sander's if he wasen't blackballed.(evidence in emails--which made me more leary of Hillary) I was so torn, and read many of those emails. The last day I could vote by mail, I left the decision up to the last hour. All the emails, promises, personalities ran through my mind. I didn't like the guy, nor felt he could do what he claimed, but just couldn't vote for her. The Clinton foundation, her condensing attitude, her staffs devious plot to destroy Sanders, all of it combined made me vote for that guy. The emails made a difference. I think Russia looked at it was psychological warfare. They knew most politicians knew squat about the Internet. They knew American politicians looked at the Internet/Technolgy as a toy. Hillary was actually smart in having her own servers, but her staff was sloppy. It was all so innocent, and fun a few months ago. Trump is telling Russia to find her lost emails--crazy? Anyways I made a mistake, and hope I'm around to vote in three plus years.
divbit 10y ago
This is how I see it: Post-primaries, I think Hillary was a much better candidate. However a large number of liberals chose to campaign for her by just straight up calling the other side racists, while ignoring her flaws / blaming them on Russians. (We are all flawed, just accept it and don't blame it on others, otherwise you might just come across as narcissistic). In the case this was done in a false-flag fashion, then the democrats didn't catch it / didn't do the obvious thing to combat it. I mean come on guys. It is likely true that there 'are' lots of racist / deplorable voters however it is analogous to this: If I were fat, I would probably not like people yelling "hey fattie! / run forrest run" at me while I am out jogging trying to improve myself. In the end, although I did not vote for Trump, (and am not fat), it did kind of seem to me that Democrats / liberals during this election, came across (regardless of whether they actually are, which I strongly doubt) as the gang from globo-gym, and I can just picture an image of a White Goodman (Ben Stiller's character) calling the other side 'deplorable.' (To Hillary's credit she seemed very apologetic during the second of the three debates) Add to this exchanges like the one between Podesta / Assange [1] which just served to reinforce this image, and you have a recipe for the election upset which happened. I am sure at the end of the day there will be some voters you cannot reach, but I imagine, if you just use basic human empathy, it will reach a whole lot of people. The moral of this story, for either side, should be: 1. Don't treat the other side poorly / call them names. Instead, use reasoning about policies, compassion, and acceptance of your own flaws to win voters. 2. Be wary of possible false-flag tactics- no one has brought up evidence that this happened, but I wouldn't be at all surprised. 3. Don't rely solely on things like this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11/09/clintons-data-driven-campaign-relied-heavily-on-an-algorithm-named-ada-what-didnt-she-see/?utm_term=.48d681866948 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11... humans are not machines to feed variables and get out votes- use actual compassion / empathy/ and talk to people. Or maybe, smarter, don't rely solely on your super algorithm sauce - obviously data analysis will help, but it shouldn't be the whole picture. [1] http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/301069-podesta-fires-back-at-assange-over-leaked-emails-risotto http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/301069-podesta-fires...

seppin 10y ago

Russia can only do what they can do, that's not the scandal. If you have members of the Trump campaign openly working together with them, they need to go to jail.

frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago

>We certainly DID learn from WikiLeaks that the DNC and media "fixed" the debates to favor Hillary Clinton though[1], but where's the outrage at that? Um... everywhere among bernie supporters? If you haven't seen outrage about the dem primary debates from the left you haven't been looking. More importantly though, this seems to be a total deflection mechanism. Why deflect to that issue when we've got a much bigger one right here?

VLM 10y ago

The election was hacked because implying there was no outside force would imply there was an internal problem. An internal problem such as an unelectable candidate being selected by a faulty biased selection process. Or the legacy regional alliances being shattered. Perhaps long cherished beliefs and ideals and slogans are simply obsolete, dead in the voting marketplace. Or the impact of demographic trends. Or simple utter gross incompetence of individual party leadership. Extremely painful questions need to be asked if the loss was not due to Russian Hacking. Therefore the powers that be, declare the only problem with the election at any level was Russian Hacking. Its a thought crime directly attacking the existing party leadership to consider is could be anything else. Would you go up against the DNC? They own TV and radio and newspapers and many websites, you'd be a fool to do anything but nod your head in agreement and repeat after them that the DNC did nothing wrong and the only problem was Russian Hacking. You're not going to see the R party disagreeing, other than trolling and LOLz, because a profoundly dysfunctional D party directly benefits them next time. Imagine the R party perspective, sure guys, do the same thing that didn't work plus more WW3 warmongering against Russia, how could the R party not win against that again? Don't hurt anyone's feelings, whatever you do, blame the Russian Hackers.

boomboomsubban 10y ago
The "election" was unambiguously hacked, you can argue that the democrats are blaming it more than is reasonable, but it happened. Basically the only thing getting a budget increase this year looks to be the military. War isn't started over stern reprimands, increasing military spending and increasing our ties to Russia seem to be the more likely sign of an upcoming war.