> Nobody, in any significant numbers, has ever claimed or believed that there were direct manipulations of vote counts. They don't need to. But the choice of

> Nobody, in any significant numbers, has ever claimed or believed that there were direct manipulations of vote counts. They don't need to. But the choice of phrase is important. What "hacked the election" does is make people draw false inferences without actually saying something like "they hacked the ballot box." The media knows people consume information in bites and rarely deep dive, and "hacked the election" is the perfect way to make people think the "election was hacked" when the truth of the matter is "the DNC was hacked". And if we really want to get technical, the "hacking" was to guess that John Podesta's email password was "password" -- but by glossing over those details the average person is lead to believe that some elite team of Russian hackers slaved away for months or years figuring out how to discredit the DNC by exposing their own misdeeds.