Not a Single Vote
I heard it again on TV this morning: not a single vote was altered by the Russian attack on the US election in 2016, not a single outcome was changed. While we were attacked, the attack was unsuccessful.
This is the current mantra of those who support the President. After the terrifying and embarrassing episode in Helsinki last week, the “logic” goes: well, even if the President is ignoring his intelligence agencies for the Russian President, and even if the Russians did attack us; it really doesn’t matter because it didn’t change anything. So don’t sweat Helsinki.
While there are multiple problems with this logic, the base point, Russian failure to change the election, is untrue.
The Russians did impact the 2016 election. They did it through a multi-pronged attack on the US electoral system. It started with attacks through social media, using Facebook, Twitter and other opinion makers to drive pivotal electoral groups. Ardent Sanders supporters, African-Americans, white male blue-collar workers, and others were specifically targeted with messages aimed to change their vote to Trump, vote for a third party candidate, or keep them from going to the polls. This targeting information may well have been provided by Cambridge-Analytica, a contractor for the Trump Campaign. Towards the conclusion of the campaign, voters were specifically targeted in key electoral districts in pivotal states.
The Russians stole the Democratic plan, the DNC analytics providing a map to the Democratic strategy. Either by themselves, or with direction (conspiracy) from some other source, this further tuned their social media strategy to have maximum impact on voting behavior.
Concurrently, the Russians released a series of targeted stolen emails to discredit first the Democratic Party leadership, and then specifically the leadership of the Hillary Clinton campaign. Using Wikileaks as their “unbiased source,” those releases were timed to forward the Trump campaign agenda. The release of DNC Chairman Wasserman-Schultz email’s immediately before the Democratic Convention is one example. Even more pointed was the use of those emails to counter the Trump disaster of the Access Hollywood tapes. We know it worked; they were able to “change the subject” almost immediately with the leaked emails from Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta.
Many of my more conservative friends argue that the emails were true, therefore their source doesn’t matter. If the New York Times would have found and released these same emails, the “liberals” wouldn’t have complained. They have a valid point; the Democratic leaders were callous, careless, and dimwitted both in putting their thoughts in a “digital record” (that’s why there are phones) and for thinking that way in the first place. But if the Russians hadn’t hacked the DNC (and there is now evidence that they hacked the RNC as well) and orchestrated the release, it would certainly have changed the course of the campaign. To say it didn’t have an impact on the outcome is simply ignorant.
And finally, and perhaps more insidiously, is the Russian attack on the actual voting process. We slowly are hearing evidence that Russians attacked multiple, at least twenty-one, state electoral processes. We only now are hearing that they stole hundreds of thousands of voter registration data, the data that identifies a voter in the voting process allowing them to actually cast a ballot.
The US voting system is incredibly fragmented. Each state has it’s own system, and within many states, each county may have it’s own system as well. It has been argued that our greatest defense against massive election fraud is the diversity of our process. However, that same diversity makes it very difficult to determine when fraud has occurred. There have been statistical analyses that seem to show selective voting fraud, but counties and states are unwilling to follow that evidence to any conclusion. Many jurisdictions simply refused to recount the votes: in Michigan, one of Mr. Trump’s key electoral victories, hundred of Detroit precincts were NOT recounted due to a legal technicality.
For those who want to immerse themselves in the data: http://www.unhackthevote.com. There is a simple future “fix,” paper ballot backups that can be recounted in case of controversy. Many jurisdictions have this backup, but still more do not.
In March of 2017 I wrote an essay about this same subject: 77744. Now more than a year later, we are still arguing about the Russian impact. And it’s not just questioning the legitimacy of the Trump Presidency, though frankly, once the conclusion is reached that the Russians were successful, whether Trump should be President is the next logical question.
We have an election in November. We have done little to change the “battlefield.” There is little reason to believe that Russia, or China, or some other actor won’t “put their thumb on the scale” of American decision making once again. It’s not just about the past, it’s about the future.
