Put on My Foil Hat
WASHINGTON — In the months before the 2016 presidential election, Russia’s military intelligence agency penetrated computer systems in at least one Florida county government and planted malware in systems at a manufacturer of election equipment, the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, said in his office’s final report on Russian interference in the election. – New York Times – 4/18/19
There are words I’ve only whispered to my closest family. They sound crazy, like one of the “nut-jobs” you see online at the extremes of the internet. I keep an aluminum foil crown on my desk just to remind me to not get too off the wall.
Right after the 2016 election, Mike Farb, author of the “Unhackthevote” website, put volumes of statistical material out about the vote. It was so much stuff that it was difficult to figure out exactly what he showed, but he ultimately drew the conclusion that either the 2016 election was fixed by Americans, or, it was fixed by the Russians.
I know, my foil hat just began to glow.
We knew fairly early, say January, 2017, that Russian intelligence was trying to penetrate the American voting process. We aren’t talking about Facebook ads or Twitter bots, we are talking about hacking into voting rolls and the software that runs the machines that tabulate our votes. At first, we were told that thirty-nine states were attacked, but no attack succeeded. Then it was narrowed down to twenty-one states, and even later, only nine.
And the story kind of faded away. No one, media or government, spoke about what happened when Russians got into the voter registration files in Illinois. No one explained what happened to the software developer out of Florida, supplier of voting machines for that state and North Carolina. Not a word, about the multiple counties in Wisconsin using the voting machines controlled from a strip mall storefront in Minnesota. It was all “OK.” The National Security Agency two years ago said that they were certain no election computers had been compromised.
This is America. When we watch the Super Bowl, we have the assurance that while the referees may make mistakes, they aren’t “rigging” the game (yes – not even for the Patriots.) When we see a sprint in the Olympics, we get to see the “photo-finish” picture, so we can assure ourselves that the results were fair. And, when some of us watch World Wrestling Entertainment, the WWE, we know that we are watching a show, with a scripted ending. We know it’s rigged, that’s a part of the deal. We watch the show – without much concern for the results already written in stone.
If we knew that the outcome of the Super Bowl, or the Olympic one hundred meter dash, were pre-ordained, they wouldn’t be very interesting. And if we found that our voting processes were altered and that our votes didn’t actually count, why would we accept the outcomes of our elections?
This is the great fear. If the Russians hacked our elections, would we ever be told? Would our government actually let us know that the results of say, 2016, weren’t legitimate; that rather than the President being chosen “by the people,” he was chosen by the GRU (Russian Intelligence?)
Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee stated in the New York Times this week:
“I don’t believe the specific victims of the intrusion have been notified. The concern was that in a number of counties across the country, there are a couple of people with the attitude of: ‘We’ve got this; we don’t need your help. We don’t think we need to do what you are telling us we need to do.’”
So not only is the national government not telling the public, they aren’t even telling the specific counties that were hacked. Instead, every county is given general instructions on how to prevent hacking. This way, no one gets singled out as having “their system” infiltrated, and their vote totals under suspicion.
Why would it be handled that way? Because if multiple counties in multiple states were notified that they were hacked and votes altered; that’s information that could not be held secret. It would slip out in local news, and ultimately someone would put a national view together. It would bring into question the legitimacy of our entire government.
There’s no such thing as a national do-over in electoral politics. Creating distrust in the American system is clearly one of the goals of Vladimir Putin and his Russian Intelligence apparatus. Add those together, and it’s not likely that even if there was hacking in key states, we wouldn’t know.
So if we can’t change 2016, what can we demand as voters to protect 2020:
Paper Ballots.
Many states use a paper ballot backup system for their electronic voting. Here in Licking County, Ohio, each vote is tabulated electronically, and also printed on a paper roll. That roll is stored for backup purposes; if there were questions about the outcome, the paper roll can be hand counted.
But other jurisdictions don’t, including the entire states of Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and South Carolina. Other states have some counties with and some without: Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas.
Senator and Presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar has authored “The Secure Elections Act” calling for paper ballot backup nationwide. She has bipartisan support in the Senate, and a companion bill in the House. And yet, the bill has been held up by Republican leadership in the Senate, at the behest of the Trump White House. The White House says they have all the authority they need to protect the election process, but the basic premise of the Secure Elections Act raises a question that Donald Trump cannot tolerate: the legitimacy of 2016.
Keep your foil hat on.
