{"id":1040,"date":"2018-07-22T09:07:43","date_gmt":"2018-07-22T13:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dahlman.online\/?p=1040"},"modified":"2018-07-22T13:22:47","modified_gmt":"2018-07-22T17:22:47","slug":"not-a-single-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dahlman.online\/index.php\/2018\/07\/22\/not-a-single-vote\/","title":{"rendered":"Not a Single Vote"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not a Single Vote<\/p>\n

I heard it again on TV this morning:\u00a0 not a single vote was altered by the Russian attack on the US election in 2016, not a single outcome was changed.\u00a0 While we were attacked, the attack was unsuccessful.<\/p>\n

This is the current mantra of those who support the President.\u00a0 After the terrifying and embarrassing episode in Helsinki last week, the \u201clogic\u201d goes:\u00a0 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\u2019t matter because it didn\u2019t change anything. \u00a0So don\u2019t sweat Helsinki.<\/p>\n

While there are multiple problems with this logic, the base point, Russian failure to change the election, is untrue.<\/p>\n

The Russians did impact the 2016 election.\u00a0 They did it through a multi-pronged attack on the US electoral system.\u00a0 It started with attacks through social media, using Facebook, Twitter and other opinion makers to drive pivotal electoral groups.\u00a0Ardent 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. \u00a0This 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.<\/p>\n

The Russians stole the Democratic plan, the DNC analytics providing a map to the Democratic strategy. \u00a0Either by themselves, or with direction (conspiracy) from some other source, this further tuned their social media strategy to have maximum impact on voting behavior.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Using Wikileaks as their \u201cunbiased source,\u201d those releases were timed to forward the Trump campaign agenda.\u00a0 The release of DNC Chairman Wasserman-Schultz email\u2019s immediately before the Democratic Convention is one example.\u00a0 Even more pointed was the use of those emails to counter the Trump disaster of the Access Hollywood tapes.\u00a0 We know it worked; they were able to \u201cchange the subject\u201d almost immediately with the leaked emails from Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta.<\/p>\n

Many of my more conservative friends argue that the emails were true, therefore their source doesn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 If the New York Times would have found and released these same emails, the \u201cliberals\u201d wouldn\u2019t have complained.\u00a0 They have a valid point; the Democratic leaders were callous, careless, and dimwitted both in putting their thoughts in a \u201cdigital record\u201d (that\u2019s why there are phones) and for thinking that way in the first place.\u00a0 But if the Russians hadn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 To say it didn\u2019t have an impact on the outcome is simply ignorant.<\/p>\n

And finally, and perhaps more insidiously, is the Russian attack on the actual voting process.\u00a0 We slowly are hearing evidence that Russians attacked multiple, at least twenty-one, state electoral processes.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

The US voting system is incredibly fragmented.\u00a0\u00a0 Each state has it\u2019s own system, and within many states, each county may have it\u2019s own system as well.\u00a0 It has been argued that our greatest defense against massive election fraud is the diversity of our process.\u00a0 However, that same diversity makes it very difficult to determine when fraud has occurred.\u00a0There have been statistical analyses that seem to show selective voting fraud, but counties and states are unwilling to follow that evidence to any conclusion.\u00a0 Many jurisdictions simply refused to recount the votes:\u00a0 in Michigan, one of Mr. Trump\u2019s key electoral victories, hundred of Detroit precincts were NOT recounted due to a legal technicality.<\/p>\n

For those who want to immerse themselves in the data:\u00a0 http:\/\/www.unhackthevote.com<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 There is a simple future \u201cfix,\u201d paper ballot backups that can be recounted in case of controversy.\u00a0 Many jurisdictions have this backup, but still more do not.<\/em><\/p>\n

In March of 2017 I wrote an essay about this same subject: \u00a077744<\/a>.\u00a0 Now more than a year later, we are still arguing about the Russian impact.\u00a0 And it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

We have an election in November.\u00a0 We have done little to change the \u201cbattlefield.\u201d\u00a0 There is little reason to believe that Russia, or China, or some other actor won\u2019t \u201cput their thumb on the scale\u201d of American decision making once again.\u00a0 It\u2019s not just about the past, it\u2019s about the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not a Single Vote I heard it again on TV this morning:\u00a0 not a single vote was altered by the Russian attack on the US election in 2016, not a single outcome was changed.\u00a0 While we were attacked, the attack was unsuccessful. This is the current mantra of those who support the President.\u00a0 After the … Continue reading “Not a Single Vote”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nNot a Single Vote : Our America - Essays on Politics and American Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/dahlman.online\/index.php\/2018\/07\/22\/not-a-single-vote\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Not a Single Vote : Our America - Essays on Politics and American Life\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Not a Single Vote I heard it again on TV this morning:\u00a0 not a single vote was altered by the Russian attack on the US election in 2016, not a single outcome was changed.\u00a0 While we were attacked, the attack was unsuccessful. 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