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Clinton Urged To Challenge Election Results Due To Possible Hacking [Update] (cnn.com)
Reader Bruha writes: After examining results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin computer scientists have discovered Clinton averaged 7% worse in counties with e voting machines vs. counties with only paper or optical scan ballots.From a CNN report:The computer scientists believe they have found evidence that vote totals in the three states could have been manipulated or hacked and presented their findings to top Clinton aides on a call last Thursday. The scientists, among them J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, told the Clinton campaign they believe there is a questionable trend of Clinton performing worse in counties that relied on electronic voting machines compared to paper ballots and optical scanners, according to the source. The group informed John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chairman, and Marc Elias, the campaign's general counsel, that Clinton received 7% fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic voting machines, which the group said could have been hacked.Halderman wrote more about it on Medium today in an article titled, "Want to Know if the Election was Hacked? Look at the Ballots"
Update: Green party candidate Jill Stein is asking for donations to fund a recount of her own in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which are the states key to Hillary Clinton's surprising loss. Stein says she must raise $2.5 million by Friday 4 pm central time to proceed.
Editor's note: the story has been updated and moved up on the front page.
Update: Green party candidate Jill Stein is asking for donations to fund a recount of her own in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which are the states key to Hillary Clinton's surprising loss. Stein says she must raise $2.5 million by Friday 4 pm central time to proceed.
Editor's note: the story has been updated and moved up on the front page.
Is this part of the fake news? Or is it actually real news? Or is it Clinton being a sore loser. The DNC and Clinton doesn't really have a leg to stand on though, especially after fixing their own primary to make sure she was the candidate.
Om, nomnomnom...
I am not an American, but I was wondering if Clinton Campaign can -- at least hypothetically -- really challenge the results? I mean, is it a thing?
This is like calling on the electors to not choose Trump, or come up with all sorts of far fetched plans that would somehow put Clinton on the big seat. Look at the county results map. Even if the DNC can somehow find a technicality to avoid a Trump presidency, the result will be more or less a civil war imo. There is no way that the actual people in those red counties are going to let 'the big city folks' put Trump aside.
I am not a big fan of him either. Nor of Hillary for that matter. But at this point it's gone so far that either he becomes president or you'll have riots from coast to coast.
Yeah. They looked like pretty typical cases of a broken touch screen to me; the lack of any reports of Democratic votes changing to Republican might be reporting bias.
If you're going to rig a machine to change a vote, you'd be pretty dumb to make it show it changing.
I'm going to have to disagree with your assessment. I work in the audiovisual department of a large multinational corporation. In my specific building, we have about 50 Crestron AV control panels that use resistive touch screens. Calibration issues run rampant with these; in any given week, I am re-calibrating at least 5 of the panels. Every single time it is the same: you will touch a button, and the actual selected area will be to the left of your finger. Every. Single. Time. Sometimes we have panels shipped off for repairs if they need to be recalibrate more frequently than the others, and even after that, sometimes the calibration will slowly slip in the same direction. So it certainly is possible that with the touchscreen voting machines, all of the panels that have calibration issues are doing so in the same or a very similar manner.
As someone utterly terrified by a Trump presidency and the damage it's going to do I say she goes for it. The point isn't to win, it's to bog down the Trump administration to limit the damage he can do. The Repubs did it to Obama (though I'd argue Obama was actually trying to Govern where Trump is just the world's largest scam). As the saying goes, this is how the sausage is made.
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Is it really the end goal of the US government to prevent people from voting?
Yes. It is fairly well established the more people vote the more likely it is an incumbent will not be re-elected. In fact, one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation has stated he doesn't want everyone to vote.
If you have followed U.S. politics in the last decade you will have noticed a concerted effort by Republicans to make it more difficult for people to vote. The excuse is there's rampant voter fraud going on yet with the exception of a few isolated cases, they have never shown this "rampant" fraud.
Which brings us full circle to the issue at hand. In my area the Republican-led districts have gone ahead with these electronic voting machines which have no way to verify votes are being correctly recorded. When asked about this issue their response has been, more or less, "Computers don't make mistakes".
Which is funny because if they're claiming voter fraud how do they know it's going on if one can't verify the vote being cast?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It also makes sense to do something he doesn't suggest, which is to break down some of the electronic voting machines and inspect the code for malware (he only suggests comparing the paper trail to the electronic count, not looking at the machines that don't have a paper trail.)
The thing for me is that I voted on a paper ballot, which then went into a machine that counted my votes. I have no idea if that machine "switched" any of my choices, or if it recorded each one accurately. There were reports of that happening at places, so this isn't much different than using individual electronic voting machines.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
> They are already being labelled "sore losers" despite conceding the election and explicitly instructing their supporters to accept the results
I'm sure SOMEBODY in the world called SOME Democrat a sore loser based on something they said. As one Slashdot's resident conservatives, I applauded Mrs. Clinton's concession speech. I post to Facebook about twice a year, and one of those was "Clinton showed some class this this morning". I thought it was worth bringing attention to her response to the election, which was more "statesman-like" than many politicians.
Most precincts in Michigan do hand counts at the end of the night. Kinda odd that a researcher at U of M doesn't know that.
She really is that unpopular. Look, even if you presume the popular vote is the right tracker of popularity (hard, because people decide their votes based upon the EC system), she's only 2% more "liked" (or 2% less disliked) than a crazy narcissistic posterchild for the 0.1% who keeps spouting fascist rhetoric.
Trump's negative campaign against her is merely a few years old. Clinton's opponents have been running a smear campaign against her for 25 years, and after a while, some of the mud sticks, no matter how unfair. Also she's a neo-conservative who pals around with Henry Kissenger, and is associated with international trade treaties widely - if unfairly - associated with the decline of US industry*. Her husband, who she's assumed to be close to, spent a significant amount of time reinventing the Democratic Party to be less concerned with social justice, neutering welfare, and introducing draconian "law and order" laws that devastated communities.
So, she's not popular with the left, and according to the right she's a murdering real estate fraudster who runs secret email servers so she can hide her secret ISIS plot to kill Heroic American Gamers in Benghazi.
Why would you think she's popular?
* Footnote: that decline actually dates back to Reagan, but people always think the bad stuff happened in the short term - witness the amnesia about how high gas prices were during Bush's eight years, for example. The novelization of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, Primary Colors, actually has him winning over his future campaign manager when he makes a speech to some out of work factory workers, telling them he can't bring back those jobs, that they're pretty much permanently moved overseas at this point, but that he'll fight every day to create new jobs for them.To bring this closer to home as we're all nerds here, Commodore, which went bankrupt in the early nineties, was widely criticized for its policy of domestic computer manufacturing, virtually everyone else was hiring companies in the far east to manufacture their computers for them, with only superficial assembly in the US, if any.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I'd like to see it looked into, but unlike you I won't propagandize on some fantasy of what the results say. I just think statistically significant routine random audits should be performed as a matter of course, and am interested in the academic side of things.
The Clinton campaign has to walk a fine line here because as a stakeholder, they are the people in a position to petition to get the audits done should it involve the courts. They are damned if they do, because it may be the case (depending on the laws in said states) that they have to talk out two sides of their mouth, saying they think the recount might change something to the courts, so they have grounds, but saying it won't to the public so as not to create a commotion. They are damned if they don't, by people like you (I'd point out if there was shenanigans in the primary it is just as likely Republicans thought Bernie was more of a challenge in the general than Clinton, and they did the deed.) Also die-hards in the party won't like it if they do not pursue this.
We can't look to Trump to ask for a recount, as he has nothing to gain from it (i.e. he lost nothing) and thus may lack legal standing. If one of the third parties can say that this could tip them from having met the threshold for ballot access in that state for future elections, they could initiate the recount (Nader made his campaign useful in this respect ISTR at points in the past.)
Someone had to do it.
Among the many problems with this is that I'm told that all counties in Michigan use paper ballots, so arguments that there is a 7% difference between paper ballots and voting machines are bogus. Can anyone name any Michigan county that didn't use paper ballots.
What the hell is Jill Stein whining about? Does she think that she had enough votes anywhere to change anything??? Or is it just an attention getting stunt (rhymes with .... ) to waste money (and perhaps steal some)?
I love all the stupid stories about trying to get the electoral college members to change their votes. Particularly Hillary supporters trying to get votes changed in states where she supposedly won, just to show that the system is flawed. Hillary was a senator and could have introduced an amendment to change that system but never did. Some fools even think they can make a difference by assuring that no one gets to 270 in the electoral college. Do they really think that the Republican Majority who then has to decide the election will give it to Hillary????
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Coming from an institutional information security guy,
Halderman is the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society. U of M isn't even on the Centers of Academic Excellence list for Information Assurance Education for cyber defense, research, or operations.
Which is an academic way of saying when it comes to quality information security education or research institutions, the University of Michigan isn't even on the radar let alone a player in the game.
No surprise that a director of an unrecognized computer security organization does not produce quality research worth reading.
Once you have the methodology and code to do the statistical analysis it should be trivial to apply it to other elections.
What happens if it shows that Clinton was cheated out of the presidency and Sanders was cheated out of the candidate position?
Please do look into it, I implore you. Not because I think it would change the outcome, but because I believe it would only expose vote tampering and fraud on the democrats' end.
Why would this time be any different than all the times GOP politicians announce they've found rock solid evidence of mass voter fraud, only to have all those rock solid cases evaporate when investigated?
"Mass voter fraud" is just a fairly tale the GOP tells the public so they can justify voter ID laws, which disproportionately target Democratic leaning minorities.
If the GOP actually cared about voter fraud they'd target mail-in ballots, since those actually are extremely susceptible to fraud. However, they'll never do that since mail-in ballots skew Republican.
For the record I don't expect this to find evidence of fraud, but I think the probability is high enough that they have to check.
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