I’m sure this is fine
by digby
If it didn’t affect the outcome of an election in which the winner won the electoral college by some very small voter margins in certain states while the loser had three million more votes, then it never will. So never mind:
To understand the scale of the hacking attempts against election systems in the 2016 presidential election, consider South Carolina.
On Election Day alone, there were nearly 150,000 attempts to penetrate the state’s voter-registration system, according to a postelection report by the South Carolina State Election Commission.
And South Carolina wasn’t even a competitive state. If hackers were that persistent against a state that President Donald Trump won comfortably, with 54.9% of the vote, it suggests they may have targeted political swing states even more.
In harder-fought Illinois, for instance, hackers were hitting the State Board of Elections “5 times per second, 24 hours per day” from late June until Aug. 12, 2016, when the attacks ceased for unknown reasons, according to an Aug. 26, 2016, report by the state’s computer staff. Hackers ultimately accessed approximately 90,000 voter records, the State Board of Elections said.
Unlike in Illinois, South Carolina didn’t see evidence that any attempted penetration succeeded, said Chris Whitmire, the State Election Commission’s director of public information and training, last week. Most of the attempted intrusions in that state likely came from automated computer bots, not thousands of individual hackers.
“Security has been a top priority for the [State Election Commission] since implementing the statewide voting system in 2004,” Mr. Whitmire said about South Carolina.
“However, events leading up to the 2016 General Election, including the breaches of other states’ voter-registration systems, created an election-security environment that was very different,” he added.
South Carolina’s and Illinois’s cases aren’t unique, as many states faced virtual threats.
There is evidence that 21 states were potentially targeted by hackers, said Jeanette Manfra, acting deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity and communications at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last month.
Read the whole article. It goes into great detail about the attempts to hack the state and local election systems.
We have been assured that they didn’t succeed in any way so I guess that’s that. President Trump says there was no interference in the electoral process in any way and he plans to do nothing to curb it in the future. Republicans are blocking all efforts to find out what happened and ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Indeed, their mission is to make it even harder for people to vote which would work very well as an adjunct to this program that screws with the voter rolls.
I’m sure that’s a coincidence. They would never take advantage of such a program instituted by a foreign government. And if they did, there would be nothing wrong with it. That’s what they say anyway.
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