News channels and my FB feed are ablaze with stories, posts, and memes (oh my) all calling out, in various fashions, that Russia hacked our elections and therefore Trump shouldn’t become POTUS. They believe that the electors should stand up and refuse to put in Trump and should, instead, put in their candidate. I see…so if I understand this correctly, the point they are making is that the election results are invalid, therefore they win?
Why, if an outside entity disrupted the democratic process, does the silver medalist automatically get the win? If it is determined that outside forces actually interfered, yet there is no evidence that the Republicans played any role in the malfeasance, how does that give Hillary the win?
This line of thinking sort of reminds me of the whole push by certain groups to make sure there was no Islamic reference anywhere in the schools, citing the requirement for separation of church and state…and then in the same breath complaining that we need God in our schools…(their god is an acceptable breach of protocol apparently). I don’t like yours, but go ahead and put mine in instead.
As you can imagine I would, I started to dig into the facts…what do we know and what is merely conjecture? Did Russia hack into the voting machines, did they actually change the outcome? Did they tamper? If so, how?
Let’s charge into the first question. Did Russian officials (or anyone tied directly to them…for the purposes of easier reading, let’s assume when I use Russia in the rest of this article, I mean this same group) actually hack into any voting systems and change or create any votes? No one, not even the Clinton-loving CNN, is claiming that Russia actually tampered with the voting machines on election day. If this is true, and no votes were changed/destroyed/added…then this election stands, right?
The Russians hacked the EAC…they got into voting machines! Well, what actually happened was that the EAC confirmed that there was a “possible intrusion” by a person named Rasputin. Well, that is certainly a definitive statement on which to base the dismissal of election results…also the EAC is an agency that certifies and maintains voting machines, not the election process…the “intrusion” in no way correlates to hacking voting machines to change votes.
While many of the people who validate and study such scenarios say it is possible for our election machines to be tampered with, there is no belief from experts that this specific EAC breach could have been used to alter votes, and there is no evidence that Rasputin has any direct ties to the Russian government. It is more probable that the hack was a typical break in to steal information for profit, as this was discovered as an attempt to sell logins to the EAC systems.
So why are we seeing the claim that Russia hacked the elections? I suppose it is because hacking no longer means just the act of breaking into a computer (or network) for the purposes of altering/stealing data. Apparently, hacking now means to affect something or attempt to alter its outcome. Life hacks…really now? When did using an item for something other than its intended function become hacking? “Look! I used Coca-Cola to clean my lawn mower…I’m a hacker!”
OK…so what is the claim then? Ah…the claim is that Russia broke into the DNC (and various personal) computers/email systems and released information that cast a negative light on Mrs. Clinton that she was unable to overcome.
Wait…the argument now is that Russia leaked a bunch of bad things about Hillary, that had these naughty things remained hidden, people may have not disliked her so much and she may have won?
This election is unfair because people found out things about a candidate…and this information *may* have modified their perceptions and therefore altered the vote? We are supposed to plead with our electors to overturn the entire electoral process because people may or may not have had their opinions swayed by the leak of inside knowledge about a candidate?
The CIA (and now the FBI) believe that they have enough evidence to prove Russia gained access to the DNC and leaked the information they acquired. While much of this evidence that the public has access to is based on people using Russian names, Russian registered domains, and specific phishing tactics often used by Russians… (they leave out that these same phishing tactics are used by everyone who uses phishing schemes) there may be information we the people don’t yet have that is the smoking gun. I just know that were I to be leaving behind evidence of my infiltration, I would certainly make it look like someone else.
Evidence aside, the intelligence agencies are not saying that Russians changed votes…or that they physically manipulated the voting system. They leaked the information to the people and hoped it might have an effect.
As the kids like to text…SMDH…Dear America, you heard and read things about our candidate that we had wanted to keep hidden. Can we please just put our person in office because if you hadn’t known these things, you might have voted for her?
That isn’t how any of this works…
No country should meddle in another country’s election. That I think we can all agree with…so tell that to Obama and Hillary and all the other US government officials who have been doing it for decades. For recent examples, ask Israel, Honduras, or Afghanistan how it feels…in fact, ask Afghanistan about the new position created in their government by the US when the election didn’t go our way…though I suppose the winner was happy he didn’t meet the same fate as the guy who won in Vietnam. Ask Guatemala, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Venezuela, Iran, Chile, or Congo how they feel about foreign countries tampering with or downright over-riding elections.
The sad thing is that in many of those countries I just listed, the US actually controlled the election or backed the overthrow of the democratically elected winner. Yes, we overthrow properly elected leaders who don’t align with our wants and needs. Kissinger once declared that we needed to save the Chilean people from themselves (meaning, they didn’t see things our way) so Nixon authorized the removal of their elected leader and replaced him with a dictator with one of the worst human rights records in history.
The fake news stories? Those are created mostly by people in eastern European countries and only to get clicks and make money…not Russians and not really trying to throw an election. Look, for every fake Clinton story there was a fake Trump story…and for every negative Clinton news story, there were tens of negative Trump stories.
I didn’t vote for the man. He certainly wasn’t my choice…but he won the election based on the rules as set forth by our country prior to the elections. You don’t have to like it, but to try to use some Russian hacking as a reason that your candidate lost…you are grasping at straws. Think about it…many Democrats were also posting about how much they hated Hillary before the primary…now they can’t believe she didn’t win.
Let’s review: First, it was all of us third party voters who cost you the election. That was funny and…no, we didn’t. Then it was the non-voters. You may actually have an argument there. The vote totals were close enough that if just a handful of the 70 million people who couldn’t be bothered had shown up, we might be listening to Trump’s team claiming everything was rigged right now. Strange that when Trump claimed, “Rigged!” all the Democrats told him and his supporters to stop whining and accept the results…
It was over-confidence…the media polling showed her in such an overwhelming lead that the voters stayed home figuring it was a shoo-in. Looks like that media favoritism backfired, eh?
Recount! Those battleground states must have been miscounted…well…Wisconsin was…they undercounted Trump’s votes by 162 apparently. So this isn’t the reason…
Now it is Russians…Russians hacked the election. They didn’t. Not in the true idea of hacking. They didn’t hack into voting machines and change votes. They didn’t erase or invalidate votes…if they did anything, they played the US politics game better than the US did…and that makes us mad.
I believe we should investigate these things and that the security of our elections is paramount. I believe that if it is that easy to get into these systems, they should spend some money and hire the best in the business to protect them. But in this case, Russians or not, it was a private group (the DNC), not the government, who was hacked and their own information was used against them.
All that said, how do we fix this one?
If you ask me, until people stop voting against candidates…until people stop believing every meme and every tweet…until people are willing to dig deeper into the subjects and understand the truth behind their candidates…until we are willing to stop trying to personally destroy the candidates, scaring away people who would make great leaders…until we demand that debates be about actual issues and not about hand size or any of the myriad other distractions…until we can commit to any of that, America is prime real estate for foreign countries to socially “hack” during election time.
Once again, as many of these discussions do, it comes down to personal responsibility. We as a country need to take responsibility for our actions. We selected the candidates, we overlooked the warning signs and listened to the social media, we went into the booth and made our selections (or we didn’t…equally at fault).
This one is on us…for better or worse, for the next four years…maybe by then we will learn our lessons and find good candidates that won’t divide the country, candidates people will want to vote *for* instead of against. But, I won’t hold my breath…and sadly, four years from today, I will probably be writing the same type of message.
Above the Nonsense 