“Was the shut-down of the electronic poll book system in Durham County the result of a benign malfunction or an intentional hack?” one attorney asked. “And, if it was the latter, who was behind the cyberattack? These questions must be answered immediately, especially if the answers lead to questions about the integrity of the election process in other jurisdictions.” Open link in new tab

Election night’s official returns had Trump beating Clinton by 178,000 votes and the Democratic Senate candidate also losing by roughly the same margin. In other races in the state, however, such as governor and attorney general, the GOP lost and there is a controversial gubernatorial recount underway in which the Republican incumbent, Gov. Pat McCrory, has accused Democrats of voter fraud. …

Florida

Clinton was ahead in many pre-election polls, but lost in the results reportedafter Election Day by 120,000 votes. (Each state has a process where counties officially tally all categories of ballots and then the state certifies the results, which can take several weeks.)

As one attorney said, “Tallahassee-based VR Systems was also allegedly hacked. The company provides electronic poll books for a number of jurisdictions which communicate in real time with each county’s voter registration system. According to the company's web site VR Systems serves almost all of Florida's counties and 14 other states."

Wisconsin

Election night’s unofficial returns found Trump ahead of Clinton by 27,000 votes. But Clinton won only counties using all-paper ballots, the computer voting experts said. In the counties using a mix of electronic and paper-based voting systems that President Obama won in 2012, Clinton lost by 1-2 percent. In the Obama counties using all paperless machines, she lost by 10 to 15 percent. (Five percent of the state’s 4.6 million voters, or 230,000 people, cast their ballots on paperless machines, state officials said Wednesday.)



Wisconsin also saw a record numbers of absentee ballots, with 831,000 ballots cast, which was about 30 percent of this fall’s vote. In past years, it was about 20 percent. Of that overall amount, about 134,000 were from people who mailed them in, instead of turning them in at polling places, state officials said.



The questions raised by the election integrity team are twofold. First, did old-school hacking pad Trump’s margin in counties with all-electronic voting systems? Under that scenario, paperless voting systems would be breached and totals changed. Second, was there a sizable effort to pad the absentee ballot voting with phantom voters, created from last summer’s Russian hacks into voter registration databases in other states? Both of these scenarios would require sophisticated operations, a skeptical former state election director from another state said. Wisconsin’s paperless voting machinery is not online and isn’t programmed online, as a security precaution, meaning someone would have to access the system in key counties from the inside. Second, if hackers put fake voters into Wisconsin’s database and boosted Trump’s absentee totals, the discrepancy between returned paper ballots and electronic totals would be found in a post-election audit. On background, Wisconsin state election officials did not believe these scenarios were possible, describing many intricate steps they take to prevent election tampering. Should any recount go forward, it is likely the first recount would be in Wisconsin, because its three-day legal window to file for a recount is expected to start in about nine days—once its 72 counties finished their tallies. Those filing would have to pay for the recount, which could run into hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, apart from the litigation team costs and deploying trained observers.