Drip, drip, drip.

Closer and closer.

Drip, drip, drip.

Time brings us our now biweekly revelation that the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 presidential election went far beyond revealing John Podesta's recipes to the world, and circulating the mean things someone once said about Bernie Sanders. This is approaching nightmare status.

In one case, investigators found there had been a manipulation of voter data in a county database but the alterations were discovered and rectified, two sources familiar with the matter tell TIME. Investigators have not identified whether the hackers in that case were Russian agents. The fact that private data was stolen from states is separately providing investigators a previously unreported line of inquiry in the probes into Russian attempts to influence the election. In Illinois, more than 90% of the nearly 90,000 records stolen by Russian state actors contained drivers license numbers, and a quarter contained the last four digits of voters' Social Security numbers, according to Ken Menzel, the General Counsel of the State Board of Elections. Congressional investigators are probing whether any of this stolen private information made its way to the Trump campaign, two sources familiar with the investigations tell TIME.

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For the moment, let's put aside whether or not this was done to benefit one remarkably orange presidential candidate. If your goal was to sow chaos generally, this is precisely the way you'd go about doing it. You wouldn't have to monkeyfck with the vote totals. (However, at this point…) If you screwed with the registration data, you could gum up the balloting procedure until people gave up and went home. But, then again, the alterations. That's a loaded phrase we haven't heard before. Who knows that next week's will be?

"There's no evidence they were able to affect the counting within the machines," says the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, Congressman Adam Schiff of California. But, he added, "the effect on the election is quite a different matter."

If it is revealed that any vote total in any state was subject to "alterations," then that's the ballgame. An unprecedented political crisis of legitimacy would erupt immediately for which the Constitution has no adequate provision or means of redress. (You can't have the election all over again. Not in this republic.) I suppose that, if there were conclusive evidence that the Trump campaign knew this was going on, and arranged itself to profit by it, the political pressure on the president* to resign might be irresistible. But, honestly, I'm guessing here. I haven't the faintest idea what would come next, except for toasts with high-end vodka in some cubicle near Moscow.

Closer and closer.

Drip, drip, drip.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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