After All That, E-Voting Experts Suggest Voting Machines May Have Been Hacked For Trump

from the just...-no dept

The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.

...the effect COMPLETELY DISAPPEARS once you control for race and education levels, the key factors in predicting vote shifts this year. pic.twitter.com/NYOINx9lEz — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 23, 2016

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In this topsy-turvy world where nothing makes any sense at all any more, Donald Trump spent months and months spinning stories about how the election was "rigged" and e-voting machines were going to be hacked in favor of Hillary Clinton. While we've spent nearly two decades pointing out problems with e-voting machines, and urged governments to do away with them, it still seemed unlikely that a hack would be sustainable on a large scale -- in part because our election system is such a mess and is handled differently from state to state. And, as Ed Snowden himself pointed out, hiding such a hack would be quite difficult. But with Trump refusing to say if he would concede, and talking up how the vote would be rigged, combined with false stories that made the rounds incorrectly claiming that George Soros owned a company that was making millions of e-voting machines, it seemed like a recipe for disaster if Trump lost and his supporters started insisting that the voting machines were hacked.But, of course, everything is upside down this year. Trump won... and now suddenly some Clinton supporters are arguing that e-voting machines may have been hacked . Now, to be clear, I wouldn't even bring up this story at all under most circumstances. Even as I don't trust e-voting machines, stories ofhacked elections tend to be the kind of thing that conspiracy theory kooks pass around, rather than anything substantiated in any real way. What's giving some people pause this time around, is that one of the people claiming that the votes in some states may have been hacked is J. Alex Halderman.Halderman is legit. He's basicallyguy who studies how hackable e-voting machines are. We've been writing about Halderman since he was just a Princeton student, and hacking DRM systems. But he's been hacking e-voting machines for almost as long. And he's really, really good at it. Remember the story of the e-voting machine that was reprogrammed to play Pac-Man? That was Alex Halderman That said... this story still seems unlikely. The NY Mag story on it is woefully lacking in detail:But... it's not clear this holds up under much scrutiny. Perhaps Halderman and voting rights expert John Bonifaz have more details on what they found, but as Nate Silver noted , a more rigorous statistical look at the data -- controlling for education and race -- seems to make the statistical anomaly disappear.A big claim of actual vote rigging via e-voting machines would need a tremendous amount of evidence to be believable, no matter who won. So far, it doesn't seem like there's enough proof here, even if someone as respected as Halderman is involved in making these claims. But the fact that he is involved at least makes it worthy of further scrutiny.But..., can wefinally get people to realize that e-voting machines without a verifiable paper trail are a disaster and should have no place in any election system? We'd all be better off if there wasn't even a question of hacked voter machines.

Filed Under: alex halderman, donald trump, e-voting, election, hillary clinton