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"The 2 ways Russia may have helped Trump steal the election aren't what you think"
This article is the best summary I've read so far which lays out how far and extensive Russian hacking of the election went.I've long dismissed the idea that actual votes were changed on election night since Republicans have already formalized voter suppression into law. A Russian oligarch purchasing state election software and compromised registration voter rolls ensure you're ahead of the game. "Voter suppression" was also an electoral strategy by Bannon and Cambridge Analytica, in tandem with the Kremlin's hacking of DNC political machinery.
In other words, if you can alter state voter rolls and suppress the vote through nefarious means, you don't need to change actual votes on election night since you've already compromised and manipulated the electoral process for a particular desired outcome.
The real scandal is how Republicans and their allies have managed to get away with this for long. Their intent is to contract the franchise, since the large tent of the Democratic Base is larger thus a serious threat, and unfortunately also easy to fracture.
"Friday’s indictment confirmed that hacking these voter databases was a key goal for the Russians. The criminal charges said the Russian spies obtained the personal data of some 500,000 American voters in a state that news reports have identified as Illinois. (State officials there had already acknowledged they were hacked but claimed a smaller scale of about 200,000 voters.)"
Some experts have pointed out that deleting or altering the registration files of voters could not only prevent some people from casting their ballots on Election Day but could also lead to mayhem such as long lines at polling places, causing some to give up and leave without casting their ballots. Unlike using a computer to change election tallies, there is no way to even investigate how many voters are “lost” in such a scenario.
This is how one actually hacks an election. One doesn’t change the vote count. One alters the voter registration rolls so that when you present your ID to vote, your name is not there, or your address is wrong, etc. And then a huge line forms and hundreds of people don’t vote.
Link to tweet
— The theft of Democratic analytics.
The Mueller indictment also revealed, for the first time, that the Russian hackers were able in September 2016 to break into a cloud-based system hosting data for the Democratic National Committee and thus gain access to the party’s “analytics” — i.e., the critical data that campaign strategists use to determine whether to target ads, ramp up get-out-the-vote or registration drives and send the candidate (or, in the infamous case of Clinton and Wisconsin, where to not send the candidate.)
The indictment doesn’t suggest the data was altered, nor — according to experts — would that have accomplished much. But the access could have been critical for revealing — either to the Russians, who we now know were mounting their own extensive social media campaign to aid Trump, or to any GOP campaign officials colluding with Team Putin — where to focus attention to counter the Democrats.
Remember, one of the great mysteries of the Trump-Russia scandal has been how did the so-called Russian trolls — creating divisive Facebook postings on race or immigration, or boosting Trump or third-party candidates like Jill Stein who took votes away from Clinton — know which states to target? Or perhaps more damning, did the Russians successfully convey some of the purloined analytics to the Trump campaign so it could adjust its strategy?
- The article goes on to answer this very question with evidence - the tweets by Trump officials and interviews.
The indictment doesn’t suggest the data was altered, nor — according to experts — would that have accomplished much. But the access could have been critical for revealing — either to the Russians, who we now know were mounting their own extensive social media campaign to aid Trump, or to any GOP campaign officials colluding with Team Putin — where to focus attention to counter the Democrats.
Remember, one of the great mysteries of the Trump-Russia scandal has been how did the so-called Russian trolls — creating divisive Facebook postings on race or immigration, or boosting Trump or third-party candidates like Jill Stein who took votes away from Clinton — know which states to target? Or perhaps more damning, did the Russians successfully convey some of the purloined analytics to the Trump campaign so it could adjust its strategy?
This was a highly sophisticated effort to ensure the election of Donald Trump ( or harm a potential Hillary presidency). It is like nothing we have ever seen in American politics.
This was not your run of the mill swiftboating a la Dukakis and Kerry, it was a concerted effort by rich powerful interests - the real oligarchs - to revert geopolitics to pre FDR/WW2 days - A reversion to an old world order which suits Vladimir Putin fine.
Putin wants to break up Western Alliances and create multipolarity. It would reduce the world to Russia's size - a country that can't even manage the GDP of California. Sure sanctions are partly responsible for this, but it is also the fault of Putin who suppressed any chance of Russia emerging as a powerful, prosperous democracy. Indeed, this is by design.
As Dr. Yevgenia Alba , editor in chief of The New Times, a political alt-weekly in Russia, remarked:
"[The] political regime in Russia is transforming from a personalist authoritarian regime, with a leader on top and running the show, toward a corporatist type of regime," ....For the first time, the political police have become power itself, its essence and its being. Stability is guaranteed by political-police operatives, technocrats in the bureaucracy, and violence as the primary method of governance. http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/publications/issue-briefs/the-direction-of-russian-politics-and-the-putin-factor
No country can thrive in these conditions and if the leader of such a country has dreams of being a global powerhouse, destroying alliances which pose a challenge to his supremacy would be his number 1 aim.
The wide reach of Russia's efforts to manipulate America's electoral processes, in conjunction with Republican complicity, shows how much was at stake and the numerous obstacles the Dem candidate faced. Popular narratives that 2016 was "easily winnable" are false and diminish the seriousness of Kremlin interference and Republican corruption/complicity.
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Mahalo, JHan, for all the work you put into it!
