This “Hacking” Stuff Has All The Makings Of A Classic Conspiracy Theory

It’s certainly possible that nefarious foreign agents, such as Russians, hacked into municipal voting systems across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania with amazingly meticulous precision so as to tip the election to Trump, their favored candidate.

To pull off this feat, they would have had to craftily align their hacking endeavor with broader demographic trends — Trump’s surge among rural white voters was consistent across the Midwest and Northeast, i.e., the same trends evident in Wisconsin were evident in neighboring Iowa. They would have also had to comport their staggeringly sophisticated hacking operation with polling data, which showed that the race had narrowed significantly in the final two weeks.

They also would have had to significantly up their game compared to previous hacks. Whereas hacking John Podesta’s gmail account required obtaining his password through a standard “phishing” email, manipulating voting results in the aforementioned three states to perfectly accord with both polling data and nationwide demographic trends would’ve been an enormously complicated effort. (And the notion that Russia was responsible for the Podesta and/or DNC hack is still only speculation. It has never been definitively corroborated — just asserted by the chronically-wrong US “intelligence community.)

Furthermore, if you intend to shift a US presidential election via hacking, it’s not like you need only to gain entry to one solitary “US Voting Database” — rather, you need to hack some combination of municipal, county, and state systems, all of which use different methods of tabulation and record-keeping.

It also would’ve been highly impressive if the Russians managed to even hack Michigan, which uses paper ballots only statewide. This is the very type of vote-management method recommended by top security experts, including the one referenced in Gabriel Sherman’s inflammatory and debunked New York Magazine article, which spurred much of the recent frenzy over potential “recounts.” (I’m not even going to link it here, because it was obviously clickbait.)

It’s possible that a “recount” would overturn the present result and win Pennsylvania for Hillary. It’s also possible that a golden unicorn could crash through the ceiling of the Waffle House I’m currently writing this in. Anything is possible.

It’s possible that Jill Stein wants to “recount” the three states that won the election for Trump, and not New Hampshire, for perfectly innocuous reasons. Hillary’s margin of victory in New Hampshire was lesser than Trump’s margin of victory in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, but it’s certainly possible that she’s excluded it from her fundraising appeal for reasons that are entirely valid.

It’s possible that Hillary Clinton, who has been running for president since literally 2006 and possibly her entire life, has seen convincing evidence of Russian hacking and chosen not to pursue any remediative action. Sure. That’s possible. It’s also possible that I could find a million dollars in a knapsack behind a dumpster at this Waffle House.

I generally like Jill Stein, but come on. What’s she’s advocating for here wouldn’t even produce any kind of forensic “audit,” which I’ve seen some people calling for. What she’d do is trigger state laws which would mandate that recounts be carried out in these states. Doing a “recount” isn’t the same as doing a “forensic audit.” It varies by state, but those two things aren’t synonymous. Even if Kremlin mega-geniuses did somehow pull off this improbable feat, there’s no assurance that a “recount” — conducted by a bunch of minimally-trained election workers — would uncover evidence of their malfeasance.

By the way, Michigan is already “certified” after an informal “recount,” and the outcome is that Trump has won. The result would have to be overturned in each of these three states for Hillary to secure an Electoral College victory. Two out of three would not be good enough — she’d need all three.

I guess the legions of passionate pro-Clinton voices out there want an extravagant multi-state recount anyway, which is fine. Let them have it. The worst that could happen: election workers in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania get a nice holiday cash bonus.