Russia Banned From Participating In 2018 U.S. Midterm Elections

MOSCOW—Citing the need to preserve the integrity of political cybercrime, the worldwide hacking community has officially banned Russia from participating in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. The ban comes in the wake of a doping investigation that revealed Russian hackers used massive amounts of steroids to gain an unfair advantage in influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

“This wasn’t just one or two nerds chugging Red Bull,” said Greta Holgate, one of the lead investigators. “We’re talking about a systematic, state-run distribution of illegal steroids to thousands of Siberian neckbeards.”

Holgate says the enhancements enabled Russia’s 2016 hacking team to stay awake for days in a row while infiltrating Democratic National Committee servers. Potent stimulants also allowed Russian coders to program pro-Trump Twitter bots in many different time zones and photoshop ISIS tattoos onto Hillary Clinton’s forehead well beyond the capabilities of the average human cybercriminal.

According to the ruling, individual hackers from Russia not convicted of doping may still meddle in the midterm election of any U.S. senator, but will be referred to not as “Russian hackers” but the more neutral “hackers from Russia” and, even more humiliatingly, the official records will forever show that Russia successfully swayed zero U.S. elections in 2018.