Reprinted from columbusfreepress.com by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
We have no evidence at this point that the Russians, or global hackers, hacked our electronic voting machines to put Donald Trump in the White House.
But we are 100% certain our electronic voting machines have been hacked by many many others, and could be in the future by virtually anybody with entry-level computing capabilities. As the New York Times and others have reported, cyberattacks have now become an integral part of the modern landscape. A tool stolen from the very National Security Agency meant to protect us has been used to perpetrate more than 75,000 recent hacks---and those are just the ones being reported.
The evidence that our electronics-based election system is particularly vulnerable to such attacks has long been well-established. It ranges from a wide range of public vote flipping demonstrations to a computing professor using a voting machine to play the University of Michigan fight song.
But, why would you need to hack the machines if you are one of the private, for-profit partisan corporations that secretly program the computerized voting machines and tabulators with secret proprietary software? The lack of transparency with our "black box voting" means that none of our elections are truly verifiable.
In 2016 some 80 percent of America's ballots were cast and/or counted on such machines and tabulators. Many touchscreen voting machines provide no usable paper trail and render vote counts that cannot be independently verified. Scanners of paper ballots can be rigged to render dishonest counts that go undetected if the ballots are never manually audited.
Though we have no evidence of Russian hacking on our electronic voting machines in 2016, there is no doubt that they or any other hacker with an interest in the outcome could have done so if they wanted to.
Or, the private companies could have simply programmed the results
So that leaves us with one inescapable conclusion: to protect the integrity of our future elections, our entire electoral system must convert to universal hand-counted paper ballots.
It has become an issue of national security.
The entire nation is now in an uproar over Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey. We know he was investigating possible Russian involvement in our election. The Russians clearly wanted Trump to win.
During the campaign, Trump very publicly asked the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton's emails. The Russians did, in fact, hack the Democratic National Committee, releasing documentation showing the DNC hierarchy worked actively against the nomination of Bernie Sanders.
We don't yet know what else the Russians actually did or did not do, if anything, to help shape our choice of presidents in 2016.
We know further that someone hacked into the recent French elections on behalf of Marine LePen.
In an electronic era, election theft has now become a matter of a few keystrokes.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
5
5
5
