CPRC at National Review: “Hack Journalism about an Unhacked Election”

Dec 2, 2016 | Featured

 

Dr. John Lott has this new piece at National Review:

With the presidential-vote recount under way in Wisconsin, hopeful leftists would have us believe that the Russians, or some other unknown entity, hacked electronic voting machines in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. (Michigan doesn’t use electronic voting; it is being included in the recount efforts because Wisconsin and Pennsylvania alone wouldn’t take enough electoral votes from Trump to swing the election. Trump won Michigan by only about 11,000 votes.)

Ironically, after the 2000 election, which revealed deficiencies in ballot design and counting procedures in Florida and elsewhere, Democrats almost uniformly wanted to force states to spend billions of dollars on electronic voting machines. Now those electronic voting machines are being blamed for what Green-party presidential nominee Jill Stein calls last month’s “hack-riddled election.” Never mind that Stein and her Democratic allies, including the Clinton campaign, admit they have no evidence of vote fraud or hacking in this year’s vote.

conspiracy theory started with a report in New York magazine that a group including “voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz [a longtime leftist activist] and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. The group is so far not speaking on the record. . . . ” (When Halderman finally did go on the record, he said that the U.S. election was “probably not” hacked and he had no evidence that it was.) Fanning the flames were people such as Edward Snowden, who explained on Twitter how an electronic voting machine can be hacked for as little as $30.

All the scary stories about electronic voting have one major problem: They are based on an inaccurate understanding of how electronic voting systems work. First of all, none of the systems are hooked up to the Internet. Electronic voting machines are stand-alone units; results from them are recorded and compiled by humans. Hacking them from Russia would be as difficult as hacking into your computer when it’s not connected to the Internet. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

johnrlott

1 Comment

  1. Gerry

    The only vote fraud is using the ill conceived and out dated electoral college. Get rid of it.

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