gracchusdixit

Donald Trump held a press conference today, the first in more than six months.  Like everything else Trump has done since he announced his candidacy eighteen months ago, it was a disgrace and a travesty—an act of political theatrics designed to aggrandize himself, to distract attention from his innumerable conflicts of interest, and to intimidate anyone who dares to question or oppose him.

His plan to “isolate” himself from his business interests is a sham.  His claim, once again, that an ongoing IRS audit prevents him from releasing his tax returns is an outright lie.  His attack on news organizations like CNN and NBC is nothing less than an attack on the First Amendment.

To anyone who questions the legitimacy of the 2016 presidential election results, let alone the legitimacy or fitness of Donald Trump himself, Republican politicians, pundits, and  propagandists declaim:  “Get over it!”

Mitch McConnell has dismissed such people as “sore losers.”  Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, Trump’s most slavish and obsequious sycophant, has dubbed them “whiners.”  And Kelly Ann Conway, the Joseph Goebbels of our new Führer, has declared, “We didn’t need Wikileaks to prove that Hillary Clinton was unpopular,” as if that (even if it were true) somehow justifies the actions of Julian Assange and his Russian handlers.

Even those on the right who are prepared to concede the now all but certain fact that Vladimir Putin intervened in the election to tip the scales in Trump’s favor insist there is “no evidence” that Russia manipulated the vote count itself.

In a strictly limited and literal sense, that assertion may be true.  In a far more consequential sense, however, it is a dangerous falsehood—which undermines our democracy and risks normalizing the most abnormal election in our history.  The consensus report of our intelligence agencies, released just days ago, states:

Russian intelligence accessed elements of multiple state or local electoral boards.  Since early 2014, Russian intelligence has researched US electoral processes and related technology and equipment.

The report goes on to say that “the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying.”  That would be a reassuring qualification—except for several complicating facts.

One is that our “vote tallying” mechanisms are hopelessly complex and, in many cases, antiquated, vulnerable, and suspect.   The only way to verify questionable “electronic” results is to compare them with paper ballots, but 14 states do not use paper ballots, and many others use odd combinations of electronic and paper voting, which cannot easily be audited or verified.

Another complication is that merely three companies manufacture our electronic voting machines.  All are owned by major GOP donors—a conflict of interest that is inherently suspect.  Worse yet, the largest of these companies, Diebold, manufactures machines that have repeatedly been revealed to be vulnerable, unreliable, and easy to manipulate.

Still another complication is that the results of the 2016 election have not been verified by any objective, non-partisan third party.  The Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, tried to get an “audit” of the results in the three swing states that gave the Donald Trump his electoral college victory: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  Stein succeeded in Wisconsin but was stopped in Michigan and Pennsylvania.  By all accounts, Pennsylvania, where Trump had his biggest margin of victory, has the most decrepit, unreliable, and “hackable” voting mechanisms in the country.

Trump’s total margin of “victory” in these three states, spread out over 222 separates counties, each of which was allowed to audit and verify election results in its own way, was a mere 78,000 votes—less than one tenth of one tenth of one percent of the total national vote.  To imagine that such an outcome was impervious to manipulation is fantastical.

Finally, there is the fact that countless academic studies have exposed the flaws in our system.  To quote one of the leading experts in the field:

America’s voting machines have serious cyber security problems.  This isn’t news.  It’s been documented beyond any doubt over the last decade in numerous peer-reviewed papers and state-sponsored studies by me and by other computer security experts.  We’ve been pointing out for years that voting machines are computers, and they have reprogrammable software, so if attackers can modify that software by infecting the machine with malware, they can cause the machines to give any answer whatsoever.  It doesn’t matter whether the voting machines are connected to the Internet.  

The author of these words goes on to point out that the local boards and committees that oversee our elections lack the knowledge, technical skill, or resources to detect, let alone prevent, the corruption and manipulation of their vote tallies by even moderately sophisticated “attackers.”  He does not claim that such attacks occurred.  He merely states that such attacks were feasible and that no adequate defenses exist to prevent them.

Given these facts, given what we know about Russian actions and intentions, given what we know about the unseemly and cozy relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, is it reasonable or responsible to dismiss the possibility that Russia hacked this election?  I think not.

The only way to get to the bottom of this possible scandal is to conduct a true forensic investigation, state by state, county by county, vote by vote.  The reason there is “no evidence” for the direct manipulation of this election by the Russians is that nobody has looked for it.  And thanks to the partisan scheming of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, it is unlikely that anyone ever will.  Until, or unless, such an investigation occurs, we must never, ever, “get over it.”  Given what we know, it is up to Donald Trump to prove that he is the legitimate 45th President of the United States.  That case has yet to be proved.