Do We Really Know the 2016 Results Weren’t Altered? by Josh Marshall

 
Do We Really Know the 2016 Results Weren’t Altered?
100+Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo

by Josh Marshall / 6h
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[Seminole County, Fla., Elections Supervisor Michael Ertel grabs a box of ballots during the count of 600 provisional ballots, in Sanford, Florida, Thursday, November 8, 2012. In background, Richard Siwica, counsel for Mike Clelland, the challenger that is currently leading incumbent Chris Dorworth, looks on. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/MCT)]

I wanted to go back to the Senate report on Russian hacking during the 2016 national election, specifically scans and intrusions into voting computer networks in perhaps as many as 50 states. My of us have operated on the strong assumption if not the certainty that Russian military and intelligence operatives did not actually change votes or manipulate the voting process itself in 2016. (In the latter case I refer to things like taking people off the rolls – things that are precisely changing vote totals but could affect the outcome.) I still largely hold to this view. But the report, which did not find evidence that such things happened, gave me a great deal of pause on that front.

The first point is simply this. At each stage over the last two and a half years we’ve learned that there was substantially more activity than we had been led to believe earlier. First nothing. Then a few states. Then more states. Then probably all the states and at least some where the penetration was deep enough that actual vote total changes could have been made if they wanted to. We also learn that at least some of the intrusions were successful and Russian agents could have tampered with election databases if they wanted to. This continued expansion of the verdict on what happened does not, to put it mildly, inspire a lot of confidence. Generally speaking it’s a very bad sign when the story keeps changing like this over time.

Are we really getting the full story even now? That is not at all clear to me. To be clear, I don’t mean that we’re being deceived. It’s that I have less confidence that they really know.

The report also makes clear that in many cases investigators simply don’t know what happened because they are relying on the states’ own investigations. In some cases those investigations didn’t happen or didn’t happen until long after the fact. In others it’s not clear the state authorities had the wherewithal or confidence to make a clear determination. Cyber-intrusions at this level are complex and difficult to detect. In many or most cases we’re relying on state authorities own investigations to tell the DHS and FBI whether tampering happening. It’s worth stopping for a moment and absorbing what that means. We don’t really have the US intelligence community’s take on this. We have their review of state authorities’ analysis of their own server logs and networks. It’s hard for me to look at that verdict with much confidence.

So the verdict is more we haven’t found any clear evidence of tampering rather than we investigating and determined there was no tampering.

One of the core questions in the report was why, if the Russians had done all this legwork and probing to make it possible to tamper, they didn’t actually do it. One answer of course – though there’s really no positive evidence of this – at least according to the report – is that they did tamper but we just don’t know it. But there’s another possible answer we should note.

President Obama first warned President Putin to back off his interference efforts in September of 2016. But the efforts continued – both manipulation efforts and hacking. So on October 31st Obama employed the so-called “red phone” to issue a warning to Putin that the United States would consider any efforts to interfere on election day or in the actual election itself an “act of war”.

Obama advisors and Obama himself took some credit for this after the fact, noting that such interference actually didn’t happen. Make of that what you will. Obviously quite a lot had happened by that point. But it seems at least plausible to me that this is the answer. They had laid the groundwork but didn’t do it because of those fairly dire warnings.

One other possibility is the decentralized nature of Russian operations. This isn’t a separate explanation. It’s more a fact or prism through which to understand these other theories. From the rest of Russia’s operations in 2016 we know that the whole effort was fairly decentralized and in some cases far less than coordinated. You had different arms of the Russian intelligence apparatus hacking into the same places or in some cases operations being mounted by quasi-governmental entities. A better way of looking at the whole enterprise might be to think rather than an organized plot a more general directive to make trouble, with a fair amount of initiative and freelancing being triggered by it. It seems clear that at least some of the oligarch outreach was of that sort. So possibly these were not altogether coordinated efforts and when it came to actually pulling the trigger they were reined in.

My own take on this is that it remains unlikely that any tampering with actual election results took place. Given the oddity and the extremely tight margins in critical states it is impossible not to wonder. But on balance the shifts that happened seem explainable to me in terms of real political factors and just a lot of luck. And at least for now there appears to be no evidence of actual tampering. Still, even if not, what we have found out makes me even more concerned about 2020