General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Was The Election Actually RIGGED? [View all]Lee-Lee
(6,324 posts)And nobody has been able to explain to me how it could have been.
Here is why. These electronic machines don't connect to the internet at all. There is one model that has an optional ability to have a cellular modem that I found, but even on those unless the local government has that feature turned on and it paying for service for each one it's not connected at all.
That means that in order to hack the machines you need to gain physical access to the machines in every county, in every precinct you want to change totals in and have the person gaining physical access to them gain access long enough to make the changes. Some could have been changed by uploading new firmware and that would require removing the machine from storage, powering it up, powering up a laptop, putting the machine in a lb upgrade setting, uploading new firmware, testing the machine, powering it back down and putting it back in storage then repeating for every machine. Others can't be upgraded like that and would require they be taken out of storage, physically opened up, the existing firmware chip removed, a new chip put in, the machine put back together, the machine powered up for testing, powered down, packed back up and put into storage.
And those steps must be done for every machine.
That's a risky operation to do in one county.
Now, you can't make the hack swing votes more than a certain percent or it's obvious, so to swing the election requires a lot of machines in a state be hacked like this.
So you need to repeat the above steps in a lot of counties in every state you want to influence.
That would require first a large number of very skilled agents, and second a lot of luck. Breaking into hundreds of county offices and doing time consuming software or hardware updates on thousands of voting machines without anyone getting caught or any sign it happened would be almost impossible. It would be such a huge scale operation that someone somewhere would have detected something amiss.
The only other ways would be to somehow intercept vote totals sent from counties to state tabulators or change the computers used at the state levels, but that would be easily detected. The states all publish results by county and by precinct and county officials would quickly note that what was listed by the state wasnt what they sent.
Then you have the post election audits that every state does on top of that.
Based on the above, I don't think it was actually hacked. And I find it telling that people who insist it was can't tell me how it would have been done, they are just sure it was.
And I think resting the blame on conspiracy theories like this harms our cause, because it allows an easy out to avoid introspection and getting to the root causes of defeat. Because if you keep blaming the boogeyman who you can't even explain how he did it for your loss you never can change anything.