Putting the trust ahead of trustworthiness

I’ve quoted election security advocate Jennifer Cohn’s twitter feed several times, such as a recent guide on how we can protect our own vote. So it is good to see her as a guest on an episode of the podcast Gaslit Nation with hosts Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa, who are experts in authoritarianism. This episode is titled How to Hack an Election.

The episode begins with a quote from Hillary Clinton saying if this is a free and fair election the Biden Harris ticket would win. But she is quite concerned about the possibility the election won’t be free and fair. Along the way she asks, “Every American should ask him or herself, do you want a country where your president admires someone who kills, literally kills, his opposition?”

I’m quite aware that some people – the nasty guy’s base – do want a president who admires killers because they want him to do some killing of his opponents here – that being black and brown people.

Cohn said that our view of the 2016 election is confusing because we were affirmatively misled. One must follow the news carefully to determine truth from deliberate misinformation.

Even if voting machines are not connected to the internet (which allows hacking) they are programmed from computers that are. In 2016 at least two swing states that voting machines that had cellular modems connecting them to central tabulators – through the internet.

Is it better to have public trust in the election or actually have a trustworthy election? Before the 2016 election Harry Reid, who was Senate Minority Leader at the time, chose the latter. He sent two letters about election integrity to James Comey, who ignored them, as did the media. President Obama chose the former, trying to act behind the scenes while telling the public that elections are trustworthy.

Even though Obama acted (which is good) we got the nasty guy. But that lack of transparency is part of the problem now.

David Shimer wrote the book Rigged which discusses what happened in the 2016 election. Chalupa asked a question that has been asked about the authors of other tell-all books: Why are people, in this case four Obama officials, willing to talk to authors and not the public? Knowing about these things as early as possible is critical to getting them fixed.

Cohn talked about the phrase that was circulating at the time – “We see no evidence that vote tallies were changed.” The glaring bit is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It’s a CYA kind of statement.

There was an Obama team that monitored internet traffic on election night looking for things that might reflect election tampering. But there was a big hole – they monitored at the state level, not county or city level. Yeah, monitoring at the county level would be hard – there’s about 33,000 counties – and even harder at the city level.

But “we saw no evidence” morphed into “they did not change vote tallies.” And that’s magical thinking about our election system and intelligence community. We simply don’t know if vote tallies were changed. The only way we could know would be to have done a robust manual audit based on a reliable paper trail. And in many places there was no paper trail.

Kendzior and Chalupa were part of an effort to get an audit of the 2016 vote. Chalupa said that in Wisconsin they had to settle for a recount – and recounts are war with nasty guy goon squad lawyers hovering over and intimidating the counters. Recounts are not adequate for forensics of election hacking.

Democrats didn’t support the recount or audit. Cohn thinks they nay have been fooled by the nasty guy. He claimed it would be rigged. Dems overstated the security of the election system. So if they asked for a recount they would have looked like hypocrites. Cohn is afraid the same situation will recur in 2020. She sees signs that it will.

Even if those Obama officials don’t want to admit that vote tampering happened on their watch, why aren’t they, and Dems in general, on the forefront of election security, talking about modems on election machines and other issues?

Cohn talked about the 2004 election, which is even more suspicious than the 2016 election. The GOP Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, in Ohio teamed up with someone referred to as the Republican IT Guru to route Ohio’s results through a backup server owned by a GOP friendly company in Chattanooga. The main server crashed with no explained reasons. Before it crashed Kerry was winning. After the system was restored Kerry was losing. Ohio made the difference. Kerry didn’t pursue it because he knew it would go to the Supremes, who had decided for Bush four years before.

In the 2012 election it again came down to Ohio. There is a memorable scene from election night where on the set of Fox News Karl Rove had a meltdown when Ohio was called for Obama. To some observers it looked like Rove had an inside track on some situation that would turn Ohio to Romney and he was baffled when it didn’t work. Cohn speculates that a hacking group, perhaps associated with Anonymous, had thwarted the electronic meddling that Rove had planned.

They went into detail of other meddling Rove had done before 2012. That made Kendzior wonder why Democrats have been so reluctant to investigate and prosecute Rove and people like him. A lack of a transparent process of oversight, accountability, and prosecution for the guilty is digging the grave of democracy.

There is still the problem of “putting the trust ahead of trustworthiness.” But it shouldn’t be up to grass roots organizers to get the word out about how to protect the vote. There should be a central group to do that for the country.

They talked about the possibility of the news of unsecure voting depressing turnout. Why vote if it won’t be accurately counted? But a concern of hacking was perhaps one of the things that increased the turnout in 2018. Kendzior wrote:

I've been accused over and over like “Sarah said don't bother to vote because there's corruption. I'm like, no! You vote because there's corruption. You vote to try to get people in who will annihilate the corruption and you vote because it's your right and people fought hard for that right. But yeah, there's a propaganda operation. I mean, there are multiple propaganda operations and then I think just other things going on, people don't want to admit that this is possible. They also don't want to deal, I think, with the repercussions of, well, wait, what if our Congress was not legitimately elected?

What does that mean for core appointments? What does that mean for other, political appointments and policies that were voted on by what would be illegitimate actors? I mean, it's just a whole can of worms. No one wants to open it. I understand that on principle, but we're at the point where we're lurching right into full flown fascism. This is the time. We've got nothing to lose. We need total honesty.

On election reporting Cohn wrote:

I think there is this irony that a lot of journalists are trained and correctly so that they don't want to report on speculative claims. So they consider the suggestion that outcomes might not be legitimate speculative. And I actually sort of–I don't agree with it really–but I can sort of see what they're saying, but what they miss is that the official results that they are reporting are also completely speculative because they haven't been verified because we don't allow that in our country and that is the story. And I think there has been headway, but the story is that we don't have a system that allows us to verify these outcomes and that's the subtle middle ground that they're missing. They think it has to be one or the other, and they are reporting on unverified claims of who won the election. That is also unverified. It's not just that the cheating is unverified, the whole thing is.

Cohn talked about the needs to make our elections secure, hopefully by November, but there may not be enough time. We need robust manual audits, including a transparent chain of custody between election night and the audit. We need meaningful paper trails, which means hand-marked paper ballots. No modems on precinct equipment, no remote access software. Paper poll books. Precinct results posted publicly so they can be photographed to compare to state tallies. We need a Right to Know about breaches, though these are tricky to avoid derailing an investigation.