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I'll say three things about this:
I have professional familiarity with voting machine security, enough to know that most people would be horrified to realize how insecure they are.
If I were Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, I would fire my intelligence chiefs if they weren't trying to influence American elections to our advantage.
It stands to reason, therefore, that any sufficiently motivated and financed group could be (and has probably at least considered) trying to hack elections.
That doesn't mean it's actually happening, of course, but the concerns are not crazy moonbat conspiracy theories.
I think we'd have to be concerned with the likely motives of such actors.
I think Russia and China etc don't have much reason to care whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge - the outcomes on things they actually care about are probably within a standard deviation of outcomes regardless of which party is in charge of what. What they are likely to care about more is the overall levels of tribal division and conflict.
Low internal conflict means that anything we do or intervene in overseas is likely to be broadly supported, consistent over the long term, decently well-planned and robust against setbacks. High internal conflict means that anything either party does will be opposed by the other for tribalistic reasons if nothing else. Interventions will tend to be the opposite - inconsistent, weak, poorly-supported, poorly-planned, likely to be canceled at minor setbacks.
As such, they probably don't really care about actually hacking voting machines, except in as much as half-assed and ineffective attempts to do so reduce everyone's confidence that whoever gets elected won legitimately. They are probably much more interested in backing extreme activist groups on both sides to amp up the overall level of division. Which IIRC is pretty much all they've been credibly accused of doing.
??? That is clearly not true. Trump intends to collapse NATO and let Russia do as they wish to their neighbors. Biden doesn't.
Well, he said that at one point, but he also threatened to bomb Moscow if they attacked Ukraine. Whatever any of us might believe, it's pretty clear that Putin started planning his invasion of Ukraine right around when Biden was sworn in. Not exactly a sign that they thought Biden and the Democrats would be much more effectively tough on him. Seems more like American chaos is what they really want.
I mean you can twist this the other way too.
Perhaps Putin felt he needed to take decisive action because of the potential for Biden administration policy to make the geopolitical situation worse for Russia.
It’s possible Trump was deterring Russian aggression against Ukraine by being a bit of a wildcard and also Putin not wanting to put him in a hard place, vs. having him as about the friendliest US president he could hope for. Once Trump was out the calculus changed. Trump was also extremely unpopular with basically all of our allies, in and out of NATO, and that division was generally good for Russia.
But also they do love American chaos.
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Iran also really hates Trump and the GOP has more hardliners on Iran than the Dems.
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Disagree that 3 follows, because it being easy to hack voting machines is very different from it being easy to hack voting machines and get away with it.
Any large criminal conspiracy of this type is going to involve some idiot mooks on the ground and a lot of contact points for someone to notice something suspicious. And any small conspiracy is going to have to focus on a single point where any anomaly large enough to sing a major election will be super obvious when compared to the exit polls.
Whether the machines are 'secure' or not, I don't actually believe anyone can influence enough of them to change large national elections without getting caught.
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I was professionally involved in fending off foreign election influence/interference in 2020.
Some cases are publicly documented. Scale for influence is very hard though, and actually affecting the voting count is very, very hard. Not because the machines are all that secure, but because we have a decentralized system.
What perhaps has been effective at influence is “hack and leak”, as happened with Guccifier and was (incorrectly) suspected of the Hunter laptop.
What’s far more effective for foreign countries is not trying to affect voters directly, but instead buying good will via donations to say think tanks, universities, and pet projects of prominent politicians.
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We've seen American attempts to influence elections in other countries, something which seems to be conveniently forgotten; Obama making suggestions about what way to vote in the independence and Brexit referendums for one.
And notice how we know that fact because the evidence is really obvious.
I believe China could influence our elections. I don't believe they could do it through hacking voting machines or changing vote counts, without leaving clear evidence behind.
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Yes, exactly. Everyone does it, we all know this, we pretend to be shocked when it's suggested that we would do that and we pretend to be outraged at the suggestion that anyone else might do it to us.
Conflating a politician making an overt statement of preference, regarding the closest ally of the US, and covert influence or interference operations is not a smart way to analyze the issue of election meddling.
You seem to think I am making an argument I'm not.
I'm saying I think that Russia trying to meddle in American elections is plausible and in fact I would expect them to try.
I am not saying I believe all the various theories about how they did.
Oh I agree you weren’t making a specific claim.
They do try. I was adding some context for evaluating the types of claims that get made by both sides of the aisle.
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