Clinton To Challenge Election Results? Campaign Chair Holds Teleconference With Activists Urging Her To Do So


According to a new report from New York magazine, former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is being pressed by activists to challenge the results of the November 8 election she lost to Republican candidate Donald Trump.

“Hillary Clinton is being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump,” Gabriel Sherman writes in the New York article. “The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.”

Sherman says the activists have not publicly spoken on the record about their suspicions but have instead been lobbying the Clinton camp behind the scenes in an effort to get them to contest the results.

At least some members of the Clinton campaign are entertaining the possibility, including some very high-ranking members, such as campaign chairman John Podesta.

Last Thursday Podesta and Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias held a conference call with the activists and academics investigating the potential rigging of electronic voting machines in three key swing states.

“The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots,” Sherman explains, for an example. “Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000.”

The group acknowledges they have not found any hard evidence of hacking or other corruption of voting machines. However, they believe “the suspicious pattern merits an independent review,” in Sherman’s words.

This election cycle, like others in the past, has been wrought with allegations, suspicions, and fears of voter fraud and election rigging.

Considering the role that hacking played in numerous stories throughout the election, it’s no surprise that there are lingering doubts and anxieties about the results.

On October 7, just over one month before the election, the U.S. government officially accused Russia of hacking into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network in order to “interfere” with the elections, The Guardian reported at the time.

“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” the office of the director of national intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced in a joint statement quoted by The Guardian.

It doesn’t help matters that nearly every pollster, including stats guru Nate Silver, seems to have gotten the numbers all wrong.

Silver’s site FiveThirtyEight gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning going into Election Day.

There are others, such as Bill Palmer of The Palmer Report, who have also suggested that the election numbers just don’t add up. Palmer’s rundown of all the things he considers to be fishy about the election results has been widely circulated on social media, but, as with the activists pushing Clinton to challenge the results, there is little evidence in his findings. He relies primarily on hypotheticals and ifs.

There could be something to the allegations, but if there is, nobody has found it yet.

That doesn’t mean our elections are safe or that we shouldn’t raise questions about them.

As Bruce Schneiera wrote in a New York Times piece the day after the election, “American elections will be hacked.” If it didn’t happen this time, it will eventually happen.

“While we may breathe a collective sigh of relief about that, we can’t ignore the issue until the next election. The risks remain,” Schneiera warned. “As computer security experts have been saying for years, our newly computerized voting systems are vulnerable to attack by both individual hackers and government-sponsored cyberwarriors. It is only a matter of time before such an attack happens.”

Until then, we’ll all have to wait and see how the Clinton campaign responds to these new calls to challenge the election results. Clinton would have to win all three of the states in question — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania — in order to change the overall election results.

[Featured Image by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]

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