Following Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the presidential election, voter security experts began privately discussing their concerns about whether the results might have been tampered with, according to John Bonifaz, the founder of the National Voting Rights Institute. The election had taken place against a backdrop of warnings from the US government that Russian hackers were “scanning and probing” the election systems of American states, and were behind the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Eight days before the election, the White House had used an emergency hotline to warn Russia against further interference. “I was getting calls from members of the election integrity community, so I joined them and began looking at possible discrepancies myself,” Bonifaz said in an interview. Several concerns emerged. Trump appeared to have performed particularly well in Wisconsin counties only using electronic voting. There seemed to have been a sharp increase in the number of ballots cast in Michigan that left the presidential field blank. Electronic voting systems had briefly faltered in one North Carolina county on election day.
… Though most agree that voter fraud is possible, experts disagree about its extent in the 2016 presidential election. J Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science of the University of Michigan, has been one of the leading voices claiming that there is sufficient evidence of fraud to justify a recount. Halderman provided an affidavit in the formal petition for a Wisconsin recount in which he said “one explanation for the results of the 2016 presidential election is that cyberattacks influenced the result”. Halderman elaborated on his views in a Medium post published on Saturday: “America’s voting machines have serious cybersecurity problems.”
Other experts have taken a more cautious view. Writing about a possible recount in USA Today on 18 November, Ron Rivest and Philip Stark, both advisers on the US Election Assistance Commission, said: “While there is, as yet, no compelling evidence, the news about hacking and deliberate interference makes it worth finding out.”
Polling suggests that most of the American public accepts the vote results. A total of 18% said that they did not believe Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2016 election, according to a survey published by the Washington Post and ABC News on 13 November. The poll, which was based on the responses of only 865 adults, found that the view was most common among Clinton supporters (33% of whom said the result was not legitimate) and least common among Trump supporters (just 1% of whom said that Trump was not the legitimate winner).
Those numbers suggest a reversal of attitudes prior to voting day when many Trump supporters were claiming that the election would be rigged. There were more than 600,000 allegations of vote rigging in the two weeks to 2 November, according to analysis by the thinktank Demos for Mashable. The accounts associated with those tweets were largely either Trump supporters or conspiracy theorists, according to Demos. On 9 November, claims of vote rigging fell by almost 90%.
Full Article: US election recount: how it began – and what effect it could have | US news | The Guardian.