The Real Reason Trump Lost
Lithuanian street mural, “Make Everything Great Again” by artist Mindaugas Bonanu, depicts Trump and Putin locking lips outside a barbecue joint. (Photo courtesy CBS News, 2016)
Mail-in voting thwarted Donald Trump’s plans to steal the 2020 election like he did in 2016. In that previous cycle I believe Russian hackers did ply their trade to scooch him past the margin. So, while he would certainly have been a sore loser anyway, that it was Coronavirus that ultimately snuffed his chances must be particularly galling. He thought he had it in the bag. The factors that lead me to this conclusion were advanced by individuals more well-connected and technologically savvy than your humble narrator, who documents the findings (to the extent that documentation is available) below. Interestingly, it seemed that coming off the 2016 elections both the outgoing Obama administration and incoming Trump gang had a vested interest in downplaying foreign intervention.
The evidence, while not conclusory, is compelling, mainly because anyone with a passing knowledge of how the internet works can see it is eminently possible (and what Shakespeare said of love is equally applicable to corruption: what it can do, that it dares attempt. The basic premise is that our nation’s electoral system consists of a patchwork of poorly secured, internet-accessible databases, used to store, tally and transfer vote results. For the most part, individual counties maintain their own voter infrastructure. “The U.S. is characterized by a highly decentralized election administration system. The entities that do the rubber-meets-the-road functions of running an election are typically on the county or city/town level,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The more rural the county, the weaker the security, according to Franklin Foer of The Atlantic, whose insightful “Putin Is Well on His Way to Stealing the Next Election. RIP Democracy” published in June woke me to the magnitude of the threat.
Granular campaign polling data could — and I believe was, and would have been again — could be used to map target areas where the vote was close enough that artificially edging it up a bit wouldn’t raise red flags. Thus, a sort of overlay map could be curated to use as the basis for a surgically precise hack. But it only works in something approximating the heat and moment of “real time.” Which is what we had in 2016, and what Covid-19 prevented from happening in 2020, when a record 160 million people voted, according to USA Today. More than 100 million cast their ballots by mail, according to The New York Times.
Election law is set by the individual states, and in three critical battleground states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — officials are required by law to wait until “on or just before Election Day itself” to start processing early ballots, sums up CNN. As the Trump campaign was well-aware, hence the clumsy attempt to cripple vote-by-mail by the unscrupulous postal tool William de Joy. In states including Arizona and Nevada there appears to have been no legal requirement to wait to count the mail-in votes, but they seem to have done so anyway. Because it is impossible to monitor and goose-up a static mountain of mail-in votes (that while still machine-counted, are personally monitored with an attention real-time votes are not) a precision mapping of counties ripe for hacking by harvesters is impossible.
So, while there was a lot of grumbling about the slow vote counts, the analog nature of if actually protected the outcome of this year’s election. Much to Trump’s chagrin. Vote-by-mail should be institutionalized to protect our democratic process.
The Trump campaign did not engineer this scheme, but presented with it by the Putin operatives, the natural-born cheaters leapt at the chance in 2016. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, convicted of bank fraud and other crimes, was identified in an August report by the Senate Intelligence Committee as a national security threat for sharing with Russia information including polling data, according to USA Today and the Associated Press, among others. There can be no doubt the Trump campaign had hope — if not promises — of a 2020 cheat-peat.
Anyone interested in the technical aspects of the hack should read Foer’s well-reported Atlantic piece, linked above. It tells the story of Jack Cable, an 18-year-old Stanford freshman whose discovery of a hacking vulnerability apparent when he attempted to register to vote online for the 2018 mid-term. “Between classes Cable began running tests on the rest of the national electoral infrastructure. He found that some states now had formidable defenses, but many others [did not].”
Gaslit Nation is a podcast from author Sarah Kendzior and journalist Andrea Chalupa that covers “corruption in the Trump administration and rising autocracy around the world.” The duo’s September 2 interview with election security advocate Jennifer Cohn was titled “How to Hack an Election” offers valuable perspective. (Read the transcript here.) While officials emphasize U.S. voter hacking is prevented by the fact of (mostly) paper ballots, “even if the actual voting machines themselves don’t connect to the internet, they all have to receive programming before every single election from centralized county computers that themselves either connect to the internet or can connect to the internet and often do, or that receive updates and programming from internet-connected systems.” In other words, plenty of opportunity for foul play.
Cohn tips her hat to the book Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference, by David Shimer. Cohn says she “was stunned to see that four former senior members of the Obama administration told him that Russia was very much in a position to alter vote tallies in the 2016 election.” She goes on to criticize Obama for reluctance “to undermine [public] trust in an untrustworthy election system” by outing the vulnerability, at the cost “of actually having trustworthy elections.” He tried, she says, “to handle it behind the scenes.” During the interview Cohn clearly states she has never personally been presented with definitive evidence of hacking that succeeded in altering election results. But she seems to believe it has happened.
Immediately following the 2016 election David Frum wrote in The Atlantic “The evidence to support the CIA’s conclusion that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump remains mostly secret.” I don’t doubt it. Nor do I doubt that the truth will eventually come out, as Trump recedes from the nexus of U.S. political power to take his rightful place as a curiosity.
Mail-in balloting and an after-the-fact, several-days count of votes — with individual traunches conformed to final digital results, should in the interest of national security become our procedural norm. It would not surprise me if the Democrats had insight based on past events that this would help keep 2020 honest, and actively skewed things in that direction. Trump, on the other hand, miscalculated, believing his force of personality coupled with DeJoy’s postal sabotage could tilt the field to real-time. Once the election is called, the results are momentous and all-but-impossible to reverse. Any argument to do so based on hacking and fraud would be disastrous on multiple levels (as seemed to be Obama’s calculation).
So yeah, Trump was sort of “robbed” of victory – by fate, which stole his chance at an(other) illegitimate win, clearing the way for an honest victory by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. He would have been irate either way, but having it within his grasp then snatched away at the last minute like Charlie Brown’s football is much worse. Now, as CNN anchor Anderson Cooper so vividly put it, we get to watch as Trump “flails around like a turtle on his back.” No offense to turtles, but Trump is of the snapping variety, going out as nasty as he came in, with accusations it was the other side scheming to cheat and defraud. It’s like Bono wrote in the U2 song “The Fly”: “it’s no secret that a liar can’t believe in anyone else.”