Last week I wrote an essay about a recent study of election fraud. I had put off reading it because it was 39 pages long and I thought it was an academic paper (it would take me several hours to wade through a paper of that length in my own subject area.) Happily, this is not the case - it is more like a piece of investigative journalism and the length is due to the large number of (well designed) graphs. And while it was not academic research, they did a good job of answering my objections as I read, which is a hallmark of good research. I highly recommend it to anyone.

The money quote for me, though, was this little gem:

...Halderman makes it clear that the risks are not theoretical. “While we were in control of these systems we observed other attack attempts originating from computers in Iran and China. These attackers were attempting to guess the same master password that we did. And since it was only four letters long, they would likely have soon succeeded.”

Go back and read that again. I'll wait.

When I first read that, my jaw nearly broke my iPad screen. In other words, while these researchers were demonstrating how to break into a randomly chosen machine, the observed not one but two unidentified foreign entities trying to guess a password so weak your grandmother would be embarrassed to use it. (It's kind of like using the word "cat" instead of even your pet's name.)

This is the tip of a pattern that I observed in the paper, but which the authors did not really comment on. Tampering appears to have been going on for years, but the interesting thing to me is how everybody seems to be doing it. They even found two apparent examples of pro-Bernie tampering.

So who does this? I have no clue and neither can anyone else. There is plenty of evidence of voter suppression by the DNC/Clinton campaign in NY and CA (and the paper touches on this a bit) but the machine tampering reminds me of those old jewel heist rom-coms where two thieves break into the museum on the same night and start bickering right away so they can get married by the end of the movie.

What we can infer I think is a kind of "playa voting", that is each hack is a kind of vote by those with the resources to fund attacks. Those "votes" overwhelmingly favoured Clinton in the primary, and that is yet another indictment of her campaign as being by and for the powerful.

I don't think we will ever prove actual tampering, however, because it is just too damn easy. We can try to follow the recommendations of paper counting, secure chains of custody and the like in the future, but it is too late for this election. Not only have the horses left the barn, but some of them may have made it to China.