Russian election hacking hit 39 states, attacked voter data

[pbrower2a]

This is bad -- really bad. Even without judging individual pols we can question the result.

Cheaters do not deserve the rewards of victory. The Olympic committee takes medals away from those who won the event with aid from banned chemicals.

Sure, Vince Lombardi said "Winning isn't everything -- it's the only thing!"...  but his great Packers teams won clean. Winning by cheating transforms an athletic contest from a respectable enterprise into a travesty. There can be forfeits and nullification of wins once on the books. In recent years the University of Michigan had to renounce some great seasons and titles because some of its players did not have amateur status:

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Michigan_basketball_scandal

So that's college basketball. Is the integrity of federal elections a comparative triviality?

I would like to have at least as much faith in the American political process as I have in the NCAA and the International Olympic Committee.

[pbrower2a]

tl;dc

What a useless post

39 states. Overkill. Possible foreign interference in the means by which we choose our leaders. Maybe Vladimir Putin is better than other leading denizens of the Kremlin between 1917 and 1985... but the pattern looks horrible. Maybe we have gotten complacent because of our huge military establishment... maybe we need to treat the integrity of our elections as seriously as  nations victimized by the Soviet Union in the late 1940s.

The Bloomberg article is well worth reading.  

[pbrower2a]

I previously did not think vote rigging was much of a threat because most machines were not online. I did not consider registration systems or other vulnerabilities that were online.

But one could hack other things, like voter registration. People likely to 'vote wrong' could be stricken from voter rolls and have no recourse in that election.