Hillary
Clinton urged to call for election vote recount in key states
Alleged
irregularities in battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and
Wisconsin prompt demands for audit amid concerns over ‘foreign
hackers’
Jon Swaine in New
York
Wednesday 23
November 2016 04.37 GMT
A growing number of
academics and activists are calling for US authorities to fully audit
or recount the 2016 presidential election vote in key battleground
states, in case the results could have been skewed by foreign
hackers.
The loose coalition,
which is urging Hillary Clinton’s campaign to join its fight, is
preparing to deliver a report detailing its concerns to congressional
committee chairs and federal authorities early next week, according
to two people involved.
The document, which
is currently 18 pages long, focuses on concerns about the results in
the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“I’m interested
in verifying the vote,” said Dr Barbara Simons, an adviser to the
US election assistance commission and expert on electronic voting.
“We need to have post-election ballot audits.” Simons is
understood to have contributed analysis to the effort but declined to
characterise the precise nature of her involvement.
A second group of
analysts, led by the National Voting Rights Institute founder John
Bonifaz and Professor Alex Halderman, the director of the University
of Michigan’s center for computer security and society, is also
taking part in the push for a review, and has been in contact with
Simons. Bonifaz declined to speak on the record.
The developments
follow Clinton’s surprise defeat to Donald Trump in the 8 November
vote, and come after US intelligence authorities released public
assessments that Russian hackers were behind intrusions into regional
electoral computer systems and the theft of emails from Democratic
officials before the election.
Having consistently
led Trump in public opinion polls for months preceding election day
in all three midwestern states, Clinton narrowly lost Pennsylvania
and Wisconsin, and may yet lose Michigan, where a final result has
still not been declared.
Curiosity about
Wisconsin has centred on apparently disproportionate wins that were
racked up by Trump in counties using electronic voting compared with
those that used only paper ballots. The apparent disparities were
first widely publicised earlier this month by David Greenwald, a
journalist for the Oregonian.
However, Nate
Silver, the polling expert and founder of FiveThirtyEight, cast
significant doubt over this theory on Tuesday evening, stating that
the difference disappeared after race and education levels, which
most closely tracked voting shifts nationwide, were controlled for.
Silver and several
other election analysts have dismissed suggestions that the swing
state vote counts give cause for concern about the integrity of the
results.
Still, dozens of
professors specialising in cybersecurity, defense, and elections have
in the past two days signed an open letter to congressional leaders
stating that they are “deeply troubled” by previous reports of
foreign interference, and requesting swift action by lawmakers.
“Our country needs
a thorough, public congressional investigation into the role that
foreign powers played in the months leading up to November,” the
academics said in their letter, while noting they did not mean to
“question the outcome” of the election itself.
Senior congressmen
including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Representative
Elijah Cummings of Maryland have already called for deeper inquiries
into the full extent of Russia’s interference with the election
campaign.
Nonpartisan experts
and academics have been in communication with Democratic operatives
and people who worked on Clinton’s bid for the White House, who are
being urged to officially request recounts in states where a
candidate may do so.
New York magazine
reported that a conference call has taken place between the activists
and John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman.
Both Podesta and the
acting Democratic National Committee chairwoman, Donna Brazile, have
privately mused about the integrity of the election result, according
to two sources familiar with the conversations.
Several senior
Democrats are said to be intensely reluctant to suggest there were
irregularities in the result because Clinton and her team criticised
Trump so sharply during the campaign for claiming that the election
would be “rigged” against him.
But others have
spoken publicly, including the sister of Huma Abedin, Clinton’s
closest aide. “A shift of just 55,000 Trump votes to Hillary in PA,
MI & WI is all that is needed to win,” Hema Abedin said on
Facebook, urging people to call the justice department to request an
audit.
Alexandra Chalupa, a
former DNC consultant who during the campaign investigated links
between Moscow and Trump’s then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, is
also participating in the attempt to secure recounts or audits.
“The person who
received the most votes free from interference or tampering needs to
be in the White House,” said Chalupa. “It may well be Donald
Trump, but further due diligence is required to ensure that American
democracy is not threatened.”
According to people
involved, activists had previously urged Jill Stein, the Green party
presidential candidate, to use rules in some states allowing any
candidate on the ballot to request a review of the result. Stein is
understood to have declined, citing in part a lack of party funds
that would be required to finance such a move.
In a joint statement
issued last month, the office of the director of national
intelligence and the department for homeland security said they were
“confident” that the theft of emails from the DNC and from
Podesta, which were published by WikiLeaks, was directed by the
Russian government.
“Some states have
also recently seen scanning and probing of their election-related
systems, which in most cases originated from servers operated by a
Russian company,” the statement went on. “However, we are not now
in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian government.”
Asked on Tuesday
whether the agencies had confidence that the election itself had been
secure, a spokesman for the office of the director of national
intelligence said: “Our colleagues at the department for homeland
security are best positioned to address this.”
A spokesman for the
department for homeland security, however, did not respond to
requests for comment.
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