How was the 2016 election fixed?

In 2016, right after 50% of the votes were in in some of the swing states that Trump ended up "winning" by very small margins, there were sudden changes in vote counts where he surged. The same thing happend in Florida. The big cities which are heavily Democratic always come in later. These states ALL broke that pattern. The Russians flipped votes in 2016.

They tried to do it again this year but there were too many variables with the mail-in ballots and the early voting. They didn't go hard enough in certain areas and overcompensated in other places. Honestly, I think this year, they mainly played with the Senate races. McConnell, Tillis, Graham, and Collins "winning" need to be looked into. They couldn't fuck with Georgia this week. Too much attention on one state.

Now that the Dems are in charge everywhere again, the actual evidence of the tampering will come out. Remember the "Russia only infiltrated ten states" turning into "Russian infiltrated all 50 states voter rolls"? That's what they let out. Can you imagine what these criminals were hiding? And, we'll have actual evidence and numbers, not just Rudy Guiliani's runny hair proclaiming nonsense.

Miss OP, we've moved on.

I believe R1 is correct, (except, perhaps, the last paragraph).

Check out the twitter feeds of Jennifer Cohn and Allison Greene. For the last four years, they've been posting lots of specific information about the voting patterns, and the specific voting machines in various states....Harry Reid also discussed it.... check out the books written by Malcolm Nance and Sarah Kendzior which explain how Russia did it and how long it had been planned.

Trump went into great detail about how he thought this one was rigged. Talking about chips and clicks and flips. Really, it's as if he was projecting. Repugs must have feared he'd be a loose cannon and tell all their secrets.

Russian hackers only had to flip Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota and it was over.

In 2016 Putin wanted to punish Hillary for planting the seed of doubt in Russian minds about their own rigged elections, causing protests and demonstrations.

In 2020 he couldn't care less.

According to DL, voting machines are easily manipulated in order to change the result. At least that was the prevailing thought from the morning of November 9th , 2016, up until around November 4th, 2020. At the latter time, there appeared to be a 180 degree turn from that belief. It's not clear what could have caused such a drastic change in DL orthodoxy.

[quote] Why didn't they rig this one then?

Look up Christopher Krebs, the chief of CyberSecurity. He made sure each voting machine carried a paper ballot. Every vote had a paper receipt.

OP is a fat, ugly False Equivalence Troll who is a toxic by-product of a failed abortion who is loved by no one, not even her own mother.

Bump

R5, they did cheat in 2020, too. Unfortunately for them, they couldn't change the mail-in ballots. But, nice try at the equivalency. I'm sure some day you'll get something right in your life but today's not that day.

No one belived us in Ga when we tried to tell them that we were not voting for these corrupt politicians. All of our elections were stolen by the GOP. People ridiculed us, calling us stupid people who should die. They all do it. For decades.

I don't think there's a claim that the election was fixed in the sense that voting machines were hacked and their tallies changed. It was mostly a social media disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Russian government, which fed right wing prejudices that were already there and probably helped sway a few thousand people to change their vote, or to vote for Trump when they otherwise wouldn't have voted at all. That's all it took in those close swing states. Clinton may very well still have lost without Russian influence, and it's probable that Comey's stunt regarding the email server right before election day was the bigger blow, coupled with the BS way the media played up Clinton's supposed health issues.

Homegrown Republican attempts to suppress the vote by purging voter rolls, etc, are in my opinion far worse than anything the Russians pulled.

I don't think there's a claim that the election was fixed in the sense that voting machines were hacked and their tallies changed. It was mostly a social media disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Russian government, which fed right wing prejudices that were already there and probably helped sway a few thousand people to change their vote, or to vote for Trump when they otherwise wouldn't have voted at all. That's all it took in those close swing states. Clinton may very well still have lost without Russian influence, and it's probable that Comey's stunt regarding the email server right before election day was the bigger blow, coupled with the BS way the media played up Clinton's supposed health issues.

Homegrown Republican attempts to suppress the vote by purging voter rolls, etc, are in my opinion far worse than anything the Russians pulled.

It isn't inconceivable to think they were successful in the 3 states that gave Trump the EC win.

......................

The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded Thursday that election systems in all 50 states were targeted by Russia in 2016, an effort more far-reaching than previously acknowledged and one largely undetected by the states and federal officials at the time.

But while the bipartisan report’s warning that the United States remains vulnerable in the next election is clear, its findings were so heavily redacted at the insistence of American intelligence agencies that even some key recommendations for 2020 were blacked out.

The report — the first volume of several to be released from the committee’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference — came 24 hours after the former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III warned that Russia was moving again to interfere “as we sit here.”

While details of many of the hackings directed by Russian intelligence, particularly in Illinois and Arizona, are well known, the committee described “an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure” intended largely to search for vulnerabilities in the security of the election systems.

R12 I think purging if the voter rolls was key to the win in 2016. Yes, Russia hacked into our voting systems, but I don’t think they were anticipating Trump winning in 2016. It was a perfect storm due to foreign election interference, the Comey Letter and voter disenfranchisement.

GA 2020 shows us what is possible when you counter voter suppression - it IS probable to beat back over fraud and corruption. Hence all the repub challenges - if the code is cracked, they know they can no longer win.

The Electoral College is a rigged system that gives undue weight to Deplorable red states with almost no residents. It was designed to protect slavery for small states when the Constitution was written.

That makes presidential elections legally rigged.

Donald Trump has never won the popular vote which means he’s always been democratically illegitimate.

Glad no one bit to this stupid lame troll’s thread. 15 posts LOL

"The big cities which are heavily Democratic always come in later. These states ALL broke that pattern."

Same for Ohio in 2018. At 8pm many Democrats were winning. By 10pm almost none of them were. Surely the last to be tallied would have been the hugely-populated liberal/minority metro areas of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton and Toledo.

The Russiapublicans have been hacking Florida and Ohio for decades.

OP, did you run out of 2015 threads to bump?

What other threads will you start, OP, in order to generate what you hope to be a lot of traffic on them and push the insurrection threads further down?

And in 2000, using the same tactics.

The American press is complicit.

r19 Maybe a few Brenda Vaccaro threads and one or two about Susan Saint James.

r19 found me out! I've spent the whole election cycle posting Brenda Vaccaro threads on various websites to repress democratic ideals! Damn.

Bump

Hillary was in bed with the Russians in 2016.

This just in:

There's a bill that's been sitting on McConnell's desk for some time, regarding election integrity. It never got brought to a vote. I wonder why?

The danger of Trump's disinformation campaign was that it misdirected and suppressed legitimate questions of how Graham, Cruz, Collins et al actually won.

didn't know how the election was stolen in 2016 until the Republicans gave away the game plans with their lawsuits and accusations in 2020. Their fraud goes back to 2000.

fucked up the USPS with the aim of election fraud, pulled mailboxes off the streets and mailsorting machines out of service.

[Quote] How? By the Russians?

YES !!!!!!!!!!! Vlad hates Hillary and did whatever he could and he won!

Type "fraud" into the search bar with the subject option checked. There are a lot of threads.

There are two fraud schemes being alleged by Trump and his allies, which were perpetrated by Republicans and Democrats depending on the locality.

1. Dominion Voting Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems- these are the algorithms. This is the same fraud scheme the Democrats were accused of engaging in during the 2016 primary against Bernie Sanders (if you can remember the Pre-Trump Era.)

Voting machines are illegally calibrated to send a certain percentage of ballots to adjudication (a process normally reserved for ballots that are damaged during handling by election clerks. Clerks copy the ballot onto a fresh sheet and destroy the original.) The FEC allows for a maximum of .004% of ballots to be adjudicated in an election for it to be legally certified. In areas of Michigan upwards of 65% of ballots cast on Dominion Machines were ajudicated.

The algorithm comes into play here because it can select a certain percentage of Trump or Biden votes to ajudicate- or select by any candidate. It can also tabulate votes by a ratio, and there have been forensic studies done in Michigan and Georgia suggesting a ratio was used in certain areas.

2. Absentee ballot fraud and ballot stuffing.

This is the controversy over universal mail-in voting. Millions of ballots were sent out unrequested to addresses listed on voter rolls which are usually years out of date. You are likely listed at multiple addresses on your state voter roll, but are only registered at the address you apply for your registration with.

Safeguards to ensure against fraud like signature matching, checking registration status, and witness signatures were almost ignored in many states.

The anonymity of absentee ballots also allows ample opportunity for ballot stuffing. Realize while counting that your candidate is going to lose?

Announce that you're stopping for the night, send election observers and media home, and then truck in extra ballots in the dead of night to cover the difference. This allegedly happened in Atlanta, Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, Madison, Minneapolis, Raleigh, Charlotte, and Richmond.

How the Russians did it in 2016, to answer OP's question, was a highly sophisticated, multi-pronged effort that included everything from machine hacking (the simplest, in all actuality) to molding public perception through disinformation, lies, confirmation bias, and funding of domestic groups to facilitate same. The US was in the perfect position for Putin to impact the outcome of 2016: his hatred of Hillary was only equaled by the rightwing cabal that has been out to destroy all things Clinton since Bubba beat Poppy with an assist from Perot in 1992; as SoS, Hillary focused on Putin and Russia's elections with laser-like accuracy (remember, she was [italic]very[/italic] vocal about Putin's manipulation of Russia's elections; it makes sense that Putin interfered in her's); and, Putin built Trump to position him as an asset, so when Trump announced he was running, it was manna from Heaven.

Putin and his oligarchs funded so much of what Republicans did throughout 2016 that it was obvious what was going on. The NRA alone was a large enough cash pipeline. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell were caught on tape discussing how to hide Russian money in political campaigns, and the NRA provided the means. There is substantial evidence that the NRA was complicit, knowing full well that what they were doing was dangerous and if caught would mean the end of their organization. And now, we have the chance to see that through via NY's suit against the NRA. Let's hope that they aren't able to slither to Texas and reform under a new organization, bankrupting the existing NY structure and leaving them unaccountable.

Then there's the troll farms, Russian media, and Facebook's complicity with those efforts. If nothing else about 2020 was made clear, it should be that social media has far, far too much power. Democrats enjoyed it when Twitter, fb, Google, and Amazon finally banned Trump (which, to be clear, was not done out of the goodness of their hearts, but more due to their bottom-line financial worries) and now that the world is aware that anyone's voice can be silenced, the Republicans and far right will use it as a weapon if no guardrails are installed.

And let's not forget that it was the Russians who hacked the DNC servers and turned over the data to Wikileaks to publish, which in turn, put Hillary's emails on the front page of the NYT every day for months on end, and gave Comey cover for stepping into the election 10 days out.

In the end, the 2016 election was the perfect storm. Everything came together for Putin to achieve his goal: Hillary is never going to be in the position again to have any power, and specifically, power over Putin. After spending 50 years harping on Russia, it laid bare the real Republican agenda which is, of course, power at any cost, when Republicans flipped their position and suddenly Russia was no longer the threat that Mitt Romney pointed out in 2012. There were simply too many people around Trump that have been shown to have ties to or affiliations with Russia to not seriously consider the events of 2016 with an eye toward proving Russian interference. For example, Russia wanted Manafort to be involved with the campaign, and within a matter of weeks of him being named head of the campaign, the sanctions and language regarding Russia were removed from the Republican platform. And, of course, the Republicans had no platform at all in 2020.

I wish we wouldn’t go down these rabbit holes when we don’t have evidence or reasonable attempts to collect it. It turns into wacky conspiracy theories. For example, in the middle of r33’s epic post, he conflates emails released from the Wikileaks hacking of the DNC server with Hillary’s voluntarily surrendered emails from her private server.

Comey’s release ten days before the election was about discovering emails on Huma Abedin’s computer after her scumball husband was arrested. That had nothing to do with Wikileaks.

Hillary had cankles. Kamala doesn't. Kamala wins.

It's not exactly wacky conspiracy theory to posit that Wikileak's release of Hillary's emails (which did nothing but corroborate her voluntary release) gave cover to Comey after months of daily front page breathless reporting from the NYT. Yes, the original excuse was that Anthony Weiner's laptop had Hillary's emails on it... until you remember that the FBI had [italic]everything[/italic] already, and anyone with even a basic understanding of forensics could run a comparison with what they found on the laptop to what they already had extensively scrutinized and come to the conclusion that there was nothing new, nothing unreported, and certainly, nothing worth stepping into the election 10 days out. The discovery of the emails on Abedin's computer was therefore merely an excuse.

I'd say that what you posted was falling prey to exactly what the Republicans wanted. They create this aura of impropriety around a target, and when facts and reason explain it away, they just sling more shit against the walls, knowing that eventually something will stick. Again, there was nothing on Abedin's computer that implicated or contradicted known facts, but even you, R34, point to that as justification for Comey's shenanigans.

To paraphrase Trump, there are crazy people on both sides who can't accept the results on an election.

Which I suspect was OP's point all along--to show that our Hillary Fans can be every bit as irrational at Trumpanzees.

There is a world of difference between what the Trumptards claim happened in the "most secure election in America's history" in 2020 vs. the explanation of why people believed the lies the GOP spun around Hillary for over 30 years.

Note that Hillary never claimed there was fraud, did not file 60+ bogus lawsuits, and did not suborn insurrection.

But yeah, it's just as irrational. /s

Twitter CEO Jack (can't remember his last name) donates to Tulski Garbage's campaign.

[quote]Anthony Weiner's laptop had Hillary's emails on it...

Just imagine, the FBI chose to look into the laptop of the husband of Hillary Clinton's top aide 8 1/2 days before her election.

R38, Hillary is still going around saying she was cheated out of the presidency in 2016 because of Russian interference. Don't play the innocent coy young bitch. You are none of those things.

Here's the only point that matters: pretty much EVERYONE who has claimed election irregularities is a monday morning quarterback. These are people with zero experience in election work looking for irregularities that they have no way of comprehending--or even digging further, meaning they can point to a state or a county but they're not following up their suspicions (Which are random) with actual journalism (meaning talking to the local politicians/local parties on the ground for more context).

People don't vote in states. They vote in PRECINCTS. Most have several hundred to several thousand voters, but usually under 1,000. It's the same election workers year in, year out. They live there. The voters are their neighbors. They are often affiliated with local democratic or republican politics. The local parties also make sure there are poll watchers (who are legally allowed to be there when the votes are counted up). It's easy to see bullshit on the macro/big scale. But on the ground, there aren't surprised poll workers or surprised local officials saying there's something funny about the vote counts. And they would know. Because they are involved with EVERY election. They know when they see more Biden or Trump signs from last time because often theyre the ones in charge of putting those signs in the ground (or in front of houses that requested them).

There's usually about 5-15 people involved with running a precinct. Often in both parties. Its very friendly because these people are neighbors, work a grueling 15 hour election day together and do it two times per year (or more). There's no huge surprises when the votes are counted. Because they've seen who showed up to vote during the day (and party affiliation usually is listed on the rolls).

Kentucky has a Democratic governor. He's the former Attorney General of the state. His dad was governor too. You think if Mitch McConnell was stealing votes he wouldn't have fifty Democratic officials on the phone claiming something weird was up? (And McConnell, a billionaire due to his wife, wouldn't need to steal an election--its never a real race and he knows it).

This brings back so many bad memories from that post-election time. It was appalling and bewildering. The only thing that pulled me out of it was the Trump-Russia collusion. Then the impeachment. Then the Covid circus. Then his spectacular election loss. Then his impeachment.

I'm okay now.

R33 Great post and explanation. Thank you.

Couple things: You mention Russia hacking the DNC emails. Many people believe, as do I, that the Russians successfully hacked the RNC emails as well. Why didn't they release those? I dunno. But maybe one could ask Lindsay Graham, or Mitch McConnell, or Ted Cruz, or any number of former never-Trumpers who made a sudden 180-degree turnaround and have been licking Trump's ass ever since.

Second, it's theorized that the misinformation campaign, Facebook posts, Russian troll farms, etc. were all mainly just noise and distraction. Russia's ability to hack into the voting machines in crucial states was all they needed, but the other stuff was necessary to make Trump's Electoral victory seem plausible.

The one thing that is still mystery to me is James Comey coming out the week before the election announcing the reopening of Hillary's emails investigation. The purpose was to use Comey as the fall guy when Trump won the following week, ("Oh, it must have been Comey's announcement of the emails that finally tipped the voting scales to Trump"). But who specifically got him to go out there? I truly don't believe Comey was in on it. Somehow he was used or manipulated, or maybe he thought he was protecting something. With his book and all his public appearances discussing it, to my knowledge, he has still never given a reasonable explanation of why he spoke publicly that second time. There is definitely some thing or some person he is covering up for that has yet to be revealed, (if it ever will).

Anyone have a different speculation? What about you R33?

Comey got his first job in the justice department from Ghouliani.

What no democrat is daring to discuss is how Obama fits into the whole story. How the hell wasn't he able to counter Russia's attack?

How is it that Obama's own press agent David Axelrod was constantly smearing Hillary?

How come Obama chose Comey to be FBI director. The very guy who delivered the last blow on Hillary Clinton?

How come Obama, at least initially blamed Hillary's loss mostly on her?

I know nobody dares to fault Obama for Trump, but there are things that I find very strange.

R45 I love Obama, and I miss him. But yeah, some of those questions bothered me too. And why did he host Trump at the WH just days after the election? (normally it is not until December). I thought it was intentional in a good way, that there really might have been a "deep state" and someone had hatched some brilliant plan that would get us out if this. But no.... and these past four years have been about as horrendous as I feared, just in ways I didn't expect.

Russia also infiltrated the Bernie Sanders campaign to spread discontent about Clinton. Sanders claims he was ignorant of this.

Jill Stein was also used by Putin.

[quote]Russia also infiltrated the Bernie Sanders campaign to spread discontent about Clinton. Sanders claims he was ignorant of this. Jill Stein was also used by Putin.

You can't use the willing.

R45 If I recall correctly, Obama was also made aware of Russia trying to influence/infiltrate the election but didn't do anything about it. Wasn't it said the excuse being that he didn't want people to think he himself was trying to influence the election?

One thing I can fault Obama for was allowing himself to get steam rolled by McConnell at every turn. Some say he cared too much about his own legacy and that's why he wouldn't push back or fight against Rethugs.

As much as I came to love and respect Barack Obama, there were still times his arrogance got in the way. To answer the questions: Why didn't Obama do more when he knew Russia was influencing the election? Why did he blame Hillary for her loss?

The answer to both could be that Obama was too arrogant, he let his ego get in the way. He thought his campaigning on Hillary's behalf and his own popularity were so exponentially high that in no way could the Putin-intervention be enough to derail him. He simply underestimated the power of Putin's campaign.

🙄

No need to go overboard.

It’s not even necessary to hack voting machines.

If people are overwhelmingly voting on the day of, in person, one only needs to hack less scrutinized local voter rolls.

For example, say, every fiftieth Democratic registration in select counties were “inadvertently” purged; some number of those same day voters would not follow up when told their registrations were missing or “expired” and might leave their polling places in frustration. You wouldn’t need a whole lot of these to flip a supposed “blue wall.”

In 2020, massive new GOTV efforts, like Stacey Abrams’ (bless her) and boatloads of mail in paper ballots, probably made such cheating harder.

You don't hack into voting machines prior to the election just to see if you can and not actually do it when the time comes.

bump

bothsiderism done us in.

Voter suppression is a real thing. When black voters showed up at their normal precincts in Milwaukee in 2016, they were told that their precinct locations had changed - often to another part of town, not accessible by public transportation. The black population of Milwaukee is 240,000 people. Trump won Wisconsin by 24,000. (1/10th of the number of black people in Milwaukee alone). Some people attributed Trump's win in Wisconsin to low voter turnout in Democratic strongholds.......GEE, wonder why that might have happened? Field reports about election day in Detroit in 2016 mention scores of precincts with failing voting machinery. There were estimates that as many as 75,000 votes in Detroit might have failed to be counted that election because the votes weren't recorded properly on the machines. Trump won Michigan by 11,000 votes. Are we starting to see a pattern here? I lived in Florida in the 1980s. EVERY election day, there were random police blockades of highways in black areas, checking IDs. Wonder why ?

Now, fast forward to 2020. Voting by mail in many states that freely and frequently practice voter suppression. The result? Democratic wins. Many of these states are red states and they are working as hard as they can to outlaw voting by mail, because they have seen that they cannot win except by suppressing votes.

[quote]According to DL, voting machines are easily manipulated in order to change the result. At least that was the prevailing thought from the morning of November 9th , 2016, up until around November 4th, 2020.

I remember one person going on and on and on in ALL CAPS about voting machines being rigged, but it was never a DL-wide belief.

A lot of local and state-level elections are rigged, have been for generations. It used to be something expected of all parties -- Nixon commented as a half-joke that JFK stole the 1960 election "fair and square" -- but it's really more of an old-school GOP thing these days, because years of rigging elections means enormous chunks of districts and states are entirely under GOP rule, from dog catcher to state supreme courts. We're seeing it right now in GA especially, and in other states where they're trying to outlaw voting by mail, as r55 mentioned.

Combine that with the usual voter suppression tactics and Russians changing voter registrations (they hacked all 50 states, remember?) to allow more votes to be tossed out or relegated to "provisional" forever, and you've got enough cheating to let Trump win.

Don't forget the FBI stepped in and threw the election, too. Comey tried it once in July of 2016 and it didn't take so he did it again a week before the election, at the behest of a lot of his GOP pals who said if he didn't release the letter, they would.

It's pretty simple. This idea that "hysterics think the voting machines themselves were hacked" is just strawmanning from rightwingers and contrarians.

[quote]To answer the questions: Why didn't Obama do more when he knew Russia was influencing the election? Why did he blame Hillary for her loss?

We found out later that Obama and Biden weren't told about the extent of the Russian hacking until two months after the election, when apparently all the evidence fell into place and they finally realized what the rest of us had suspected for months. Biden reportedly said in response to finding out, "If this is true, it’s treason."

We also later learned that the Russian spy network set up among the US ambassadors, many of which Obama had kicked out of the US, had embedded espionage tools into computer systems, which I don't believe anyone knew until after the 2016 election.

Sounds very much like the government thought they had fixed the problem prior to the election, then later realized they hadn't fixed anything at all. Of course, we're not going to learn TOO much about this, in part because of security reasons, but also because the government doesn't like to advertise its failures.

Simple. My candidate didn’t win = rigged. My candidate won = safest election. Usually how it works.

R57 Great post. Thank you.

[quote]We found out later that Obama and Biden weren't told about the extent of the Russian hacking until two months after the election, when apparently all the evidence fell into place and they finally realized what the rest of us had suspected for months. Biden reportedly said in response to finding out, "If this is true, it’s treason."

That sounds like Obama wasn't on top of things at all in 2016. I mean Mitt Romney knew the Russians were up to no good in 2012 and told Obama during the debates. Russia meddled in Brexit in June 2016. The coup in the Ukraine with Ynukovych happened years before and Paul Manaford and Ted Devine, both were key players for Trump and Bernie Sanders in the 2016 elections.

There were so many red flags and Obama had no idea what was going on?

How did Hillary know that the Russians were up to no good and that it was an issue (I'm the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse... and Donnie being a Russian asset)... but Obama and Biden didnt know it was THAT serious?

Bump

Great thread. I don’t think we will ever find out the truth about most of this.

I do think paper ballots saved us in November 2020

Bump

It was fixed by the 2020 election

From what I read Obama warned them but they shrugged their shoulders.

Obviously Obama knew it was serious, I don't know why people earlier in the thread think he didn't. He sanctioned Russia and tried to get a bipartisan announcement made but Mitch scuttled it.

He didn't know how bad it was, that's not the same thing as "not knowing what's going on" or "not being on top of it."

Bump

This is still topical.

[Quote] Why didn't they rig this one then?

OP They did. That's precisely why Donald feels robbed. Because HE cheated and THEY won.

Look at this way. You get all the question papers and cheat. The grades come back and you get an F. Wouldn't you feel robbed?

R70 That's a great analogy!

bump

I think Bush definitely cheated to win over Obama but was outsmarted by counter-hackers which is why Karl Rove was in utter shock live on air.

Bush and Obama were never opponents. McCain and Romney were Obama’s opponents.

Whoever R74. Can't even remember now but Rove was in shock prompting everyone to conclude they'd tried to rig election.

That was Romney. Republicans were completely shocked by his loss. Whatever they did that made sure he was winning didn’t work or was countered by the Dems, legally or illegally.

[quote]The Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election with the goals of harming the campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the candidacy of Donald Trump, and increasing political and social discord in the United States. According to the U.S. intelligence community, the operation—code named Project Lakhta[1][2]—was ordered directly by Russian President Vladimir Putin.[3][4] The Special Counsel's report, made public in April 2019, examined numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates.

[quote]The Internet Research Agency (IRA), based in Saint Petersburg, Russia and described as a troll farm, created thousands of social media accounts that purported to be Americans supporting radical political groups and planned or promoted events in support of Trump and against Clinton. They reached millions of social media users between 2013 and 2017. Fabricated articles and disinformation were spread from Russian government-controlled media, and promoted on social media. Additionally, computer hackers affiliated with the Russian military intelligence service (GRU) infiltrated information systems of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and Clinton campaign officials, notably chairman John Podesta, and publicly released stolen files and emails through DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks during the election campaign. Several individuals connected to Russia contacted various Trump campaign associates, offering business opportunities to the Trump Organization and proffering damaging information on Clinton. Russian government officials have denied involvement in any of the hacks or leaks.

[quote]Russian interference activities triggered strong statements from United States intelligence agencies, a direct warning by then-U.S. President Barack Obama to Russian President Vladimir Putin, renewed economic sanctions against Russia, and closures of Russian diplomatic facilities and expulsion of their staff. The Senate and House Intelligence Committees conducted their own investigations into the matter. Trump denied the interference had occurred, contending that it was a "hoax" perpetrated by the Democratic Party to explain Clinton's loss.

[quote]The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation of Russian interference in July 2016, including a special focus on links between Trump associates and Russian officials and suspected coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Russian attempts to interfere in the election were first disclosed publicly by members of the United States Congress in September 2016, confirmed by US intelligence agencies in October 2016, and further detailed by the Director of National Intelligence office in January 2017. The dismissal of James Comey, the FBI director, in May 2017, was partly because of Comey's investigation of the Russian interference.

[quote]The FBI's work was taken over in May 2017 by former FBI director Robert Mueller, who led a Special Counsel investigation until March 2019.[5] Mueller concluded that Russian interference was "sweeping and systematic" and "violated U.S. criminal law", and he indicted twenty-six Russian citizens and three Russian organizations. The investigation also led to indictments and convictions of Trump campaign officials and associated Americans, on unrelated charges. The Special Counsel's report, made public in April 2019, examined numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that, though the Trump campaign welcomed the Russian activities and expected to benefit from them, there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates.

Bump

It depends on which cult you belong to, OP. If you're a Blood, the 2020 election was, indeed, rigged, but if you're a Crip, as of 2020, our elections are some of the most secure elections in the world and there is zero evidence of election fraud except the mounds of evidence that the Bloods committed election fraud which implies that our elections are, indeed not secure.

But in 2016, if you're with the Bloods, then there was zero evidence of election fraud and our elections are secure. This doesn't, of course, apply to the 2012 or 2008 elections for the Bloods, unlike the Crips who insist this is, certainly the case for the 2004 and 2000 elections.

I don't understand what's so difficult to understand about this, OP. It's completely logical. Do try to keep up.