[link to index of press clippings]

From
ALTERNET

Security experts join Jill Stein's 'election changing' recount campaign


Tuesday 29 November 2016 00.02 EST
Jon Swaine in New York


More election security experts have joined Jill Stein’s campaign to review the presidential vote in battleground states won by Donald Trump, as she sues Wisconsin to secure a full recount by hand of all its 3m ballots.

Half a dozen academics and other specialists on Monday submitted new testimony supporting a lawsuit from Stein against Wisconsin authorities, in which she asked a court to prevent county officials from carrying out their recounts by machine.

Stein argued that Wisconsin’s plan to allow automatic recounting “risks tainting the recount process” because the electronic scanning equipment involved may incorrectly tally the results and could have been attacked by foreign hackers.

...

Stein, the Green party’s presidential election candidate, is working to secure full recounts in the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, ...

A petition from Stein requesting a recount was accepted by Wisconsin last Friday. ...

Wisconsin also told Stein on Monday that the recount, which was previously estimated to cost $1m, would actually cost $3.5m ...

The election took place amid warnings from the US government that Russian hackers had been detected ...

Stein’s effort to have votes recounted ... has been sharply criticized by Trump and his allies ... Late on Monday, however, a new group of academics came out in her support.

Professor Poorvi Vora of George Washington University said in an affidavit that hackers could have infected vote-scanning machinery ...

...

Wisconsin officials have said the recount must be completed by 8pm on 12 December in order for the results to be finally certified by the following day in time for a federal deadline. Fearful that hand recounts would take too long, the state’s election commission has told counties they may decide how they recount their ballots, prompting the lawsuit from Stein.

Arguing that a manual count of paper ballots was the only way to ensure there had been no outside interference, Professor Ronald Rivest of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology quoted the Russian proverb made famous by president Ronald Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”

...

Professor Dan Wallach of Rice University said it was “entirely reasonable” to suspect that a foreign adversary was capable of a sophisticated and targeted attack on the American electoral process. “They know about battleground states,” he said.

Wallach cited the US-Israeli hacking of Iran’s nuclear program to argue against skeptics who insist that voter machines cannot have been hacked because they were not connected to the internet.

...

Professor Philip Stark, director of statistical computing at the University of California, Berkeley, said that Trump’s winning margin in Wisconsin of about 22,000 could “easily be less” than the errors frequently made by the optical voting systems used in most counties, ...

“To determine whether the reported winner actually won requires verifying the results as accurately as possible, which in turn requires manually examining the underlying paper records,” said Stark, ...

The group who filed affidavits in support of Stein on Monday also included Douglas Jones, an associate professor at University of Iowa, and Harri Hursti, a Finnish expert on the hacking of electronic voter machines.