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As the Post's Dave Weigel reports, most Democrats see the effort as a waste of time. And as we noted earlier this week: they're almost certainly right. A brief news article published by New York magazine on Tuesday night became a safe harbor in stormy seas for Democrats shocked by the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. In it, the magazine's Gabriel Sherman --
slayer of Roger Ailes -- outlines a conversation between computer security experts and the campaign of Hillary Clinton.
The core of the story was this:
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The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000.
And that combination of "academics," "30,000" and "27,000" was all it took for the story to rocket through social media. ...
...
That's not really the case.
Reached by email, Halderman pointed us to
a statement he'd written at Medium. It's a lengthy examination of how vote-tallying systems have been rigged or manipulated in the past, but the most important line (for our purposes) is this one:
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Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not. I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked. ...
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Sherman's article didn't provide robust new evidence that the election was hacked. What it did was provide
logical justification for thinking the election was hacked. It gave stressed-out Democrats something concrete at which they could point to say, this, this is why Clinton lost the election.
Clinton lost the election because it was close enough in those Midwestern states for her to lose. Because, as Nate Silver was noting even before Election Day, her firewall in those states was
much shakier than it was for Barack Obama. Because her get-out-the-vote operation was
not all it was cracked up to be.
She lost, in other words, because she got fewer votes where it counted. That was a surprise, and surprises can be awfully hard to accept.
