Over the years, we have often read of elections being “tampered with” in far off countries. 

What comes to mind, at least for me, when I hear of such things is that actual vote counts are altered, i.e., vote counts are physically changed by doing such things as “stuffing” ballot boxes or outright destruction of ballot boxes so as to change vote totals. And now we get to be the focus of such concerns as our intelligence agencies are “highly confident” that Russia has tampered with our presidential election to favor Donald Trump. This sounds like actual vote counts were altered, say in places like Wisconsin, where Trump surprisingly won a narrow victory. 

Trump unexpectedly won several states by very small margins, and maybe the Russians somehow changed actual vote totals in some of those states. As an American, my main concern was – did Russia actually somehow hack into our election vote counting systems and change vote totals? That would be scary, indeed. Last week we finally heard from the U.S. intelligence community as to their opinion. In a Wall Street Journal story on Friday, they devoted 38 inches of column space to the story. Finally, in the next to last paragraph the story said that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper “emphasized that there was no information to suggest that Russian hackers changed vote tallies or interfered with voting systems.” That strikes me as a pretty central finding. 

Maybe the Russians did release some embarrassing Clinton campaign emails, which maybe had some impact. But hey, our own FBI released statements about Clinton’s email server that probably influenced the campaign, too. That’s not to dismiss what the Russians did (if they did do it), but I don’t see it as a national emergency.

Edward Wolfe

Bowling Green