The administration of US President Barack Obama on Friday said that despite Russian attempts to undermine the presidential election, it has concluded that the results “accurately reflect the will of the American people.”
The statement came as liberal opponents of US president-elect Donald Trump, some citing fears of vote hacking, are seeking recounts in three states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — where his margin of victory was slim.
A drive by Green Party candidate Jill Stein for recounts in those states had brought in more than US$5 million by midday on Friday and had increased its goal to US$7 million, her campaign said.
She filed for a recount in Wisconsin on Friday, about an hour before the deadline.
In its statement, the administration said: “The Kremlin probably expected that publicity surrounding the disclosures that followed the Russian government-directed compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations, would raise questions about the integrity of the election process that could have undermined the legitimacy of the president-elect.”
That was a reference to the breach of the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail system and the leak of e-mails from figures like John Podesta, Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign chairman.
“Nevertheless, we stand behind our election results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people,” it added.
Supporters of Clinton have enthusiastically backed the notion of challenging the results in the three states as a last-ditch effort to reverse Trump’s clear majority in the Electoral College. They have seized on suggestions by some computer scientists that the states, which were crucial to Trump’s victory, need to manually review paper ballots to ensure the election was not hacked.
The campaign, uniting around the hashtag #AuditTheVote, has picked up momentum among grass-roots groups still mourning Trump’s victory. However, the pleas for recounts have gained no support from the Clinton campaign, which has concluded that it is highly unlikely to change the outcome.
In Michigan, Stein must wait for a meeting of the state’s Board of Canvassers tomorrow to certify the results of the Nov. 8 balloting before filing for a recount. In Pennsylvania, where paper ballots are used only in some areas, election officials said that the deadline to petition for a recount had passed, but that a candidate could challenge the result in court before a deadline tomorrow.
The recount efforts have generated pushback by experts, who said it would be enormously difficult to hack voting machines on a large scale.
In its statement the administration confirmed reports from the US Department of Homeland Security and intelligence officials that they did not see “any increased level of malicious cyberactivity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election Day.”
The administration said it remained “confident in the overall integrity of electoral infrastructure, a confidence that was borne out.”
It added: “As a result, we believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.”
However, intelligence officials are still investigating the impact of a broader Russian “information warfare” campaign, in which fake news about Clinton, and about US-Russia relations, appeared intended to influence voters. Many of those false reports originated from RT News and Sputnik, two state-funded Russian sites.
Those reports were widely circulated on social media, independent studies, including one set for release soon, have shown, sometimes in an organized fashion by groups that appear to have had common ownership. Individuals, conservative talk-show hosts and activists recirculated them, often not knowing, or apparently not caring, about the accuracy of the reports.
A study published just before the election on warontherocks.com, written by Andrew Weisburd, Clinton Watts and J.M. Berger, documented efforts by “trolls” to attack the reputations of those who challenged Russia’s activities in Syria, and to spread rumors about Clinton’s health.
The study said that an effort to track 7,000 social media accounts over 2-and-a-half years indicated that support for Trump “isn’t the end of Russia’s social media and hacking campaign in America, but merely the beginning.”
However, many people who spread false news have no connections to any foreign power, including a man in Austin, Texas, who posted a Twitter message saying that paid protesters were being bused to an anti-Trump demonstration there. Although the report quickly went viral, the buses, it turned out, were there for a corporate conference.
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