No, voting machine hackers probably didn't steal this election for Trump

Two weeks after the presidential election, a whiff of scandal is all it takes to rattle voters, even if just for a moment.

A New York Magazine article published Tuesday night indicated there was a chance hackers had broken into voting machines in Wisconsin, altering the tally just enough to tip the state in favor of Trump.

If that was true, and if Clinton somehow pulled off a win in still-too-close-to-call Michigan, and if she was somehow able to challenge the results in Pennsylvania and pull off a win there, maybe she could win the election after all.

The argument in the article might have sounded plausible to many readers at first pass. The U.S. government, after all, has accused Russia of overtly trying to influence the outcome of the election via hacking of democratic institutions and releasing of private information.

Now computer scientists had reportedly discussed a hacking-related recall in at least one state with the Clinton campaign. Surely they wouldn't have done such a thing without significant evidence of a hack?

The claim was this: Clinton performed significantly worse in Wisconsin areas with hackable voting machines than she did in areas with paper ballots. Again, on the surface, this seems alarming. But polling experts quickly took the evidence to task.

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The sources in the initial article did not initially go on record, but one of them wrote a Medium post Wednesday morning aiming to tamp down some of the initial hysteria, and clarify his views.

"You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical states," wrote computer security and privacy expert Alex Halderman. "That article, which includes somebody else’s description of my views, incorrectly describes the reasons manually checking ballots is an essential security safeguard (and includes some incorrect numbers, to boot)."

He goes on to say that, no, the election was probably not hacked. But he also says hacking into a significant number of voting machines is far from an impossibility, and raises concerns about the security of those machines going forward.

Anyone who has been interested in reading about voting machine security over the past decade knows that these machines are not exactly unassailable.

Halderman likely understands this better than just about anyone, and he uses his Medium post to advocate for paper ballots as a back-up system that is always in place to verify results of an election going forward. That's why he says he believes a recount is important -- not because of a likely hack, but because the integrity of the system is more fragile than many might believe.

"Examining the physical evidence in these states — even if it finds nothing amiss — will help allay doubt and give voters justified confidence that the results are accurate," he wrote. "It will also set a precedent for routinely examining paper ballots, which will provide an important deterrent against cyberattacks on future elections."