David E. Sanger Quotes
If you go in to vote, and you are no longer confident that the vote that you put in is the way it's going to get recorded because you don't know if the Russians or someone else have gotten into the voting system, that undercuts your trust in the democratic process.
Sanger, David E. Interview with Terry Gross. Fresh Air, NPR, 19 June 2018.
Although this is generally attributed to Stalin, there is no writing of his that has the quotation. So some believe that this quotation is apocryphal.
In the razor thin 2000 Presidential election the Republican controlled Florida legislator called a special session to name their own electors to go to the electoral college. The Governor, Jeb Bush, was the brother of the Republican candidate.
Zt the time he made this statement, some Russians—probably with the blessing of the Russian government—had been hacking the e-mail computers of the Democratic National Committee and making embarrassing e-mails public through Wikileaks. Many Americans were concerned at the possibility that Russia, another nation, or a non-state group could hack into the voting machines and the computers that tally the votes. This statement was made to reassure them. There are 9000 different polling places where Americans can vote in a Presidential election. There is no single entity that anyone could hack to rig the vote counts. And there is no uniformity in the voting machines used, the tabulating and aggregating methods and machines, and the software that is used to tally the vote in cities, counties and states. And no voting machines are connected to the Internet.
Without a paper trail, there is no way to audit an election to prove that there ahs not been any tamering with the vote counting, the machines that do the counting or the processes of aggregating the results of all the machines in a state ort other election district. Without a hard copy paper trail, there is no way to be certain that some of the voting or aggregating machines had not been hacked and manipualted.
David E. Sanger is the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times. A 1982 graduate of Harvard College, Sanger has been writing for the Times for 30 years covering foreign policy, globalization, nuclear proliferation, and the presidency.
