DG: Because elections are run locally, it's nearly impossible to provide a truly definitive answer to that question. But it's reasonably clear that the results, beyond a reasonable doubt, were accurate. Some votes were picked up that slipped through the cracks, but they were of such a low volume as to not even contribute to a rounding error in terms of the end result.
As for how they were run, there's always something inspiring, encouraging, and humbling to watch how seriously some of our citizens take their civic responsibility.
JB: You wrote in your recent piece, Why a Recount is Important and Why Trump Should Support It: "The bottom line is simple: anywhere we use digital technology in our voting process, the results could be compromised. Therefore, we have to have a proven, practiced way of confirming the accuracy of the vote." Let's examine the first part of that statement. You say that "the results could be compromised." What do you mean by that?
DG: To answer that, I need to speak a bit more broadly about the nature of digital threats vs. physical threats. Without getting sidetracked about the illegalities or the current investigation into Russia, just consider the practical differences.
To do so, the best place to start is the Watergate break-in back in 1972. At that time, G. Gordon Liddy and the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (Nixon) decided that they wanted to perform an intelligence gathering operation against the DNC. To do so, they wanted to wiretap DNC headquarters. And to do that, they sent Virgilio Gonza'lez, Bernard Barker, James McCord, Eugenio Martnez, and Frank Sturgis to physically break and enter the Watergate complex where the DNC's headquarters was then located.
In 2016, tapping into communications between John Podesta and other DNC members involved some geeks sitting somewhere in a foreign country tapping on their computer keyboards. There was no need to travel across the world or put themselves at physical risk. In fact, there was probably no need for any of them to wear anything other than pajamas or sweatpants while sitting on a couch.
Digital attacks are so prevalent because, technically, nearly every data repository is connected to everyone else on the Internet. There are very few "air gaps," where computers exist off the grid. And since every machine is a few hundred milliseconds from every other machine, the challenge is no longer physical in any way.
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