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As you read yesterday, the New York magazine reported on a group of computer scientists and lawyers who have been privately lobbying Hillary Clinton to contest the results of the electoral college in three swing states due to possible vote tampering. Today one of these scientists, J. Alex Halderman, has published an essay explaining with more detail why it is imperative to check the results of this election... and it's not just to unseat Donald Trump.

2016 has seen unprecedented cyberattacks aimed at interfering with the election. This summer, attackers broke into the email system of the Democratic National Committee and, separately, into the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, and leaked private messages. Attackers infiltrated the voter registration systems of two states, Illinois and Arizona, and stole voter data. And there’s evidence that hackers attempted to breach election offices in several other states.

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Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not. I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked. But I don’t believe that either one of these seemingly unlikely explanations is overwhelmingly more likely than the other. The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the available physical evidence — paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, nobody is ever going to examine that evidence unless candidates in those states act now, in the next several days, to petition for recounts.

To me, this does not sound like the ravings of a conspiracy theorist. Read the rest here.