Russians were able to manipulate voter rolls in Florida

[someoneyouknow]

Among the findings in the Senate Intelligence Committee Preliminary report we released this week is that during the 2016 election cyber actors were in a position to, at a minimum, alter or delete voter registration data in a number of states. #Sayfie
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) May 11, 2018​

That is what Florida Senator Mark Rubio wrote last year when he and former Senator Bill Nelson were informed by the FBI and other intelligence agencies that Russian agents were able to penetrate at least one Florida county's election rolls. In addition to having penetrated the election mechanism, the Russian agents were in a position, if they had so chosen, to manipulate that data.

Former Florida Senator Bill Nelson, had this to say on the matter:

“The Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman and Vice Chairman asked Senator Rubio and me in June 2018 to send a letter to the 67 county Supervisors of Election to warn them of Russian intrusion in Florida,” Mr. Nelson said in a statement. “The Mueller Report makes clear why we had to take that important step as well as my verbal warnings thereafter.”

It should be noted that when Nelson made the warnings before the election, Republicans immediately attacked him as being out of touch and purposefully spreading false information. They chose to attack the messenger rather than find out if this report was true, thus continuing their trend of ignoring facts.

The warning from the Mueller report was a single sentence, but spoke volumes about the ability of Russian agents to penetrate our election systems.

“The F.B.I.,” it said, “believes that this operation enabled the G.R.U. to gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government.”​

It should be noted the report says at least one county government though the FBI sent out warnings to all 67 counties in Florida. This was done to protect their sources and methods and not alert the Russian agents they had been found out.

However, because all 67 counties were notified rather than pointing out who had been compromised, this left a bad taste in the mouth of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

“They won’t tell us which county it was. Are you kidding me?” an exasperated Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, said at a news conference in Miami on Thursday. “Why would you have not said something immediately?”

The Florida Secretary of State’s office in Tallahassee said it had been unable to learn which county it was. “The department reached out to the F.B.I. and they declined to share that information with us,” said Sarah Revell, a department spokeswoman. “No county has come forward.” The secretary of state who was running the department at the time, Ken Detzner, did not respond to requests for comment.​

While the Russian agents would not have been able to change the vote tabulations (that part was already taken care of by Republicans who insisted on using electronic voting machines whose tallies can't be audited), they would have been able to create havoc at the polls. By deleting or changing voter rolls, people would have shown up to vote and told they weren't eligible or were at the wrong location, thus taxing the county's ability to get accurate vote counts as well as figure out why they had so many errors.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/us/florida-russia-hacking-election.html

 

[Rightguide]

Who was in charge in 2016 at the time of the election? There's your answer.