General Discussion

US election: Leading statisticians call for vote audit over hacking fears

Two respected statisticians have called for a recount of some votes cast in the US election to rule out the possibility that the outcome was artificially manipulated.

Since Donald Trump surged to victory, claims of foreign manipulation and the hacking of ballot-counting computers to skew the results have been rife.

The assertions are backed up by the US Department of Homeland Security and the NSA, who have both implicated Russian hackers as being behind hacks relating to the election.

These include the DNC email hack that blighted Ms Clinton’s campaign, and an attack on US voter registration databases.

MIT cryptographer Ron Rivest and Berkeley statistician Philip Stark say votes should be audited in a small number of jurisdictions in battleground states to check the veracity of the overall result which handed Mr Trump the White House.

In an article in USA Today, they say some of the crucial swing states had little means of defending against attacks, and that relatively few successful hacks could have been enough to change the outcome of the election.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-statisticians-vote-audit-hacking-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-a7434516.html