Not only that, the party itself has a history of meddling against this election's likely winner.

Did Russia actually meddle with (read: modify) the election? Or did they just buy ads? I thought it was only the latter.

I read there was unsuccessful attempts and not only by Russia, but if foreigners are willing to do it I absolutely would not put it past interested Americans to try either. The ads were meddling but in a different sense, just like the Russians meddled in Brexit with ads.

There is no evidence of changing votes by any other nation. Ad buying and fake advocacy accounts have been shown to exist for multiple nations. Also, multiple countries have given money to organizations in the US for non-election work that seems to end up on elections. The DC advocacy culture is a wonder to behold from money both domestic and imported.

Most people consider the illegal hacking and distribution of emails as "meddling" with the election and believe it had a greater impact on how people voted than the ad buys did.

If you're just arguing that it's irrelevant because vote totals weren't hacked, fine. That's a dispute over word choice of what it means to "meddle." Russia also hacked into and downloaded data from voting registration systems, which should cause us to re-evaluate our voting systems, but again, that didn't impact vote computations or anything like that.

I’m gonna break a rule, but, honestly, HN confuses me. I asked a genuine question and I’m being downvoted for it because (I assume) some people mistake it as trolling.

Anyways, I never said they didn’t do anything. I said, “here’s what I thought: x. Was I wrong?” My use of “(read: modify)” was to clarify that when I said meddle in that instance, I meant actual modification; I was referencing what the parent comment had said.

I didn't downvote you (I promise!). And I hope I answered your question.

For those who did, I think what happens is that it's hard to tell which people are and are not operating in good faith and sometimes people mistake one for the other. But it sounds like you genuinely weren't sure whether Russia had actually hacked into the voting machines. Only into the Podesta, the DNC, and into voter registration systems. There's no evidence to suggest they changed tabulations (and by that I mean they almost certainly didn't), so that's why people haven't made that claim.

Thank you. I like HN because the community is a lot nicer than others, but it’s frustrating being drive-by downvoted when you just asked a genuine question. It reminds me of other online communities where people just downvote because you said something they disagree with.

The only thing I want to add to this discussion is that even though there's no evidence any nation has ever hacked into our voting machines, we still need a paper trail. It could absolutely happen.

We have over 3000 different voting systems - one for each county. Some counties are staffed better than others. They use different types of machines. In some ways, that's a strength. But in others, it's a weakness. There should really be much more discussion of the issue nationally and what needs to be done.

Oh for sure. The issues with all digital elections are well known (in the tech community), but the governments ignore us. I think Russia was a wake up call for a lot of people that hacking our results is a real possibility, but it sadly wasn’t enough.

Thankfully(?), Georgia (the state) is in the middle of some lawsuits (somewhat) regarding their lack of a paper trail in their elections.