Reality Winner Leak Information could have Prevented Election Day Chaos

August 12, 2017

The prosecution in the Reality Winner leak case is seeking to deny her a fair trial. The 25 year-old Air Force veteran charged with releasing classified documents about Russian election interference to The Intercept, don’t want her defense to be able to talk about the contents of the documents, or even news reports about the document.

That’s probably because the Espionage Act, the law she’s being charged with, doesn’t even mention classified information — it’s meant to punish people for distributing information “to be used to the injury of the United States.” And the more we learn from news reports, the more clear it becomes how much injury the government caused by withholding the information in the first place.

An NPR story details chaos on election day in North Carolina, and quotes an election official:

“A leaked top secret National Security Agency report suggested the Russian cyberattack took place in August 2016. It didn’t become public until June of this year — and state officials were never told about it.

“We found out like everybody else did,” says Josh Lawson, general counsel for the state board of elections.

Lawson says the state first learned of the hack attempt when The Intercept, an online news site, published its story detailing Russian attempts to hack VR Systems. The report attributed to the Reality Winner leak said hackers then sent emails to local election offices that appeared to come from VR — but which actually contained malicious software.

North Carolina election officials eventually concluded their machines hadn’t been hacked. But had they audited their voting machines ahead of time, it’s likely they wouldn’t have experience the absolute chaos that resulted from switching to paper ballot books at the last minute:

“At first, the county decided to switch to paper poll books in just those precincts to be safe. But Bowens says the State Board of Elections & Ethics Enforcement got involved “and determined that it would be better to have uniformity across all of our 57 precincts and we went paper poll books across the county.”

That move caused a whole new set of problems: Voting was delayed — up to an hour and a half — in a number of precincts as poll workers waited for new supplies.”

The list of states where election systems were infiltrated by Russian hackers is still unconfirmed, but news reports have the count up to 39.

A whole host of government officials, including Republican and Democratic Senators, have said states should have been informed about the infiltration instead of reading about it in The Intercept. Matt Masterson, chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, said as much in the NPR story:

“As information has come out in various media reports, election officials, I think fairly, have said, ‘Why are we reading about this? Why has no one shared this information with us?’ ” he says. “Moving forward, that can’t be the case. The election officials need to be in the know, need to be receiving this information.”

The evidence is clear — both the Obama and Trump administrations caused incredible harm to the U.S. election system by not informing states of this vulnerability before the election, and by continuing to withhold information months after the fact.

If Reality Winner indeed leaked the document, she did the entire country an enormous favor. She doesn’t deserve to be tried as a spy trying to harm America, and she deserves our support.

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