There is no proof of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/os-mdaniel-062018.pdf
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/hearings/open-hearing-policy-response-russian-interference-2016-u-s-elections
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
“Responding to Russian Interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election”
Written Testimony of: Michael Daniel
Former Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator for President Barrack Obama
June 20, 2018, 9:30 a.m.
Hart Senate Office Building – Room 216
U.S. Response to Russian Interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections
During President Obama’s administration, I served from June 2012 to January 2017 as the
Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator on the National Security
Council staff. In that capacity, among other things, I oversaw the development of cybersecurity-related policy, coordinated our responses to significant cyber threats and incidents, and facilitated the development of inter-agency plans to disrupt our adversaries’ cyber activities.
Going into late spring of 2016, as the Presidential election got into full swing, we fully expected
Russian cyber-based espionage activities against the major political campaigns – it had happened in previous election cycles and our operating assumption was that the Russians would target the campaigns for intelligence collection. However, by late June / early July 2016, as information from the Democratic National Committee began to be released, and as a few States began to report intrusions into certain parts of their electoral infrastructure, we realized that the Russians were doing something more than merely collecting intelligence. They were carrying out operations aimed at least at influencing the election and potentially even disrupting it.
This prompted us to take action, including with respect to the following two lines of effort:
– Improve the cybersecurity of the electoral infrastructure; and
– Impose costs on the Russians for their current actions and deter escalation or future actions.
I will now turn to each of these lines of effort in more detail.
The goal for this line of effort was to make it more difficult for the Russians to disrupt or interfere with the actual voting process, while maintaining Americans’ confidence in the electoral system. Although many cybersecurity experts have focused on cybersecurity issues surrounding electronic voting machines, we quickly determined that the voting machines, while vulnerable, were not the most vulnerable part of the infrastructure. We also quickly determined that Russia’s goal was probably not to use cyber means to surreptitiously change the outcome of the election by changing votes. In order to achieve that goal, the Russians would have had to have selected the precincts that were going to be close several months in advance, gained undetected access to the voting machines, installed malware that flipped just enough votes to change the outcome but not so many as to be detected, and then remain undetected through any post-election auditing. We did not believe carrying out such an operation was feasible.
Instead, we realized that a far more practical goal would be to use cyber means to undermine confidence in the election; once the potential scenarios included more than vote flipping, the potential for malicious activity expanded considerably. Widening the aperture to include the entire electoral process from beginning to end revealed segments that would be much more vulnerable to remote cyber operations. That turned out to be the points at which the electoral infrastructure touches the public internet: voter registration databases; vote tabulation reporting; and media reporting on election day.
Once we had concluded what were more likely targets and vectors for Russian activity, the Administration used the regular, NSC-led interagency process to develop and implement activities to address the threat. Since States and local governments run the election process in the U.S., by necessity our efforts became focused on providing assistance to States and localities. The Department of Homeland Security spearheaded those efforts for the Administration. These actions focused on determining what assistance we could provide States and local governments in the near term and alerting States and local governments to the potential threat.