DHS head of cyber security says that the Russians DID penetrate voter registration rolls in several states.

Courtesy of NBC News:  

The U.S. official in charge of protecting American elections from hacking says the Russians successfully penetrated the voter registration rolls of several U.S. states prior to the 2016 presidential election. 

In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Jeanette Manfra, the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said she couldn't talk about classified information publicly, but in 2016, "We saw a targeting of 21 states and an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated." 

Jeh Johnson, who was DHS secretary during the Russian intrusions, said, "2016 was a wake-up call and now it's incumbent upon states and the Feds to do something about it before our democracy is attacked again.

"We were able to determine that the scanning and probing of voter registration databases was coming from the Russian government." 

NBC News reported in Sept. 2016 that more than 20 states had been targeted by the Russians.

Of course this reporting is followed up by the disclaimer that there is no evidence that the Russians altered the voting rolls in any way, but I am having a harder and harder time buying that.

First off why would the Russians work so hard to penetrate these voter rolls and then simply leave them untouched?

Secondly how do we know they were not altered since these are the main data bases? Is there a hard copy of these voter's names, compiled before the hacks, that these lists can be compared against?

Clearly the Russians were desperate to defeat Hillary Clinton and to put Donald Trump into the White House, and since he entered that building he has done nothing but undermine our democracy, sabotage our government, and attack the free press.

In other words he is doing precisely as Putin has commanded.

And here we sit doing nothing to prevent it. 

41 states are now refusing to give Trump Administration their voter information.

Donald Trump and Kris Kobach, getting ready to do some voter suppressing.

Courtesy of CNN:

Forty-one states have defied the Trump administration's request for private voter information, according to a CNN inquiry to all 50 states. 

State leaders and voting boards across the country have responded to the letter with varying degrees of cooperation -- from altogether rejecting the request to expressing eagerness to supply information that is public. 

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, vice chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which President Donald Trump created by executive order in May, sent a letter to all 50 states last Wednesday requesting a bevy of voter data, which he notes will eventually be made available to the public. 

The order came months after Trump claimed without evidence that millions had voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election. When states began to express concerns about the legality of his administration's efforts to investigate voter fraud, Trump called them out on Twitter on Saturday, questioning whether they were hiding something.

Well it's nice to see that most states are standing up to this oppressive administration.

Let's face it giving Trump and his cronies our personal voter information would surely have been used to suppress the vote and alter the outcome of elections all across the nation.

And any president who came to power by way of interference in our election systems by a foreign power is certainly not going to give up the White House without using every dirty trick in the book.

Bernie Sanders, who is vying for the Democratic nomination, is suing the DNC for an incident that happened months ago.

Courtesy of TPM: 

The campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) officially served the Democratic National Committee on Thursday with a lawsuit over the decision to suspend the campaign's access to voter data after a staffer viewed confidential information back in December. 

A source told The Hill the move was "very procedural" as Thursday was the deadline to file paperwork given to the campaign by a federal judge. 

The DNC temporarily revoked the campaign's access in mid-December to all voter information after a staffer inappropriately accessed voter data compiled by Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

Of course the Sanders campaign DID regain access to the data, and one of their staffers was fired, which sort of illustrates that there was wrongdoing on the part of the campaign. Though of course nobody is accusing Sanders himself of doing anything unethical.

However I find myself a little confused as to why an incident since resolved would inspire the Sanders campaign to file a lawsuit simply because time is running out for them to do so.

I mean I confess to not having any legal training which might make this seem reasonable, but from a purely public relations point of view this seems like something that just makes it easier to point out that Sanders is NOT a Democrat and that he does not always respect or support the Democratic party.