Still troubled

The ability to "micro target" and "influence voters" still troubles me. It's not so much that it happened because it probably did.

The question is about whether it helped sway the entire election.

I keep going back to the polling that was taking place. Near the end of September, the polls looked like this:
Clinton: 49%
Trump: 45%
Other: 3%
Undecided: 3%

Now to be fair, a month or so before, the undecided percentage was higher and looked something like this:
Clinton: 45%
Trump: 37%
Other: 9%
Undecided: 9%

So in essence, they each took some of the undecided and other voters.

But people are funny. Some of the ones who switched might have been single issue folks who could be swayed. But I can't see how it would be enough to swing the election, can you?

I doubt it. Especially since Clinton won the popular vote.

The more I consider it, look into it, and understand it, it seems much more likely that the effort required to affect the vote itself is much less than trying to influence voters and maybe get a result.

Think about the voter suppression efforts. The subtle attempts to change voting locations and times they were open for early voting. The mailers that went out that were intended to confuse voters. The ID requirements. The provisional ballots in some cases.

And then, of course, there is the VERY REAL prospect that votes were altered, or not counted properly.

Electronic voting is vulnerable, as unhackthevote.com and others have shown us.

Or maybe it was even simpler. We know that some election databases were hacked. To what aim? Whatever it is, it can't be good. Perhaps it was to target some voters so they would encounter issues and have to be provisional - and essentially uncounted.

Hopefully we'll know the truth one day. Our democracy depends on it. Let's simply go back to paper ballots and hand counting them until we find a better way.