State of the Election 2016

Trump Meteor Forecast

The Trump Meteor has a 21% of striking the Earth and destroying civilization as we know it.

Yes I Know It's Saturday

As I was writing this, news hit that FBI Directory Comey had notified congressman of potential new Clinton Emails found. If you've had any contact with a human being or electronic device, you've already heard about this. Comey statement amounted to "I may have found something important, maybe not. I'll tell you later. I don't know when.". That has us all chasing our tails.

So, I wanted to let the story brew a bit.

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Is the Trump Meteor Going to Hit Now?

How has Trump chances of becoming president change? The short answer is that his chances have probably risen to 30% and in an extreme case 50%. Obviously, that's all subject to what polls say that have not come out yet.

So, let's look at what numbers we have.

In a previous update I gave post new Post Labor day numbers.

39% Trumpys
4% to 6% Hopeys

43% Borings
2% to 6% Excitables

6% to 8% No-Way-No-Hows
2% to 6% Wait-n-Sees

Now nothing this bad has happened to Clinton since Labor Day, so can we still say her 43% base still holds or do we need to go back her pre-Labor Day of 39%? I believe we can still stay with the 43% for two reasons. One, the No-Way-No-Hows (Johanson and Sten voters) has been around 7% lately, so attitudes towards Third Parties definitely changed. Two, the numbers were formed by Trump's horrible performance from the 1st Debate. Comey did not suddenly prove Trump is now 'temperamentally fit'.

The news analysts are saying this will not take votes away from Clinton, but would add votes to Trump. This translates to Clinton being ahead by 2% to 3% instead of 5% to 6%. I would agree with this, but I'd like to back it up with more math.

If we assume that No-Way-No-Hows are going to be 6% and Trump can't beat a post-Debate high of 43%, the Clinton starts with 43%, leaving 6% of Excitables/Wait-n-Sees for her. Her maintaining 2% to 3% lead looks quick likely with those numbers. That coincides with where the race was Oct 2 to Oct 3, which is 30% in the FiveThirtyEight Nowcast.

Now, if there are the Shy Trump voters mentioned in When Can We Say Trump Will Not Be President? and/or more bad news for Clinton, Trump could pull even, and thus 50%.

Here's the good news. Comey provided such vague information, the news cannot talk about about this for 10 days. If Comey provides more details, the news is more likely good (all were duplicates, etc.) for Clinton, because the bad outcomes (ground to reconsider prosecution, etc.) take longer to reach. Clinton also has all the tactical advantages if the race goes to turnout, and over 12 million have already voted.

Tech Talk

I'm not going to go into all the details of the story because you can get that from all the professional news sources. However, fortunate for you, I understand the technology well, and here I can add.

Following some bread crumb, I can speculate with some confidence that the Clinton servers were using Microsoft Exchange Server. That's important because different email software stores emails differently. In all cases, emails are stored on the server. With Microsoft Exchange Server the emails can potentially be stored in two other devices: the one that received the email and the one that sent it. So, now we can see why Huma Abedin laptop becomes part of the investigation.

The next thing to know is how emails get deleted. When Office 'deletes' an email, it archives it instead, in case you want the email back and technical reasons we don't care about. But the archived emails are marked as what can be removed if you need more space on your hard drive. Then, the OS deletes the emails.

However, when an OS deletes a file, it does not delete the data. It removes knowledge of where the file is on the hard drive. You can think of it as more the OS 'forgets' the file. Now in time, that hard drive location will be re-used, but until then you can recover the deleted files with special software and some work. The company managing the servers did more. They used a software, BeachBit that overwrite those location to prevent them from being recovered.

My guess is that the FBI used a special technique that read trace magnetic field off the hard drive to read 'bleached' data. (Yep, that's some super spy type stuff there.) But, the technique cannot 100% restore the data. The FBI was left with only what Clinton had handed over, what had been sent to/from others, and the fragments they had recovered. They can never be sure they got every email.

It's a good bet, however, Abedin unlikely went to such extraordinary measures. So, you can see why there would be some hope that the FBI could find emails they had not seen before. But, any of these emails would have been duplicated on the server, and in all likelihood, the FBI has already seen them.

Now lets talk about how email gets sent. When you send an email, until it reaches the recipient, anyone with the technology to 'listen' can read it. Doing so is hard and the email is sent in mixed pieces so it's not as bad as it sounds. You can think of it as talking to someone in a crowded room where everyone is talking loudly. Someone could be listening in, but they're more likely only to hear fragments of your conversation. When you're worried about state secrets, however, that can be enough.

The only way to thwart easedropping is to encrypt the emails as they are sent. This though requires coordination between the software the sender and receiver are using. Even then, if a hacker can get into the device he can 'infect' it with software that reads the emails before and after they are secured.

This is where the story gets bad for Huma Abedin. Since Anthony Weiner also used this laptop, it could not be a secured device, and he definitely does not have security clearance. So, if Abedin sent classified emails to this laptop, she could be subject to prosecution. Currently the security clearance of Abedin is unknown, but she did have it as aide to Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

What is still murky to me is how Clinton could be held accountable. If Abedin had set the laptop to use an email address from the private server, than it would have downloaded the emails automatically and indiscriminately. But even if Clinton had sent a classified email or Abedin had forwarded one, there still would have to prove 'intent', which is the reason she was not prosecuted before.

What is also murky is some lack of details being provided by Comey. I understand why he can't remove the possibility of none of the new emails being classified. However, I could find out if any had a classified headings within a few minutes. With a couple of days I could write a program that tells how many are duplicates. Both these facts would clarify the severity of what is being investigated.

Do I need to say this is all speculative on my part, and more information could invalidate all I have said. (Is this a cowardly qualification? You bet.)