Did Russia hack the US vote, turning some blue ballots red? That’s the fear behind a new hashtag movement, #AuditTheVote, urging voters to call their representatives and demand an audit.

"Each of us must contact Electoral College members and alert them to widespread Russian hacking of our voting systems, and request urgent vote audits in states with systems that may have been compromised," wrote one Facebook group.

A Change.org petition asking for an audit now has more than 30,000 signatures. USA Today ran a column titled "Still time for an election audit." Even singer Aimee Mann has been beating the drum.

In October, the Obama administration formally accused the Russian government of hacking and leaking emails from the Democratic National Committee. It’s undoubtable that, through that breach and the resulting media coverage, the Kremlin had some impact on the American election. But what #AuditTheVote is claiming — that the Russian government may have tampered with US election results — is akin to crying wolf, cybersecurity experts say.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t audit voting results — we should, in every election, as part of protocol. It also doesn’t mean we should downplay the threat of a cyberattack on our electoral process in the future, or that we shouldn’t take steps to make our system more secure.

But let’s try to panic in the right way and at the appropriate level of hysteria.

Safety in chaos

Voting in America is actually protected by its inefficiency, said Jeffrey Carr, a cybersecurity consultant and author of Inside Cyber Warfare. The process is fragmented by state and then again by precinct, which makes it very difficult for a hacker to even know where to strike without advance knowledge of which counties would be needed to swing an election, what machines are in them, and how to compromise them.

"You’ve got this incredibly diverse map of machines that are different ages, different components, different methods of calculating, different software," Carr said. “Many of them are insecure, but to be able to actually hack them all is impossible.”

Unlike the DNC’s email server, voting machines typically don’t connect to the internet, Carr said. That means any tampering would have to be done in person. "You have to find the machine, gain access to the machine, and figure out how to upgrade the software that’s in it," he said. “You can’t just do it from some remote part of the world or even down the street.”

"Hacking a single election machine isn't too hard — at least if you're a computer expert with access to the control panel of the voting machine for a reasonable amount of time and aren't too bothered about being caught later," said Matt Tait, a UK-based cybersecurity consultant. "But hacking enough election machines to make any impact on the vote results is insanely hard, and doing so in such a way that it wouldn't be immediately discovered is borderline impossible."

Hacked voter registration databases

Supporters of #AuditTheVote cite two breaches of voter registration databases, one in Arizona and one in Illinois, as evidence of Russia’s tinkering in the electoral process.

In August, the FBI circulated an alert that said one of eight IP addresses behind the attacks had previously been seen on a Russian hacker forum. Unfortunately, that fact has been widely misinterpreted as "FBI says Russia, the country, attacked US voter records."

Just because an attack appears to originate from a Russian server does not mean the hacker is Russian, is physically located in Russia, or even speaks Russian. Carr did some reporting of his own and found the small Russian company that rented server time to the hackers. The hackers spoke English, the owner said. What’s more, he said Carr was the first person to inquire about it even though the FBI or DHS was supposedly investigating.

Just because an attack appears to originate from a Russian server does not mean the hacker is Russian, is physically located in Russia, or even speaks Russian.

Furthermore, lots of hackers are Russian, but it doesn’t mean they are all working for Vladimir Putin. Sometimes they just want to steal data so they can resell it and make money. Unfortunately, this distinction is repeatedly lost. Note how the Washington Post story about this conflates "Russia," referring to the government, with “Russian,” referring to the nationality.

In October, the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement admitting there wasn’t enough evidence to tie the state hacks to the Russian government.

Still, we shouldn’t NOT panic

To be clear, voting security is not robust. Many voting machines run old, vulnerable consumer software. Some are now all digital, meaning they don’t have paper backups that could be checked against the data. Voting machines and the computers that aggregate precinct totals for the states are not supposed to be connected to the internet, but some researchers suspect they might log on from time to time, even if it’s just by accident. In 2015, Virginia decertified 3,000 voting machines due to security problems including insecure Wi-Fi capabilities. Security standards should be higher, especially as more states push for online voting.

We should also force all precincts to use paper ballots that can be checked against the digital results if needed. Right now, 25 percent of registered voters are assigned to precincts with no verifiable paper record.

No good reason not to audit

If Americans want fair and legitimate elections, we should be auditing every vote. An audit — which is different from a recount, an adversarial situation in which parties argue over which votes to count — would give more legitimacy to results especially in tight elections. Some states already audit elections. California has required it since 1965.

Auditing can be done quickly and relatively inexpensively, says Philip Stark, associate dean of mathematical and physical sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the board of advisers of the US Election Assistance Commission, and author of that USA Today column calling for an audit.

One method, called "ballot polling," works like an exit poll. Auditors pull a random sample of paper ballots and check them against the final tally. Stark estimates we would need to examine just 0.5 percent of votes to know with 95 percent confidence if the election results were accurate.

The other method, the comparison audit, can only be done with voting machines that track the way they process each ballot. Then auditors take a random sample of ballots and check them manually against the machine’s interpretation.

“This is why it is so critical that we perform election audits, if for no other reason than to put to bed any crazy conspiracy theories”

Both methods require paper ballot backups. That means counties like Montgomery County in Pennsylvania, which uses an all-digital, no-paper-backup machine for 425 precincts, would be un-auditable.

Stark believes it’s possible that Russia-sponsored hackers interfered with the vote count. "I’d start with places that don’t have paper to check and places where the margin was predicted to be thin," he said, putting himself in the Kremlin’s shoes. “And then I might not be heavily invested in whether it worked or not. The whole thing might just be a probe to figure out whether I can mess with US elections.”

Matt Bernhard, a computer science PhD candidate at the University of Michigan who co-wrote a report titled "What might go wrong in the 2016 Election," doesn’t buy that argument.

"While it is true that only a few counties need to be tampered with in a race this close to change the result, it is almost certain that few of those counties use the same voting mechanism or machines," Bernhard said. “Whatever kind of undetectable attack you can develop in one precinct, you have to develop a different one for a different precinct. That likely requires a significant amount of resources and boots on the ground, so to speak.”

"As of right now I have not seen any evidence to suggest that Russia directly manipulated election results," he said. But, he said, “This is why it is so critical that we perform election audits, if for no other reason than to put to bed any crazy conspiracy theories about what went on and reassure ourselves that even though our elections are vulnerable, they are still being carried out fairly.”

Vote of confidence

This is what former National Intelligence Director James Clapper was worried about two months before the election. Not that Russia would hack our votes — but that the Kremlin would seed doubt in the electoral process, just as Donald Trump did during the campaign when he claimed the election was rigged against him.

"The biggest threats to the integrity of this November’s election and our democratic system are attempts to undermine public confidence in the reliability of that system," Lawrence D. Norden, the deputy director of the Brennan Center's Democracy Program and coauthor of the report "America’s Voting Machines at Risk", warned the House Oversight Committee two months ago.

"Attacks against the voting machines upon which Americans cast their ballots are highly unlikely to have a widespread impact. By contrast, attacks or malfunctions that can undermine public confidence are much easier."

It’s too late for the latter. Americans are wondering: Was our election even legitimate? Unfortunately, the narrative about direct manipulation by Russian state hackers could result in bad solutions to nonexistent problems and no solutions to real ones.