Was The Election Rigged?

NoCoPilot wrote:

No large scale conspiracy.  One or two guys with some programming expertise.  The Diebold consolidators have remote-in capabilities, surprisingly.

And the method outlined in the paper is clever.  It flips votes, rather than adding anything to the total, so the overall totals stay the same.  And it flips votes based on a percentage of the precinct size, so smaller precincts (where the populace is predictable) don't get suspicious.

I have been reading papers outlining just such possibilities for the past sixteen years. And the name Diebold crops up often.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Jill Stein's recount won't mean shit -- they'll just jigger the consolidator again.

Whether or not Stein's recount attempt is successful, it will still be meaningful: "We are watching you!"

_Howard wrote:

[I have been reading papers outlining just such possibilities for the past sixteen years. And the name Diebold crops up often.

In 2002 Diebold bought Global Election Systems, a manufacturer of touch-screen voting machines, and renamed them Diebold Election Systems (DES).  After the controversy about security of these machines in the 2002 election, and revelations of the CEO Walden O'Dell's 2003 promise to "deliver Ohio to Bush" in 2004, and an SEC lawsuit which saw several DES executives pay settlements to avoid jailtime (2002-2007), in August 2007 DES, run by Bob Urosevich, was rebranded Premier Election Solutions (PES) "for strategic reasons" and then in 2009 sold to a competitor Election Systems & Software (ES&S), which was run by the Bob's brother Todd Urosevich.  In 2010 a Justice Department anti-trust action (joined by 14 states) caused ES&S to split ownership of Premier with Dominion Voting Systems (DVS, a competitor).  A month later Canadian-based (and thus outside US regulation) Dominion bought another competitor, California-based Sequoia Voting Systems (SVS), only to have SVS (in the midst of numerous lawsuits) declare bankruptcy in February 2014.

To recap: two brothers control 80% of voting in the United States.  

Who's behind the brothers?  Karl Rove -- who famously declared Ohio for Romney in 2012 despite early returns indicating an Obama landslide.

Rense.com?

Really?

The information is out there.

Up until November 8 most of it warned that Democratic operatives would be using it to steal the 2016 election, but the narrative seems to have shifted.

kilo wrote:

Rense.com?

Really?

Yeah. Really?

Looks to me like every national election result from now on — actually, starting with Bush vs Gore — is going to have this undertone of illegitimacy, that shady behind-the-scenes characters have electronically flipped the results. The solution, obviously, is paper ballots. Unfortunately this would require that states actually invest in local precincts, hiring and training poll watchers and vote counters and allowing polls to close and votes to actually be counted before results are announced. Of course the spectacle-driven media would fucking hate this. But here's the thing — exit polls are crap and results of opinion polling in general have been upended by changes in the way people communicate. Would it be asking too much to let voting occur in a news blackout, with media outlets just describing different races and ballot questions and providing information as to turnout without announcing the winner two minutes after eight o'clock Eastern Time? Yes, it would.

I suggest that Democrats simply leave the party and register as Republicans, then work to get progressive candidates running on the GOP ticket.

Make Election Day a national holiday.

Register voters as a matter of course.

Return to paper ballots.

Shorten the campaign cycle.

Impose term limits.

All good ideas -- all ideas opposed by those in power because it would tend to put them out of power -- all therefore never gonna happen.

kilo wrote:

But here's the thing — exit polls are crap and results of opinion polling in general have been upended by changes in the way people communicate.

Actually, I think the results aren't matching the exit polls because the results are corrupt. Exit polls have been considered the best way to identify rigged elections for a long time now. That American elections don't agree with exit polls is just symptomatic of those elections not being run and counted properly.

kilo wrote:

I suggest that Democrats simply leave the party and register as Republicans, then work to get progressive candidates running on the GOP ticket.

Democrats don't need to change parties. They just need to start nominating liberal candidates, preferably younger, charismatic ones.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Shorten the campaign cycle.
Impose term limits.

State-mandated term limits for federal offices has been denied by SCOTUS. They say that it adds a requirement for Congress that is not in the Constitution, and therefore would require an amendment (as the term limit on the presidency did).

If the campaign cycle is shortened, wouldn't that impel the candidates to spend most of their time in the larger states? That's something you have written about as being unfavorable.

I'm surprised you didn't mention abolishing the Electoral College. I believe that would be the biggest step the country could take toward ensuring fair - or more fair - elections. It would be very difficult to fuck around with every state's votes; much more difficult than screwing up a few selected "battleground" states.

richard09 wrote:

Actually, I think the results aren't matching the exit polls because the results are corrupt.

Bingo!

richard09 wrote:

Exit polls have been considered the best way to identify rigged elections for a long time now.

I know exit polls are sometimes accurate reflections of real results but not under all conditions in every election. For instance, I think they were a bit wild in 2004 — Kerry was expected to do much better than he did. How do pollsters filter or weigh for self-selection? Why would an angry, suspicious Trump voter even want to talk to weird people from away? I suspect this is factored in but unvarying accuracy is seldom achievable in the social sciences. Aberrant behavior by masses of people can't always be predicted. Or sometimes even explained.

_Howard wrote:

I'm surprised you didn't mention abolishing the Electoral College. I believe that would be the biggest step the country could take toward ensuring fair - or more fair - elections.

I didn't put it on my list because it would not favor the party out of power, as the other items I listed would.

The Electoral College is a vote multiplier, it makes smaller states have more power, but that does not necessarily favor one party over another.

kilo wrote:

I know exit polls are sometimes accurate reflections of real results but not under all conditions in every election.

Exit polls are one way to identify election fraud.

Another is to watch how the election results come in.  In the past few elections the early returns have shown one candidate or another ahead by a substantial margin, then this result is reversed (always in favor of the Republican candidate, oddly enough) when more precincts come in.

This was the crux of the 2012 report linked above.  Trendlines always favoring one party, always late in the game, always having to do with larger late-reporting precincts and state totals.  The "swing states" are almost always the last to come in, and perhaps unsurprisingly, their trend always seems to "swing Republican" late in the vote tabulating.

Despite exit polling

NoCoPilot wrote:

I didn't put it on my list because it would not favor the party out of power, as the other items I listed would.

I don't see how those measures would necessarily favor one party over another.
And why would you want a system that favors one party? The system should be party-neutral.

NoCoPilot wrote:

In the past few elections the early returns have shown one candidate or another ahead by a substantial margin, then this result is reversed (always in favor of the Republican candidate, oddly enough) when more precincts come in.

Historically, early voters trend Democratic, while election day voters trend Republican. No mystery or conspiracy there.

kilo wrote:

I know exit polls are sometimes accurate reflections of real results but not under all conditions in every election.  For instance, I think they were a bit wild in 2004 — Kerry was expected to do much better than he did.

You are under-estimating how corrupt presidential elections are. Every presidential election back to 2000 suffered the vote-flipping cheating of the Republicans. Kerry did do much better than was reported. So did Al Gore. Only the overwhelming support for Obama led to him winning in 2008 and 2012, and the Republicans were taken by surprise, especially in 2012. There is some restriction on just how much vote-flipping the Republicans can do before people notice. After the 2012 upset, they may have pushed the limit up this time, knowing that Trump was getting crushed. The result is that the cheating is indeed obvious, if anybody looks.

Unless this organized cheating gets exposed, it will be virtually impossible for anybody except a Republican to be elected president, going forward. If they can make Dubya or Trump "the winner", then pretty much anything is possible.

So how does it get exposed?  Statistically it is very obvious what happened, but I don't know if such "circumstantial evidence" would be sufficient.  You'd probably have to identify the culprit and catch him red-handed before you had a case.

And...
I don't think the Republican election fraud goes back to 2000 (Bush v. Gore).  Diebold didn't buy GES until 2002, and the 2000 election was fucked up enough with the 'hanging chads' in Florida.

Wisconsin is going to hold a state-wide recount, after Jill Stein filed for it.
We Probably won't find out until early next week whether Pennsylvania and Michigan will have recounts.
So far she has collected five million dollars to pay for the recounts.

CNN wrote:

Hacking experts alerted the Clinton campaign earlier this week it was possible, based on voter low turnouts in some counties with electronic voting, that voting systems might have been hacked. But nobody has presented any evidence yet that they were tampered with.

Even if Stein and others succeed in winning recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, it's unclear they would be enough to swing the election from Trump to Hillary Clinton, with Trump holding leads as big as more than 60,000 votes in Pennsylvania. When Florida officials launched their recount in 2000, the margin was just 537 votes.

They're looking in the wrong place.

But I suppose if they compare the recount to the official tabulation they still might find the discrepancy.

NoCoPilot wrote:

I don't think the Republican election fraud goes back to 2000 (Bush v. Gore).  Diebold didn't buy GES until 2002, and the 2000 election was fucked up enough with the 'hanging chads' in Florida.

True, the vote-flipping cheating may not have started until 2004. But they did cheat in some states in 2000 - Florida being one. There were some very suspicious results in Florida, nothing to do with "hanging chads".

Maybe so. That's why they had to devise a scheme which was less suspicious.

OK, so at this point, the Obama administration and everybody else is spouting the line that the only reason for the recount is the fear that Russia may have hacked the voting machines, and since that didn't happen, we're all going to accept the results.

What a pile of crap.

Quote :

April 2, 2015 at 11:52 pm

Message below duplicated from email sent to: bclarkson@niar.wichita.edu

Hello Ms. Clarkson,

I was pleased to see that Wichita Kansas Eagle paper published an article mentioning you, stating that you confirmed my findings in a 2012 paper.
WSU statistician sues seeking Kansas voting machine paper tapes

WSU statistician sues seeking Kansas voting machine pape…
Beth Clarkson has analyzed election returns showing an unexplained pattern where the percentage of Republican votes increases the larger the size of the precinct.

I’d like to chat with you some more as to what could be the actual cause of this discrepancy. I have MUCH more data available if you’re interested. Most counties were analyzed. The papers show only a subset of what we analyzed. The data is mostly for the 2008 2012 elections, but we went far back to see when the problem started occurring.

I am reasonably confident that the root cause is not with the DRE machines, and maybe not even with the central tabulators. I did find some very disturbing problems with the voter registration databases of several states and counties.

Due to a total lack of interest by the media and most statistician, I pretty my put the project aside, hoping that one day, someone like you would find these results — amazing.

I attach the two papers that I wrote also with Mr. James Johnson, a Russian financial analyst with excellent statistical and programming skills.

Please don’t hesitate to call or write me to discuss this further.

Kind regards,

Francois

To date I can find nothing online to indicate Choquette's and Johnson's 2012 analyses have been applied to the 2016 results. It's a sizable undertaking, or I'd consider doing it myself. The authors emphasize that the analysis has to be done at the precinct level.

There are 3,142 counties in the US. There were 185,994 precincts (in 2004). Current estimates range from 203,000 (in 2009) to 300,000 (2011) to 500,000 (2012).

Trump won the "so-called" popular vote.
Don't believe me? Ask Trump. He knows.

Get used to it. The next four years will be a funhouse mirror where facts don't matter, up is down, and right is wrong.