Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 08, 2016 3:46 pm
by seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 08, 2016 4:00 pm
by JackRiddler » Sun Nov 13, 2016 5:29 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Nov 16, 2016 5:12 pm
The Election was Stolen – Here’s How…
Friday, November 11, 2016
Before a single vote was cast, the election was fixed by GOP and Trump operatives.
Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP–controlled states.
The system, called Crosscheck, is detailed in my Rolling Stone report,
“The GOP’s Stealth War on Voters,” 8/24/2016.
Crosscheck in action:
Trump victory margin in Michigan: 13,107
Michigan Crosscheck purge list: 449,922
Trump victory margin in Arizona: 85,257
Arizona Crosscheck purge list: 270,824
Trump victory margin in North Carolina: 177,008
North Carolina Crosscheck purge list: 589,393
On Tuesday, we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump. The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including “Caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted.
Trump signaled the use of “Crosscheck” when he claimed the election is “rigged” because “people are voting many, many times.” His operative Kobach, who also advised Trump on building a wall on the southern border, devised a list of 7.2 million “potential” double voters—1.1 million of which were removed from the voter rolls by Tuesday. The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of color and the poor. Here's a sample of the list
Those accused of criminal double voting include, for example, Donald Alexander Webster Jr. of Ohio who is accused of voting a second time in Virginia as Donald EUGENE Webster SR.
Note: Watch the four-minute video summary of Crosscheck. The investigation and explanation of these methods of fixing the vote can be found in my book and film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: a Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits (2016).
No, not everyone on the list loses their vote. But this was not the only racially poisonous tactic that accounted for this purloined victory by Trump and GOP candidates.
For example, in the swing state of North Carolina, it was reported that 6,700 Black folk lost their registrations because their registrations had been challenged by a group called Voter Integrity Project (VIP). VIP sent letters to households in Black communities “do not forward.” If the voter had moved within the same building, or somehow did not get their mail (e.g. if their name was not on a mail box), they were challenged as “ghost” voters. GOP voting officials happily complied with VIP with instant cancellation of registrations.
The 6,700 identified in two counties were returned to the rolls through a lawsuit. However, there was not one mention in the press that VIP was also behind Crosscheck in North Carolina; nor that its leader, Col. Jay Delancy, whom I’ve tracked for years has previously used this vote thievery, known as “caging,” for years. Doubtless the caging game was wider and deeper than reported. And by the way, caging, as my Rolling Stone co-author, attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., tells me, is “a felony, it’s illegal, and punishable by high fines and even jail time.”
There is still much investigation to do. For example, there are millions of “provisional” ballots, “spoiled” (invalidated) ballots and ballots rejected from the approximately 30 million mailed in. Unlike reporting in Britain, US media does not report the ballots that are rejected and tossed out—because, after all, as Joe Biden says, “Our elections are the envy of the world.” Only in Kazakhstan, Joe.
While there is a great deal of work to do, much documentation still to analyze, we’ll have to pry it from partisan voting chiefs who stamp the scrub lists, Crosscheck lists and ballot records, “confidential.”
But, the evidence already in our hands makes me sadly confident in saying, Jim Crow, not the voters, elected Mr. Trump.
What about those exit polls?
Exit polls are the standard by which the US State Department measures the honesty of foreign elections. Exit polling is, historically, deadly accurate. The bane of pre-election polling is that pollsters must adjust for the likelihood of a person voting. Exit polls solve the problem.
But three times in US history, pollsters have had to publicly flagellate themselves for their “errors.” In 2000, exit polls gave Al Gore the win in Florida; in 2004, exit polls gave Kerry the win in Ohio, and now, in swing states, exit polls gave the presidency to Hillary Clinton.
So how could these multi-million-dollar Ph.d-directed statisticians with decades of experience get exit polls so wrong?
Answer: they didn’t. The polls in Florida in 2000 were accurate. That’s because exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you vote?” What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted.”
In 2000, in Florida, GOP Secretary of State Katherine Harris officially rejected 181,173 ballots, as “spoiled” because their chads were hung and other nonsense excuses. Those ballots overwhelmingly were marked for Al Gore. The exit polls included those 181,173 people who thought they had voted – but their vote didn’t count. In other words, the exit polls accurately reflected whom the voters chose, not what Katherine Harris chose.
In 2004, a similar number of votes were invalidated (including an enormous pile of “provisional” ballots) by Ohio’s GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. Again, the polls reflected that Kerry was the choice of 51% of the voters. But the exit polls were “wrong” because they didn’t reflect the ballots invalidated by Blackwell.
Notably, two weeks after the 2004 US election, the US State Department refused the recognize the Ukraine election results because the official polls contradicted the exit polls.
And here we go again. 2016: Hillary wins among those queried as they exit the polling station—yet Trump is declared winner in GOP-controlled swings states. And, once again, the expert pollsters are forced to apologize—when they should be screaming, “Fraud! Here’s the evidence the vote was fixed!”
Now there’s a new trope to explain away the exit polls that gave Clinton the win. Supposedly, Trump voters were ashamed to say they voted for Trump. Really? ON WHAT PLANET? For Democracy Now! and Rolling Stone I was out in several swing states. In Ohio, yes, a Black voter may have been reluctant to state support for Trump. But a white voter in the exurbs of Dayton, where the Trump signs grew on lawns like weeds, and the pews of the evangelical mega churches were slathered with Trump and GOP brochures, risked getting spat on if they even whispered, “Hillary.”
This country is violently divided, but in the end, there simply aren’t enough white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate. The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guys—and they did so by tossing Black provisional ballots into the dumpster, ID laws that turn away students—the list goes on. It’s a web of complex obstacles to voting by citizens of color topped by that lying spider, Crosscheck.
by Rory » Wed Nov 16, 2016 5:20 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Nov 16, 2016 5:43 pm
Rory » Wed Nov 16, 2016 4:20 pm wrote:I've read some of the Greg Pallast stuff recently, and during the Primaries (where he categorically states Clinton defrauded Sanders and stole the nomination).
Why isn't this a bigger deal? Seems pretty clear cut, voter ID, and other Republican legislation efforts doing exactly what people predicted they would. Rig the vote.
Something Stinks When Exit Polls and Official Counts Don't Match
A discussion with an exit poll expert reveals an electoral house of cards.
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet
November 14, 2016
Media exit polls in last Tuesday's election suggested Democrats were going to win the White House and the Senate, yet the reported vote counts brought a GOP landslide. While theories abound about what happened, election integrity activists say the exit poll descrepancy underscores the need for a far more transparent and accountable process. AlterNet's Steven Rosenfeld interviewed Jonathan Simon, a longtime exit poll sleuth and author of Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century. Simon explains why exit polls are a critical clue in the breakdown of the voting process.
Steven Rosenfeld: Let's start by telling people about your involvement with election integrity and tracking exit polls.
Jonathan Simon: I've been working in this field which we call election forensics for about 15 years, since the 2000 election. Certainly things kicked in with the 2004 election and the exit polls there. I was actually the person who downloaded the exit polls that were left up on the CNN website which then made it possible to compare the unadjusted exit polls—and we can explain that in a bit—but comparing the exit polls with the vote counts and show through all those disparities that there was reason to suspect possibly manipulation of the vote counts.
It has deep roots and basically looking at every election since has found varying, but at the same time, fairly pervasive patterns of what we call the "red shift" and where the exit polls are to the west of the vote counts. We track that, we record it and we attempt to analyze it and get some sort of handle on what has caused it as a phenomenon. Then we look at all sorts of forensic data, accumulative vote share, tables and hand counts where we can find them. I've always been particularly conscientious about trying to take whatever baseline we're using and validate that baseline, so that if we have an exit poll for instance, we try to make sure something that has been skewed by over-sampling one party or over-sampling people of color or something to that effect and validate it by that.
We try as carefully as we can. I've been doing this pretty steadily now for the last 15 years along with some of my colleagues, and I would be the first to acknowledge that there is a lot of smoke there and there's a lot of probative value to this work, but that bringing it forth as ironclad proof is very problematic. So we're stuck at a place where I pivoted to is looking at the risk involved in having a computerized, privatized, unobservable vote counting system and just taking on faith that that system is not being manipulated when there is such a obvious vulnerability (on which the experts strongly agree) of the system to malfeasance and manipulation. That is where I've tended to go, is to look at that risk rather than screaming fraud from the rooftops and claiming proof.
SR: Let's go through this piece by piece, because it's a lot for people to really understand. You get the raw state-by-state exit polls that are commissioned by a big consortium of national media organizations. What did you find this year, that happened this week? What do you see in the raw data?
JS: Of course, we don't get the raw data. The raw data would be... we have three definitions here. There's raw data, which is the actual questionnaires and the simple numerical toning up of answers on the questionnaire. That is never publicly released. It's if you want to characterize it as such, it's what's inside the sausage of exit polls, and we are not privileged to see that. I've had one opportunity in my life through an inside source to actually look at some of the raw data, but that's a very rare thing. It's not generally accessible to the public. Many of us have clamored for the public release of that raw data, certainly in the aftermath of the 2004 election, and have been denied it.
Then there is the weighted exit poll data and that's what the exit pollsters put out as soon as the polls close. This has been demographically weighted to their best approximation of what the electorate looked like and it is very valuable information. That's what I was able to download in 2004 and that's what I was able to download in many of the elections since, and that's what I was able to download this Tuesday.
Then you have adjusted exit polls and what happens is they take the vote counts as they come in and they use the term as the art of "forcing," they force the exit polls to [be] congruent with that vote count data so that by the end of the night or by the next morning when you have your final vote counts and final exit polls, the exit polls and the vote counts will match, but that's only because in essence they've been forced to match the vote counts.
SR: I'm looking at the New York Times website right now, at its election 2016 exit polls interactive. What are the totals then that I'm seeing?
JS: I'm not looking at the New York Times. I've pulled these off of CNN and I'm also looking at MSNBC. Because the firm that does this, Edison, contracts with the consortium of major networks and then has some lesser clients such as the New York Times. When I say lessor, they're still very major clients, they just don't have the prime membership that these five networks and the AP have, but all these major clients get the same feed of weighted exit poll data.
What you're probably looking at now would be adjusted exit polls and they're very close to, if not congruent with, the vote counts. But if you had looked up Tuesday night, for instance, if a poll closed at 7pm Eastern Time and you had gone online to a network site at 7:01pm Eastern Time, what you would have seen at that point was a weighted poll that had not yet been adjusted to match the vote counts. They would tell you the number of respondents. They'd give you all the cross tabs, by which I mean broken down by gender, age, income, party affiliation, usually 30 to 40, sometimes 50 questions ... Pretty detailed stuff that indicated how each subgroup of the polled population had answered these various questions.
Some of those questions are demographic questions: What is your race? What is your income level? What party do you identify with? Who did you vote for in the last election? etc., etc. ... Then there are the current choice questions. Who did you just vote for this evening and/or this afternoon? Those are all presented in sort of a scroll fashion. You can pull that up on all these websites.
However, they will change over time as the vote counts come in. That's why we screen-capture these initial public postings, because that contains the purest information in terms of not relying on the vote counts and if we're approaching this with a certain amount of suspicion of the vote counts, we're trying to verify or validate the vote counts, we want exit polls that are independent as possible from the actual vote count data, which then becomes blended in as the evening goes on from the time the polls close until whenever the final vote counts are available. That vote count data becomes blended in with the exit poll algorithm and gradually pulls the exit polls in congruence with the vote counts, at which point they're used for academic analysis of demographics, but they're not anymore used for validating the vote counts.
SR: Tell me again what the 'red shift' is and how you saw this shift again this year.
JS: The red shift is a term that I coined back in 2004 after the Bush-Kerry election, because the familiar term the "red shift" when we mean astronomy, that's what brought it to my mind. But the reason it's called the red shift is that it was very directional in that election where you saw vote counts coming out more in favor of Bush, more in favor of Republican candidates. Since Republican by that time had been designated red as in red states and blue states, that's how it got the moniker the red shift.
What we found from that point forward is that it's almost a singularity, very rare, that we find any significant blue shift anywhere. When we look at exit polls and vote counts, what we're almost always seeing are vote counts that come out more in favor of the Republican candidate than the exit polls and, in the case of intraparty nomination battles, more in favor of the candidate that is, I guess you'd have to say, to the right of their opponent.
For instance, in the 2016 primaries, a massive shift of exit polls state after state after state, in favor of Hillary Clinton. The vote counts were more in favor of Clinton than the exit polls, which were more in favor of Bernie Sanders. We saw a very consistent pattern of that.
In this past Tuesday, again we saw a very consistent pattern of exit polls that were more in favor of Hillary Clinton, more in favor of Democratic senatorial candidates and then vote counts were shifted from the exit polls to the right towards Donald Trump, towards the Republican senate candidates. Those are the figures that I pulled down and did a very basic analysis of. You have a column of numbers of state by state showing the degree of that shift and we'll eventually do that for the national vote for the House of Representatives as well.
SR: When you see this discrepancy, without being overly simplistic, the question becomes, why is it there and what caused it? You've been through this four or five times and not even counting the midterm elections. What do you think is really going on when you see this general one-way shifting? Does it mean the polling is wrong? Does it mean the voting machinery is being tampered with? Does it mean both? How do you explain or understand this?
JS: What it means to me is that neither system is self validating. Neither system can be trusted. If you look at accounting, you do double entry accounting. I'm not an accountant so my terminology may be off, but you basically audit by checking one column of numbers against another column of numbers. If they disagree, you know something is wrong somewhere. There is some arithmetical mistake, some failure of entry, possibly fraud ... you don't know. You just know that if two things that are pretty much supposed to agree had disagreed, there's a problem somewhere. I can rule out mathematically and scientifically, by this time, errors due to random chance. Errors due to random chance, sampling errors, what we call margin of error issues, would not be expressing themselves so consistently in one direction. They'd be going in both directions and they'd be much smaller.
If you take a mathematical sample of a whole ... if you take a blood draw in a person and you look at 1,000 or so blood cells as represented in of all their millions of blood cells, that's guaranteed to be a random sample. It's not like all the bad blood cells hide out in a single vein or something. From that, you get a very clear and crisp mathematical margin of error and it tells you how likely you are to be within X number of percent about what the truth is about the entire target that you're looking at of the blood of the whole body. That's how you can make a diagnosis based on a pinprick.
In exit polling it's not that simple. In exit polling you have sampling that is not purely mathematically random. First of all, it's done in clusters because it would be an impractical matter to catch people all over the state randomly coming out at the polls. You'd have to have a person at each precinct, etc. We're not even talking about early voting and absentee voting. Let's just leave that out of the equation and assume everybody votes on election day. You'd still have to go to thousands of precincts. It would be prohibitively expensive. What they do instead, and I was a pollster for a couple of years quite long ago, but the methods haven't changed that much, you basically cluster sample. You pick 20 or 30 precincts that are representative politically and demographically of the whole state and those are the precincts in which you do all your interviews.
That adds mathematically about a 30 percent increase to the margin of error, to the inaccuracy if you want to call that of the poll. It's certainly a tolerable change or loss of accuracy that can be factored in mathematically, but the real problems come up in exit polling with selection bias, response bias, the possibility of people lying to the pollster, etc. These are the things that have been seized on by those who have debunked the exit polls and said they're worthless. They're not worthless and at the same time they're not best evidence. Best evidence would be the voter marked paper ballots. Best evidence would be the memory cards in the computers and what program is actually determining how these votes are counted, what the code is on those memory cards.
Exit polls are indirect. They're statistical evidence and they have flaws that are difficult to quantify. When you see pervasive patterns where it is substantial well beyond the margin of error repeatedly in the same direction, in particular when you've been able to independently validate the demographics of the exit poll sample. This is the work that I did. It's in my book, Code Red: Computerized Election Theft in the New American Century.
SR: So this is a persuasive and recurring pattern and not just in this week’s vote?
JS: In the 2016 primary, we compared the performance of the exit polls in the Republican primaries with the performance of the exit poll in the Democratic primaries. There was a glaring difference. I call these "second order comparatives." Second order comparatives are very important because you're essentially validating your baseline by doing that. If you're conscientious about election forensics, that's the work that you try to do. Does it add up to ironclad proof? No, but it's a very consistent pattern that is absolutely probative enough that it says, Okay, we want to now take a look at the other system and how the votes are being counted. When you look at that other system and how the votes are being counted, your hair stands on end because it's so vulnerable to not just outsider hacking, but to insider manipulation as well.
There are certainly a lot of anecdotal instances of this. For instance, just in this particular election, they bought machines in Ohio that had a feature in them that was basically capable of self auditing. It was a security feature. The Republican secretary of state of Ohio allowed the counties to switch off that feature. You have to ask why. You bought it and it had that feature. They said, Well, it would create chaos. You look at things like that and say hmm. You scratch your head and say, what is going on here? What may be happening in that darkness of cyberspace that the exit polls are giving us a pretty good hint about, but the vote counting system itself completely conceals?
SR: Let's talk about what you found this week. I'm looking at your 2016 presidential chart. I'm looking at North Carolina for example, where it says the exit poll margin was 2.1% ahead for Clinton, but the final vote count showed Trump with a 3.8% lead. You have similar 4.4% Clinton lead in Pennsylvania but then losing by 1.2% to Trump, a 5.6% shift. You have Florida where she was ahead in exit polls by 1.3% and ends up losing by 1.3%, a 2.6% shift.
Is there any reason you can point to as to why you are seeing that in so many different states?
JS: First of all, let me preface it that what they've done since 2004 is exit poll fewer and fewer states. I think there were about 30 states exit polled this time, 20 states were left out because they were considered to be locks, non-competitive. What that does for a forensic standpoint is that it cuts our baseline... It's as if they had a certain limited amount of resources, and they decided to really plow it into getting larger sample sizes in states that they knew were going to be competitive and possibly controversial.
North Carolina was one of those. I believe it had the largest sample size in the country. It was almost 4,000 voters were sampled and the usual sample size in these state exit polls is somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 if they expect it to be competitive. That was basically a double sampling that reduces the mathematical margin of error, but it also improves in a less quantifiable way the accuracy of the poll. That 5.9% red shift from Clinton to Trump is way outside the margin of error for that poll and therefore very unlikely to occur by chance. What might have made it happen? People could've been lying to the exit pollster. The exit pollster could've been all young urban college kids and the Trump voters might have been reluctant to comply with their requests. There might have been refusals from Trump voters.
Now Edison usually tries to get these things right and one of the ways they try to get it right is through some expensive training and they try to get a fairly represented sample of polling interviewers. The polls by the way are confidential. They're not verbal interviews. You're just handed a clipboard with a poll on it. It's not as intimate as some people would believe. There's less of an incentive to lie because it's basically confidential. You fold your polling sheet up and you put it in the box or you hand it back to the interviewer to put it into a grab bag. There's no name on it. There is nothing that associates you with it. The incentive to lie isn't particularly high. We've always dealt with the—is there a reluctant [George W.] Bush responder going on here, is there a shy Trump voter? We don't know. These are possibilities, but we've seen the same kind of exit poll pattern in intraparty contests, we've seen it year after year, we've seen it at the Senate races, at the House exit poll. It transcends an individual race like this where there was so much intensity.
If you want to sleep well at night, which I also prefer to denial, and you want to say to yourself, Yeah, it must have been people just lying to the exit pollsters and I'm not going to worry about it, that's fine. What you're missing at that point is the fact that if you challenge me to say, How do you know these exit polls are valid? I would turn right around and challenge you and say, How do you know the vote counts are valid?
The fact is, and this is cold hard fact, neither of us can prove our case. That is the problem. We have an unobservable system that cannot answer the challenge that it might be subject to manipulation. It can't demonstrate that it is not rigged. Exit polls are just a tool that we use to look at it and say, Well folks, there might be something to dig deeper into here. The problem is virtually never is anyone allowed to dig deeper. We have optical scanner equipment all over this country right now that have the voter marked ballots that drop through the optical-scan reader device and sit in their cabinet below. Those voter marked ballots need to be saved 22 months in theory, although they've been destroyed early, in fact, in many cases, especially if when there was an investigation going on in Ohio.
You have these voter marked ballots that would have probably not been destroyed within two days of the election and they're there. They theoretically could be exhumed and examined. You could go machine by machine, you could look at them in public and you could compare them with machine counts, then you could reconcile those machine counts with the central tabulator. County counts, and state counts ... You could say, Yes, this was a valid election or no, this was not a valid election. We had a problem. Might have been fraud, might have been a glitch, we don't know. The fact is, nobody has access to those ballots. They are corporate property. They are off limits to public inspection. It might as well, in the 99.9% of cases, be a paperless touchscreen that has no record whatsoever.
The fact is, we are denied, when I saw we, the candidates, the public, very often election administrators, by the rules of their states, are denied access to the actual hard evidence we call it, that would allow a determination of whether the election has been accurately counted or perhaps has been illegitimately counted and manipulated. As a matter of fact, in quite a few states and usually under Republican control, but the Democrats have not been tremendously cooperative about this either. The trend has been for ballots to be removed from public record status so that they are no longer susceptible to four-year requests and similar public information requests, Freedom of Information Act requests. They are getting less transparent, not more so.
SR: Where do we stand today? You have your exit poll analysis that says something is not right here. We look at the results. We don't have access to the ballots. We really don't have meaningful audit or recounting possibilities. People are just left feeling very upset and powerless and then the days pass and attention goes elsewhere and the election machinery and the polling machinery largely remains the same.
Am I wrong? Am I missing something?
JS: I couldn't have stated that better. There was a Supreme Court case famously where it had to do with pregnancy and it stood for mootness; when cases became moot because they couldn't be heard in time so they had to do either abortion or pregnancy. By the time it came up through the channels, the time had passed and the woman was no longer pregnant and the issue was moot.
In a similar kind of way we go through these cycles. Interest heightens right before the election. If there is high suspicion of fraud, which sometimes as there sometimes are. If in presidential elections, 2004 obviously being the major one and then this one, there is a flurry of interest, a kind of window of opportunity, but the public attention span and the media attention span in particular is very short. We live in a sound-bite society. There's always other stuff to attend to. People are busy. People are working hard. By and large, you couldn't find a subject that is less sexy than election forensics. The Kardashians are a lot sexier as is the football games on Sunday. So yes, it passes briefly in front of the public eye. There's a lot of stirring about it and then it dies out and it's basically left to us hardcore election integrity advocates. This is catastrophic. This is tragic. What we're left with is a system that was accepted more or less without real proof.
If that's what democracy is worth to us, then we deserve what we get. Democracy requires support. It requires citizen support. It requires an investment of care and an investment of vigilance and an investment of participation more than deciding, Yeah, I'm going to vote or I'm not going to vote. It requires the fulfillment of a duty to be part of the public that counts and observe the counting of the votes so we don't have the ludicrous situation where we hand our ballots to a magician who takes them behind a curtain, you hear them shred the ballots, comes out and tells you so-and-so won. This is what we've got now and it's what we've accepted. We spend more money in two weeks in Iraq then would cost us for 30 years to hand-count our elections. This is surrealistic, this is absurd, but it's the very strong inertial reality. Getting the energy up to change that reality, especially when that reality has worked well by definition for everybody who is sitting in office. They're the people with the least incentive to look under the hood and say, Hey, we need to change this. It's what put them in office.
You will rarely meet a politician or a journalist with a seat at or anywhere near the adult table who wants to rock this boat, who wants to pull the cover off of this thing, who wants to restore public sovereignty. One other point about that is that the musical Hamilton is popular now and Hamilton was notoriously an elitist. Somebody who really didn't believe in full franchise as many of the founding fathers, of course. Women didn't vote, blacks didn't vote, etc. You had to have property to vote in certain states. There's a strain of that elitism that pervades the highly educated classes that tend to fill the political offices and tend to fill the journalistic offices around this country. These are people with high education, high capabilities. They look out at the American people and rightly or wrongly, if I channel what they see, they see a mass of Kardashian following and football fanatic uninformed people.
That's our public. That's our sovereignty. That's what they see from their perch. It's very understandable in a way that they're not all that excited about restoring the sovereignty of that group because they don't really trust it. In their minds, [the] last people you'd want making decisions about whether to war with Iraq or Russia or do this or that deal politically are a bunch of people who come on, flip on the TV, tune on "Dancing with the Stars" and drink a couple of beers. There's not a whole lot of belief in public sovereignty, right or wrong. As moronic as one might believe a good part of this public is, it's really the experts who keep wandering into the minefield. The public knows more than they're given credit for.
One of the things that's going on in this election manifests through Bernie Sanders, manifests through Donald Trump, is a very widespread recognition of that reality, whether they'd call it exactly such or not, a recognition that we are not being listened to, we are not being heard, we are not being considered. So there is this huge populist uprising. Was there enough to give Donald Trump the victory? That remains to be seen and may never be seen, but it was certainly enough to give both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump the kind of support that was shocking to the journalistic establishment and to the political establishment. They're not being the elites that they are ... and yet they are not advocating for having a vote counting system that accurately, publicly and verifiably translates the will of that public into leadership policy and direction. That's in large part what's led us into the place that we're in today, November 10th.
SR: Thank you, this is very good. There's a lot here. I hope people will take the time to understand that something is not right with both the exit polls or the vote count machinery, and at a deep systemic level there are questions that are not being answered. I respect the work you’ve done, as discouraging as its findings are.
by stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Nov 16, 2016 9:14 pm
by seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 04, 2017 11:33 pm
ELECTION 2016
At Least 50 Trump Electors Were Illegitimately Seated as Electoral College Members
More evidence surfaces as calls mount to challenge congressional ratification of Electoral College vote.
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet January 4, 2017
More than 50 Electoral College members who voted for Donald Trump were ineligible to serve as presidential electors because they did not live in the congressional districts they represented or held elective office in states legally barring dual officeholders.
That stunning finding is among the conclusions of an extensive 1,000-plus page legal briefing prepared by a bipartisan nationwide legal team for members of Congress who are being urged to object to certifying the 2016 Electoral College results on Friday.
“Trump’s ascension to the presidency is completely illegitimate,” said Ryan Clayton of Americans Take Action, who led the effort. “It’s not just Russians hacking our democracy. It’s not just voter suppression at unprecedented levels. It is also [that] there are Republicans illegally casting ballots in the Electoral College, and in a sufficient number that the results of the Electoral College proceedings are illegitimate as well.”
“Republicans like to talk all the time about people voting illegally,” Clayton continued. “We have a list of a bunch of Republicans that allegedly voted illegally in the Electoral College. Pam Bondi is the attorney general of the state of Florida and the Florida Constitution says that you cannot hold two offices. And she holds the office of Attorney General and she holds the office of federal elector in the Electoral College. That is a violation of the law. That is a violation of the Constitution. And the vote that she cast in this election is illegal.”
A joint congressional session is scheduled to ratify the 2016 Electoral College vote this Friday. While there have been calls to challenge that certification—including one women-led effort saying Trump's victory is due to voter suppression targeting people of color—the analysis that scores of Trump electors were illegally seated, and the additional finding that most states won by Trump improperly filed their Electoral College "Certificates of Vote" with Congress, is unprecedented.
Their research and report grew out of the Hamilton Electors movement, in which Clayton and others urged Republican electors to reject Trump when the Electoral College met in December, saying they had a constitutional responsibility to pick a more qualified president.
Clayton is hoping that sufficient numbers of Republicans in Congress will not vote to ratify the Electoral College results, thus depriving Trump of the 270 Electoral College votes he needs to win the presidency. If that transpires, the House would then decide between the three top Electoral College vote-getters—Trump, Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell, he said. But before any of that can happen, there needs to be a formal challenge to ratifying the 2016 Electoral College results in Friday’s joint session of Congress, which is where the research finding that scores of Trump votes were illegally cast comes in.
“We have reason to believe that there are at least 50 electoral votes that were not regularly given or not lawfully certified (16 Congressional District violations and 34 Dual Office-Holder violations),” the executive summary of the Electoral Vote Objection Packet said. “The number could be over a hundred. We urge you to prepare written objections for January 6.”
“The compiling of the laws and evidence in this Electoral Vote Objection Package was completed by a national team of roughly 15 pro bono attorneys, law students, and legal assistants who represent no client or entity,” the summary said. “We are non-partisan—Democrat, Republican, and Independent. We live in different parts of the country, urban and rural, red states and blue states.”
Challenging the Electoral College
The Electoral College’s results have only been challenged twice since 1877. The most recent was in 2005, when an objection to Ohio’s Electoral College votes was filed by Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, D-OH, and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA. While that effort did not stop President George W. Bush's reelection, it did force both chambers of Congress to debate for two hours before the Electoral College vote was ratified. Tubbs-Jones and Boxer used the podium to rail against GOP efforts to suppress the vote and disqualify ballots in communities of color.
The process for challenging the Electoral College vote is two-fold. First, a House member has to file a formal challenge and objection. Then one House member and one senator has to sign on, prompting each body to retire to their chambers for the two-hour debate.
The Electoral Vote Objection Packet briefing cites two main areas where 2016 Electoral College members were illegally seated and a third where their votes electing Trump were improperly sent to Congress.
“Specifically, at least 16 electors lived outside the congressional districts they represented in violation of state statutory residency requirements, and at least 34 electors held dual offices, in direct violation of statutes prohibiting dual-office holding,” the briefing's executive summary says, noting this violates two sections of the U.S. Constitution.
The first group of illegitimate electors amounts to political carpetbagging. “In North Carolina, for instance,” the briefing says, a state law, “NCGS 163-1(c) states, ‘One presidential elector shall be nominated from each congressional district…’ Yet, we have voter registration cards showing that numerous North Carolina electors lived outside the congressional districts they represented.”
The report lists the following states and their number of illegitimate electors: Arkansas (two from outside its congressional district); Indiana (one), Louisiana (one), Michigan (one), North Carolina (seven), Oklahoma (one), and Texas (three).
The second group of illegitimate electors is based on the fact that presidential electors hold a public office, however short-lived, and that directly conflicts with states that ban elected officials from holding more than one office at a time. Florida’s state constitution, for example, bars dual-office holding. Its Supreme Court has issued rulings that further define what constitutes an officeholder. And the state legislature has passed other laws treating them as public officials, such as reimbursing them for travel costs.
“Ironically, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has issued a number of Advisory Legal Opinions on dual-office holding, was a presidential elector,” the briefing said. “Her name was on the Governor’s certification list of Republican electors, and also Attorney General Bondi cast her electoral ballot on December 19. More Negron, who also cast an electoral vote, is currently president of the Florida Senate.”
The report lists the following states and their number of illegitimate electors based on dual-office holders: Alabama (two), Florida (12), Georgia (four), Iowa (two), Kansas (four), Kentucky (one), Michigan (one), Missouri (one), Nebraska (one), North Carolina (one), Ohio (one), Oklahoma (two), Pennsylvania (two), South Carolina (one), South Dakota (three), Tennessee (two), Texas (four), Utah (one), and West Virginia (three). This tally, which adds up to 49 electors, was taken from a spreadsheet accompanying the briefing and is a larger number than what was cited in the report’s executive summary, which is quoted above.
Finally, there is another area of concern. Apparently, 23 states—out of the 31 that cast Electoral College votes for Trump—did not properly report separate vote counts for president and vice-president to Congress. That violates the 12th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and a federal law requiring presidential electors in each state to “provide ‘two distinct lists of votes,’ one for the president and the other for the Vice President,” the briefing said. “Of 31 states, only eight states followed that law," the report said. "Some states codify the federal law into their own state law regarding presidential electors. Of those, 15 states did not provide two lists of signatures on their Certificates of Vote.”
“We are not providing any legal advice,” the briefing’s disclaimer says. “We strongly suggest that members of Congress employ their own legal teams to verify our work.”
It may be that the efforts to convince Congress to challenge the ratification of the 2016 Electoral College amounts to little more than a Hail Mary aimed at derailing a Trump presidency. As of late Wednesday, Clayton thought there would be House members willing to object to certifying the Electoral College vote, but he was less certain about finding a senator willing to go along.
But even if a challenge is mounted and fails, it underscores the illegitimate basis of Trump’s presidency and the deep opposition to it, and refutes the GOP’s outrageous claim that it has a mandate for dismantling government programs across the board.
“We have a list of 50 illegal electors,” Clayton said. “That puts Donald Trump below the threshold that he needs to be elected president. Let’s debate it in an open session. According to the Constitution, the Congress, if nobody wins on the first round of balloting, picks from the top three candidates. That will be Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Colin Powell.”
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/l ... ge-members
by JackRiddler » Thu Nov 29, 2018 10:28 pm
https://www.votingjustice.us/pa_recount ... everywhere
http://www.votingjustice.us
PA Recount Settlement a Victory for Voters Everywhere
Posted by Robert Blackmon
on November 28, 2018
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2018
Stein Recount 2016
Contact: Dave Schwab, schwab@jill2016.com 518-610-2708
Historic PA recount settlement is a victory for voters everywhere - Jill Stein.
Today, Green Party 2016 Presidential nominee Jill Stein announced the formal settlement of her 2016 lawsuit against the state of Pennsylvania. The lawsuit called for an end to the use of paperless voting machines known to be vulnerable to hacking, tampering and error, and for the reform of unworkable recount procedures that prevent verification of the vote. The settlement guarantees that Pennsylvania will provide new voting systems using paper ballots by 2020, followed in 2022 by automatic robust audits after every election to confirm the accuracy of the vote before results are certified.
Stein declared, “This is a critical victory for everyone concerned with the integrity of our elections. We congratulate the state of Pennsylvania for raising the bar not only for Pennsylvanians, but for voters everywhere. By agreeing to end the use of paperless voting machines, Pennsylvania is not only safeguarding its citizens’ right to vote. By example, the agreement is also a big step towards the retirement of paperless voting machines that one in four voters across the nation are still required to use, despite their demonstrated vulnerability to hacking, tampering, and error. Automatic robust audits provide an essential safeguard by cross-checking paper ballots against machine totals using hand counts and the human eye to make sure every election is verified before the results are official. These two reforms are a first step to restoring confidence in our broken elections.”
Read the Settlement Agreement
“With this settlement, Pennsylvania will go from an election integrity backwater to a national leader,” said Ilann M. Maazel, of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, counsel for the plaintiffs. “We will be watching closely to ensure Pennsylvania implements every one of these important election reforms.”
In 2016, Jill Stein’s presidential campaign conducted a multi-state recount campaign in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania on behalf of thousands of concerned voters across the nation. Powered by over 10,000 volunteers and 161,000 donors contributing an average of $45 per person, the recounts of 2016 brought into the national spotlight the urgent call for elections we can trust, that are accurate, secure and just, and free from Jim Crow voter suppression.
In Pennsylvania, thousands of voters calling for a recount were thwarted by a bureaucratic nightmare of vague, obstructive rules requiring at least three voters in each of over 9,000 precincts to file notarized requests by undefined deadlines at unknown locations - all of which was required within days following the election. After multiple attempts to compel a statewide recount were blocked, Jill Stein and five citizen plaintiffs challenged the state's reliance on paperless voting machines and its dysfunctional procedure for recounts in federal court.
In addition to paper ballots and automatic audits, the settlement reached today allows Jill Stein and fellow plaintiffs to designate observers to ensure that the state carries out its commitments in full. Today’s agreement builds on the state of Pennsylvania’s statement in February 2018 requiring voting machines with a paper trail by the 2020 elections - an apparent concession announced the very day of a court-imposed deadline for the state to respond to the recount lawsuit. Today’s agreement goes further by replacing the requirement for a paper trail with a paper ballot specifically - a far more secure, reliable and enduring record of the actual vote cast. Furthermore, the court will retain jurisdiction to enforce the settlement agreement. The state has also agreed to pay $150,000 in attorney’s fees to the plaintiffs.
The Stein campaign is still in court in Wisconsin, where they have established the right to examine key voting machine software for evidence of tampering or errors that could compromise an election. The Stein campaign is still fighting a gag rule sought by voting machine corporations to prevent any public disclosure of the findings, a move that could bury discoveries critical to the security and accuracy of our elections.
The Stein campaign has committed to distributing any recount money left over - after recount-related litigation is completed - to election protection / voting justice organizations that will be chosen by the recount donors.
Stein observed, “The continuing controversies, uncertainties and injustices of the 2018 midterm elections, including the epidemic of voter suppression, illustrate the ongoing crisis of our elections. This includes many instances of machine malfunction reported in New York, California and Arizona and vote flipping observed in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Texas and Illinois. These problems underscore the importance of the solutions provided in today’s settlement - paper ballots and automatic robust audits - which together ensure that any errors in the count will be detected and corrected.”
“To provide an overarching framework for restoring trust in our elections, the Stein campaign and the 2016 recount team have called for a nonpartisan Citizen Commission for Election Protection & Voting Justice to push for urgently needed follow-on reforms - including an end to voter suppression, gerrymandering and barriers to voting, and the adoption of open debates, ranked choice voting and proportional representation, public financing of elections, fair access to the ballot, and rigorous chain of custody laws to safeguard ballots cast.”
“Today’s agreement with the State of Pennsylvania to replace paperless voting machines with paper ballots and automatic robust audits is a critical step towards rebuilding confidence in our elections. We look forward to working with the state of Pennsylvania to raise the bar for election integrity in Pennsylvania and across the nation and ensure elections we can trust.”
Read the Settlement Agreement
https://blackagendareport.com/jill-stei ... nnsylvania
blackagendareport.com
Jill Stein Lawsuit Forces Adoption of Paper Ballots and Election Audits in Pennsylvania | Black Agenda Report
Bruce A. Dixon, BAR managing editor 29 Nov 2018
When you absolutely, positively need to steal an election, nothing beats the simple elegance of modern, computerized faith based voting machines. You can gerrymander districts, you can conduct malicious purges on spurious grounds like people convicted of felonies in other states having similar names. You can close polling places in neighborhoods unlikely to vote for you. You can even intimidate voters at the polling place, but all these things either leave paper trails or can generate unwanted publicity.
But with modern faith-based voting you allow the voter to touch a screen and press a button, apparently casting a vote. But no paper trail is created, no audit or recount is possible. The official and certifiable result is whatever the machine says it is, period exclamation point. State officials and corporate news talkers doggedly insist that questioning the machines is conspiracy theory, akin to questioning the integrity of arithmetic itself. And the machine’s manufacturer makes a healthy investment – I mean a healthy campaign contribution to the officials responsible.
In 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein filed lawsuits in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania demanding recounts and audits of the vote in that year’s presidential election, following numerous irregularities including tens of thousands of votes that vanished or went uncounted in Wisconsin and Michigan. The suits in Michigan and Wisconsin were dismissed on flimsy grounds, a judge in Michigan directly ruling that US voters had no right to any kind of audit of election results. But the case dragged on in Pennsylvania, and was finally settled yesterday.
In an out of court settlement reached in order to dismiss the suit, the state of Pennsylvania agreed to begin using paper ballots in 2020, with automatic audits beginning in 2022. The precise details of how the state will manage the introduction, or re-introduction of paper ballots by 2020 and audits by 2022 are still to be negotiated, but this is a significant step away from the faith-based voting regimes in place in much of the US.
The Hillary Clinton campaign had the same information the Greens had, but refused to question the crooked 2016 election results. There was a split among Democrats, and many small amount contributors like those affiliated with MoveOn.Org supported Stein’s effort for a 2016 recount and audit pitched in to make the lawsuit possible. Likewise there was dissension inside the Green Party as to whether this was a good idea as well, with some complaining that Stein had essentially joined the Democrats. This seems to be groundless, since the Democratic party and its presidential candidates in 2000 and 2004 threw away their own legitimacy by prematurely conceding to their Republican opponents and stubbornly refusing to wage any sort of public fight against Republicans who orchestrated a nationwide electoral crime wave to secure the White House and more than a few seats in Congress. It’s more accurate to suggest that the Stein lawsuit, and the Green effort to abolish some of the most flagrant electoral theft tactics was an invitation to Democrats and Republicans to join not just Greens, but the rest of the planet in rejecting this obvious abuse of the pubic trust.
Fact is, the lawsuit contributed mightily to what is now a broad and nonpartisan groundswell against faith-based electronic voting, a groundswell that includes Republican candidates for office as well as Democrats and Greens. That’s right – just like Democrats borrowed the name, if not the substance of the “Green New Deal,” a surprising number of state level Republican candidates for the offices which administer elections are insisting that they too want to see paper ballots, and the possibility of audits and recounts. The persistence of Stein’s legal team, and the original good call in filing the suit doubtless contributed to what looks like the beginning of the end of faith based electronic voting. Even the Republican candidate for secretary of state in Georgia of all places, without even being asked, says he is for paper ballots now.
There are still plenty of other ways to steal elections, of course, many justified in opinions of the black robed crooks who sit on our nation’s state and federal courts – gerrymandering, caging, purges, outrageous restrictions on voter registration and early voting just to name a few. You can visit gregpalst.com for a summary of the ways elections can and are still being gamed.
But we should take a moment to thank Jill Stein and her team for pursuing this legal angle, and that’s what it is not liberation but a legal angle, to make elections in this country a little closer to fairness. It’s important. After all Greens and opposition Democrats and independents across the country will have to compete in local elections in 2019, and another round of primary and general elections in 2020. This is one less piece of skullduggery they’ll have to worry about.
Please , if you haven’t done so already, do visit our site at http://www.blackagendareport.com and subscribe to our free weekly email newsletter which delivers links to all our new print and audio content published each week at Black Agenda Report. Facebook, ]Google and other corporate social media do game their algorithnms to suppress the appearance of news, commentary and analysis from the black left. I’m Bruce Dixon for Black Agenda Radio Commentaries.
by Grizzly » Thu Nov 29, 2018 10:38 pm
by Marionumber1 » Thu Nov 29, 2018 11:16 pm
2. The Secretary will only certify new voting systems for use in Pennsylvania if they meet these criteria:
a. The ballot on which each vote is recorded is paper
b. They produce a voter-verifiable record of each vote; and
c. They are capable of supporting a robust pre-certification auditing process.
by JackRiddler » Thu Nov 29, 2018 11:24 pm
by seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 07, 2018 11:06 am
Missouri Secretary of State Ashcroft launches investigation into Josh Hawley
By Jack Suntrup St. Louis Post-Dispatch 1 hr ago
Election 2018 Senate Hawley Missouri
JEFFERSON CITY • Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft has launched an investigation into the way Attorney General Josh Hawley ran the office, Ashcroft’s deputy general counsel wrote to a Democratic-allied group Thursday.
The American Democracy Legal Fund wrote to Ashcroft on Nov. 2, days before the midterm elections, alleging that Hawley may have “used public funds as Attorney General to support his candidacy for U.S. Senate.”
The complaint came after the Kansas City Star reported on Oct. 31 that political advisers who would run Hawley’s U.S. Senate campaign also directed taxpayer-funded staff, confusing the attorney general office’s chain of command.
The advisers also worked to raise Hawley’s national profile after Hawley took office as attorney general, the Star reported.
“This office will commence an investigation into the alleged offense,” Khristine A. Heisinger wrote to Brad Woodhouse, president of the legal fund. Heisinger asks Woodhouse to forward the secretary of state’s office any information he may have.
Like Hawley, Ashcroft is a Republican.
Mary Compton, spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, said by email that the office was “delighted to cooperate” with the probe “and put these ridiculous allegations to bed once and for all.
“These allegations are totally meritless and nothing more than a partisan attempt to slander the work of the Attorney General’s Office. As we have said before, no taxpayer resources were ever expended for campaign purposes. And no government employees ever participated in campaign or political activities.”
Woodhouse cheered the news.
“Josh Hawley’s flagrant abuse of his taxpayer funded office for his own political gain deserves immediate investigation,” he said in a statement. “We’re heartened to see Secretary of State Ashcroft give this racket further scrutiny.”
U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who lost to Hawley in November’s election, argued in the campaign’s closing days that he may have committed a crime by inviting political advisers to manage aspects of his office.
“It is against the law to use state resources for political gain,” McCaskill, a former prosecutor in Kansas City, said. “You cannot use taxpayer-paid staff to assist in any political purpose. The last (Republican) attorney general went to prison for utilizing his office and his state staff to promote him politically. Those are the facts.”
In 1993, Missouri Attorney General William L. Webster was sentenced to two years in prison for conspiracy and embezzlement of state resources after an investigation revealed Webster was using state resources for political purposes.
One of Josh Hawley's first moves as AG: scrapping his environmental division
"That was a big red flag to me," one attorney who still works in the office, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliati…
The agenda at various meetings with consultants Timmy Teepell and Gail Gitcho and office employees included official business such as the budget, staffing decisions and how to roll out major policy initiatives against sex trafficking and opioid abuse, the Star reported.
Hawley, at a campaign stop after the report, denied any wrongdoing.
“From Day One, we’ve made combating human trafficking, taking on the opioid industry, protecting Missouri consumers a top priority. And I came into office wanting to do that and you can see that reflected in everything, from our notes, our meetings, our calendars, all of that from the very first,” Hawley said.
Teepell was among the entourage traveling with Hawley as he made stops in Mexico, Hannibal and La Plata in the closing days of the campaign.
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/cri ... b988c.html
North Carolina Republicans are national models for election fraud and abuses of power
Absentee ballot fraud scheme is latest chapter in the NC GOP history of undermining democracy. As other states follow its lead, it must be stopped.
The North Carolina Republican Party'sdisrespect for the constitutional right of all Americans to vote in free and fair elections should send chills down the spines of every citizen regardless of political party. The subversion of this sacrosanct principle that Republicans regularly commit for cynical partisan gain has reached a new low, and as a growing election fraud scandal consumes the congressional race in North Carolina’s 9th district, we must all speak out against these partisan actions that undermine the bedrock of our democracy.
While much of the country is now getting its first look at the disgusting tactics of the North Carolina Republican Party, for me, this is an enragingly familiar sight. In 2016, eight years to the month after dropping out of North Carolina State University to join the Obama campaign, I moved home to the Old North State to work for Hillary Clinton. This experience left me with a host of important memories. Most of them I’ll cherish for a lifetime, but some I won’t.
GOP persistent in twisting the law
That July, apanel of three federal judges unanimously struck down a GOP voter suppression law that they ruled had “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision” in many ways. In part, the judges wrote, “With race data in hand, the legislature amended the bill to exclude many of the alternative photo IDs used by African Americans.”
Instead of correcting its course at the time, the GOP doubled down. The party’s executive director, Dallas Woodhouse, was even caught exploiting the updates to voting rules that resulted from this legal decision by directing all Republican members of local election boards to “make party line changes” by cutting early voting polling places and hours. Early voting is disproportionately used by citizens of color.
The Republicans on these boards largely complied with Woodhouse’s instructions, and countless North Carolinians across the state who tried to vote early in 2016 were forced to wait in lines that stretched multiple blocks for hours.
The pretext used to justify such offensive voter suppression is purportedly widespread, in-person “voter fraud” — a comprehensively debunked concern. Of over 1 billion ballots cast in the U.S. from 2000 to 2014, only 31 instances took place. On average, a comparable number of Americans are killed by lightning every single year.
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While the “problem” the GOP claims to address is a fabrication, the burdens of its “solutions” are real and invariably disenfranchise people of color and other constituencies who statistically don’t tend to vote the way Republican politicians would like. This is a un-American strategy and the fact that is has become so common makes it all the more outrageous.
Fast-forward to now. The race for North Carolina’s 9th congressional district has been engulfed by a rare, real-life election fraud scandal as mounting evidence shows that a convicted felon who was on the payroll of the top consultant for one of the candidates carried out a large-scale absentee ballot fraud scheme. The North Carolina Board of Elections and Ethics enforcement has made a bipartisan decision not to certify this election so it can be investigated.
But curiously, the North Carolina Republican Party wants the results of this extremely abnormal fraud-tainted election to be made official first, and an investigation should only follow. They’ve even threatened to sue the board of elections.
If that seems perplexing after the state party’s years-long bawling about their supposed nemesis of fraud, consider that the beneficiary of this felon’s actions is the Republican nominee, Mark Harris.
Disregard for voters is a pattern nationally
At the very same time, Republicans in the state legislature are pushing a bill that would give their party control of local boards of election in what they are calling “even-numbered years,” as if they think people are too stupid to understand what that means.
This scorched earth disregard for voters in North Carolina endangers democracy across America because Republican-controlled legislatures are all too ready to emulate worst practices that begin here. Look no farther than Wisconsin, where the GOP is replicating the same craven attack on voters’ will that took place in 2016 after Roy Cooper was elected governor.
The truth is obvious and intolerable. In North Carolina and, increasingly, elsewhere, Republican leaders aren’t just unconcerned about the integrity of our elections, they are hostile to it. They only care about winning, even if corruption and moral bankruptcy are the price and even if it means — in the American South —- encroaching on the most fundamental American rights. This must be called what it is and it must be stopped.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/ ... 226567002/
by Grizzly » Fri Dec 07, 2018 12:12 pm
by seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 07, 2018 7:51 pm
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