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by Morty » Sun Nov 27, 2016 6:20 pm
Katie Halper
@kthalps
If you're blaming Trump on Stein, Bernie, "bros" & not demanding a recount to remove the existential threat, you're dishonest & hypocritical
11:00 AM - 24 Nov 2016
0 replies 79 retweets 303 likes
by elfismiles » Sun Nov 27, 2016 6:21 pm
by Agent Orange Cooper » Sun Nov 27, 2016 8:07 pm
Open Letter to Jill Stein
Jill,
I believe that you are doing the recount because you believe your votes have been stolen and that this is a great opportunity to bring the election fraud bogeyman out in the open. I have been doing election fraud analysis since 2003.
View my blog: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ib2 ... jry0ij1jz1
I believe you made a mistake in picking just the three states to recount. What about the states that Clinton barely won?
Like VA ME MN NH CO NV
In addition, I would recommend a recount in CA, a state that Clinton stole from Bernie. Did Clinton pad her margin at your expense in CA and elsewhere to show that she won the popular vote? Do you really believe she did better than Obama in CA?
Check out the results in Humboldt County, CA,. It is the only county in the US which uses an Open Source system to count and audit the results. It is a foolproof system. You had 5.2% of the vote in Humboldt, but just 1.8% in CA.
Did you actually win 5% in CA? That would add 300,000 votes to your CA total. If you had 5% nationally, it would mean that you had 6.5 million votes, not the 1.2 million you are credited for.
In conclusion, recount everything. And make sure the recount is done fairly. They rig recounts too, you know.
Best,
Richard Charnin
by 0_0 » Sun Nov 27, 2016 8:57 pm
by Nordic » Sun Nov 27, 2016 9:24 pm
They rig recounts too, you know
by brekin » Sun Nov 27, 2016 11:53 pm
Morty wrote:From twitter:Katie Halper
@kthalps
If you're blaming Trump on Stein, Bernie, "bros" & not demanding a recount to remove the existential threat, you're dishonest & hypocritical
11:00 AM - 24 Nov 2016
0 replies 79 retweets 303 likes
If she's worried about existential threats, I'm thinking she'll have a right proper one on her hands the day they change the election result.
by dada » Mon Nov 28, 2016 1:48 am
by seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 28, 2016 2:27 am
Green Recount Effort Poised to Explore Whether Russia Hacked the Vote for Trump
The stakes and lines of inquiry became clearer as the Clinton campaign joined the effort.
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet November 26, 2016
Investigating Russia’s role in interfering and with possibly hacking the 2016 presidential election vote is at the center of the Green Party-led recount effort.
The recount entered a new phase Saturday, when both the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Donald Trump transition team issued dueling statements about the need to verify votes in the three states that gave Trump an Electoral College majority. But beyond their appearances, with Clinton’s campaign saying it would participate in the effort, was a remarkable development: the prospect that the recount will try to investigate the biggest unanswered question hanging over the election beside who won: did Russia take steps to hack the vote?
Trump called the recount a “ridiculous” effort by the Greens that was fleecing donors of the nearly $6 million raised by midday Saturday. But the statement by the Clinton campaign’s top lawyer, Marc Elias, noted in its opening paragraphs that the election, the Democratic Party, and their campaign was repeatedly targeted by the Russians.
“This election cycle was unique in the degree of foreign interference witnessed throughout the campaign: the U.S. government concluded that Russian state actors were behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the personal email accounts of Hillary for America campaign officials, and just yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Russian government was behind much of the 'fake news' propaganda that circulated online in the closing weeks of the election,” Elias wrote on Medium.com, then elaborating about their private investigative efforts to assess the impact of Russian interference in the campaign.
Going even further, the first recount petition filed by the Greens, in Wisconsin, primarily focused on Russian hacking, not on the more easily understood line of inquiry of different voting technologies reporting different margins of victory for Trump despite their locations. The Green's petition opens by stating they believe “an irregularity” has occurred affecting the entire state. It goes on to say that in August, “foreign operators breached voter registration databases in at least two states and stole hundreds of thousands of voter records” at the same time the email systems of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign were hacked and put online. It lists warnings by federal homeland security officials to states to take steps to protect these databases, and then lays out its theories. First, Wisconsin’s voting systems are aging and known to be susceptible to hackers, “including they can be breached without detection and even after certain security measures are put in place.” And that may account for “a significant increase in the number of absentee voters compared to the last general election. This significant increase could be attributed to a breach of the state’s electronic voter database.”
That summation and line of inquiry has been reported by AlterNet before. However, the Green’s petition went further to explain what they are going to be looking for as the recount ensues. The first piece of supporting evidence is an affidavit by J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan professor of computer science and engineering, and director of the Center for Computer Security and Society based in Ann Arbor. He was part of the team set up by California’s ex-Secretary of State, Debra Bowen, that reviewed the vulnerability of its electronic voting systems and led to the state banning the same machines used in Wisconsin.
Russia tried to breach voter registration databases in 20 states last summer, Halderman said, citing the Department of Homeland Security as his source. “Russia has sophisticated cyber-offensive capabilities, and it has shown a willingness to use them to hack elections elsewhere. For instance, according to published reports, during the 2014 presidential election in Ukraine, attackers linked to Russia sabotaged Ukraine’s vote-counting infrastructure, and Ukranian officials succeeded only at the last minute in defusing the vote-stealing malware that could have caused the wrong winner to be announced,” he wrote, referencing and submitting a June 2014 Christian Science Monitor article that described the hacks and averted tampering.
Not mentioned in the Green’s filing was Paul Manafort, who came aboard Trump’s campaign last spring and shepherded it through the Republican National Convention until he was forced to resign because of a multi-million-dollar cash payment from consulting in Ukraine, and he was working for the pro-Russian side of the June 2014 Ukranian election, the Washington Post reported last August. “Even with [pro-Russian Viktor] Yanukovych out of the country, the [New York] Times reports Manafort kept working in Ukraine with the president's former chief of staff to help keep the pro-Russian party in the political game. It worked. The party ended up being a significant influence in parliament.”
Halderman’s affidavit continued, saying the same vote tampering that occurred in Ukraine could have occurred in some of 2016’s presidential swing states:
"If a foreign government were to attempt to hack American voting machines to influence the outcome of a presidential election, one might expect the hackers to proceed as follows. First, the attackers might probe election offices well in advance to find ways to break into the computers. Next, closer to the election, when it was clear from polling data which state would have close electoral margin, the attackers might spread malware into voting machines into some of the states, manipulating the machines to shift a few percent of the vote to favor the desired candidate. This malware would likely be designed to remain inactive during pre-election tests, perform its function during the election, and then erase itself after the polls closed. One would expect a skilled attacker’s work to leave no visible signs, other than a surprising electoral outcome in which results in several close states differed from pre-election polling.”
America’s voting machinery is especially vulnerable to that scenario, Halderman said, noting that he personally has installed malware in electronic voting machines to achieve that exact result. Whether voting machines are connected to the internet “is irrelevant,” he said, which is directly applicable to Wisconsin, whose safeguards include keeping its voting machines offline, state election officials have previously told AlterNet. All it takes is one memory card to be inserted into the system at any point, he said, for such malware to be spread.
“This explanation is plausible, in light of other known cyber attacks intended to affect the outcome of the election; the profound vulnerability of American voting machines to cyberattack; and the fact that a skilled attacker would leave no outwardly visible evidence of an attack other than an unexpected result,” Halderman reiterated. “The only way to determine whether a cyber attack affected the outcome of the 2016 presidential election is to examine the available physical evidence—that is, to count the paper ballots and paper audit trail records, and review the voting equipment… Using the electronic equipment to conduct the recount, even after first evaluating the machine through a test deck, is insufficient. Attackers intending to commit a successful cyber attack could, and likely would, create a method to undermine any pre-tests… Voting equipment that might yield forensic evidence of an attack includes the voting machines, removable media, and election management system computers. Paper ballot, paper audit trails, and voting equipment will only be examined in this manner if there is a recount.”
This scenario of examining the entire voting system is not what the state of Wisconsin is envisioning when conducting the recount, according to a statement by the state election administrator, Michael Hass, on Friday, saying that the Green Party has filed for its recount.
“In a recount, all ballots (including those that were originally hand-counted) are examined to determine voter intent before being retabulated. In addition, the county boards of canvassers will examine other documents, including poll lists, written absentee applications, rejected absentee ballots, and provisional ballots before counting the votes.”
Haas said the Wisconsin Election Commission’s role in the recount is “to provide legal guidance to the counties during the recount, and to certify the results.” This is a new state board composed of partisan appointees by Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who disbanded the state’s former Government Accountability Board, which was comprised of retired state judges and was among the most highly respected election oversight panel in the country.
In other words, these preliminary and contradictory statements from the Clinton campaign, Green Party and Wisconsin election administrator show why the upcoming presidential recount is going to be controversial and headed into court at many steps along the way. It also shows that the Greens are taking the lead in advancing the one storyline the Clinton campaign did not get the media to heed—the extent to which Russia may have tampered with America’s voting machinery and tilted the result to a candidate who embraced Vladimir Putin.
“Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves, but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides,” Clinton counsel Marc Elias said on Saturday. “The campaign is grateful to all those who have expended time and effort to investigate various claims of abnormalities and irregularities. While that effort has not, in our view, resulted in evidence of manipulation of results, now that a recount is underway, we believe we have an obligation to the more than 64 million Americans who cast ballots for Hillary Clinton to participate in ongoing proceedings to ensure that an accurate vote count will be reported.”
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/g ... vote-trump
by brekin » Mon Nov 28, 2016 3:47 am
dada » Mon Nov 28, 2016 12:48 am wrote:I prefer to look at politics as negotiation. It sounds like an open dialogue. Haggling for a better deal. Businessmen negotiate. Cops negotiate to save the life of a hostage. Also you negotiate over an obstacle, or through a difficult path. It's a positive, pro-active word. Compromise sounds like everybody loses. Also integrity is compromised. When something is compromised, it breaks down. It's a negative, reactive word.
Enlightenment isn't at all like it's advertised. It's like staring into the abyss, and seeing your own reflection staring back. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
by seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 28, 2016 2:39 pm
There's Dark Money Buried in the Complicated State of Wisconsin
How did a state of progressive ideals turn so conservative?
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
NOV 28, 2016
It's fitting that the current demand to audit/recount the presidential vote is centered on Wisconsin. The transformation of the state where so much of the progressive improvements to self-government began into the independent Republic of Griftsylvania (Scott Walker, assistant manager for sales) is one of the great triumphs of the money power and its lickspittles in modern American politics. Further, if you want to see how long and hard a pull it's going to be to roll any of this back, you should check out the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's account of one race for a seat on the state's supreme court.
(Reminder: an elected judiciary is the second-worst idea in American politics. Thank you.)
"I haven't heard anyone making any noise about Annette," said Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Joe Donald, who ran for the Supreme Court this year but lost in the primary. "If someone was out there thinking about it, they would need to move right away." Attorneys, judges, political consultants and others contacted for this story told The Associated Press that they hadn't heard of anyone who was planning to challenge Ziegler. "I haven't heard a thing," said Madison attorney Linda Clifford, who ran against Ziegler in 2007. There was no talk, either publicly or privately, about any potential challenger to Ziegler during the annual Wisconsin Judicial Conference meeting last week, said former Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler. He lost his re-election bid in 2008 and is now working as an attorney in the Milwaukee area.
As the story informs us, Annette Ziegler's ascension to the state's highest court can be seen as the beginning of the conversion of that court into a rubber-stamp for the ongoing campaign to sell off Wisconsin for parts waged by Walker and his pet legislature.
Ziegler, 52, paved the way for a conservative re-shaping of the officially nonpartisan court with her victory in 2007. When she joined the court nearly a decade ago, liberals held a 4-3 majority. Now conservatives have a 5-2 majority, which they would retain if Ziegler were to win…Outside money could also play a large role. Ziegler's race in 2007 marked the first time that outside groups spent heavily on Supreme Court races in Wisconsin. Of the $3.1 million spent by outside groups in that race, about $2.7 million came from conservative groups backing her, according to a tally by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. Outside groups spend about $3.4 million on this year's race won by conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley. All but about $700,000 went to Bradley. Knowing that so much outside money could flow in for Ziegler, as it did in 2007 and has for conservative justices since then, could also be scaring off potential challengers, Bannon said.
Once in office, unsurprisingly, Judge Ziegler ran afoul of the state's ethics laws because ethics laws used to be something of which the state was justly proud. Therefore, they can be ignored before being destroyed. Again, from the J-S:
According to a summary of the complaint, Ziegler told an Ethics Board investigator that her husband, J.J. Ziegler, has been a director of the West Bend Savings Bank since 2000 or 2001. Annette Ziegler, 43, told the investigator that her husband is paid $20,000 a year to serve as a director for the bank but noted that he is a developer and said the bank is "not how we make our living." Ziegler also told the investigator that Supreme Court conflict-of-interest rules did not enter her mind when she acted on the five cases, and if they had, she would have felt that her conduct was allowed under the rules. State Supreme Court rules explicitly say a judge cannot rule on a case if his or her spouse is a company director unless both sides in the case approve a waiver allowing that judge to preside.
And there, in microcosm, is the whole damn thing. The destruction of traditional political norms. (The court was designed to be bipartisan.). Big money helping to elect a knee-jerk conservative majority. Dark money helping to guarantee that majority's permanent survival. And, eventually, an opposition party giving into the futility of it all. That's how Wisconsin got the way it is. That's how Kansas got the way it is. One day, unless people get smart and careful in one quick hurry, that is how the United States is going to have become what it is.
In related developments, the University of Wisconsin, the pioneer state university in using its research facilities for the general good of the people of the state, home of The Wisconsin Idea, just fell out of the National Science Foundation's list of Top Five research universities for the first time since 1972. Nice work, Scott. Keep an eye on Wisconsin. It's the lab rat for a lot of really terrible ideas.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/po ... ting-2016/
by seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 28, 2016 3:24 pm
Wisconsin rejects doing recount by hand; Stein to sue
Jason Stein and Patrick Marley , Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 2:15 p.m. EST November 28, 2016
636159265457965419-voting.jpg
(Photo: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
Madison — The Wisconsin Elections Commission set a timetable Monday for a recount of the presidential election but rejected a request to conduct it by hand made by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who quickly responded that she would sue.
Also Monday, Stein filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania to force a recount there and her supporters began filing recount requests at the precinct level there. Stein — who received just a tiny piece of the vote —also plans to ask for a recount in Michigan on Wednesday.
Unless Stein wins her lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court, officials in each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties would decide on their own whether to do their recounts by hand. That could mean some counties perform recounts by machine and some by hand.
Citing the results of a 2011 statewide recount that changed only 300 votes, Elections Commission chairman Mark Thomsen, a Democrat, said this presidential recount is very unlikely to change Republican Donald Trump's win in the state.
"It may not be 22,177," said Thomsen, referring to Trump's win over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the vote count. "But I don’t doubt that the president-elect is going to win that."
Thomsen dismissed Stein's claims of problems with the vote as unfounded and misleading. But he directed his toughest criticism to Trump's unsupported allegations that millions of people voted illegally nationwide, calling them "an insult to the people that run our elections."
The commission is made up of three Democrats and three Republicans. It adopted the recount plans unanimously.
Stein is seeking to pay for the recount of Wisconsin's election — in which she received about 31,000 votes, or 1% — to make sure that Democrat Hillary Clinton really lost Wisconsin to Republican Donald Trump by some 22,000.
Independent candidate Roque "Rocky" De La Fuente, who received about 1,500 votes, also requested a recount.
"We must recount the votes so we can build trust in our election system," Stein said in a written statement. "We need to verify the vote in this and every election so that Americans of all parties can be sure we have a fair, secure and accurate voting system.”
Under the plan adopted Monday, the recount would begin Thursday, provided Stein, De La Fuente or both paid by Tuesday.
The recount could cost $1 million and a formal estimate is to be developed Monday based on what counties say the recount will cost them.
If the estimate is high, Stein and De La Fuente will get a refund but if the costs come in above expectations they will have to pay more.
Stein has taken in $6.5 million since Wednesday through an online fundraising blitz to fund her recount efforts. A spokeswoman for De La Fuente said he is considering his options for paying for his share of the recount.
Most machines in Wisconsin are optical readers. Voters fill out a ballot and feed it into the machine, which then electronically records the vote. In a hand recount, clerks would individually tally those ballots. In a machine recount, they would feed the ballots back through the machines, though they would also run a number of other checks such as reconciling the votes and signed names on poll lists.
A small number of votes in Wisconsin are cast on touch-screen machines. Those machines also generate paper records.
For some counties, hand recounts might be faster and less expensive because they could avoid reprogramming their voting machines, according to the Elections Commission.
Under federal law, any disputes over the 2.98 million votes cast in the presidential election must be resolved within 35 days of election day to ensure electoral votes are counted. That’s Dec. 13 this year.
Electors must meet on Dec. 19 this year, and that deadline is more crucial, election experts says. Missing that deadline could put Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes at stake.
The last statewide recount in Wisconsin took about a month to complete. In that 2011 recount, Supreme Court Justice David Prosser hung onto his victory over Appeals Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg. The margin tightened slightly after a few hundred additional votes were counted.
Securing a recount in Pennsylvania will be more difficult than in Wisconsin.
Pennsylvania law allows recounts to be conducted at a precinct if at least three voters from that precinct request one. Stein's supporters started doing that Monday, but it would take thousands of voters to get them going in all of Pennsylvania's state's precincts.
Pursuing a second track, Stein also filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania court to try to get a statewide recount.
Here’s the timeline for the recount:
Monday, cost estimates and vote tabulation method will be provided by county clerks to the commission by noon. Commission officials will provide estimated statewide costs to the campaigns of both Stein and De La Fuente by the end of the day.
Tuesday, the Stein, De La Fuente or both must pay for the recount. Once full payment is received, the commission will issue a recount order to all presidential candidates.
Wednesday, commission staff will hold a teleconference in the morning for all county clerks and canvass members to outline the process and rules of a recount. Since a 24-hour public meeting notice is required for the recount, each county must post its notice by Wednesday.
Thursday, recount begins in every Wisconsin county.
Dec. 12, all county canvass boards must be completed by 8 p.m.
Dec. 13, Elections Commission staff will prepare the official recount canvass certification by 3 p.m.
Clinton's campaign announced Saturday that it would take part in the recount process "to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides," campaign general counsel Marc Elias said. Trump took to Twitter over the weekend to pillory Clinton for particiapating in the recount. and his advisers strongly criticized the recount and the Clinton campaign's involvement.
Trump was the first Republican presidential nominee to win Wisconsin since 1984. In addition to her effort under way in Pennsylvania, Stein has said she also intends to pursue a recount in Michigan, another traditionally Democratic states carried by Trump.
Clinton would have to flip the vote in all three states to win the presidency, a possibility that election experts call extremely remote.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/poli ... /94539210/
by maco144 » Mon Nov 28, 2016 9:48 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 28, 2016 9:55 pm
Wisconsin Officials Pledge Quick Recount; Lawsuit Filed in Pennsylvania
by DANNY FREEMAN , ALEXANDRA JAFFE and BETH FOUHY
MADISON, Wisc. — Wisconsin election officials approved plans for a recount of the state's presidential vote on Monday, but recommended against a demand by Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein to count the ballots by hand.
Officials promised a quick turnaround of the recount, with plans to start this Thursday after they've received full payment from the candidates requesting the recount. They plan to "work continuously" to get the recount done by the night of Dec. 12, said elections supervisor Ross Hein, the day before the federal deadline for states to certify their votes.
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politic ... ia-n689306
Jill Stein beats deadline in Pennsylvania but faces uphill battle for recount
Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by about 70,000 votes in Pennsylvania, according to state election officials.
By Doug G. Ware | Nov. 28, 2016 at 4:09 PM
A suggested Democratic ballot sits outside a polling location in Philadelphia, Pa., after the polls opened on Nov. 8. On Monday, Green Party candidate Jill Stein filed for a recount in the state of Pennsylvania, though she faces a complicated battle in the effort. Photo by Tracie Van Auken/European Press Agency
HARRISBURG, Pa., Nov. 28 (UPI) -- Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein officially filed for an election recount in Pennsylvania on Monday, but she needs to do a lot more to actually get elections officials to start reviewing votes -- and she doesn't have much time to do it.
by 82_28 » Mon Nov 28, 2016 10:26 pm
maco144 » Mon Nov 28, 2016 5:48 pm wrote:Wisconsin is done. PA deadline is missed and not going to happen. Michigan has happened and not going to happen again. Jill just ran off with 6 million dollars from ignorant idealists and whomever had the bot network to source her 160k an hour. Time to move on.
by seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 28, 2016 10:58 pm
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