Because the "experts" who approached Stein for this are Dem party partisans who admittedly needed her to instigate a recount. .....wrong
Because the money poured in almost instantly and most of it was not from Green Party members......wrong
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by seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 30, 2016 4:59 pm
by Nordic » Wed Nov 30, 2016 4:59 pm
by Nordic » Wed Nov 30, 2016 5:04 pm
seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 30, 2016 3:59 pm wrote:Because the "experts" who approached Stein for this are Dem party partisans who admittedly needed her to instigate a recount. .....wrong
Because the money poured in almost instantly and most of it was not from Green Party members......wrong
by Nordic » Wed Nov 30, 2016 5:12 pm
The group began hearing from Democratic-leaning activists and liberal writers convinced that Trump’s victory required further scrutiny. Increasingly dismayed as Clinton’s lead over Trump in the nationwide popular vote grew to more than two million, they were sharing apparent anomalies in the results online using the hashtag #AuditTheVote.
It was decided that this loose coalition would push for a full audit or recount in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – three states critical to Trump’s electoral college win that pollsters had previously thought safe for Clinton. To do this, they needed to persuade one of the candidates who was actually on the presidential ballot to ask state authorities to review the results.
Stein, the Green party’s candidate for president, agreed to spearhead the effort to secure recounts following requests from Bonifaz and the security experts. Having been reluctant initially due to financial concerns, Stein was persuaded that the cost could be met via crowdfunding. On Wednesday, the Guardian first reported that she had decided to act.
John Bonifaz Rocks the House
UPDATE: John Came Up With Enough Delegates and WILL Be on the September Ballot!
Reports confirm John rocked the House at the Massachusetts Democratic State Party Convention this AM with his speech!
http://www.johnbonifaz.com
John Bonifaz's Speech to the Massachusetts Democratic Party Convention:
My name is John Bonifaz and I am a Democratic candidate for Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
I am running for Secretary of State because I believe we need a progressive leader in that office who will fight to safeguard our democracy and to protect our right to vote, who will work to create a model for free and fair elections for Massachusetts and for the nation, and who will not be afraid to stand up to entrenched power.
For the past dozen years, as the founder of the National Voting Rights Institute and as a public interest attorney, I have been working on these very issues.
When George W. Bush was rushing to take this nation into war against Iraq, I stood up. I sued the president on behalf of a coalition of United States soldiers, parents of soldiers, and Democratic Members of Congress, challenging the president for lacking the constitutional authority to launch a first-strike invasion of Iraq.
When Beacon Hill refused to fund the Massachusetts Clean Elections Law, I took the legislature to court on behalf of a coalition of voters and candidates. And we won.
And, after the 2004 election, when we began to hear widespread reports of voting irregularities coming out of Ohio, I went to Ohio. I fought for a full recount of the presidential vote there, a fight that took us all the way to the federal courts.
Since announcing my candidacy last December, I have traveled across this state, from the Berkshires to the Cape, from South Dartmouth to Newburyport. I have had the opportunity and pleasure to meet many of you. I have learned an enormous amount in this process. And I have listened.
I have heard many Democrats say that they believe that voters should have choices, that elections should be contests of ideas, and that competition is healthy for our democracy. I have heard many say that politics has moved away from the people, that our system is too dominated by big money, and that the voices of ordinary citizens are being drowned out. And I have heard many say that they are ready for a fresh wind of change.
I ask for your support today to help place me on the primary ballot. Massachusetts Democratic Primary voters deserve an open and honest debate on the state of our democracy and, especially, on the state of our right to vote.
Let us discuss why the Justice Department is investigating Boston, Lawrence, Springfield, and Lowell for potential violations of the Voting Rights Act and why Boston is facing election monitoring for not providing proper assistance to language minorities.
We deserve a Secretary of State who will work for progressive electoral reform, not someone who works behind the scenes with Republican members of the state legislature to kill a Democratic bill for Election Day Registration.
We need to know why the Secretary of State did not fully investigate allegations of fraud in the signatures submitted for the anti-gay marriage ballot initiative. Let us discuss why he certified all of the signatures in the face of these fraud charges.
by seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 30, 2016 5:20 pm
by Nordic » Wed Nov 30, 2016 5:24 pm
by seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 30, 2016 5:25 pm
by Nordic » Wed Nov 30, 2016 5:30 pm
seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 30, 2016 4:25 pm wrote:and Trump has promised you that?
and you believe him?
please
that's the problem you believe a lying asshole
by norton ash » Wed Nov 30, 2016 5:31 pm
by brekin » Wed Nov 30, 2016 5:39 pm
Nordic » Wed Nov 30, 2016 4:04 pm wrote:seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 30, 2016 3:59 pm wrote:Because the "experts" who approached Stein for this are Dem party partisans who admittedly needed her to instigate a recount. .....wrong
Because the money poured in almost instantly and most of it was not from Green Party members......wrong
Not wrong at all. I'm in the Green Party. The GP didn't even approve of this. Stein'a own running mate doesn't approve of this. More money poured in in just a day or so than she raised for her entire election campaign. It is not money from GPers.
And yes the experts who approached Stein are Dem party partisans. They admitted it. I'll go find the article although I'm sure you won't read it because your brain has been permanently jammed into "all that matters is how bad Trump makes me feel and to hell with everything else" for months now and shows no signs of slipping in any other direction.
by seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 02, 2016 10:35 am
Donald Trump staffer found guilty of 10 counts of election fraud
Brandon Hall faces five years in prison for the crime
Brandon Hall standing with President-elect Donald Trump
A man who worked on Donald Trump’s campaign in Michigan has been found guilty on 10 counts of election fraud.
Brandon Hall, a political activist, forged signatures on petition forms in 2012 and now faces up to five years in prison.
The 27-year-old from Grand Haven, along with his friend Zachary Savage, forged signatures in support of judicial candidate Chris Houtaling.
Mr Savage received immunity from charges by the Attorney General’s Office in exchange for his testimony in this case, according to Grand Haven Tribune.
The High Court overturned the Michigan Court of Appeals and Hall was charged with felony, despite his defence arguing he should face misdemeanour charges due to a statement printed on the petitions.
Hall and Mr Houtaling met when they were members of the Grand Haven school board, but Hall was forced to resign from the position after being convinced of stealing from a school fundraiser.
He also ran for the state House earlier this year for the 89th District seat but was defeated in the Republican primary in August.
In a statement, Progress Michigan, a group that holds public officials to account, said Hall’s conviction was proof that a recount of the votes cast in the US presidential election was needed in the state.
“Donald Trump has made claim after claim calling the integrity of the election into question, but his Michigan campaign had no problem hiring a staff member facing election law charges,” executive director Lonnie Scott said, Grand Haven Tribune reported.
“The fact that the Trump campaign and the Michigan Republican Party embraced Brandon Hall is just one more reason to recount and audit the vote in Michigan.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 49046.html
by seemslikeadream » Sat Dec 03, 2016 1:13 pm
Trump Campaign and GOP Allies in Full Legal Panic as Recounts Could Create Electoral College Crisis
Invoking Bush v. Gore to stop them or ignore the results.
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet December 2, 2016
Republicans are panicking because the Green Party’s presidential recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania could prevent Donald Trump from receiving 270 Electoral College votes—the final hurdle to the presidency—on December 19.
In the past 24 hours, the Trump campaign and its GOP allies in the three states that gave him an apparent Electoral College victory after on November 8 have filed lawsuits and legal motions to block, delay and freeze the recounts. In the case of Michigan, where Trump’s lead is smallest, 10,704 votes, the state's Republican attorney general is arguing the recount's results should be ignored.
“If a recount cannot be accomplished by the ‘safe harbor’ date [a week before the Electoral College meets], or if it is started but not finished by that date, then the State Defendants must, on or before December 13, 2016, certify to the federal government the initial elector results announced on November 28, 2016,” Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said in his lawsuit filed against the Michigan board overseeing the recount and its state election director.
The Trump campaign filed a similar complaint Thursday against Michigan's Board of State Canvassers, saying Stein has no basis for the recount because she has no grievance and no chance of winning—ignoring that presidential candidates, even in minor parties, have standing under state and federal law.
By midday Friday, the canvassers board had met to consider the Trump campaign's motion and deadlocked along partisan lines. That means the recount will resume next week, barring other appeals and court orders. Thus, the Trump campaign’s first legal move in Michigan has delayed the start, and therefore the finish of the recount, increasing the likelihood of an upcoming legal fight over whether the state's Electoral College members can vote by December 19.
But Trump allies have filed even more eyebrow-raising lawsuits in the other states.
In Wisconsin, where counties started recounting ballots Thursday, two super PACs supporting Trump, Great America PAC and Stop Hillary PAC, sued in federal district court to stop the recount, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s intervention in Florida in 2000 where they stopped a recount and awarded the presidency to George W. Bush. That decision followed the twisted logic that since Florida counties weren’t following identical procedures, Bush did not receive equal treatment under the law. (In Wisconsin, counties have differing voting machinery and local officials have discretion to decide if they want to recount votes by hand or electronically.)
“The recount will be conducted in a manner that violates the requirements set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore for recounts in presidential elections,” the pro-Trump super PACs argued. “Because Wisconsin law lacks adequate protections to ensure that similarly completely ballots will be afforded similar treatment, both within the same county and across different counties, the recount should be enjoined to prevent further Equal Protection violations from tainting the outcome of the election.”
Besides harshly dismissing the recount, the super PACS, like the Michigan attorney general, are only seeing what they want to see in the legal precedents cited. In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court said its equal protection ruling was not to be applied to another case. Moreover, the Greens last week sued Wisconsin’s election oversight board seeking a uniform statewide standard, hand-counting of ballots. A judge agreed that was a good idea, but said she could not order it under state law.
The pro-Trump super PACs also said that should a recount continue past December 13, when the state is supposed to certify the winner, the recount should be stopped and Trump should be declared the winner for Electoral College purposes. “Because there is no reasonable assurance the recount can accurately and carefully be conducted within that timeframe, this Court should enjoin the recount to prevent careless mistakes from tainting the results of the election, or incomplete or partial results to cast a pall over President-Elect Trump’s victory.”
Later Friday, U.S. District Court Judge James Peterson denied the super PACs' motion to halt the recount, saying there was no harm in letting the process continue. He scheduled a hearing for next Friday on the underlying lawsuit.
However, it is the Pennsylvania lawsuit, filed by that state's Republican Party and the Trump campaign, which shows the most hypocrisy. The Greens' recount has faced the roughest going in that state. The Secretary of the Commonwealth, Democrat Pedro Cortes, and other top elected Democrats are not on board. That’s prompted the Greens to file petitions signed by voters representing hundreds of the state’s 9,163 precincts, for a citizen-initiated recount. The Green Party also filed a lawsuit seeking to preserve the right to argue for a state-ordered recount once the results of its smaller effort are known.
Since filing last week, county election offices have been turning in official results and Trump’s lead has been cut by a third from more than 70,000 to 46,435 votes. It is now within 0.2% of triggering an automatic statewide recount.
Trump’s lawyers and Pennsylvania Republicans filed a motion to dismiss the Greens' lawsuit, citing much the same arguments as those made by recount opponents in Wisconsin and Michigan. But shamelessly, their legal brief quotes Cortes speaking in mid-October about the integrity of the state’s election systems. That was Cortes’ response to Trump’s campaign trail rant that the election was going to be "rigged" against him.
“Before the election, Secretary of State Pedro Cortes assured Pennsylvania voters that Pennsylvania’s voting systems are 'secure,' and criticized contrary suggestions as 'not only wrong and uninformed,' but 'dangerous,' Trump’s legal team argued with a straight face. “He [Cortes] also explained that all voting systems in Pennsylvania were ‘examined and certified to federal and state standards,’ and that voting machines were ‘not connected to the Internet,’ or ‘to one another,’ thus reducing the risk of compromise.”
The Green Party would disagree with that last statement, because it knows Pennsylvania has some of the oldest entirely paperless voting systems in the nation, including countywide tabulators that have been shown by computer scientists to be vulnerable to hacking. But the bigger point, echoed by David Cobb, campaign manager for the recount, is that Trump and the GOP do not want to examine the ballots and verify his apparent presidential election victory.
“Why is he so worried about letting this recount move forward?” Cobb said Friday. “We will continue to help Pennsylvania voters make sure that the election in Pennsylvania had integrity and that their votes counted.”
Other Recount Developments
The Greens issued an update on Friday listing the vote count anomalies they are hoping a recount will clarify. In Wisconsin, they noted that two-thirds of the counties are doing hand-counts of paper ballots, which is this only way to check against machine-induced errors. One of those counties, Ottagamie, where observers noticed that an early tabulation counted 1,500 more votes than actual ballots cast, will not be doing a hand count, which is very frustrating to election integrity activists.
Their update said “there are a number of statistical irregularities in voting data, which merit heightened scrutiny given the historic level of concern over hacking during this election:
“Wisconsin: Three counties saw large discrepancies in votes between 2012 and 2016, with the margin of victory for Donald Trump in some cases being ten-fold higher than the GOP’s average in the last four presidential elections.
“Wisconsin: Another statistical analysis, done by Stanford PhD candidate Rodolfo Barragan and Axel Geijsel of Tilburg University, finds that even when taking into account factors like ethnicity and education, there is significant evidence that counties with electronic voting showed higher support for Trump than counties using only paper ballots.
“Michigan: More than 75,000 Michiganders cast no vote for president in the 2016 election—almost twice as many 'under-votes' than were cast in the 2012 election (49,840). The high number is a red flag, especially when considering that these 'under-votes' were concentrated in the heavily Democratic precincts of Detroit.”
The Greens also said the touchscreen voting systems in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were especially vulnerable to hacking, and even cited a tweet by Edward Snowden affirming that point. “Hacking voting machines: not that difficult. Hiding a secret deviation in votes from after-the-fact statistical analysis: nearly impossible.”
“In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, approximately two-thirds and one-tenth of voting, respectively, is done through touchscreen machines (DREs) that are susceptible to manipulation and hacking (and which many states have banned or are phasing out),” their summary said. “In Pennsylvania, whose voting system has been called a 'nightmare scenario' by one leading expert, the machines do not even dispense a paper ballot or receipt. As a result, the only way to conduct a full, foolproof audit is through a 'forensic analysis' —opening each machine to look for evidence of tampering or voter manipulation.”
“Optical scan voting—the method for all voting in Michigan, 85 percent in Wisconsin and one-third in Pennsylvania—is considered an improvement over DREs, but can still be breached without detection,” they continued. “The machines suffer from glitches and are prone to mistakes, including misreading voters’ markings. For example, in a recount of Ohio votes initiated by then Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb in 2004, almost 90,000 votes were left uncounted due to a machine calibration error. As such, manual hand recounts—as opposed to simply running ballots back through the machine—are essential, and considered the gold standard of recounts by election integrity experts.”
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/t ... 068226&t=2
by Iamwhomiam » Sat Dec 03, 2016 1:20 pm
by Wombaticus Rex » Sat Dec 03, 2016 3:55 pm
But because of this exorbitant fee increase – bringing the total money required for recounts in all three states to $9.5 million – we need your help. We’re not there yet, and we need every last penny to reach the $9.5 million benchmark. And share this video on Facebook and Twitter – we can’t let our voices be silenced by this obstruction to a citizen’s movement for a transparent and accountable vote.
If we raise more than what's needed, the surplus will also go toward election integrity efforts and to promote voting system reform. This is what we did with our surplus in 2004.
The 2004 Green Party presidential campaign of David Cobb and Pat LaMarche led investigations and demanded recounts in Ohio and New Mexico in the wake of widespread complaints about disqualification and obstruction of legitimate voters. The complaints came mostly from majority-black precincts and college campuses, and included allegations of tampering with computer voting machines on Election Day.
Democrats, led by nominee John Kerry, were silent in response to these complaints. A notable exception was U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), who held hearings on the Ohio election theft and published "What Went Wrong in Ohio." A few local Democrats in Ohio spoke up, but the Green Party ultimately led the charge. Cobb was joined by Libertarian nominee Michael Badnarik, although Greens did most of the recount work. Greens raised the money to file the initial recount and litigated all the issues in court. Democrats and the major media have swept most of this under the rug—especially the role of the Green Party. Greens stood up for clean elections in 2004 and exposed GOP irregularities, while Democrats (who should have learned something from 2000) looked the other way.
Here are additional concrete, tangible results of the 2004 recount efforts:
1. The investigation uncovered evidence that led to the conviction of two Republican operatives in Cuyahoga County, greater caution in many states regarding computer voting and the decision in some states not to use Diebold machines in future elections.
2. It helped to accelerate the growth of the "Election Integrity" movement, which is largely responsible for the halt of the proliferation of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machines (which is renowned for "Black Box Voting").
3. The recount helped to provoke a "top to bottom" review of the California voting systems by then-Secretary of State Debra Bowen. This led to DREs being outlawed in that state.
4. New Mexico Green Rick Lass helped organize a citizens' lobbying effort that culminated in that state revamping its voting system: They eliminated all DREs and went to a full paper-ballot system. They instituted mandatory audits. They instituted state-funded recounts in any state races where the reported margin of victory is 0.5% or less.
5. A group of citizens from Minnesota participated as election observers in the Ohio recount, and were so appalled by their experience that they created Citizens for Election Integrity, a nonpartisan organization advocating for verifiable, transparent and accurate elections across the country. Their searchable database of recount/audit laws is the premiere source of information for anyone attempting to understand this complicated legal landscape.
by Belligerent Savant » Sun Dec 04, 2016 2:09 am
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