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Post by the Scribe on Mar 8, 2020 14:17:59 GMT
THIS THREAD CONTAINS SOME OF THE BEST EVIDENCE OF REPUBLICONSERVATIVE VOTER SUPPRESSION AS WELL AS CORPORATE MEDIA BIAS THAT HAS BEEN IN FAVOR OF DONALD J TRUMP AGAINST ALL OTHER CANDIDATES WHETHER IN THE PRIMARY OR THE CAMPAIGN. It has been expanded to include similar evidence from past elections to show a pattern of behavior.
Election theft is at the core of my intense dislike and distrust of conservatism as our right to vote is not ensured by the Constitution. The Supreme Court plays 'fast and loose' with the concept especially when it is dominated by conservatives who as the minority party will do anything to remain in power to push their unpopular agenda. Tyranny of the minority. This is why I feel the need to post articles and evidence as to how the majority is being duped by a concerted effort from the "right."
Every single unethical and criminal activity to steal an election has once again been carried out by the Republican Party, Conservatives and the media on all sides. That being said, the DNC on the left has lost some moral authority when they sought to direct the primaries for their chosen super delegate candidate in 2016. They have their process in place, it is published and no surprise to anyone however that party is NOT without its own problems. Their issues are nothing compared to the wholesale theft from the conservatives.
Historically it has been CONSERVATIVES whether Democratic Conservatives OR (most recently) Republican Conservatives that are always at the forefront of voter suppression and election theft. Since the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts of the mid-1960's Conservatives have made a mass exodus to join the Republican Party and that exodus is 100% complete. These crimes are CONSERVATIVE CRIMES.
GOP voter suppression efforts have led to a MASSIVE buildup of conservatives in all US Federal, State and Local political branches.
There will NEVER be an end to the rhetoric between Left and Right until elections are seen as fair, properly implemented, properly and publicly counted (paper ballots) and audited to dismiss cheating accusations. When one or both sides feels their votes don't count or the system is rigged that is the basis for civil war. comprehensive list of RepubliCONServative election shenanigans: republicansexposed.org/2000-election-rigged/ Special Message to the Congress: The American Promise [on the Voting Rights Act], 3/15/65. MP506.
The following New York Times review of Ari Berman's book Give Us The Ballot is a great synopsis of our country's history of voter suppression. Following are some video interviews of Ari which speak to the state of things now, going forward and how far we have fallen backwards. It is grim if you are anything other than a Libertarian, Republican, Conservative and racist.
Doesn't all of "this" tell you something about the type of person, the character of that person and the "worth" of that person who is a member of a political party and movement that constantly seeks to denigrate minorities and opposition party members? This is not just about Civil Rights. This is about Human Rights being denied by legislation AFTER a persons Civil Rights are taken away. ‘Give Us the Ballot,’ by Ari Berman By JEFFREY ROSENAUG. 25, 2015 (NYT)
Fifty years ago, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6, 1965, he felt, his daughter Luci said, “a great sense of victory on one side and a great sense of fear on the other.” According to Ari Berman, a political correspondent for The Nation, he knew the law would transform American politics and democracy more than any other civil rights bill in the 20th century, but he also feared that it would deliver the South to the Republican Party for years to come. Both predictions proved to be accurate. “The revolution of 1965 spawned an equally committed group of counterrevolutionaries,” Berman writes in “Give Us the Ballot.” “Since the V.R.A.’s passage, they have waged a decades-long campaign to restrict voting rights.” Berman argues that these counterrevolutionaries have “in recent years, controlled a majority on the Supreme Court” and “have set their sights on undoing the accomplishments of the 1960s civil rights movement.”
Berman’s claim that those he calls the counterrevolutionaries — including Chief Justice John Roberts — have set out to undo the accomplishments of the 1960s is, of course, contested. Still, Berman usefully explores how the debate over voting rights for the past 50 years has been a debate between two competing visions: Should the Voting Rights Act “simply provide access to the ballot,” as conservatives claim, or should it “police a much broader scope of the election system, which included encouraging greater representation for African-Americans and other minority groups”? Regardless of where you fall on this policy question, one historical trend is clear: Every time the Voting Rights Act came up for renewal, from 1969 to 2006, Republicans and Democrats in Congress and the White House repeatedly endorsed the broader interpretation. And the Supreme Court repeatedly responded by imposing the narrower interpretation by judicial fiat.
The initial success of the Voting Rights Act in increasing minority voter registration is striking and impressive: In the decades after Johnson signed the act, black voter registration in the South soared from 31 percent to 73 percent and the number of African-American elected officials nationwide expanded from fewer than 500 to 10,500. And in 1969 the Warren court, by a 7-2 vote, held that the act prevented Mississippi from adopting an at-large election system for county supervisors, since countywide elections were harder for minority candidates to win. But after Richard Nixon won the election of 1968 with a Southern strategy, he appointed four Supreme Court justices who took a less expansive view of the scope of the Voting Rights Act.
In a 1980 decision, the Burger court upheld an at-large election system in Mobile, Ala., on the grounds that both the 14th and 15th Amendments and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required evidence of an intent to discriminate against African-Americans. (Later, as Berman tellingly observes, a smoking gun emerged: a 1909 letter from a former Mobile congressman confessing, “We have always, as you know, falsely pretended that our main purpose was to exclude the ignorant vote when, in fact, we were trying to exclude not the ignorant vote but the Negro vote.”) Republicans and Democrats in Congress resolved in 1982 to overturn the Mobile decision with amendments to the act that restored the Supreme Court’s previous ban on voting changes that had a discriminatory effect. Conservatives in the Reagan administration lobbied against the amendments, including John Roberts, then a 26-year-old special assistant to the attorney general, who wrote more than 25 memos opposing them. “An effects test would eventually lead to a quota system in all areas,” Roberts wrote. Nevertheless, the Senate and the House restored the effects test by a nearly unanimous vote, and President Ronald Reagan signed the amendments, which he followed with a reception attended by Coretta Scott King.
Roberts’s prediction that the amendments to the Voting Rights Act would lead to demands for proportional representation for minorities proved to be accurate. But it was vindicated in an unexpected partisan twist that ultimately cost the Democrats the South, just as Johnson had feared. After George H.W. Bush’s election in 1988, his campaign manager, Lee Atwater, the new head of the Republican National Committee, decided to form what Berman calls “an improbable partnership with black Democrats in the South to overthrow the white Democrats who had controlled the region since the end of Reconstruction.” By interpreting the newly amended Voting Rights Act to require the creation of majority-black districts whenever possible, the Bush Justice Department, Atwater believed, could “siphon black voters away from adjoining white Democratic districts, making those districts whiter and more conservative.” The strategy worked. In 1992, 17 African-American representatives were elected to Congress as Democrats from newly created majority-black districts, the largest minority class ever. But two years later, the Republicans gained 54 seats in the House and retook the chamber for the first time in four decades.
After the 2000 election, the Justice Department of George W. Bush decided to focus on voter fraud rather than on maximizing minority representation. Despite this shift in strategy, President Bush signed a sweeping, bipartisan reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006, once again passed by a nearly unanimous Congress, because he concluded — like Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan before him — that opposing the act would harm the Republican Party’s standing with black voters. Seven years later, on June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, struck down the formula Congress had adopted in 1965 and renewed in 2006 for identifying jurisdictions subject to federal oversight. Chief Justice Roberts held that it violated the Constitution because of progress in black voter registration and electoral success. In her blistering dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Congress, not the court, had the constitutional authority to define progress in voting rights. “Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the V.R.A.,” she wrote.
In 2014, the first election since 1965 without the preclearance protections of the Voting Rights Act, voters in 14 states faced new voting restrictions adopted by mostly Republican legislatures, including a voter identification law in Texas and cutbacks on same-day registration and early voting in North Carolina. The Supreme Court allowed both laws to go into effect, over dissents from Justice Ginsburg. But because the new voting restrictions were arguably adopted to help Republicans rather than harm African-Americans, the Supreme Court may continue to uphold them on the grounds that the Constitution does not prohibit hyperpartisanship by legislatures. Berman notes that “the number of voters potentially affected by new barriers to the ballot box exceeded the margin of victory in close races for Senate and governor in North Carolina, Kansas, Virginia and Florida, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.”
“Give Us the Ballot” is an engrossing narrative history rather than constitutional analysis. Berman does not explore why justices who are devoted to the original understanding of the Constitution have repeatedly voted to narrow the scope of the Voting Rights Act with the argument that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment is colorblind. (In fact, as Justice John M. Harlan observed in his 1964 dissent from one of the original Supreme Court decisions regarding “one man, one-vote,” the framers of the 14th Amendment believed that the equal protection clause did not regulate voting or apportionment at all.) Still, Berman vividly shows that the power to define the scope of voting rights in America has shifted from Congress to the courts, a result that would have surprised the Reconstruction-era framers. What is a democracy without voters? The 1965 Voting Rights Act should have been a given; instead, it was a long struggle. One that is not over yet. Berman, a correspondent for The Nation, a frequent commentator on NPR and MSNBC, and the author of Herding Donkeys, shows that what looked like the grand achievement of the civil rights era has lost ground in the subsequent fifty years, embattled by gerrymandering, purging of voter rolls—notably in Florida in 2000—voter ID rules, and a Supreme Court decision declaring part of the law unconstitutional.
www.npr.org/books/titles/429327139/give-us-the-ballot-the-modern-struggle-for-voting-rights-in-americaPublished on May 12, 2016 Harvey Wasserman, Solartopia/forthcoming book, STRIP & FLIP SELECTION OF 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft, joins Thom. Nearly 80% of the votes that will be cast in the 2016 general election will be cast on electronic voting machines - which can have their records altered by a governor or secretary of state with just a few keystrokes Election rigging is easier than you think. How we can stop it. For more information on the stories we've covered visit our websites at thomhartmann.com - freespeech.org - and RT.com. You can also watch tonight's show on Hulu - at Hulu.com/THE BIG PICTURE and over at The Big Picture YouTube page. And - be sure to check us out on Facebook
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 8, 2020 14:19:01 GMT
Why It’s (almost) Impossible for Democrats to Win the House www.thedailybeast.com/why-its-impossible-for-democrats-to-win-the-houseIn 2010, Republicans successfully redrew district lines to rig House elections in their favor. One leading redistricting expert says the problem is even worse than we think. JAY MICHAELSON 09.14.16 10:00 PM ET
Even if Hillary Clinton pulls off an electoral landslide, and even if the Democrats flip the Senate, Republicans are likely to hold onto the House, where they hold a 247-188 majority. In large part that’s because the House districts were gerrymandered in 2010 by Republican-controlled state legislatures, part of the brilliantly effective campaign known as REDMAP. This fact, not ‘gridlock’ or ‘partisanship,’ is why the 114th Congress has accomplished so little (and can’t even pass emergency funding to fight Zika). The House is rigged.
Gerrymandering has been going on since the beginning of the republic – the word itself dates to a 1812 redistricting effort by Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, which included districts so convoluted that one looked like a salamander. But 2010 was different.
First, in the wake of their 2008 electoral losses, Republican activists poured unprecedented amounts of money into the 2010 state legislative elections, particularly in blue or swing states, particularly at the tail end of the election cycle. They made huge gains in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.
Why focus on the states? Because 2010 was a census year, and in most states, state legislatures draw the boundaries of congressional districts. The strategy worked: in 2011, Republicans redrew four times as many districts as Democrats did. Next, the same group of activists used the new technologies of Big Data to analyze voting patterns and design districts to “pack or crack” Democrats – either crowding them into a few districts, or diluting them across several.
Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford University professor who has served as a court-appointed nonpartisan redistricting effort expert in four different states, told the Daily Beast that “the 2010 redistricting process couldn’t have come at worse time for Democrats,” Persily told the Daily Beast. “That year was the Tea Party election, sweeping Republicans into control of state legislatures. They were in the driver’s seat to draw lines, so they took advantage of it.”
Salon’s David Daley, author of Ratf*cked: The True Story Behind The Secret Plan To Steal America's Democracy, called it “Moneyball applied to politics.”
The results were astounding.
In 2012, for example, Democrats running for House seats got 1.3 million more votes than Republicans – but the minority-elected Republicans maintained a 234-201 majority in the House. In Ohio, where President Obama won the election, Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the congressional delegation by 12 to 4.
In Pennsylvania, another Obama-voting state, the margin was 13 to 5.
And in 2014, Republicans got 52% of House votes, but 57% of House seats.
Ironically, thanks to REDMAP, the House of Representatives is designed to be unrepresentative. At least until 2020, it is engineered to elect Republicans. Persily, however, said the problem runs deeper than just gerrymandering.
First, he said, population patterns play an equally important role. “The elephant in the room is that Democrats aren’t efficiently dispersed in the population as Republicans, because Democrats are concentrated in cities. So even if you had compact districts, you’d end up having a Republican bias.” No matter how much attention is spent on congressional redistricting, those population patterns aren’t likely to change any time soon.
Second, there’s no obvious way to draw districts because of the Voting Rights Act. Suppose a state simply drew a grid, for example. This might sound appealing, but it would also have the effect of diluting minority populations into majority-white districts. That would violate the VRA.
On the other hand, Persily said, that’s exactly what Republicans did in 2010. “There have been lots of challenges brought by Democrats and civil rights groups alleging that Republicans used race to pack African Americans and Latinos into inefficient districts.” Challenges have prevailed in Alabama, North Carolina, and Virginia.
“It’s the Goldilocks Principle of redistricting,” Persily explained. “You have to take race into account, but not too much.”
Was 2010 really worse than other gerrymandering efforts, though?
“The tools are different,” Persily said, “but the motivations remain the same.” Persily pointed out that Democrats gerrymandered extensively in 2000, but now “the technology is more sophisticated, the data much more granular than historically.”
Moreover, recent elections have been closer than in the past. “Remember, for a hundred years, the South was so solidly Democratic that it didn’t matter what the gerrymanders did… Now, the House could swing one way or the other, so a thumb on the scale can make a difference.”
Is the House hopeless, then? Is there nothing that proponents of fair elections can do, except wait until 2020, when the Democrats will try to be as conniving as the Republicans were in 2010?
There have been some encouraging developments.
First, there are cases in the pipeline now arguing that highly partisan gerrymandering is, itself, unconstitutional. (Ironically, one of these involves a gerrymander by Democrats, in Maryland.) The Supreme Court has thus far split on the issue – in one case, they announced six different standards of review – but Persily pointed out that an additional left-leaning justice could bring about consensus.
“These are big constitutional issues – and all of this could change,” he said. “Partisan gerrymandering, race and redistricting, voter rights and voter ID, campaign finance – all of these hinge on one vote.”
Second, independent redistricting commissions got a big boost earlier this year when the Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s commission, despite explicit language that the “legislature” is to draw districts. That case, plus the success of independent commissions in California, offers another way forward.
Third, as the situation becomes more and more egregious, audacious reform proposals such as “cumulative voting” – in which larger districts vote for multiple representatives, allowing more proportional representation – may begin to be seriously considered. And there are various proposals for changing the principles of redistricting to prohibit partisan considerations, for example, or favor compact districts.
Finally, the Republican gerrymander may collapse under its own weight. The “crack” part of “pack and crack” has scattered minority voters into majority-white districts. But this year, some of those white-elected Republicans may be vulnerable, thanks to Donald Trump. In other districts, REDMAP has made elections so safe for Republicans that it’s empowered the Freedom Caucus, the Tea Party, and other hard-right groups to take down establishment candidates.
In other words, Republicans may have gotten more than they bargained for.
Yet despite all of these developments, Persily remained pessimistic. “Whatever reform is proposed, it’s full employment for lawyers: what does compactness mean, what about the Voting Rights Act…. The fact is, courts have become permanent players in the redistricting process.”
If nothing changes, the 115th Congress is likely to look a lot like the 114th: even if the Democrats take the Senate, nothing President Clinton proposes will likely make much headway in the House. That won’t be because of gridlock, or “the system” in general. It will be because of a deliberate Republican strategy. It will be because the House has been rigged.
Even if Hillary Clinton pulls off an electoral landslide, and even if the Democrats flip the Senate, Republicans are likely to hold onto the House, where they hold a 247-188 majority. This Election Is Being Rigged – But Not by Hillary ClintonThose actually trying to manipulate the election outcome support the guy who keeps whining about election-rigging
Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that this election is being "rigged" for Hillary Clinton. Spencer Platt/Getty By Joshua Holland
November 4, 2016 The Racism Behind Trump's 'Rigged Election' Talk
How the Hillary Clinton Outrage Cycle Took Over the Media
How FBI's James Comey Fumbled Clinton Email Investigation
Donald Trump established what's alleged to have been an entirely fraudulent "university." He has a hard-earned reputation for screwing over contractors and investors, a long history of hanging out with mobsters and has been named a defendant in 1,450 lawsuits. And yet he's dubbed his opponent, who's been subjected to dozens of investigations that all came up with bupkis, "Crooked Hillary." No candidate in history has taken projection to such remarkable lengths.
Why Rigging an Election Is a Lot Harder Than Trump Thinks While Mike Pence and Paul Ryan said GOP will "accept the results of the election," Republican presidential nominee stokes fears among followers
But an even more impressive example of projection can be found in Trump's constant claims that this election is being "rigged" for Hillary Clinton. There do seem to be a lot of actors trying to manipulate the outcome – or at least having that effect – but they're all lined up behind the guy who won't stop whining about election-rigging.
It's unclear whether WikiLeaks is actually in cahoots with the Russian government. But Reuters reported this week that U.S. intelligence officials are investigating "a campaign they believe is backed by the Russian government to undermine the credibility of the U.S. presidential election."
Meanwhile, a small town in Macedonia called Veles has become a "global hub for pro-Trump misinformation," according to BuzzFeed. The village of 45,000 people hosts 100 websites that spew Facebook-shareable nonsense about the election – and Hillary Clinton's many "crimes."
Julian Assange says his motives are anything but partisan, but the timing, selection and presentation of the emails hacked from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta's account leave little doubt that their intent is to sway the outcome. (If there were any lingering doubts, WikiLeaks' habit of tweeting out fake stories about Clinton plucked from the wingnuttosphere should dispel them.)
The emails have revealed only that politics is a rough-and-tumble business, and people working campaigns talk a lot of shit in private. But they appear damning to anyone who has never worked on a campaign, especially when the emails are stripped of context and spun to seem dark and sinister. Regardless, they clearly divide the Democratic coalition, and dribbling them out on a daily basis for the final weeks of the campaign is as clear an example of trying to rig an election as you'll find.
Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman reports for The Guardian that "deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI ... spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election."
Hillary Clinton Hillary Clinton's email controversy has dominated airwaves. Brendan Smialowski/Getty
Regardless of FBI Director James Comey's intent, it's clear that his oddly vague letter to Congress about some emails found on a computer shared by disgraced perv Anthony Weiner and Clinton aide Huma Abedin – emails that nobody had even looked at – violated established protocols and threw a monkey-wrench into the election in the final days before the vote.
That was followed by various leaks about a long-stalled investigation into the Clinton Foundation that was reportedly fueled at least in part by the book Clinton Cash, which may be popular with the credulous seniors who watch Fox News but should nonetheless be relegated to the fiction aisle. "The FBI is Trumpland," one current agent told Ackerman.
And it’s important to remember that the entire nontroversy over Clinton's emails began when Congressional Republicans' failed to come up with any evidence that the Benghazi attacks were the result of wrongdoing by the administration, despite spending millions of tax dollars on a dozen investigations.
Matt Yglesias defined the "Prime Directive" of Clinton scandals like this: "We know the Clintons are guilty; the only question is what are they guilty of and when will we find the evidence?" None of Clinton's emails was marked classified at the time. More to the point, classified info is only supposed to be sent over special secure channels; there's no difference between sending it through a private email account or a state.gov email address. And if using a private server was a way to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests, it was a poor strategy. We know this because her mails were successfully FOIA'd and are available online.
Trump constantly whines about the media being biased against him. But he's not talking about bias, which is an entirely subconscious process. He's offering a goofy conspiracy theory that mainstream media outlets purposefully manipulate their coverage to give the election to Clinton.
Most reporters and editors would personally prefer Clinton over Trump. They're mostly college-educated people who live in big coastal cities, and he's spent months bullying and threatening them. But their subconscious biases clearly favor Trump.
Bias is elevating a process story about emails to the same level as a candidate bragging about sexual assault, and a dozen women coming forward to say it wasn't just idle "locker-room talk." It's the networks devoting three times as much airtime to Clinton's emails than all of the issues at stake in this election combined. It's the fact that the media have spent the final week of an incredibly important election talking about some emails that we know nothing about, other than Hillary Clinton didn't send or receive them. Why is that even news?
The proof is in the pudding: PolitiFact looked at 500 claims made by Clinton and Trump, and rated 51 percent of Trump's claims either "false" or "pants on fire," whereas only 13 percent of Clinton's statements earned those ratings. And yet, a Washington Post/ABC News poll released this week found Trump leading Clinton on who is "honest and trustworthy" by eight percentage points.
Meanwhile, red-state legislators are working hard to suppress the Democratic vote. You want an under-reported email scandal? According to a Reuters report, private emails show Republican officials in North Carolina "lobbied members of at least 17 county election boards to keep early-voting sites open for shorter hours on weekends and in evenings – times that usually see disproportionately high turnout by Democratic voters. ... The officials also urged county election boards to open fewer sites for residents to cast ballots during early." One Republican official recalled what happened when he balked at the plan: "I became a villain ... I got accused of being a traitor and everything else by the Republican Party."
The same thing's been happening in Florida, Ohio and elsewhere. Hell, election officials in Macon-Bibb County, Georgia, tried to move a polling place in a black community to a sheriff's office. Real subtle, guys. And if we really want to talk about rigged elections, all of this was made possible, or at least much easier, by the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act, a long-standing goal of a chief justice appointed by a president who won a half-million fewer votes than his opponent in 2000. Unsurprisingly, early voting in black communities has been sluggish this year, compared with earlier cycles.
In the pursuit of a highly dubious "voter fraud" case in Indiana, a state headed by Trump running mate Mike Pence, state police seized 40,000 mostly African-American registrations from a grassroots group working to get out the vote. Nobody can say for sure how this unorthodox bit of policing will affect those voters' ability to cast their ballots.
Meanwhile, restrictive voter-ID have been popping up around the country, despite the fact that in-person voter fraud isn't really a thing. In the most comprehensive study of the impact of these laws to date, researchers at UC San Diego found that they depress Democratic turnout by 8.8 percent, while Republican turnout only drops by 3.6 percent.
And if that weren't enough, notorious ratfucker and "informal Trump adviser" Roger Stone and pro-Trump groups say they're going to send a bunch of white goons out to "monitor the polls" in primarily minority districts. (Best of luck to any Alt-Right goober who actually goes to the "ghettos" of Philadelphia to hand out "40s and weed" to local residents.)
The conventional wisdom is that Hillary Clinton is a deeply flawed candidate who'd really struggle against a conventional Republican opponent. There's some truth in this, and the Clintons were no doubt wise to sacrifice some cows on Eid al-Adha to get Trump nominated.
But if Clinton wins on Tuesday, she will have overcome not only a quarter-century of scandal-mongering and thousands of years of deeply embedded sexism, but also a shit-ton of efforts to tilt the playing field toward her toxic opponent.
Watch the racism behind Trump's "rigged election" talk.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 8, 2020 14:20:00 GMT
Republicans have used many methodologies to steal elections since 2000:
1) Voter suppression techniques i.e. sending out wrong election dates and locations, cutting locations in Democratic areas, putting old machines that break down in minority areas with fewer machines causing long lines, etc.
2) Stripping people of their votes as organized by Trump team member Kris Kobach who is also the Secretary of State of Kansas and a member of ALEC who wrote Arizona's SB1070 driver discrimination law. For example, Kobach's Operation Crosscheck purged some 400,000 votes from Michigan which forced at least 70,000 in the Detroit area (mostly black) to vote on provisional ballots that were never counted. Trump supposedly won Michigan by 10,000 votes.
3) Another method to steal an election is by FRACTIONAL VOTING. If I understand it correctly just one person can flip an election with this method via tabulator encryption and it can go undetectable unless an after election AUDIT is demanded. It is the old "one for you two for me" scenario.
In the most recent election where recounts and audits were requested in three states Republican leadership and Trump sued to have the audit and recount stopped and Republican appointed judges in those jurisdictions agreed and it was halted. The only way this will change is IF Democrats pull the same shit that Republicans have been getting away with since 2000 OR the Democratic leadership GROW A PAIR and confront this program head on. This OUGHT to become part of the Democratic Party Platform and a goal of the Resistance. Once a Liberal Darling, Bev Harris Still Thinks the Elections Are Rigged
The King County resident says Trump’s criticisms are “inevitable” given the lack of transparency in ballot counting. • DANIEL PERSON • Tue Nov 1st, 2016 1:30am • When King County resident Bev Harris emerged as one of the nation’s leading critics of electronic voting machines the early 2000s, those who appreciated her work tended toward the left: U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, even Sen. Hillary Clinton all picked up, in some form or fashion, her talking points about the dangers of leaving vote tabulation in the hands of machines built by private corporations. Meanwhile, she proved most troublesome to those on the right, like Sen. Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, who had an ownership stake in one of the companies writing software expected to impartially count our votes.
These days, Harris still thinks our elections are ripe for the stealing, and it’s safe to say you won’t hear any “Amens” from Democrats, who have had it up to their donkey ears with Donald Trump’s ravings about the fix being in. But that hasn’t deterred her. If raising the alarms puts her in league with The Donald, so be it. “Although many will say Trump is sort of a flawed model to put forth the message, I think it’s very important that he’s bringing this to the fore,” she says by phone on Thursday.
Now, if you’re a Democrat and you feel your blood pressure surging right now, let me deliver you some beta blockers: Nobody is saying that Trump isn’t being totally self-interested in his claims of rigged elections, nor does this story seek to defend his race-baiting claims of inner-city voter fraud. But what Harris is arguing is that if you were concerned about computerized voting during the Bush years, then you should still be concerned about it today. “It’s not a left/right issue at all … It’s not about the candidates anymore,” Harris says.
Harris’ latest bugaboo is something called “fractional voting,” ( blackboxvoting.org/fraction-magic-part-6/ )which refers to a piece of code in some ballot-counting software that allows votes to be counted as a fraction rather than a whole number. This, she says, makes the systems vulnerable to a hack that would predetermine the percentage of the vote each candidate gets, and then match that figure to the number of ballots that come in without causing any logic issues the computer would detect—since it would allow the computer to assign, say, one-fourth of a vote to a candidate in order to make the figures compute.
Harris admits that the issue is complicated—a short YouTube video explaining factional voting posted to her website, blackboxvoting.org, is liable to baffle more than illuminate. Others may find it fringes on the paranoid. But her proposed solution, to this and all other potential software issues, is straightforward: Make ballots available for review by the public. She envisions a system in which photos of marked ballots are posted online so members of the public could conduct crowd-sourced recounts. Since ballots don’t have a voter’s name on them, Harris says there would be no privacy issues.
“Frankly, although the media kind of sat on [Trump] pretty hard for saying he wouldn’t necessarily accept the results, it is ridiculous to say that a candidate or the public has to accept votes it can never verify,” she says. “We absolutely have the right to verify the count and to verify the results we are told are true.”
Many ballot-counting machines already take digital photos of each ballot, so the records are there. But the idea of releasing those images to the public has been hotly contested. In Colorado, courts found they are a public record subject to release; other states have been more reluctant. ( www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/news/colorado-court-rules-digital-ballots-are-open-records )
Kendall LeVan Hodson, chief of staff at King County Elections, says both ballots themselves and images of ballots are exempt from public disclosure. But she vigorously rejects the idea that this is any reason to doubt the veracity of election results. Rather, Hodson argues that their vote-counting system is already transparent and well-tested. Among other things, the office runs “logic and accuracy tests” that make sure the software is properly counting ballots; such tests are run before the election and then midway through the count. There are also several observers at every step of the way; as we spoke, she noted that several members of the public were touring the election office to look over the system.
“The more we can do to help the public feel more confident, the better,” she says. “We are always happy to have people come down.”
As for getting hacked, the system is completely isolated from the Internet, and any access to the vote counting machines requires several steps of identity authentication. She says that scrutiny of the election system this year has been high, but that was no problem.
“I think it’s higher with any presidential election. I think the last week, week and a half, have been consumed with questions about election security and voter fraud. And we’re totally great with that,” she says.
Harris, to put it lightly, disagrees. But that’s par for the course for the rabble-rouser. Over the years her work has put her at odds with everyone from the Washington Secretary of State to an anti-terrorism task force convened by Bush. ( archive.seattleweekly.com/2004-05-19/news/www-bigbrother-gov/ ) Last year, Harris re-emerged in the news when it was revealed that her book, also called Black Box Voting, was discovered on Osama bin Laden’s bookshelf. She was hardly troubled by the revelation. ( blackboxvoting.org/2015-may-21-black-box-voting-book-found-on-osama-bin-ladens-bookshelf/ )
“It looks like he was reading works that were critical or questioning” of the American system, she told us when the news broke. “You kind of have to look at it as a compliment.”
dperson@seattleweekly.com www.seattleweekly.com/news/once-a-liberal-darling-bev-harris-still-thinks-the-elections-are-rigged/
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 8, 2020 14:20:51 GMT
Make NO mistake Donald Trump's narrative about millions of ILLEGAL voters casting votes for Hillary Clinton (when he knows full well it to be untrue) is the further attempt by Republicans to increase their voter suppression laws (against minorities and likely Democratic voters). They have more legislation waiting in the wings, written by A.L.E.C. and other right wing think tanks about to be passed in many more states to do just that. This will help to ensure a Republican congress and like minded judges to further cement their bias into our judicial and legislative branches. Never mind that Republicans and conservatives are in the minority of this country but they feel it is THEIR entitlement to be the ruling party.
Republicans CAUGHT Engaging in "Insane" Jim Crow-Style Voter Suppression Karine Jean-Pierre on Voter Suppression in 2016 – MSNBC AM Joy Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Voter ID LawsMore than 30 states have enacted some version of voter ID law in recent years. How much do these laws change voting rules and what impact could they have on the general election? by Suevon Lee and Sarah Smith ProPublica, March 9, 2016, 7:33 a.m. www.propublica.org/article/everything-youve-ever-wanted-to-know-about-voter-id-laws Democracy, Voter Rights, and Federal Power www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Democracy,_Voter_Rights,_and_Federal_Power
Kris Kobach Wants His Disastrous Voting Restrictions Adopted In Every State www.rightwingwatch.org/post/kris-kobach-wants-his-disastrous-voting-restrictions-adopted-in-every-state/
Eyeing Tough Reelection, Paul Pate Proposes Voter Suppression Bill iowastartingline.com/2017/01/05/eyeing-tough-reelection-paul-pate-proposes-voter-suppression-bill/ January 5th, 2017 With his own difficult statewide reelection race on the line in 2018, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate today proposed legislation that would effectively limit the amount of Iowans who could vote. Who does his plan target the most? The very voters who would be less likely to vote for him.
Pate announced today his ideas for a restrictive voter identification legislation that he hopes the Republican-run Statehouse will pass. It also includes shortening the amount of time absentee balloting is allowed and signature verification at the polls.
The reality of enacting such a program would mean it would be difficult for students, older retirees who don’t drive anymore and many lower income Iowans to vote, even with Pate’s plan to provide free ID’s. While Republicans claim such measures are intended for voter integrity, in reality their main goal is to keep people who might vote against Republicans from voting.
Throughout the country, Republicans in recent years implemented new voter suppression laws that disproportionately affected populations that tend to support Democrats. In Wisconsin a new voter identification bill pushed through by Republicans was estimated to impact 300,000 people who wouldn’t have the proper papers to vote. The effort seemed to work as 60,000 fewer people voted in Milwaukee County in 2016 than did in 2012, effectively handing the state to Republicans. Their statewide turnout was the lowest in 20 years, with many election officials explaining the restrictive identification mandate as the cause.
Pate’s actions are also clearly a so-called solution in search of a problem. The simple fact of the matter is that voter fraud is extremely rare in Iowa, and in-person fraud, which is what voter identification might prevent, is basically nonexistent. The most prominent case of voter fraud this past election in Iowa was the Trump supporter who voted twice because she feared the election was “rigged.” Her actions were quickly discovered, she was charged with the crime and her vote didn’t count. The system worked as it was supposed to, and no amount of voter identification would have stopped this specific instance. Indeed, Pate reiterated today his belief that Iowa elections are clean and fair.
But that’s not what Pate’s actions today are about. VOTER SUPPRESSION A MAJOR WEAPON OF THE RIGHT IN 2016 ELECTION; ACTIVISTS SEEK WAYS TO FIGHT BACK Posted by Robert Woodruff 229.20Pts on September 07, 2016 www.progressivemaryland.org/voter_suppression_a_major_weapon_of_the_right_in_2016_election_activists_seek_ways_to_fight_back#_msocom_1
Voter suppression -- voter ID laws and other measures to make it harder for the poor and minorities to vote -- are a nationwide strategy of the right, including even here in Maryland. Here's a map of how the struggle is playing out, including in our own and neighboring states.
/By Woody Woodruff/ PM BlogSpace Report/ “Many Americans face an ever-shifting voting landscape. The national struggle over voting rights is the greatest in decades.” That observation from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University gets truer every day, as onerous voter suppression efforts in 17 states are challenged and in some heartening cases overturned by courts, while other states – possibly including Maryland – try to find wiggle room for their restrictions to survive court scrutiny.
Simultaneously, activist groups try to find work-arounds to beat restrictions the courts won’t overturn.
Voter suppression comes in two basic flavors: measures that actually disqualify otherwise eligible voters from casting a ballot, and measures that make it more difficult for voters. What these flavors have in common is their disproportionate effect on the poor and working poor and minorities, who often vote for Democrats, and their near-perfect alignment with the list of states run largely or solely by Republican state governments.
The Advancement Project, a civil rights organization, says “Today in dozens of states, laws are being used in partisan politics to keep millions of Americans from voting. These include new measures that require voter ID or proof of citizenship, eliminate early voting days or locations, restrict or shut polling locations, and a myriad other tactics designed to unfairly limit and discourage voter participation by African-American, Latino, Asian, young, and lower-income Americans.”
It’s about class, finally.
Progressives who find the presidential race an occasion for holding their noses can nevertheless agree that the people most affected by voter suppression are the people we want to help emerge from the toils of capitalism-fueled inequality through the whole panoply of democratic means. Voting is not the only weapon of the weak in the armory of progressive democracy, but it is central. Activism on the terrain of expanding the vote and including the excluded in use of the tools of power is, progressives all agree, a social good. Conversely, voter suppression frequently takes advantage of capitalism’s more general form of oppression – keeping workers and out-of-workers alike anxious and busy with survival. When your life offers few opportunities to raise your head and examine your rights and opportunities to effect change, it takes fewer and more seemingly trivial barriers to keep you from the polls.
And although voter suppression is something we expect to see taking place in states of the Old Confederacy or the far Southwest, it can happen anywhere, including Maryland. An early example came in the last (primary) voting cycle, when a local election board closed polling places in Montgomery County that served largely minority communities.
As the Baltimore Sun article pointed out in late 2015, “The dust-up in Maryland's most populous county could portend partisan conflict in other jurisdictions because every election board in Maryland now has a GOP majority after Republican Larry Hogan became governor this year.”
The furor in Montgomery led to a rollback of the move. But in many Maryland counties where the GOP majority on the election board can count on the support of conservative local officials and voters, such moves might stick.
Maryland progressives and their allies have numerous opportunities to work against voter suppression and for voter inclusion in neighboring states, principally in Virginia and West Virginia. The Mountain State’s GOP-controlled legislature passed a voter-ID bill this spring “right out of the ALEC playbook,” according to one dissenting Democratic legislator. Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, a Democrat, later signed a conference version of the bill in which he cannily negotiated a wider range of possible IDs acceptable at the polling place and, quite positively, “requires the Secretary of State's Office to work with the Division of Motor Vehicles to create an automatic voter registration system.”
Virginia beckons activists this year because its voter ID law, upheld by a lower court earlier, will be weighed by the 4th Circuit appeals court in Richmond beginning Sept. 22 and however the decision falls there will be little time left to organize before the Oct. 17 voter registration deadline. Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s campaign to mass-enfranchise tens of thousands of ex-offenders now barred from voting was blocked in court by GOP legislators but McAuliffe vows to use his robopen to approve as many individual cases as possible before the election.
Pennsylvania, another neighbor state, passed a voter-ID law in 2014 but it was overturned by a court. Now run by a Democratic governor’s administration, Pennsylvania is less vulnerable to top-down voter suppression but (as we will see) may still have varying levels of access in the many counties between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh that are GOP bastions.
Positive attempts to improve the access to voting for poor and minority voters frequently run into resistance from those same Republican forces. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey recently vetoed a very progressive automatic voter registration law that would have broadened access for many marginal voters. Perhaps surprising to many, there is not an affirmative right to vote in the US Constitution – just a recitation of items that may not be used to deny that implied right, such as race, gender etc.
The news on voter suppression has not been muted, and the court decisions of the past six weeks or so have highlighted them nicely for a wider public. One of the most complete accounts is from ProPublica. Sarah Smith reported on Aug. 12 that “There are 15 states with new voting laws that have never before been used during a presidential election, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice. These laws include restrictions like voter ID requirements and limits on early voting. Many are making their way through the courts, which have already called a halt to two laws in the past month — one in North Carolina and one in North Dakota. Most recently, the US Supreme Court deadlocked on whether or not to review the 4th Circuit panel’s devastating rejection of the North Carolina law, but the Washington Post, in a lengthy backgrounder, showed that local officials were still trying to restrict low-income and minority voters even after the state law, clearly crafted to impose such restrictions, had been invalidated for at least the November 8 election.
“ ‘All the sides were pushing for opinions over the summer so that nobody would run into the concern that it was all of a sudden too late to shift what the state had been planning to do,’ said Jennifer Clark, counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program.”
Still, the uncertainty about voting in North Carolina and other states where suppressive measures are in play means that many voters on the margin will have less incentive to assert a right to the polls and more incentive for the induced passivity that has frequently reduced the ballot-box impact and power of poor and minority voters in the past. This is open terrain for activism.
Republicans are not missing the opportunity this affords. The Trump campaign, according to Politico,[Cc1] is recruiting election observers to pursue the (quite debunked) notion that voter fraud is rampant – which is the pretext for many of the more onerous voter ID laws. “In a move that's unprecedented in a presidential election, the [Trump] campaign late this week launched a page on its website proclaiming, ‘Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election! Please fill out this form to receive more information about becoming a volunteer Trump Election Observer.’, " Politico reported Aug. 13. Voter fraud has in fact been almost entirely absent from US elections and “ballot security” efforts are notoriously prone to tactics of intimidation and discrimination. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Right Under Law, parent group of Election Protection, assembled a 75-organization coalition that wrote an open letter to chairmen of the four parties contesting this presidential election urging them to refrain from ballot security activity and discourage it throughout their organizations. Election Protection’s state by state information map is among the most complete in the array of progressive organizations working to expand ballot access.
The source of the immediate peril is laws in a wide array of Red states modeled on American Legislative Exchange Council proposals and introduced quite quickly after the Shelby decision in a lockstep fashion that is hard to see as merely coincidence. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights issued a report earlier this year mapping the state-by-state danger. The Afro-American published in our region reported June 22: “Scott Simpson, the report’s co-author and director of Media and Campaigns for The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and The Leadership Conference Education Fund, said there’s reason for concern. ‘As we approach the first presidential election in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act, we’re seeing the perfect storm of a diversifying electorate and a set of states and localities responding by implementing a broad array of voter discrimination tactics,’ he said. “In 2016, it is entirely possible that the presidency, control of the Senate, and a number of governorships could be determined by the voter discrimination made possible by Shelby.”
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 8, 2020 14:21:38 GMT
This year, 2017... 21 states so far have more voter suppression legislation waiting to be passed.
Republicans were wildly successful at suppressing voters in 2016 Three GOP-controlled states demonstrate the effectiveness of disenfranchising the opposition. Voters wait in line outside a polling place at the Nativity School on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016, in Cincinnati. CREDIT: AP Photo/John Minchillo By Alice Ollstein and Kira Lerner thinkprogress.org/2016-a-case-study-in-voter-suppression-258b5f90ddcd/
Last week, the first election in 50 years without the full protection of the federal Voting Rights Act propelled Donald Trump to the White House.
Trump will assume the presidency because of the Electoral College’s influence — though nearly three million more people cast ballots for Hillary Clinton. The election was also marked by low turnout, with tens of millions of eligible voters choosing not to participate at all. Yet there has been relatively little discussion about the millions of people who were eligible to vote but could not do so because they faced an array of newly-enacted barriers to the ballot box.
Their systematic disenfranchisement was intentional and politically motivated. In the years leading up to 2016, Republican governors and state legislatures implemented new laws restricting when, where, and how people could vote — laws that disproportionately harmed students, the poor, and people of color. In several instances, lawmakers pushing such policies said explicitly that their goal was suppression of voters who favor the Democratic Party.
Three such states serve as case studies for the effectiveness of these voting restrictions: Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Florida.
All three elected staunchly conservative governors during President Obama’s terms. All three implemented voting restrictions that affect millions of people. President Obama won all three states in 2008, and won all but North Carolina in 2012, while Hillary Clinton lost all three of those states this year. WISCONSIN
Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed Wisconsin’s strict voter ID law in 2011, and it has been tied up in court battles for years. A federal court held that the law unconstitutionally burdens low-income people of color, but ultimately the Supreme Court allowed it to go into effect for the 2016 election.
In one of the many trials concerning the law, former government officials testified that behind closed doors, Republicans pushing for the voter ID were “politically frothing at the mouth” over the prospect that it would make it more difficult for people to cast ballots for Democrats.
Donald Trump won the state by fewer than 30,000 votes. According to the state’s own records, ten times that many eligible voters in the state — as many as 300,000 people — lacked the proper ID and may have been disenfranchised.
Neil Albrecht, the executive director of Milwaukee’s Election Commission, believes the policy depressed turnout in the blue counties Clinton desperately needed to carry Wisconsin. Compared to 2012, 60,000 fewer people voted in this year Milwaukee — the county that holds the vast majority of the state’s black population. Statewide, turnout was the lowest it has been for a presidential election in two decades.
Albrecht said his office received a flood of calls from voters in the city’s poorest districts who said they were unable to cast a ballot because they lacked the proper identification. According to new data released by the state, nearly 600 ballots will be thrown away because voters did not have the right ID. And Albrecht said he worries many more did not even attempt to vote because of the law.
In the final weeks leading up to the election, voting rights groups discovered that Wisconsin officials at local DMV offices were giving false information to voters attempting to get the proper ID, putting those officials in violation of a federal court order.
The University of Wisconsin launched an investigation this week into just how much the voter ID law reduced turnout in the state, and it plans to report the results later this year.
NORTH CAROLINA
In 2013, North Carolina — led by the GOP — approved a law that eliminated same-day voter registration, cut a full week of early voting, barred voters from casting a ballot outside their home precincts, scrapped straight-ticket voting, and got rid of a program to pre-register high school students who would turn 18 by Election Day. That law also included one of the nation’s strictest voter ID requirements.
Federal courts struck down most of the law after finding that it was passed with the intention to suppress African-American voters “with almost surgical precision.” The court noted that the lawmakers first studied which racial demographics used which voting methods, and then moved to eliminate those favored by black residents. The law was a perfect example, the judge wrote, of “the inevitable tendency of elected officials to entrench themselves by targeting groups unlikely to vote for them.”
Republican-controlled county elections boards tried to find a way around the verdict. No longer able to cut a full week of early voting, the state GOP instructed the boards to make “party line changes to early voting”: cutting hours and locations.
Though some of the most extreme cuts were blocked by the state board of elections, many remained in place through the election. For example, Guilford County reduced the number of polling sites in the first week of early voting from 16 in 2012 to just 1 this year. A GOP memo issued at the end of the state’s early voting period celebrated the inevitable results of those cutbacks: African American turnout had dropped nearly nine percent.
In counties that slashed early voting hours and sites, voters also had to wait in lines several hours long to cast their ballots. A new Harvard study found that such long waits not only disenfranchise working-class voters who can’t afford to wait, but also discourages voters from participating in future elections.
Trump won the state by fewer than 200,000 votes, and the governor’s race remains too close to call. FLORIDA
Florida is one of just three states that permanently disenfranchise anyone with a felony conviction. The state has no automatic process for former felons to regain their voting rights. Instead, people have to travel to the state capital and proactively request that the governor grant them clemency on an individual basis.
That process has become even more difficult since Republican Gov. Rick Scott was elected in 2011. During governor Charlie Crist’s four years in office, more than 150,000 people had their rights restored.
Voting advocates claimed that even that number did not go far enough, given the long backlog of applications. But when Scott took office, the clemency board changed its rules and progress slowed to a crawl. In his first term as governor, fewer than 1,600 people have had their rights restored.
Tampa resident Rodney Johnson Sr. lost his voting rights in 2002 after a drug conviction, and he has been petitioning Gov. Scott for clemency for years. He told ThinkProgress shortly before Election Day how hard it is for former felons to live in a state that doesn’t let them vote.
“We can only just watch as somebody else speaks for us and is our voice for us,” he said. “We would like to speak for ourselves. I would like our voice to be heard… But road blocks are everywhere. They make it so difficult for you to even try to have a second chance at life.”
In total, roughly 1.5 million Florida residents (almost 2.5 percent of the state’s population) are disenfranchised because of the law, which white lawmakers designed in the years after the Civil War in a deliberate attempt to dilute the voting power of freed slaves. This year, one in four of Florida’s black residents could not cast a ballot.
Clinton lost Florida by just 119,770 votes. ________________________________________ After last week’s election, these barriers — and others like them — will likely multiply. Missouri, for example, voted last week to enshrine a voter ID law in its state constitution. State officials estimate that 220,000 otherwise eligible voters could be disenfranchised by the policy. Republican Jay Ashcroft, the son of George W. Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft, will take over as Missouri’s Secretary of State, and has promised to strictly enforce the voter ID requirement.
This year, the GOP expanded its control to 32 state legislatures and 33 governorships. With all three branches of the federal government and a majority of states now under Republican control, American voters can expect to face more barriers and restrictions in the coming years.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 8, 2020 14:22:10 GMT
States that passed voting restrictions saw decreased turnout, flipped to Trump
Donald Trump: It's time to heal this divided nation BY Christopher Brennan www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/states-new-voting-restrictions-flip-trump-article-1.2866395 NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, November 9, 2016, 4:00 PM
While a surge of unexpected Donald Trump supporters flipped some Rust Belt states red, voter suppression measures may have also contributed to a depressed Democratic turnout.
Ohio and Wisconsin, which saw drops in overall voter numbers since 2012 despite working class white support for Republicans, also enacted laws restricting voters’ ability to cast ballots.
NY Daily News: Live 2016 Election Results Map
A lack of enthusiasm among Democrats may be partly to blame for fewer voters in places such as Milwaukee County, though some suggest that Republican-led restrictions on voters functioned as intended.
KING: The Democratic Party deserves blame for electing Trump www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/king-democratic-party-deserves-blame-electing-trump-article-1.2866238
“It’s undeniable that there is an effect [from new voting laws]. The people that enact these laws know what they’re doing,” said Gerry Hebert, the director of voting rights and redistricting at the Campaign Legal Center.
*** World Rights *** Sam Kotrba, an 18-year-old freshman at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, hands his identification to poll workers before voting in his first presidential election. (USA TODAY Network/USA TODAY Network/Sipa USA)
Wisconsin, which went for Trump by about 30,000 votes, saw only 2.8 million votes cast this year as opposed to more than 3 million in 2012.
The state also has one of the most well-known voter ID laws, requiring photo identification to vote.
Measures like Wisconsin’s are seen as disproportionately affecting minority voters like those in Milwaukee County, where turnout was more than 50,000 votes less than it was four years ago.
Mark J. Rozell: Why Trump was poised to win www.nydailynews.com/opinion/mark-rozell-trump-poised-win-article-1.2866303
Core parts of the law were struck down by a federal court this summer, but upheld on appeal in August.
NEW YORK, NY - NOVEMBER 08: People react as they watch voting results at Democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's election night event at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center November 8, 2016 in New York City. Clinton is running against Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump to be the 45th President of the United States. (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)
Election Night 2016: Joy and despair as Donald Trump is elected president
Other battleground states have less strict laws that still impact certain demographic group's ability to vote, such as Ohio, where Trump won by 400,000 votes.
The 50,000 fewer voters, which would not have closed Clinton's gap, included drops in places such as Cleveland's heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County.
Ohio allows voters without ID to vote only on provisional ballots, though Hebert said that national data from previous elections show that only 10 to 15% of those who cast provisional ballots end up certifying their eligibility through the local registrar in time for their votes to be counted.
New Yorkers head out early to vote in ‘election of our lifetimes'
He added that a raft of legislation, such as an Ohio law purging some voters from rolls because of inactivity that was overturned earlier this year, can generally decrease the number of people exercising their right to vote.
Donald Trump got electoral votes from Wisconsin and Ohio after new voting restrictions. (Evan Vucci/AP)
A provision eliminating the "Golden Week," a period when voters could both register to vote and vote early in Ohio, was upheld by the Supreme Court.
“The cumulative effect of all that on the voter psyche is very damaging. Voters feel they are targets and they are being targeted intentionally,” Hebert said.
The former Justice Department lawyer also said that even if laws are challenged and struck down in court, people not up to date with the news may not realize that legislation such as the Ohio voter purge is no longer in effect.
Vote of no confidence: Freedom to cast ballots must be absolute www.nydailynews.com/opinion/vote-no-confidence-freedom-cast-ballots-absolute-article-1.2854395
A strict voter ID law in North Carolina, which went for Trump by about 170,000 votes and saw an increase in turnout since 2012, was struck down by a federal judge earlier this year.
The Tar Heel State also had restrictions on early voting, which led the state's Republican Party to praise the fact that black early voting was down 8.5% as an "encouraging" sign.
Florida, which Trump won by 120,000 votes, has been criticized for cutting the early voting period and restricting voter registration drives.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 8, 2020 14:24:02 GMT
When voter suppression doesn't work why not outright steal the election?This is a great outline of the history of modern day voting and the problems it has presented namely stolen elections. It is not all encompassing but it captures the spirit of what has happened.
The entire chapters are at the link: www.electiondefense.org/how-to-rig-an-election/
How to Rig An Election
Victoria Collier Harper's Magazine, November 2012
www.electiondefense.org/how-to-rig-an-election/
Old-school election fraud was limited in scope, but new electronic voting systems allow insiders to rig elections on a national scale.
Introduction
As the twentieth century came to a close, a brave new world of election rigging emerged, and two major events paved the way: the mass adoption of computerized voting technology, and the outsourcing of our elections to a handful of corporations that operate in the shadows, with little oversight or accountability.
This privatization of our elections has occurred without public knowledge or consent, leading to one of the most dangerous and least understood crises in the history of American democracy: We have actually lost the ability to verify election results.
Old-school ballot-box fraud at its most egregious was localized and limited in scope. But new electronic voting systems allow insiders to rig elections on a statewide or even national scale. And whereas once you could catch guilty parties in the act, even dredge ballot boxes out of the bayou, the virtual vote count can be manipulated in total secrecy.
By means of proprietary, corporate-owned software, just one programmer could steal hundreds, thousands, potentially millions of votes with the stroke of a key. It’s the electoral equivalent of a drone strike.
Part One
Privatized, Computerized Voting Ushered in a New Era of Massive election Fraud
From the earliest days of the republic, American politicians saw vote rigging as a necessary evil.
Privatization of elections has occurred without public knowledge or consent, leading to a dangerous crisis in American democracy.
Just one programmer could steal millions of votes with the stroke of a key. It’s the electoral equivalent of a drone strike.
Part Two
Election Results Deviated Severely from the Polls When a Voting Executive Ran for Senate
Until shortly before the election, Hagel had been chairman of the company whose computerized voting machines would soon count his own votes.
Hagel never truly disclosed his financial ties to the voting industry to the Senate Ethics Committee.
Part Three
A Faulty Computer Memory Card Triggered the Florida 2000 Fiasco
Our faith-based elections are the result of a new Dark Age in American democracy, brought on, paradoxically, by technological progress.
Part Four
Citizen Sleuth Exposes Shocking Faults Built into Diebold Election Systems
Diebold voting machines feature unencrypted audit logs that allow vote rigging to be wiped from the record.
There is no reason to trust insiders in the election industry any more than in other industries.
— Jimmy Carter and James Baker
Part Five
National Laboratory Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack Electronic Voting Machines
This is a national security issue. The manufacturers seem to be in denial on some of these issues.
— Roger Johnston
Part Six
The Help America Vote Act Subsidized Fraud-prone Touchscreen Voting Systems
There’s an erosion of voting rights implicit in our inability to trust the technology that we use. This country is ripe for stealing elections.
— DeForest Soaries, EAC
Part Seven
Election Day is dominated by a handful of secretive, Partisan corporations with interlocking ownership
Two brothers have monopolized American election technology for decades through a pair of supposedly competing corporations.
Part Eight
Voting Machine Companies Employ Criminals
Although 6 million citizens are disenfranchised due to felony convictions, nothing prevents felons from working in the elections industry.
Part Nine
Was Max Cleland Sabotaged by Illegal Software?
The American right has in recent years been empowered by a slew of upset victories that range from unexpected to implausible.
Part Ten
Partisan Technology Firm Is Implicated in John Kerry's Implausible Loss in Ohio 2004
The SmarTech people may have been guiding the manipulation of paper ballots in places like Warren County.
— Cliff Arnebeck
Exit polls make a compelling case that somebody may have been tampering with the presidential vote count in Ohio.
Part Eleven
The Red Shift: Anomalies in Electronic Voting Trend Overwhelmingly in One Direction
We approach electoral integrity with a nonpartisan goal of transparency, but there is nothing nonpartisan about the patterns we keep finding.
— Jonathan Simon
Our great, free, and open media are concealing data so that it cannot be analyzed.
— David Moore, veteran pollster
Part Twelve
Tea Party Candidates Have Been Primary Beneficiaries of America's Rightward Thrust
Where Massachusetts ballots were counted publicly by hand, Martha Coakley beat her Tea Party opponent, but in electronically counted areas, she lost.
South Carolina voters and election observers reported ES&S touchscreen machines “flipping” votes to an unqualified patsy all day long.
Part Thirteen
The Watchdogs Have Been Silent and Complicit in the Erosion of American Election Integrity
Like their counterparts in the media, Democrats in office today appear unwilling to defend what matters most.
Part Fourteen
Germany and Ireland have Restored Secure and Transparent Voting Systems
A privatized, secret ballot count must be viewed as a violation of our civil rights.
No matter how cynical we may have become about our elections, doing nothing to secure an accurate vote count is not an option. It may be too late to completely prevent vote rigging in the 2012 election. But the spotlight of increased public scrutiny may deter the most brazen acts of fraud—and perhaps dissuade those who believe that shifting votes by minuscule percentages in the electronic dark will go unseen.
Where paper ballots still exist, we can demand that local election clerks allow them to be counted by hand before they leave the precinct. Organizing citizen volunteer groups to count them may be necessary. Sheila Parks, who founded the Center for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots, has also urged citizens with legal standing to file injunctions to impound ballots, memory cards, and even voting machines after the polls close. “This prevents tampering with any of these items after an election,” she told me, “and gives us access to them with a secure chain of custody.”
Staring at the outside of a black-box voting system and attempting to detect fraud, however, will not ultimately produce clean elections. It is an exercise in futility if we do not take the next steps now. In preparation for the 2014 election, we must demand that our representatives pass comprehensive election reform, including publicly financed races and a secure, transparent vote count.
A privatized, secret ballot count must be viewed as a violation of our civil rights. Once that principle is clear, as it is now in Germany and Ireland, the rest will naturally follow. If we the people do not feel the outrage, or lack the courage to fight for this most basic right of American self-governance, who will?
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 8, 2020 14:25:41 GMT
Does this surprise anybody? This is part of the m.o. to justify adding more voter suppression techniques in the states where legislation in 21 states is already pending to thwart the vote.
President Trump's ‘voter fraud expert’ is registered to vote in three states THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Monday, January 30, 2017, 7:21 PM
SAN FRANCISCO — A man who President Trump has promoted as an authority on voter fraud was registered to vote in multiple states during the 2016 presidential election, the Associated Press has learned.
Gregg Phillips, whose unsubstantiated claim that the election was marred by 3 million illegal votes was tweeted by the President, was listed on the rolls in Alabama, Texas and Mississippi, according to voting records and election officials in those states. He voted only in Alabama in November, records show.
In a post earlier this month, Phillips described "an amazing effort" by volunteers tied to True the Vote, an organization whose board he sits on, who he said found "thousands of duplicate records and registrations of dead people."
Trump has made an issue of people who are registered to vote in more than one state, using it as one of the bedrocks of his overall contention that voter fraud is rampant in the U.S. and that voting by 3 to 5 million immigrants illegally in the country cost him the popular vote in November.
Donald Trump voters think he should be able to use private server (HUH? What F'N hypocrites) www.nydailynews.com/news/national/donald-trump-voters-private-server-article-1.2957662
Gregg Phillips was listed on the rolls in Alabama, Texas and Mississippi, according to voting records and election officials in those states. (CNN)
The AP found that Phillips was registered in Alabama and Texas under the name Gregg Allen Phillips, with the identical Social Security number. Mississippi records list him under the name Gregg A. Phillips, and that record includes the final four digits of Phillips' Social Security number, his correct date of birth and a prior address matching one once attached to Gregg Allen Phillips. He has lived in all three states.
At the time of November's presidential election, Phillips' status was "inactive" in Mississippi and suspended in Texas. Officials in both states told the AP that Phillips could have voted, however, by producing identification and updating his address at the polls.
Citing concerns about voters registered in several states, the president last week called for a major investigation into his claim of voter fraud, despite his campaign lawyer's conclusion that the 2016 election was "not tainted."
"When you look at the people that are registered, dead, illegal and two states, and some cases maybe three states, we have a lot to look into," Trump said in an ABC interview.
AG to sue NYC Board of Elections over improper purging of voters
Reached by telephone Monday, Phillips said he was unaware of his multiple registrations but asked, "Why would I know or care?"
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 8, 2020 14:26:39 GMT
To me the actions of James Comey, FBI Director were instrumental in suppressing the vote.
Say It With Me Again: James Comey Elected Donald Trump President Kevin Drum MAR. 8, 2017 11:05 AM
Engagement Labs is a company that tracks "what people are talking about." Brad Fay, one of their executives, tells us that during the presidential campaign people were talking very negatively about everyone. They were more negative about Donald Trump, but they were plenty negative about Hillary Clinton too. However, the gap between the candidates changed from time to time based on external events:
Most decisively, there was a sudden change in the net sentiment results that followed immediately after FBI Director James Comey released his Oct. 28 letter to Congress about a renewed investigation of Clinton emails. Immediately afterwards, there was a 17-point drop in net sentiment for Clinton, and an 11-point rise for Trump, enough for the two candidates to switch places in the rankings, with Clinton in more negative territory than Trump. At a time when opinion polling showed perhaps a 2-point decline in the margin for Clinton, this conversation data suggests a 28-point change in the word of mouth "standings." The change in word of mouth favorability metric was stunning, and much greater than the traditional opinion polling revealed.
Of course, a picture is worth a thousand words: www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/03/say-it-me-again-james-comey-elected-donald-trump-president
In late October, Clinton leads Trump by 24 points in the Engagement Labs survey. Two days after the Comey letter is released, Trump is ahead by 4 points. Trump kept that lead until Election Day. Once again: Clinton did nothing particularly wrong in her campaign. She didn't ignore working-class whites. She wasn't too cautious on policy. She didn't overestimate the impact of educated voters. She wasn't complacent. What happened was simple: 12 days before the election, the FBI director released a letter saying he had found a brand-new trove of emails and implying that this might finally be the smoking gun about her private email server. That's it.
We'll never know for sure if James Comey did this because he's terminally stupid and didn't realize what impact it would have, or if he did it knowing full well what impact it would have. But he did it. And that's why Donald Trump is president.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 8, 2020 14:28:02 GMT
Here is proof of voter suppression by REPUBLICANS that STOLE the Wisconsin election for Donald J Trump. This confirms what I have been saying before, during and after the 2016 election and STILL the Democratic Party is hiding their heads in the sand. It is contemptible and cowardly of them. While Republicans are despicable and deplorable human beings (mostly reptilian anyway) this was to be expected behavior from them especially since the stolen 2000 election and shenanigans long before that in individual cases like Nixon and Reagan stolen elections where treason was key.
Now adding to this it looks like Republicans are beginning to get their CLAWS into the Census Bureau which will have all kinds of election/political implications.
2016 Election Results Skewed by Voter Suppression, Not Voter Fraud
JoAnn Chateau May 12, 2017 4 Comments
Although there is little evidence of voter fraud, President Trump claims the 2016 Election results were skewed by millions of fraudulent votes. Whether he is suggesting he would have otherwise won the popular vote, or should have lost the election, is unclear. To prove his point, whichever it is, Trump created a Voter Fraud Commission yesterday.
How ironic. The Fraud Commission launched only a week after a new study on voter suppression revealed Trump would likely have lost the 2016 Election, except for the boost he got from stricter voter suppression laws.
The President could have saved his energy (which I know he would want to do), but he must not have heard about the Study. That alone, without another commission (which might bloat the government), could have adequately provided what he needs most: a graceful way to bow out of the presidency. Before he gets impeached.
Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman talked to Ari Burman, who broke the story about the study results on voter suppression. Extremely interesting. Both his article and Goodman’s video are linked below.
Wisconsin’s Voter-Id Law Suppressed 200,000 Votes in 2016 (Trump Won by 22,748) | The Nation www.thenation.com/article/wisconsins-voter-id-law-suppressed-200000-votes-trump-won-by-23000/
Would Trump Have Won Wisconsin—or the 2016 Election—Without Widespread Voter Suppression? | Democracy Now! www.democracynow.org/2017/5/12/would_trump_have_won_wisconsin_or?utm_content=buffer25610&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=bufferA new report has called into question whether President Trump would have actually won Wisconsin during the 2016 presidential election without the state’s strict voter ID law. The study was published by the progressive advocacy group Priorities USA. It says the law suppressed the votes of more than 200,000 residents, the majority of whom were African-American and Democratic-leaning. President Trump won only about 23,000 more votes than Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin. Talk about this, Ari.
ARI BERMAN: So I wrote about this study this week. And what they found was that, overall, turnout increased by 1.3 percent in 2016 over 2012. But states that adopted strict voter ID laws, turnout dropped by 1.7 percent. And it dropped in Wisconsin by 3.3 percent, so much greater decrease than the national turnout increase. And what they found, this study, was that 200,000 more people would have voted in Wisconsin if not for their strict voter ID law. Trump only won the state by 23,000 votes. The largest drop-off was among black and Democratic-leaning voters. So they not only compared Wisconsin to other states, they compared it to states like Minnesota right next door, which have similar demographics and turnout rates, and they found that there was a much larger drop-off in Wisconsin than Minnesota, which does not have a voter ID law, that counties with a large African-American population had a larger drop-off. So this is yet another study showing that voter ID laws suppress the vote. And my feeling is, these laws are bad regardless of if they impact an election, because we’re making it harder to vote for no reason. But in Wisconsin, we have a very clear case study that this law impacted the final results of the presidential election.
AMY GOODMAN: The significance of the timing of the commission, two days after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, and also, you know, you have Pence and Kobach as the heads of it?
ARI BERMAN: Well, clearly, this is an attempt to try to distract from the news. Voter fraud is something that plays to Trump’s base. When people were testifying before Congress, FBI experts, they said one of the things the Russians did, one of their, quote, "active measures," in the presidential election was to raise doubts about legitimacy of the election. So, this is something that Trump always dusts off when there’s some sort of controversy.
And if you just look at the people who are leading it—Mike Pence is from Indiana, the first state to adopt a strict voter ID law, which started this whole voter suppression craze. In 2016, the state police in Indiana shut down of voter registration group, raided the office of a group that was registering black and low-income voters, which had a chilling effect on voter registration there. You look at Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, who’s the vice chair of the commission. He is the leading figure within the Republican Party behind voter suppression efforts, behind anti-immigrant efforts. He is a very, very, very powerful, very, very dangerous figure within the Republican Party. Making him the vice chair of this commission shows that it’s designed for one purpose, which is to try to suppress the vote.
AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly—we have less than a minute, but the fact that the census director has now quit, can you talk about the significance of this?
ARI BERMAN: It’s very significant, because the census determines who is counted, literally, who is counted in terms of congressional—in terms of congressional representation, who is counted in terms of people getting resources, federal money, government programs. Often blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, low-income voters are undercounted already by the census. So if the census has no money, you’re going to see a further lessening of representation, a further lessening of minorities, low-income people counting in society. So, it’s one of those under-the-radar things that has a big impact on democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: And it determines how many candidates, how many congressmembers represent a state.
ARI BERMAN: Absolutely. It literally determines who is and who isn’t counted. So, if the census isn’t getting money, if the census director resigns—and this is all being done in 2020, when there’s going to be a whole new round of redistricting after the presidential election—it’s very significant.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 8, 2020 14:28:58 GMT
Greg Palast On Gerrymandering & Voting Rights
Was a Georgia Congressional Candidate Responsible for Kicking Voters off Rolls? (w/Greg Palast)
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 8, 2020 14:29:59 GMT
More proof that Donald J Trump's election DIDN'T add up. Exit polls are accurate. When they don't match "official" quote-unquote results something is fishy. Exit polling showed Hillary won North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida and she won the national exit poll by over 3%. Yet the "tallied" official vote put trump ahead. If those results don't jive something is wrong. Just the way it is. Evidently few people, except for me and the people that compiled these reports care about it. Expect more undeserving Republicans to take office for two more decades, at least. By then they will have totally institutionalized their election sham and their minority will always win. Liberals, Democrats, Progressives will just need to adapt to that inevitability.
Math Increasingly Suggests Election Fraud Against Hillary Clinton
Published on Nov 14, 2016 --According to exit polls conducted by Edison Research, Hillary Clinton won four key battleground states (NC, PA, WI and FL), but ultimately lost those states according to computerized vote counts
tdmsresearch.com/2016/11/10/2016-presidential-election-table/
2016 Presidential Election Table
by Theodore de Macedo Soares
According to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research, Clinton won four key battleground states (NC, PA, WI, and FL) in the 2016 Presidential Election that she went on to lose in the computerized vote counts. With these states Clinton wins the Electoral College with a count of 306 versus 232 for Trump. Clinton also won the national exit poll by 3.2% and won the national vote count by 2.1% or about three million votes.
Exit polls were conducted in 28 states. In 22 states the discrepancies between the exit polls and the vote count favored Trump. In 12 of these states the discrepancies favoring Trump exceeded the margin of error of the state’s exit poll. See Table and its footnotes below.
Readers may find the following answers to questions in the comments section very helpful: •Discussion on the suitability of exit polls conducted by Edison Research as an indicator of possible election fraud •Unadjusted exit polls may have shown much larger wins for Clinton •On margin of error (MOE) including its relationship with the confidence interval •Simple explanation on the application of the MOE in the table below •Important distinction between “election fraud” and “voter fraud” •On speculative theories
www.gregpalast.com/election-stolen-heres/
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
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 8, 2020 14:30:50 GMT
Republicans WIN all special elections and Democratic leadership still in denial about voter suppression. This was to be expected in my opinion just like I don't seriously expect Democrats to take back the House or Senate during the mid term elections next year. I also expect that the Supreme Court that is now very conservative will continue with their voter suppression rulings and dismantle the Voting Rights Act even more including allowing gerrymandering which will assuredly keep the minority Republicon Party in power. Add fellow partisan hacks like Julian Assange to continue to assist Republicans with their winning mission of installing global corporatist whores and they just can't lose. Democrats are SUCKERS!Greg Palast On Gerrymandering & Voting RightsWas a Georgia Congressional Candidate Responsible for Kicking Voters off Rolls? (w/Greg Palast) Exclusive — Karen Handel: ‘I Intend to Have the Last Laugh When I Win’
www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/06/19/exclusive-karen-handel-intend-last-laugh-win/
Political fallout from Karen Handel's special election win
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 8, 2020 14:32:25 GMT
It is unbelievable to me that the man (Ken Blackwell) that STOLE the 2004 Presidential Election for G W Bush and the man (Kris Kobach) who stole the 2016 Presidential Election for Donald J Trump are heading up this TRUMP Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity whose name is a joke itself. It is no more than a STEAL AMERICA AGAIN Commission for Republicans. Unbelievable but NOT surprising. One of the worst attributes of this president is his absolute gall and in your face attitude. He thinks because he is President nothing he does is against the law. Anyone else would have been in prison by now but the imbecile Republicans could care less that they are the Republicon Crime Family for the Corporate and Wealthy. Presidential voting commission member defends 'legitimate objective'By Liz Stark and Grace Hauck, CNN Updated 12:55 PM ET, Thu July 6, 2017
Opposition to voter fraud commission grows
Story highlights Blackwell is one of 14 members tasked with investigating alleged voter fraud Blackwell raised concerns about the possibility of foreign intervention in US elections
Washington (CNN) — A member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity defended the commission's "legitimate objective" Thursday morning.
"This is a commission with a legitimate objective and mission, and we're going to get it done and we're going to get it done working in a bipartisan fashion," said commission member Ken Blackwell on CNN's "New Day."
Blackwell, a Republican and former Ohio secretary of state, is one of 14 members tasked with investigating alleged voter fraud. The fifteenth, Maryland Deputy Secretary of State Luis E. Borunda, resigned Monday. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, vice chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity which President Donald Trump created by executive order in May, sent a letter to all 50 states last week requesting a bevy of voter data, which he notes will eventually be made available to the public.
Related Article: What the federal government can get from your voter file
In a statement on Wednesday afternoon, Kobach said 20 states will provide public information and another 16 are reviewing their options, while 14 states and DC have outright refused to comply.
According to a CNN inquiry to each state earlier this week, however, at least 45 states and DC said they would be unable to provide at least some of the information or outright refused to comply, including Kobach's own office, which can't provide all of the data under state law. A small number of states did respond positively, and some had yet to receive the letter or were still reviewing it.
"There are those who want to kill the commission in the crib. That's pure nonsense," Blackwell said of resistance to the commission's objectives. "There are organizations that understand that our voter rolls across the country are corrupt. And that corruption is a vulnerability and an opening to folks who might want to change the result of an election. What we have to work on is an articulation between the 50 states and the District of Columbia, and counting ballots -- who can be against that?"
Related Article: Here's the real problem with Kris Kobach's voter fraud commission
Blackwell said a vote per precinct could be enough to tip election scales.
"We don't have to chase 5 million alleged corrupt voters. We, in fact, have to be concerned about one vote per precinct because that can change the course of history and the well-being of the United States of America," he said.
Blackwell also raised concerns about the possibility of foreign intervention in US elections: "I just heard you with your previous guest talk about a threat of manipulation of election systems at the state level by the Russians. I'm sure the Chinese, the Iranians, and others with technological capability will try to manipulate our system."
Related Article: Forty-five states and DC have refused to give certain voter information to Trump commission
Blackwell's comments come as President Donald Trump faced questions about alleged meddling by Russia in the 2016 presidential election during his visit to Poland Thursday.
"I think it very well could be Russia but I think it could very well have been other countries," Trump said in a news conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda. "I think a lot of people interfere." and the so called LIBERAL MEDIA is actually the CORPORATE MAINSTREAM MEDIA has been complicit in this election scamfreepress.org/The massive election-rigging scandal the media ignored
In 27 states, a program called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck suppressed and purged minority votes
www.salon.com/2017/01/10/the-massive-election-rigging-scandal-the-media-ignored_partner/
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 8, 2020 14:33:46 GMT
Not just suppression but outright theft. With the ease of manipulation of electronic data, fake news to cover election theft, ends justify the means politicians and the corporatization of American it should become obvious to everyone that a verifiable paper trail is the only way to stop fraud and election theft. Nothing else if verifiable that can be trusted. 4. Search Engine Algorithms and Electronic Voting Machines Could Swing 2016 Election www.projectcensored.org/4-search-engine-algorithms-electronic-voting-machines-swing-2016-election/ October 4, 2016
From search engine algorithms to electronic voting machines, technology provides opportunities for manipulation of voters and their votes in ways that could profoundly affect the results of the 2016 election. In the US, the 2012 presidential election was won by a margin of just 3.9 percent; and, historically, half of US presidential elections have been won by margins under 7.6 percent. These narrow but consequential victory margins underscore the importance of understanding how secret, proprietary technologies—whether they are newly developing or increasingly outdated—potentially swing election results.
Mark Frary, in Index on Censorship, describes the latest research by Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology on what they call the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME). Their research focuses on the powerful role played by the secret algorithms (including Google’s PageRank and Facebook’s EdgeRank) that determine the contents of our Internet search results and social media news feeds.
Epstein and Robertson studied over 4,500 undecided voters in the US and India, using randomized, controlled, double-blind methods, with research subjects who matched as closely as possible each country’s electorate. “The results,” Frary reported, “were shocking.” Epstein and Robertson showed that biased search rankings “could shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more.” The effect could be greater than 20 percent in some demographic groups, and—perhaps most significantly—this search-ranking bias “could be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation.”
In an earlier article for Politico, Epstein wrote that the Search Engine Manipulation Effect “turns out to be one of the largest behavioral effects ever discovered … We believe SEME is a serious threat to the democratic system of government.”
Epstein described how the study’s measures—including research subjects’ trust, liking, and voting preferences—“all shifted predictably” based on information provided by a Google-like search engine that he and Robertson created, which they called Kadoodle. In one of the experiments, Epstein and Robertson documented SEME with real voters during an actual election campaign: In a study involving 2,000 eligible undecided voters in India’s 2014 Lok Sabha election, they found that “search engine rankings could boost the proportion of people favoring any candidate by more than 20 percent—more than 60 percent in some demographic groups.”
Predictably, Google challenged these findings. As Frary reported, a senior vice president at Google, Amit Singhal, responded in Politico, “There is absolutely no truth to Epstein’s hypothesis that Google could work secretly to influence election outcomes. Google has never ever re-ranked search results on any topic (including elections) to manipulate user sentiment.” However, as Frary duly noted, “Singhal specifically says ‘re-ranked’ rather than ‘ranked.’ What he means by this is that the algorithm decides on the ranking of search results and that no one goes in and manipulates them afterwards. Google’s stated mission to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ should perhaps have a caveat—‘as long as our algorithm decides you should see it.’”
Hidden algorithms shape online content in significantly different ways from more widely recognized concerns about editorial censorship on television and in print. On TV and in print, Frary observed, “there is a person at the heart of the decision process … We can imagine how commissioning editors think, but the algorithms behind Facebook and Google are opaque.” This concern has led Emily Bell, a journalism professor at Columbia University, to observe, “If there is a free press, journalists are no longer in charge of it. Engineers who rarely think about journalism or cultural impact or democratic responsibility are making decisions every day that shape how news is created and disseminated.”
When filtering is financially motivated, secret, and beyond our control, Robert Epstein told Index on Censorship, “we should be extremely concerned.” Online filtering on massive platforms such as Google and Facebook, he warned, is “rapidly becoming the most powerful form of mind control that has ever existed.”
More than 75 percent of online searches in the US are conducted on Google—in other countries Google’s share of Internet searches is as high as 90 percent; some 1.5 billion individuals, political parties, businesses, and other organizations now use Facebook. Epstein and Robertson are now researching how to counter SEME. “We found the monster; now we’re trying to figure out how to kill it,” Epstein wrote in his Politico article. These efforts hinge in part on eroding public trust in Google, including our willingness to accept whatever our search results present to us as fact.
As Frary reported, Facebook, Google, and others are “highly secretive about how their algorithms work.” Electronic voting machines present similar challenges, as Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis document in their book, The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft. “Electronic voting machines are owned by private corporations … And the courts have ruled that the source code on these electronic voting machines is proprietary,” Wasserman told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! in February 2016.
In 2016, about 80 percent of the US electorate will vote using outdated electronic voting machines that rely on proprietary software from private corporations, according to a September 2015 study by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. Forty-three states are using machines that will be at least ten years old in 2016; in fourteen states, machines will be fifteen or more years old. The Brennan Center study identified “increased failures and crashes, which can lead to long lines and lost votes” as the “biggest risk” of outdated voting equipment, while noting that older machines also have “serious security and reliability flaws that are unacceptable today.”
“From a security perspective,” Jeremy Epstein of the National Science Foundation noted, “old software is riskier, because new methods of attack are constantly being developed, and older software is likely to be vulnerable.” Virginia recently decertified an electronic voting system used in twenty-four of its precincts after finding that an external party could access the machine’s wireless features to “record voting data or inject malicious data”. The investigation also raised concerns over the AccuVote-TSx machine, which is used in over twenty states. In 2014, voters in Virginia Beach observed that when they selected one candidate, the machine would register their selection for a different candidate, due to an “alignment problem.”
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! asked Wasserman how voters using electronic voting machines could be sure that their votes are counted. He told her, “They can’t be. You cannot verify an electronic voting machine … The proprietary software prevents the public from getting access to the actual vote count.” In a March 2016 article on the Free Press website, Fitrakis and Wasserman wrote that the “veracity of outcomes” in electoral races for the offices of president, US Congress, governorships, state legislatures, county commissioners, and others “will vary from state to state based on the whims and interest of those in charge of the electronic tallies.”
On Democracy Now! and elsewhere, Wasserman and Fitrakis have advocated universal, hand-counted paper ballots and automatic voter registration as part of their “Ohio Plan” to prevent stripping and flipping in US elections.
Corporate media outlets including CNNMoney, Fortune, and the Washington Post provided some coverage of Epstein and Robertson’s research. In May 2016, the Huffington Post published an article by actor and activist Tim Robbins, titled “We Need to Fix Our Broken Election System.” “Every broken machine, every disenfranchised voter, every discrepancy between the exit polls and the final results,” Robbins wrote, suggests “malfeasance” and “leads to more and more disillusionment that results in less and less voters.”
Robert Epstein, “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election,” Politico, August 19, 2015 www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548.
Mark Frary, “Whose World are You Watching? The Secret Algorithms Controlling the News We See,” Index on Censorship 44, no. 4 (December 2015), 69–73. (Extract available via: ioc.sagepub.com/content/44/4/69.extract)
Lawrence Norden and Christopher Famighetti, “America’s Voting Machines at Risk,” Brennan Center for Justice (New York University School of Law), September 15, 2015, www.brennancenter.org/publication/americas-voting-machines-risk.
Harvey Wasserman, interview by Amy Goodman, “Could the 2016 Election be Stolen with Help from Electronic Voting Machines?” Democracy Now!, broadcast February 23, 2016, transcript, www.democracynow.org/2016/2/23/could_the_2016_election_be_stolen.
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, “Is the 2016 Election Already being Stripped & Flipped?,” Free Press, March 31, 2016, freepress.org/article/2016-election-already-being-stripped-flipped.
Student Researchers: Brandy Miceli (San Francisco State University) and Amanda Woodward (University of Vermont)
Faculty Evaluators: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University) and Rob Williams (University of Vermont)
Harvey Wasserman · Eastmoor Thank you for this. The silence on electronic election theft has been astounding. But it totally negates any illusion of democracy. We must have hand counted paper ballots, universal automatic voter registration, a four-day holiday for voting. Plus aboliton of the Electoral College, an end to gerrymandering and corporate money in campaigns. Otherwise, we are nothing but a traditional empire, about to fall!! Like · Reply · 10 · Oct 13, 2016 7:07pm .. Bob Fitrakis · Professor of Political Science at Columbus state community college As Free Press Editor I appreciate Project Censored indispensable work. Those who believe in democracy recognize that private, partisan for-profit corporations should not be recording and tabulating the people's vote with secret proprietary software. Harvey and I are grateful for this recognition. Like · Reply · 4 · Oct 22, 2016 7:34am
Joyce Diggs We need to overhaul the system to ensure fair and accurate vote counts. A return to properly observed paper balloting is a start. Like · Reply · 3 · Oct 27, 2016 1:13am
Adam Cherson Im tired of hearing the paper ballot solution. Paper ballots can be hacked too by things like ballot stuffing, vanishing ballots, multiple voting. What is needed is a hybrid system that makes the raw data publicly available. I've detailed this elsewhere. Like · Reply · 1 · Nov 2, 2016 5:58am
projectcensored.org/4-search-engine-algorithms-electronic-voting-machines-swing-2016-election/
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