And why did the concession unfold the way it did? When it became clear she was going to lose, everyone expected Hillary to concede immediately. (That is, after all, what she stressed as integral to democracy and the peaceful transfer of power.) Instead, we got John Podesta shooing everyone away, an alleged telephone concession, and a speech only delivered the next day (as if Hillary hadn't even prepared to lose).
Why the establishment's plans seemingly changed is another matter. We'll come back to that. But the ultimate point is that an honest recount would likely reverse several Trump wins.
Jill Stein's recount focuses on three states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Let's go back to the exit poll table. WI and PA have outcome-reversing red shifts of 4.8% and 5.6%, respectively. MI goes from a tie in the exit polls to a slim Trump victory in the official vote count. However, since MI is split-timezone, the exit poll is mostly adjusted before it's released, so the true red shift is probably greater. Chances are good that Hillary, rather than Trump, is the true winner of all three states.
Recount integrityGranted, I mentioned an honest recount. We have no way of knowing that it will be, and past experience isn't very comforting. Recounts could be just as manipulated as vote counts, or more so.
Bev Harris recently wrote an article about the risk of sham recounts. One major potential issue is that the ballots being recounted may not even be the original ones cast by voters. Corrupt election officials might tamper with the stored ballots to make them match a rigged machine count. And the count itself can also be faked, especially if observers are blocked from seeing ballot marks and the counters know what the intended official results should be (like Chicago's audit in the primaries).
The 2004 Ohio election recount saw clean precincts being preselected, a crime for which some people actually went to jail, and tabulators that were reprogrammed in advance of the count. Richard Hayes Phillips also believes that many jurisdictions altered ballots before the recount.
When Bev Harris observed the recount of the 2008 New Hampshire primary, she saw egregious security breaches. Election officials were up to unseen activities in the ballot storage facilities the weekend before the recount. Ballot boxes arrived already open, sometimes even containing ballots from the wrong ward. And some election officials likely used an ink solvent on a set of ballots.
In both elections, there were red flags pointing to election fraud. But the recount was just as corrupt as the election itself, and the results didn't change. Ultimately, both recounts did little more than reconfirm fraudulent results.
Similarly corrupt recounts could easily happen this time too. In fact, it's already been 3 weeks since the ballots were cast, giving election officials plenty of time to alter them out of public view. There's virtually no way to verify that the ballots brought out in the recount are what the voters cast.
What this means is that election officials can contrive any result they want. If they want to cover up fraud, they can do that, and the election integrity movement will be publicly embarrassed as this high-profile effort finds nothing amiss. And let's say all the evidence pointing to fraud in Trump's favor is wrong. Manipulated ballots can still make it look like the election was stolen for him.
So what does the establishment hope to get out of this recount? The media's past coverage gives a clue.
Following the leaked DNC emails, the media began peddling a false narrative about Russian hackers. Agents of Putin were said to have hacked the DNC, Podesta emails, and state voter registration databases. Government agencies, such as the FBI, DHS, and NSA, were behind these reports of Russian election meddling, but refused to show any convincing evidence. In fact, the FBI apparently identified Russia largely on the basis of IP addresses, an absurd misunderstanding of technology.
And at one point, around early August, the media even brought up voting machine security. This issue was a third rail for 16 years, and suddenly, they're bringing in CS experts to talk about it. Why would they do this, given that it's such a massive turnaround from how they treated election fraud in the past? It's because the media made sure, every single time, to paint the concern as outside cyberattacks rather than insider manipulation. They only decided to cover election rigging in terms of a Russian hacker threat.
Every election integrity expert agrees that this is false. It's not technically impossible for Russian hackers to remotely access many central tabulators. But the greatest threat comes from election insiders, who already have access to the election systems and know the local politics well.
An insidious effect of this is to mislead the public on what the real election threat is. If Americans never expect insider fraud, only foreign hacking, they'll only worry about the latter. And the government can introduce "solutions" like DHS protection, which will guard against this minuscule foreign threat, while introducing a lot more shady insiders into the mix.
The media drummed up fear of Russian hacking for a while, but made sure to discredit Trump's concern about a rigged election. In fact, we ended up with them claiming, simultaneously, that the election couldn't be rigged against Trump, but it might be hacked by the Russian government.
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