Did human error, computer glitches, hacking, or other problems change the outcome? While there is, as yet, no compelling evidence, the news about hacking and deliberate interference makes it worth finding out. Please contact Sen. Gillibrand and Congresswoman Lowey (info included) to ask HRC to press for a recount. This is not (only) about her; it's about all of us and what faces our nation if she does not!

::::::::

URGENT!

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 1.7m votes at last count. Exit polling indicates she also won key states which suspiciously showed Trump "victories" of 1%.

Hillary Clinton must initiate a recount in key states MI, WI, NC, PA, FL, Ohio.
If the assault on democracy and respect for the votes of all citizens is not challenged, how can we ever again hope for an election that reflects the will of the people?

Please contact:

Senator Gillibrand
(212) 688-6262
https://www.gillibrand.senate.gov/contact/

Congresswoman Nita Lowey
(914) 428-1707
https://lowey.house.gov/contact/email (her web site will not accept
email from anyone outside her district, so use the phone!)

Tell them:

* Please contact Hillary Clinton and urge Hillary to press for a recount
* We need a recount of the ballots in key states MI, WI, NC, PA, FL, Ohio
* The person with standing to get recounts in those key states is Hillary Clinton.
* Clinton won the popular vote
* Exit polls showed her winning key battleground states that she later "lost" when the vote counts from hackable voting machines came in
* The deadline for requesting a recount in Wisconsin is this Friday, so time is very short.
* more than 1.1 million predominantly black, Hispanic, Islamic, and Asian-American citizens were stripped from the voter rolls

WANT TO KNOW MORE? Read below: USA Today calls for recount, How the vote was "Flipped and stripped"

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/11/18/election-audit-paper-machines-column/93803752/

Still time for an election audit: Column
This should be standard -- and it's easy, too.

Ron Rivest and Philip Stark 11:26 a.m. EST November 18, 2016

A Washington Post--ABC News poll found that 18% of voters -- 33% of Clinton supporters and 1% of Trump supporters -- think Trump was not the legitimate winner of the election. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has called on Congress to investigate the Russian cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee and the election.

There are reasons for concern. According to the director of national intelligence, the leaked emails from the DNC were "intended to interfere with the U.S. election process." The director of national intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Security Agency concluded that the Russian government is behind the DNC email hack and that Russian hackers attacked U.S. voter registration databases.

We know that the national results could be tipped by manipulating the vote count in a relatively small number of jurisdictions -- a few dozen spread across a few key states. We know that the vast majority of local elections officials have limited resources to detect or defend against cyberattacks. And while pre-election polls have large uncertainties, they were consistently off. And various aspects of the preliminary results, such as a high rate of undervotes for president, have aroused suspicion.

Computers counted the vast majority of the 130 million votes cast in this year's election. Even without hacking, mistakes are inevitable. Computers can't divine voter intent perfectly; computers can be misconfigured; and software can have bugs.

Did human error, computer glitches, hacking, or other problems change the outcome? While there is, as yet, no compelling evidence, the news about hacking and deliberate interference makes it worth finding out.

About 25% of voters used machines that do not generate a paper trail. Any hacking, glitches or other errors that affected their votes could be undetectable. But the other 75% of the vote, including the key states of Michigan and Wisconsin, could be double-checked in various ways.

A full manual recount of the paper records would be definitive, but that's unnecessarily difficult, expensive and time-consuming if the results are actually right.

There's an easier way: an audit that manually examines a random sample of the ballots in a way that has a large chance of detecting and correcting incorrect results. This is called a "risk-limiting" audit. If the reported winner of a contest really won, a risk-limiting audit generally needs to examine only a small fraction of the ballots. But if the reported winner actually lost, a risk-limiting audit has a large chance of indicating that a full hand count is needed to set the record straight.

Risk-limiting audits are a crucial check on election integrity and accuracy even when elections are not controversial and margins are wide. They have been endorsed by the Presidential Commission on Election Administration and many organizations concerned with election integrity. Colorado law requires risk-limiting audits starting in 2017, and California law requires them for deploying some new voting systems.

There is no federal law mandating election audits. A number of states perform some kind of audit, but our research shows those audits have little or no chance of detecting and correcting erroneous results. To audit this election effectively will require immediate legal action.

Auditing surprisingly few ballots could give 95% confidence that the results are correct in every state: about 1.5 million ballots in all, a bit over 1% of the ballots cast.

But if we just want to check whether Donald Trump won the election, an audit might examine even fewer ballots, because it could proceed in stages.

First it would check the results in the states Trump won. If auditing confirms those results, there's no need to audit in the states Clinton carried: Trump really won. That means auditing about 700,000 ballots in the 29 states Trump won, about 0.5% of the ballots cast in this election.

How could checking just 0.5% of the ballots give such high confidence?

States where the contest wasn't close probably won't have to check many ballots. If their results are right, even a small random sample is likely to have a majority for Trump that would be implausible if Clinton had actually won.

Missouri had such a wide margin that examining just 10 ballots should give high confidence. Texas would need to check about 700.

The few states where the contest was tight would have to do more work. Michigan had the smallest margin among states that Trump carried. To get 95% confidence there would require checking about 11% of the ballots.

It does not take much technology to conduct these audits: dice (to select random ballots), a pencil and paper, and access to the paper ballots. The calculations are simple addition and subtraction. They could be done by a fifth-grader. No programming would be required.

This is an assurance of democracy our nation can afford and should perform routinely. Electronic-only voting systems should be replaced with systems that generate a paper trail, and election results should be audited against the paper trail to ensure that election outcomes are correct.

There is still time to audit this election -- barely. States only have until Dec. 13 to give their final results to the Electoral College.

Americans should demand this simple step to ensure that the machinery of democracy worked. To add your voice, please sign this petition.

Ron Rivest is Institute Professor at MIT and was a member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Technical Guidelines Development Committee. Philip Stark, associate dean of mathematical and physical sciences at the University of California, Berkeley,was appointed to the board of advisers of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

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http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/40381-how-the-gop-flipped-and-stripped-yet-another-american-election

How the GOP Flipped and Stripped Yet Another American Election
By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
20 November 16

Summary-

"This year, Palast has reported that a new program called Crosscheck has been used by some 30 GOP secretaries of state to strip more than 1.1 million predominantly black, Hispanic, Islamic, and Asian-American citizens from the voter rolls.

"Numerous reports indicate that citizens were often confronted with photo ID requirements even where they were voided by the courts".reports indicate many citizens were directed by official websites to polling places that did not actually exist. This year Ohio secretary of state Jon Husted failed to distribute more than 1,050,000 absentee ballot applications to citizens entitled to them.

...

According to a report by Richard Hayes Philips, extremely high turnouts for Trump in rural areas of Wisconsin "are not credible." Among other things, the vote counts in five Republican towns exceed the number of registered voters. ( www.freepress.org )

"""

Polling Indicators "pre-election polls strongly indicated a Clinton victory. Post-election exit polls showed her winning as well, most critically in the swing states whose Electoral College votes could have given her the presidency.

Exit polls are the accepted international standard for indications of election fraud and vote tampering.

In 24 of 28 states, unadjusted exit polls also showed Clinton with vote counts significantly higher than the final official outcome. The likelihood of this happening in an election that is not rigged are in the realm of virtual statistical impossibility.

In key Senate races in Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Missouri, exit polls also showed Democratic candidates winning by statistically significant margins, but then losing the official vote count.

Millions of dollars would be required to do meaningful recounts in states like Wisconsin, which may well have legitimately gone for Clinton and chosen a Democratic US Senator. Michigan's 4,800 precincts could cost up to $125 each to recount.

Authors Bio:
Teresa Hommel is a voting activist in NY and chair of the Task Force On Voting Integrity, Community Church of New York.