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December 23, 2016

Election Theft 2016 (Part 4 of 4)

By Josh Mitteldorf

There is evidence that the 2016 Democratic Primary was stolen for Clinton and the General Election was stolen for Trump. Several Senate seats also look suspicious. The evidence is not as airtight as it has been in the past, and is most convincing in light of the history detailed in the first 3 parts of this series.

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This is Part 4 of 4 of a series on election theft

Links to...

Part 1 : History
Part 2 : Statistics
Part 3 : Four Stories

2016

The Democratic Primary

A year ago, before the first primary vote had been cast, the usual monied interests had lined up behind the usual establishment candidates. But two upstarts with anti-establishment messages were attracting genuine, grass-roots crowds with genuine, grass-roots enthusiasm. These were Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Sanders's appearances were more popular even than Trump's, and media polls showed he had a much larger following. And yet news coverage in the "liberal" press gave Trump about ten times as many column-inches as Sanders. Trump's flamboyance was a subject the press loved to harp on, albeit with coverage that was harshly critical in the press outlets of the Eastern establishment. The real injustice was to Sanders, whose popular successes were ignored where possible and marginalized in the few reported articles. This story was documented in detail by an article by Thomas Frank in Harper's last month, titled Swat Team: The media's extermination of Bernie Sanders, and real reform.

Sanders was dismissed with the meme that he was unelectable--his populist socialism was too far from the American mainstream. The best evidence at the time was exactly opposite: In polling projections, Sanders beat Trump handily, while Clinton was projected to be an even match.

Months later, Wikileaked emails revealed that the Democratic leaders knew that Sanders was the stronger candidate, knew that he threatened their policies and tradition. "Many of the most damaging emails suggest the [DNC] was actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign." [Washington Post] Un-elected "super-delegates" gave Clinton a 300-vote lead over Sanders before the first vote was cast. It was the Democratic National Committee, with the cooperation of America's press, that quashed Sanders's candidacy in favor of Clinton--but it took some help from the voting machines to complete the job.

Evidence from the exit polls suggest that the nomination was stolen from Sanders, and that were it not for electronic vote-shifting, Sanders would have been the Democratic nominee, and probably the President Elect today. There were exit polls in 27 states, and in 23 of these, Sanders did better in the exit polls than in the officially-reported count [data by TDMS Research]. 11 of the 12 statistically significant exit poll discrepancies favored Sanders, and the 12th was the interesting case of OK. In Oklahoma, Clinton did better in the polls than in the official results. Oklahoma votes on paper ballots, some counted by hand and some by machine. OK is unique among the 50 states in that the scanning machines are programmed for each election by state employees, rather than the private vendors who do the job on contract in all other states.

If we assume the Oklahoma election was honest, it suggests an interpretation that corroborates the hypothesis of creeping, built-in shift in the polling methodology, which I described above. If you have accepted the logic of this article thus far, then the polling companies have learned to weight conservative demographics more heavily in their quest to match the reported results. In this case, the disparity in Oklahoma's primary could mean that the polling weights have a built-in bias for Clinton over Sanders, which should be added to the reported disparities in all other states.

In June, Clinton won the nation's largest primary in California by 53-46%, but there were no media exit polls. My daughter and I helped to administer a small, citizens' exit poll in the Bay Area, which showed no consistent anomalies. California has one of the most verifiable election systems in the nation, with paper ballots counted on op-scan machines kept honest by spot checks and sample hand counts. The California primary, however was tainted in a way that did not involve computerized manipulation. The Democratic party in California has an open primary system, in which people who registered with "no party preference" can vote in the Democratic (but not the Republican) primary. NPP voters are a big constituency in CA, and they favored Sanders by 40 points. On the other side, registered Democrats favored Clinton by 30 points. So reported suppression of the NPP vote damaged Sanders's chances in a way that is difficult to quantify.

Overall, exit poll evidence indicates that Sanders actually beat Clinton in the primaries. This conclusion must be qualified because there was no tight control to validate the exit polls. The best we have was the parallel exit polls, held in the same places at the same times for the Republican primary. Republican exit polls agreed consistently with the reported vote.

The General Election

It is well known that Clinton won the popular vote. In the exit polls, Clinton handily won the electoral college as well.

In the context of all that has gone before, I am inclined to believe that the election was stolen for Trump by the same Republican operatives who have been stealing elections since the computerization after HAVA. But the evidence in this case is not as overwhelming as it has been in some past elections. The best case for electronic election theft is the fact that the exit poll discrepancies favoring Clinton are larger in just those swing states which were critical for Trump's victory. This is a clearly visible, but not striking effect.

Election Polls in Swing States
Election Polls in Swing States
(Image by Josh Mitteldorf)
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This chart, too, comes with footnotes--esoterica of interest only to the exit poll afficionado. It happens that two crucial states for Trump are spread across two time zones. Both Michigan and Florida are mainly on EST, but a piece of the panhandle and a sliver of the Upper Peninsula are on CST. In deference to those small areas, the news services delay their exit poll announcements until an hour after most of the polls are closed, and local returns have been reported from a sizable piece of each state. Above, I described how reported "exit poll" numbers are progressively adulterated with official counts as the evening wears on. The upshot is that we don't have access to unadjusted exit polls for Florida and Michigan, and we might suspect that the raw numbers favored Clinton more than the numbers which we have been allowed to see. The outsized disparity between early voting and election-day voting in Florida is another cause for suspicion of the Florida count.

Of course, the perennial vote suppression machinerywas out in force this year, and even more devastating than usual because Clinton's support was tepid, and she relied heavily on Democratic strongholds. It is clear that, but for vote suppression, the election would have gone to Clinton. On the other hand, the usual media bias which had lent gravitas to G. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan in the past was not working for Trump. Even the genetically Republican news organswould did not offer Trump a full-throated endorsement.

The Recount

Hillary Clinton was made aware of the evidence that she had been cheated of a victory, and that a recount might yet overturn the election; but like Gore and Kerry before her, she was uninterested in taking a stand for election integrity, even when her political future hung in the balance. Jill Stein was the Green Party candidate, nominally with 1% of the vote, but polls suggest she may have received much more. Stein was approached by election integrity activists and apprised of the indications of foul play, as well as the generally dysfunctional state of vote counting in America. As a candidate, Stein had standing to challenge the vote, and as an outsider, she was freer to risk taking a principled stand, in defiance of the media and both political parties.

On the day before Thanksgiving, with just two days left before a Wisconsin filing deadline, Stein posted on her campaign web page a crowd-funded bid to recount the votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. (Florida was omitted, despite evidence that it was a major locus of irregularities, and the existence of paper ballots that might, in principle, be recounted, because state law in Florida makes any challenge to the vote count impractical.) Immediately, thousands of small pledge began pouring in to the Jill2016 web site, sustaining for several days at more than $200,000 per hour. No one was more surprised than Stein herself. The web site raised $7.3 million, which went for filing costs in three states and an upscale legal team, averaging $600/hr.

In Wisconsin, where the last statewide hand recount cost $700,000, the state demanded a $2 million deposit, then $3.2 million, then $3.9 in small bills. (Literally, individual contributions were limited to $2700 each.) After the Greens met the demand, the State Court decided that it had no power to compel individual counties to count votes by hand. And indeed, most Wisconsin counties went through the motions of a meaningless re-run of the same computer programs that produced the original totals.

Michigan had reported a 10,000 vote plurality for Trump, but there were 75,000 "undervotes". These were ballots on which the op-scan machines were unable to detect a vote for president. The undervotes were concentrated in heavily-Democratic areas of Detroit. 600 precincts were identified where the number of recorded votes failed to match the number of signatures on the register, and a legal loophole permitted the presiding judge to specify that no recounts could occur in these places. A later judicial ruling halted the Michigan recount altogether.

I live in Pennsylvania, where 80% of the population votes on equipment that carries no memory of their individual votes, no paper ballots and no audit trail. There is literally nothing to recount. Why did Stein even bother with Pennsylvania? In Philadelphia (84% Clinton), tens of thousands of voters were shunted to provisional ballots, and most of those were eventually disqualified, and never counted. But the Court has ruled that the recount did not extend to a reconsideration of ballots that were disallowed the first time. The (Democratic) Election Commission has declined to make the provisional ballots public, or even to offer a statement about how many there are. The Election Commission also refused a request to inspect the State seals over memory chips that are supposed to guarantee physical integrity of the voting machines.

In the end, what we learned was how fiercely the Republicans and Democrats resist granting access to the ballots that might reveal whether votes are being accurately tallied. Meanwhile, the press has reported the that the recount ended in an anticlimax, with no discrepancies uncovered.

Post Script: Why is this a taboo topic?

How is the consensus maintained that it is appropriate for the "world's greatest democracy" to rely on proprietary, secret software to count votes without the possibility of inspection or challenge by the public?

Why have mainstream journalists ignored this issue? Why are Democratic party leaders so reluctant to reform a system that seems to be tilted against them?

Perhaps the unusual confluence of events in 2016 has created an opening for public discussion of deep questions about American democracy for the first time in a dozen years.



Authors Bio:



Josh Mitteldorf, de-platformed senior editor at OpEdNews, blogs on aging at http://JoshMitteldorf.ScienceBlog.com. Read how to stay young at http://AgingAdvice.org.

Educated to be an astrophysicist, he has branched out from there to mathematical modeling in a variety of areas, including evolutionary ecology and economics. He has taught mathematics, statistics, and physics at several universities. He is an avid amateur pianist, and father of two adopted Chinese girls, now grown. He travels to Beijing each year to work with a lab studying the biology of aging. His book on the subject is "Cracking the Aging Code", http://tinyurl.com/y7yovp87.



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