From the conclusion of a new study of the Democratic Party primary elections this year by Rodolfo Cortes Barragan, Stanford University, and Axel Geijsel, Tilurg University, The Netherlands, entitled: “Are we witnessing a dishonest election? A between state comparison based on the used voting procedures of the 2016 Democratic Party Primary for the Presidency of the United States of America,” dated June 7, 2016:
Are we witnessing a dishonest election? Our first analysis showed that states wherein the voting outcomes are difficult to verify show far greater support for Secretary Clinton. Second, our examination of exit polling suggested large differences between the respondents that took the exit polls and the claimed voters in the final tally. Beyond these points, these irregular patterns of results did not exist in 2008. As such, as a whole, these data suggest that election fraud is occurring in the 2016 Democratic Party Presidential Primary election. This fraud has overwhelmingly benefited Secretary Clinton at the expense of Senator Sanders.
Essentially, Barragan and Geijsel, the authors of this study, looked at states where there no paper voting trail (i.e., e-voting machines) existed and found Clinton did significantly better in those states than Sanders compared to states where a paper trail did exist. They also showed that exit poll results deviated significantly from final results by a large margin in Clinton’s favor. Further, the discrepancies between the exit polls and final results were wider in states where there was no paper voting trail.
The authors used the 2008 primary elections as a control for this year’s primaries. They found that in the 2008 primaries between Clinton and Obama there were no such voting anomalies between states with paper voting trails and and states without paper voting trails. If you’re a statistician, please feel free to examine their paper at greater length.
Here’s a pie chart graphic from the study that shows the differences in a way anyone can understand:
Make of this what you will.
I don’t expect anyone to change their mind regarding their candidate preference over this. However, I do believe this is another reason why we should move to a paper ballot system, and get rid of all e-voting machines. I believe that Ohio in 2004 was also likely flipped thanks to e-voting machines. Other countries get by just fine running clean elections without these unverifiable, and easily hackable machines. And please remember that the GOP controls the majority of states. There is no reason why we should be using them.
Hopefully, all of us can agree upon that much.
UPDATE: In light of the criticisms raised by some commenting that the study I cited is “a joke” and otherwise invalid, I have passed all such comments in full along to the study’s authors for their response.
I’ve also sent it to my father, Donald T. Searls. He’s a retired professor with a Ph.D in statistics, for his evaluation of the study. I did not send along any commenta to him as I simply wanted his unbiased evaluation. In fact, I did not even mention that I posted about this study online.
A brief (and incomplete CV) to establish his credentials:
Employment history:
Westat Research Analysts, Inc., National Assessment of Educational Progress, Professor of Mathematics and Applied Statistics (retired) University of Northern Colorado.
Academic Titles:
Donald T. Searls, Ph.D.
(1996), Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Applied Statistics — B.S., M.S., Ph.D.; Appointed 1983)Selected papers:
ON THE “LARGE” OBSERVATION PROBLEM, Donald T. Searls 1962. link
An Estimator for a Population Mean Which Reduces the Effect of Large True Observations, Journal of the American Statistical Association
Volume 61, Issue 316, 1966Adjusting Educational Survey Data – American Statistical Association, Robert C. Larson and Donald
T. Searls, 1974Age of Admission and Trends in Achievement: A Comparison of Blacks and Caucasians, American Educational Research Journal, 1984
When I receive any feedback I will pass it along in a separate post.
This: “I don’t expect anyone to change their mind regarding their candidate preference over this. … Other countries get by just fine running clean elections without these unverifiable, and easily hackable machines. And please remember that the GOP controls the majority of states. There is no reason why we should be using them.
Besides the fact that this study is statistically laughable, its entire premise is demonstrably false. In 2008, the exit polls were even more inaccurate than now:
“In theory, exit polls should match election results. But for all the care that goes into conducting accurate exit polls, errant results aren’t completely uncommon. Respected polling analyst Mark Blumenthal found that during the Democratic primaries this year, preliminary exit polls overestimated Obama’s strength in 18 of 20 states, by an average error of 7 percentage points, based on leaked early results.
The reason? Obama’s supporters were younger, better educated and often more enthusiastic than Hillary Clinton’s, meaning they were more likely to participate in exit polls.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/media-sweats-over-exit-poll-accuracy/
Steven, you need to either delete this post, or put a disclaimer up that states that it’s completely and utterly wrong.
…and by the way, here’s an interview with Joe Lenski, Executive VP of Edison Media Research, which conducts exit polls, explaining why the NY primary exit polls initially showed that Bernie was much closer to Hillary:
FIX: So the New York issue, I can’t help but notice that you said that younger people are more likely to fill out the surveys and then also that Sanders was over-represented in the initial estimate. Do you think there’s a link there?
LENSKI: Oh, yes, there’s definitely a link there.
We’re adjusting for that throughout the day. As I said, we know the response rate in our 35 precincts. We know that younger voters are more likely to choose to fill out the questionnaire than older voters, and that’s typically the case so we’re already making those adjustments.
Obviously in this case, that was even more than normal. As soon as we started getting sample precinct returns, we made that adjustment even more so that we’d match the actual results.”
https:/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/22/how-exit-polls-work-explained
This is an issue that cropped up in 2000, was aggravated by the Help America Vote Act that shoved out insecure (and possibly compromised — remember Diebold) voting machines. It has been scammed by the GOP with the media attention on voting fraud instead of election fraud and on the passage of voting ID acts.
And we have noticed since 2004 the shady use of provisional ballots to disenfranchise voters. And underallocation of resources and long lines to depress votes unevenly across the geography.
Despite the logic of distributing voting places according to past vote numbers, we should insist that voting places be allocated according to voting age population. This is just one of a number of planks that could provide a “common sense” solution to the gradual delegitimization of US local, state, and national elections.
A substantial platform plank is not the the only thing required.
There should be widespread court cases to overturn discriminatory voter ID laws.
And there should be substantial effort expended for 3080 precinct election protection operations. Are there enough Democratic election lawyers and election judges to create such an organization within the general election unity campaign (and have a workable permanent organization in the DNC and state Democratic Party organizations between elections to head off further legal shenanigans in legislatures and Congress).
Ever since the file name “ROBGA” appeared in the 2002 Georgia election, we should have investigated what was going on.
This is ridiculous. Look at these two sentences: “As such, as a whole, these data suggest that election fraud is occurring in the 2016 Democratic Party Presidential Primary election. This fraud has overwhelmingly benefited Secretary Clinton at the expense of Senator Sanders.” Grrr. You move from “suggest that fraud is occurring” to “this fraud” as if it’s a fact.
The authors float their entire assertion on a simple correlation between machines and Clinton wins but there’s nothing substantial to suggest causality except some weak thing about exit polls, which are such flimsy things, especially since people don’t do bilingual exit polling and miss Latinos. Exit polling sucked this season.
The diary purports to be concerned about e-voting machines, but it and the study seem largely designed to throw shade on Clinton’s decisive win. That undermines democracy by creating cynicism.
Did you read the study or just the conclusion excerpt I included?
Steven, the fact that you’re cutting and pasting that section indicates that you either didn’t understand or chose to ignore Mikeray’s comment. I’ll do my own cutting and pasting: “The authors float their entire assertion on a simple correlation between machines and Clinton wins but there’s nothing substantial to suggest causality except some weak thing about exit polls, which are such flimsy things, especially since people don’t do bilingual exit polling and miss Latinos. Exit polling sucked this season.”
Mikeray is absolutely right. These grad students are arguing that one extremely weak correlation means there is nationwide vote fraud. That’s so absurd that to state is to refute it.
It sucked in the Democratic primaries, not the Republican ones.
Since the “authors” don’t discuss that, I’d like to see the statistical analysis that supports that claim. Regardless, here’s the thing and I’m going all caps here: EVERYONE WHO KNOWS ANYTHING ABOUT EXIT POLLS KNOWS THEY’RE INACCURATE. EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON.
If you make a claim of nationwide vote fraud — not suppression, but fraud –based upon exit polls, you deserve to be mocked.
Steven, it’s not just the presumptions re. exit polling which are problematic in this study. Look at this big damn red flag about the presumptions made by the study authors:
“Does the pattern seen in ballot states occur in caucus states? By the very nature of caucusing procedures, caucus results are generally thought to be more trustworthy. However, in the current Democratic caucusing cycle, Iowa and Nevada had caucuses widely alleged to have involved a considerable level of voter suppression and potential fraud. We examined the [data] and found that these two states had far higher support for Secretary Clinton than the other caucus states…”.
Let’s just sit with this for a minute. In about a dozen States which held caucuses, Sanders outperformed advance polling of voters in the State on caucus day. The authors admit that they failed to study the outcomes in those States. Why? Because Clinton supporters in those States did not blame the caucus outcomes on voter suppression and potential fraud.
This is a particularly extreme case of confirmation bias, up to and including the description that the claims of suppression/fraud have been “widely alleged.”
Your silence on this appears to be an admission that you did not read the full study, including the appendices and supplemental material before making your initial comment. I hope that is because you are taking the time to read it now.
And yeah, I read “the study.” Anfd I literally laughed out loud.
I think a move to online voting would even be better and improve accessibility. There has to be a way to do it especially since so much is done online already.
I think you might face the same issues regarding security and who is doing the counting. Withour a verifiable hard copy trail, data can be manipulated even in situations where it was protected by very good encryption etc. Remember the massive hack of SONY and other corporations?
obviously each voter would have a record but there’s the same problem with paper ballots, what’s to stop someone from burning the ones they don’t want or destroying them in some other way.
There’s never going to be a full proof system, we just need checks in place, regardless of the system to ensure that the results are as close to accurate as possible.
I’m sure that we could come up with a way to make it reasonably safe and reliable so far as submitting votes goes, but the challenge is to make fraud difficult. Our current system is terrible in many ways, but one of it’s benefits is that it’s so distributed, and so manually intensive that large scale manipulation is really difficult. There are just too many people involved.
Obviously, we want some form of paper/audit trail as well to add confidence (and since people are inherently error-prone, it allows us to re-check in the event of a very close contest).
An automated system where we go online, hit a vote button, and that is tabulated on server would be very efficient, and very easy to manipulate.
I think that your point about a large number of election judges of multiple parties and election workers watching the other parties for due diligence is the best form of auditing. Also recounts and security audits of transferred materials.
Raising the amount of effort required to carry out a sufficient fraud to win is the general direction of most proposed measures.
Something I’d noted earlier.
We get excited, but the ruling class doesn’t like commoners interfere with government. Clinton has always been the favorite of the elite. These machines are hackable. Why shouldn’t or wouldn’t they cheat to get the outcome they want?
The overriding concern is how can we trust any election, including the upcoming general election to be accurate at this point. Which candidate will the hackers choose, or will their be competing teams of hackers trying to flip votes?
It;s made a mockery of our elections.
I suspect that there aren’t hackers at cross-purposes. I suspect it’s a coordinated effort in the coronation of Clinton.
I assume Hillary was the favorite of the elite in 2008.
Why didn’t they fix that election for her?
Steven, this is absolutely fucking embarrassing. This “study” is a joke: it’s a two page “analysis” based on unspecified exit polls, and the “data” tables look like something out of a high school math class. There’s no assessment of the size, sample composition, or margin of error in exit polls — which everyone knows are unreliable — and no discussion of the most obvious problem — you and these Psychology grad students (!) — are alleging nationwide vote fraud — not suppression, but outright fraud — which would require the coordination of dozens if not hundreds of people, many of whom would have to have been opposed to Hillary.
Anyone who doesn’t laugh at this “study” — which would fail an intro level stats course and get laughed out of any Poli Sci course — is a child.
Not a joke. Did you review the appendices and supplemental materials? It appears not. Please do.
Yes, I did and they’re a fucking joke. One of the tells is that they include links to stories about “investigations” into Hillary, such as Benghazi. Obviously, that has nothing to do with vote fraud, but more importantly, the Benghazi “investigation” was a partisan witch hunt. By including that, the “authors” are telegraphing their irrational bias.
Even better, the “authors” assert — again, with one extremely weak correlation — that Hillary stole 700,000 votes. Again, that would have required dozens if not hundreds of people in multiple states committing multiple felonies.
This is idiotic, and you should be ashamed.
I’m honored that a troll attacks me.
I did not contend this proves fraud occurred, I said potential fraud.
As for their references, those were only added tom proved reviewers with outside references mentioning potential fraudulent activity. The data analysis does not rely on anything in those articles, regardless of whether you consider them credible or not.
I’ve yet to see a substantive argument regarding the data or their methodology.
In any case, if this happened in a race where the Republican won over a Democrat would you be so quick to dismiss the possibility? Rhetorical question.
So I post a number of comments which are supported by facts, and I’m a troll? Right.
And when you say “I’ve yet to see a substantive argument regarding the data or their methodology,” you’re either lying or admitting you never read my comments. Here’s my “argument,” which is actually two facts.
What I’m going to say might sound like trolling, but I mean it sincerely: you’re arguing like a Republican. You started from the premise that Hillary is evil and because of that you bought into a laughable conspiracy theory.
Please refer to my update.
Further responses will come after I hear back from the study’s authors and my father.
I should add that the exit polls were all done by Edson Research which has been hired and used by all the major media outlets for many years.
http://www.edisonresearch.com/2016-exit-poll-coverage/
And id the exit pols are unreliable why did they consistently match the results for the Republican primaries? Why does our own State Department contend that election fraud may have occurred in foreign nation when the exit polling diverges as little as 2% from the results?
http://2001-2009.state.gov/p/eur/rls/rm/39542.htm
The fact that you don’t know that exit polls are spectacularly unreliable shows you were too lazy to do even a cursory amount of research before posting this idiotic “study.” Let’s go to Nate Silver:
Also, the entire premise of this article is wrong. The 2008 exit polls were also inaccurate:
“In theory, exit polls should match election results. But for all the care that goes into conducting accurate exit polls, errant results aren’t completely uncommon. Respected polling analyst Mark Blumenthal found that during the Democratic primaries this year, preliminary exit polls overestimated Obama’s strength in 18 of 20 states, by an average error of 7 percentage points, based on leaked early results.
The reason? Obama’s supporters were younger, better educated and often more enthusiastic than Hillary Clinton’s, meaning they were more likely to participate in exit polls.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/media-sweats-over-exit-poll-accuracy/
You clutch at the straws you have, not at the straws you wish you had.
Good grief. I knew the science-averse GOP didn’t know the difference between correlation and causation, but I kinda thought libs did.
OT: I need to share this.
I’m an old man, and when I sleep I wear a CPAP and wear earbuds. For some reason, British accents are comforting to me. The world being ravaged when described by someone with a Brit accent is just like a lullaby to me. On I go to sleep listening to the BBC overnight.
But last night there was a panel of neocons. Some of them people should have been prosecuted in the last decade over Iraq war crimes. One of the speakers was one of Dubya’s undersecretaries at State.
The interesting consensus was that America (i.e., Obama) lost focus in the last several years (after Clinton left State) and as a result the Russians have taken advantage of the Middle East, and that’s why there’s so much terrorism.
It could have been a round table of neocons talking about Carter being weak.
This suggests to me that the foreign policy agenda is already set for the next four years. While I was listening no one mentioned the election or any candidate by name. It was as if the man-of-war that is America had a predetermined course, Obama had taken his foot off the pedal, but that soon things would be on the correct path again. The BBC talker running the panel gave verbal affirmative cues at the right moments.
Of course, the explanations are always, “It’s Russia’s fault”, quite remarkable since Russia gave the US a decade’s head start to muck up the ME and when it did enter in Syria has been fighting against all of the rebels. To include the “good” rebels our government, the House of Saud, Qatar et al have been funding and supplying.
So, it’s in the cards. If Hillary is elected we’ll get a “no-fly zone” where Russian jets are flying. We’ll have the US getting tougher in Ukraine and along the Baltic because Russia is getting aggressive. Violence is the answer to everything.
If Trump by some wild chance is elected his foreign policy will be directed by the people on that panel.
Full-court press against the other major nuclear power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrOE2s_ldlQ
They are blaming ME terrorism on RUSSIA! That is some f*cking good deflection there.
Just amazing. Or just depressing.
So, let’s summarize: a discussion on a BBC program filled with talking heads, at least one of whom was part of the W. Bush Administration, “suggests” to Bob that Hillary will be a warmonger.
Sounds legit.
At least Bob includes in his summary of the discussion that the participants were disappointed in President Obama’s insufficient warmongering. Bob rakes Obama over the coals on a regular basis for his foreign and military policies. So, if Bob found this BBC discussion evidential for his purposes, perhaps he could find it evidential for the purpose of undermining some of his more extreme views of President Obama.
I certainly hope so.
Too subtle for you? It was propaganda, it wasn’t analysis, and it was preparing Brits for more war. Brit special forces are already in Libya, American and French special forces are in Syria. There were reports of American special forces in Libya earlier, and I doubt they’ve left. There’s been a big CIA presence in Kiev since the early days after the coup.
The BBC is nothing if not a “legit” source for propaganda.
These memes are the exact same memes that are regularly used against any Democrat who suggests less militaristic ways to solve international problems. I was surprised because the military pretty much gets what it wants from the executive branch since 1963, and with the exception for bombing Assad based on a false flag operation, Obama’s pretty much gone along with PNAC and the neolibs.
You may have noticed that Obama mumbled something about “new roles” for American troops in Afghanistan, eight years after Obama said he’d get us out of there. That should suggest to the keen observer that, no, we didn’t invade Afghanistan to catch bin Laden. And in fact the President of the US is murdering people without trial. Or at least our government is murdering people without trial in Obama’s name. Of course, the coup in Ukraine has been brewing for seventy years, since the US used the OUN/B to fight a civil war in Ukraine in the early fifties and imported fascists Ukrainians through the Congress For Freedom CIA scam.
The fact that these propagandists blame Russia for the mess in the Middle East is laughable if it didn’t signal future moves by the West. There are NATO troops on the Russian border now, having “exercises”. Remember when Russia had exercises in their own territory a few years ago the western media just presumed it signaled a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Ultimately, whatever war that the MIC wants under Clinton they undoubtedly would have been gotten out of Trump. Maybe even Sanders. And if they couldn’t get Sanders on board they’d go around him or over him. The Presidency isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Christopher Simpson had an excellent book on America’s propaganda campaign to coincide with the Cold War, THE SCIENCE OF COERCION. It’s a very short book, and it’s free online if you’re interested.
You’ve heard of governments using propaganda, right?
Steven D–
I did read the report. I also had a look at the authors’ tabulated data. I use statistics in my work from time to time, so I think I’m not commenting out of ignorance. Here are a few thoughts about what I read:
1–The authors assume that exit polls are a reliable point of reference to which published results may be compared. Is that assumption correct?
2–The authors list 24 states in their sample set. Just wondering about the rest. Are those all caucus states? Were the data unavailable? An explanation would have been nice.
3–The authors separate their data into two subsets: those with a paper trail (14) and those without (10). Neither sample set is large.
4–Of the 10 listed states without a paper trail, 8 are in the South, and Clinton had huge majorities in all of them. She had huge majorities even in the exit polls. It would be interesting to hear a hypothesis for why these states would have been inclined to vote fraud on behalf of Clinton.
5–The authors appear to have committed a very basic error: they did not report results for the aggregated data (that is, all 24 states) and then compare those results to what they found for the two subsets. What they might try to do, say, is to look at the distributions of what I will call delta (equal to Clinton reported percentage minus Clinton exit poll percentage) for the two subsets and compare those to the aggregate. Doing this sort of test is, in my opinion, essential. The authors did not do it, or at least did not report on it.
2-I doubt that caucus states are included because the votes are not tabulated on machine in caucuses, as far as I know.
3-There was a similar case when H. Clinton won New Hampshire in 2008. Those who monitored voting machines indicated a lot of flip-flops on those Diebold machines, as I recall. It was also a mixed use state in that election, different kinds of machines and methods in different districts. The machines without a paper trail were more likely to produce results contradicting polls both before and after the voting.
4-I can think of several reasons why vote fraud is more likely in our south.
I defer to your greater knowledge of statistics.
In similar news, there was an article on the net this morning about how two million votes still haven’t been counted in California.
Thanks for the response.
I will try to find time over lunch to look more carefully at the authors’ tabulated data and do the statistical test I alluded to.
One quick observation about the data: In the 14 states listed that do have paper trails, Clinton out-performed the exit polls in 12. Make of that whatever you wish.
I find the study weak for a number of fundamental reasons.
Tarheel: Your point (3) is something I remarked upon as well (above).
If you look at delta = (Clinton reported) – (Clinton exit poll), uff da. delta is positive in 22 of 24 states! All the ones without a paper trail, 12 of 14 with a paper trail. Kind of suggests a methodological problem with the exit polls. Just wondering what statistical test you would use to assess the two subsets relative to the aggregated data, given the fact that delta is so radically not normally distributed.
Thanks.
Your comment got me thinking about what could create spurious conclusions.
Yes, you have found another. You would have to model the results with a non-normal distribution or transform the data some way so as to be able to analyze it in a normalized framework.
You write:
Sadly, all of us cannot…nor should we…”agree upon that much.” There is a very good reason why digital voting is being used here. It is being used to guarantee the continuance of the Deep State, Permanent Government fix. Put some sodium pentathol or some other truth-centric drug into any number of highly-placed politician’s coffee and then have a discussion with them about the truth or falsehood of what I just said. The truth of it would come rushing out in a caffeine-induced tumble.
These .01 percenters believed this…quite obviously…when the drew up the constitution to make sure that only white, male landowners had the vote. This position has been driven down over time by many factors…the sheer growth and wealth of the country being a primary factor. It’s fairly easy to disenfranchise a large number of people in a small country, but much harder to do as the numbers of the potentially disenfranchised grow. So they used various sleight-of-hand moves to continued the dominance of the rich…mass media (newspapers originally) as the arbiters of public opinion being the primary one.
But…as the digital revolution grew it became increasingly harder to run the scam entirely through media influence. Too many media, the smallest to the largest all equally easily available. The problem started with cable news, and (not at all coincidentally) accusations of vote fraud started to rise at about the same time…and at the same rate…as did the fragmented mass media. Once the real internet-induced digital revolution was fairly strongly in place, the only other option to guarantee the fix was what happened in 2000 and 2004. Dummy DemRat presnidential candidates set up to be robbed, people who could be trusted to acquiesce to the robbery with the promise of more revolving door wealth.
Again…you state “There is no reason why we should be using them.”
There is a wonderful Lone Ranger joke that goes like this:
The Lone Ranger and his Indian sidekick (Remember, this was pre-PC as evidence by the sidekick’s name, Tonto…which means “idiot” or “fool” in Spanish.) are pinned down behind a rock by a large number of very pissed-off Indians. The Lone Ranger turns his lon-time companion and says “what are we going to do, Tonto!!!???”
Tonto’s immortal answer? “Who “we,” white man?”
“There is no reason why we should be using them.”
Who “we,” Steven?
A real question.
Do you mean this country? The government of The United States of America? Does it really represent “us?” I think not. Not anymore is doesn’t, if it ever did. This whole “we” thing is just the remnant of a now rapidly breaking down hustle…a habit we learned in brain washing school, also known as our “education.”
Ain’t no “we” in this country. Not at its highest levels, not at the controller levels. remember this. It’s “them” and “us” now…and in point of fact always has been. “They” never trusted us, so they sold us a “we” ticket.
Bullshit!!!
Here’s “them,” in a nutshell.
Put the above image up on your most-used mirror, along with this one:
L’il Jimmeh wasn’t s’pose to win. That’s why he’s so far out of this grouping. He was their last mistake…so far….and they corrected that mistake in under four years.
Rmdember this.
You be bettah off.
We be bettah off.
“We” may not win, but at least we’ll not go down dumb.
Later…
AG
Yes. And every election cycle the techniques for flipping votes gets a little more subtle.
Indeed. The rate at which computer technology is accelerating is astounding, and the people who are involved in this kind of control mechanism are also the ones who are in control of the think tanks in which that acceleration is being promoted.
I am reminded of that statement given to Ron Suskind during Bush II’s runup to the Iraq War…supposedly from Karl Rove…about what is really happening.
Is this an immutable fact? Something on the order of prophecy?
Could be…
We shall see, soon enough.
There’s always some kind of glitch in all machines eventually.
Sometimes it’s more like a monkey wrench thrown into the gears.
We shall see.
Soon enough.
Chaplin was a prophet, too.
Watch.
AG
California has a paper trail. Clinton crushed Sanders and beat all the polls leading up to election day.
Not sure why the authors believe exit polls are accurate in any way. We know from experience they are inaccurate when it comes to predicting the winner.
The authors’ conclusion/suspicion that fraud is the reason for Clinton’s victory is completely unjustified by their data, and I’m saddened that Booman Tribune would support this fringe nonsense.
There was a story on the net saying that there are two million uncounted votes in California. Clinton won California by 400,000 votes.
The 400K margin was attributable to early voting. Those were counted first. Thereafter, the count was basically 50/50. Or so I heard reported on NPR.
NPR = National Pentagon Radio
Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell The Truth!
Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me is comedy, Bob.
Yes, and “Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me The Truth” was was a humorous comment on NPR’s international reporting. Sorry you didn’t get it.
Obviously that Ryan Hughes guy ate the missing votes and crapped them out in a landfill somewhere.
Yeah, I was thinking about that. Another case where Steven undermined his credibility by getting out in front of his skis.
Jerry Fowler and Dominion Voting Systems handled 40% of California’s voting machines. Dominion used to be Sequoia for those of you who remember some earlier hanky panky with voting machines. Fowler got some illegal political payoffs in Louisiana. There was a mob-up guy from New Jersey, Pasquale “Rocco” Ricci, involved in past activities.
The upshot about the article I linked to earlier is that criminal records may prevent you from voting in some places in the US but it doesn’t prevent you from counting the votes.
Can we expect investigative reporting to look into this?
Of course not.
People believe exit polls because the media uses them to declare winners before all the votes are counted (and sometime before all the votes are cast).
yeah but that’s not all they use to call states from what I understand
You mean they still use the Ouija board?
retired it in 2000 from what I understand
Another precinct is reporting.
http://www.madcowprod.com/2016/06/09/hey-california-election-rigged/#more-11973
Contracting out government functions tends to lead to corruption as much a does old-style patronage politics when all government employees are hires. Take your pick of who you want to do due diligence on.
Exit polls have been and likely will always be garbage (witness the NY Times article just yesterday on the 2012 exits). So, I don’t see how they can be held up as credible evidence supporting some type of fraud.
FWIW, there is in the UK a so-called “shy Tory” effect: The Conservative Party routinely gets a higher percentage of votes than opinion polls suggest. I believe that some pollsters try to adjust their results to account for this effect, but it’s a fraught exercise.
… the fact remains that it’s possible to systematically corrupt the vote-counting process. And the new systems make it easier to do so rather that more difficult. And there’s no legitimate reason for that increase in vulnerability.
This keeps coming up. And every time it comes up, people get stupidly bogged down in arguing about whatever the current example is, and miss the fucking point. And nothing gets done, and the overall system contines to deteriorate.
Do something useful this time.
https://www.ndi.org/e-voting-guide/emerging-electronic-voting-standards
Look at the data. A cursory review shows that there is a clear correlation between “States without paper trails” and southern states – i.e., states where Democratic voters tend to be African-American and strong HRC supporters. Further, southern states with paper trails also show high margins for HRC. Plus, the few states outside the South without paper trails do not show the same lopsided HRC victories.
I think what these researchers have found is a correlation between states with high African-American percentages of voters and states using an obsolete voting technology.
They have then made the classic mistake of confusing correlation with causation.
What is so sad is the forlorn belief that Bernie didn’t really lose.
Some Bernie supporters now apparently find it plausible that Sanders, an old man with an unremarkable political career, virtually unknown outside the northeast a year ago, actually achieved millions more votes from Democratic voters than Hillary Clinton, a life-long Democrat with 30 years of national accomplishments.
So they are ready to believe these missing votes were cast in states like Arkansas and Mississippi and Florida and Alabama and Georgia and Louisiana — where Hillary consistently polled far ahead of Bernie. And there must have been some kind of sophisticated secret technological voting machine conspiracy that wiped out these Bernie votes before they could be compiled at Democratic polling stations.
I know its hard to lose, but this is just too sad. I really hope Bernie will demonstrate some leadership soon to nip this craziness in the bud.
But also that dozens to hundreds of individuals would be willing to commit multiple felonies each to effect an election that was a forgone conclusion 6 weeks after the primaries started.
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A point which makes this, as with so many other conspiracy theories, such garbage. How many people can be entrusted with such a huge secret, in such a complex, far-reaching effort, before somebody blabs? Lets something slip? Forgets a key bit of coverup? We’re talking human beings, not legions of supervillains, here. It’s just bloody silly, bordering on paranoid reality-denying, to go haring after this sort of massive conspiracy that requires a fantastically complicated edifice of deception to pull off.
Cathie, you’ve read about hanging chads? You’ve read about the lawyers’ riot in Florida? You’ve read about Ohio 2004. You’ve read about New Hampshire 2008?
God, if the DNC has laundered money for Hillary PACs through 32 state Democratic Parties, how shocking would it be that someone is fixing voting machines, considering our history?
In Puerto Rico they reduced polling places by two thirds and made voting in the presidential primary require you go to a separate poll. That was the Democratic Party in PR.
So the Dems apparently have no problem limiting votings locations and making it harder for people to vote.
When Dubya came up with the Help America Vote Act did anyone actually think that he actually wanted to help Americans vote?
Oh, and this cycle’s voting records in PR indicate that the Dems hope to limit turnout worked. Last winter it was expected that 700,000 would participate in the primary. After eliminating polls and making voters go through standing in line twice there were only 60,000 who voted.
Democracy at work.
Well, another Steven D. post just waiting to be walked back.
They really shouldn’t have children with no experience of elections (and no proofreading skills) getting published with this sort of crap.
Oh, wait, it’s not actually published.
I don’t particularly have a problem here with Steven D. His loathing for Hillary Clinton is no secret. I have a big problem with the people who wrote up the “study” and spread it over the internet. The study is garbage statistically, as several of us noted above. It’s objectively garbage whether one supports Clinton or one supports Sanders. This was the product of a Stanford University academician? Good Gawd.
After Googling the authors’ names, it seems that the only person promoting this on the internet is Steven D, both here and at caucus99percent.
Greg Palast has several columns about voter fraud in California.
http://www.gregpalast.com/
This is what happens when a candidate who is beloved by his followers doesn’t tell – or possibly, doesn’t understand – the truth about the state of the race and his prospects. The faithful have to choose between reality and loyalty.
Choose better, Steven.