BLOG -- ONE SUBJECT – BERNIE’S LAWSUIT


June 26, 2016


DO WATCH THIS VIDEO. Not surprising, but still infuriating!! It would be so great if Sanders’ group wins the suit!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVaVwnJki3g

Racketeering Lawsuit Filed Over Election Fraud That Cost Bernie Sanders the Election
The Humanist Report
Published on Jun 17, 2016

We already knew that election fraud had been rampant this election season, but a new racketeering lawsuit that will be filed claims it was so widespread it cost Bernie Sanders the election. We review the details of the suit and discuss why the lawsuit is necessary. The problem, however, is that time is running out.

Find More Information At:
http://trustvote.org

Europe Rejects Electronic Voting Machines: http://www.newsweek.com/europe-reject...

Watch Sane Progressive's Interview With Bob Fitrakis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5ZqA...


COMMENTS

Mattias Sollerman1 week ago
As a foreigner I find all this very difficult to comprehend. Not just the election fraud, gerrymandering, voter purge, voter ID laws, etc. but also basic stuff like caucases, the electoral college, first past the post, voting machines, 'endorsing' candidates... the list goes on and on. Maybe it's just a cultural thing I don't understand, but to me the whole system appears designed to make the will of the people as irrelevant as possible, while still maintaining a facade of democracy.
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SaturnV1 week ago
America should invade it self to spread some Democracy.

Joey Ragone4 days ago
Election fraud is OBVIOUS. Post links on how to support the lawsuit. EVERYONE SHOULD SUPPORT and keep it in the media. Great work!

Misael Cifuentes1 week ago
sad that they have evidence of tampering, but no one has been arrested. #congressEATaDICK

Heather Holt1 week ago
Sometimes it seems there are so many things working against us. Not only for Bernie but for democracy in general.

xb3l13v3r1 week ago (edited)
She has also been saying there is no way she hasn't/won't won/win. She's got it in the bag remember? I knew some bullshit was up the way she has been acting and how overconfident she is despite the people being behind bernie in a huge way. I was speculating of course, I was saying to myself I wouldn't be surprised. I was right I am not surprised, I am extremely angry.

Fluffy Bunny1 week ago
Mike, in the video you said the racketeering lawsuit will be filed, and in the description you said it had been filed. I'm disappointed that the lawsuit hasn't been filed yet, looking forward to when it's filed.Reacted Tonight's Lee Camp showed a chart of a study done by Stanford University of states with paper trails, and states without paper trails, with a paper trail Bernie won by a small margin, without a paper trail Clinton won by a huge margin.
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James M.1 week ago
I think the U. N. should be asked to oversee our elections.

I am Your Father1 week ago
WHY HAVE PRIVATE COMPANIES COUNT VOTES

Jim Willson5 days ago
Anyone who donated to Bernie has grounds to join in on class action lawsuit against DNC for election fraud.

Jake Korban4 days ago
This is good and should be carried through

tim weatherill
tim weatherill6 days ago
Very sadly, you guys in the US have lost the plot regarding your democracy. I am not critical of you as a nation; rather, I feel a terrible loss. I hope that this awful situation will be resolved immediately. Peace.

Noelle Crowner6 days ago
Sadly, it won't be resolved. Our corporate media isn't even talking about it.

holly downs1 week ago
I totally agree HRC bought the election and if that did not work she also used voter suppression and outright fraud! I will be voting Jill Stein unless Bernie chooses to run Independent . Bernie is a feminist HRC is not . HRC pays females only .72 on each dollar to a man . The national average is .79 , HRC is not on the side of women

+Chris Stephens She DID buy the election. In August of last year she paid 33 States $63,400 each for their Super Delegates loyalty. The money was from her private donors whose money she laundered through the Victory for Hillary Fund so her donors could bypass the $2700 cap on donations,

Kortez1 week ago
So let me get this right, she cheats her ass off in order to (barely) beat an old man most people have never heard of. She has the second highest dislike rating ever (second to Trump). And has already proven that she's nothing more than a Republican wearing a Democratic jacket. Why the f**k would I vote for her again? That's the part of this whole thing I can't seem to figure out, everything else is plain as day.

scotty4 days ago
+John Patrick Yeah better just leave that 1% alone they deserve those trillions they've earned it. But don't we pay taxes either way? aND as it is have no say and see services cut, jobs moved overseas and ever growing debt and bank bailouts.

Ted cox4 days ago
+harrison thompson I'm going to vote for the most honest person on my ballot. Without Bernie, that leaves Jill Stein. So, I'm not going strategize with my vote and vote for the cheaters and liars. If we end up with Trump so be it.

Dawna Bell1 week ago
she said "I will be the nominee " she is so confident because she knows the "fix is in" for her?

Angel Santiago1 week ago
Come on..... She will say that it was just a mistake and that she evolved. Now she knows stealing elections is wrong. And you should vote for her because of Trump something something.

RIGHT ON, ANGEL!



http://usuncut.com/resistance/bernie-sanders-supporters-are-suing-dnc/

Thousands of Bernie Sanders Supporters Are Suing the DNC in a Massive Class Action Lawsuit Tom Cahill | June 23, 2016


Millions of Bernie Sanders’ donors may now have legal recourse against the Democratic primaries they saw as rigged.

Beck & Lee Trial Lawyers, a civil litigation firm based in Miami, Florida, is announcing the filing of a class action lawsuit against the DNC early next week, alleging fraud and collusion with the Hillary Clinton campaign. While roughly one hundred people have officially signed on as plaintiffs, partner Jared Beck told US Uncut that thousands of requests for legal paperwork have come in within the last 48 hours.

“Signed agreements are coming in steadily and we continue to get new requests by the minute,” Beck said.

Anyone who donated to the DNC after Bernie Sanders entered the race for the Democratic nomination, either directly or indirectly through third-party payment platforms like ActBlue, is eligible to join the lawsuit, along with anyone who donated to Bernie Sanders’ campaign throughout the course of the primaries and caucuses.

“We think that the DNC has been running absolutely out of control and completely disregarding their responsibilities, rights, and duties to the public,” attorney Elizabeth Beck told US Uncut.

Jared Beck said whether or not a “class” in the lawsuit is deemed valid by the court will depend on a number of factors, but the number of class representatives in the lawsuit could be as high as the number of individual donors to Sanders’ campaign.

Around two million people donated a combined seven million contributions averaging $27 apiece. Sanders accumulated more than $222 million in donations throughout the primaries and caucuses.

“The way a class action works in civil litigation is that not everybody who is represented or is a member of the class needs to be a class plaintiff,” Beck said in a phone interview. “We’ll be seeking relief for everybody who falls into the class around the country.”

“Given the average donation of $27, that could be a lot of people, to say the least,” he added.

The basis for the lawsuit stems from DNC internal communications published by hacker Guccifer 2.0, who took ownership of the compromising of DNC servers and allegedly leaked their contents. Among other items, the leaks revealed emails showing the DNC had been actively working behind the scenes to boost Hillary Clinton’s profile in the media as early as May 26, 2015, nearly a month after Sanders had entered the race for the Democratic nomination.

New leaks published this week showed the DNC spent time and resources assessing Clinton’s vulnerabilities as a candidate in the early summer of 2015, and the DNC even drafted talking points for campaign operatives to suggest as narratives to members of the media, attempting to inject their own phrasing into third-party stories.

Beck said he believes the lawsuit will be successful, as Article 5, Section 4 of the charter and bylaws of the Democratic Party explicitly requires the chair of the DNC to remain impartial during the primary process:

In the conduct and management of the affairs and procedures of the Democratic National Committee, particularly as they apply to the preparation and conduct of the Presidential nomination process, the Chairperson shall exercise impartiality and evenhandedness as between the Presidential candidates and campaigns. The Chairperson shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process.

Beck also said a fraud lawsuit is justified due to multiple actions taken by DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who served as co-chair of Clinton’s 2008 campaign. Wasserman Schultz repeatedly claimed neutrality throughout the primary season despite numerous allegations from the Sanders campaign and national media that she tipped the scales in Clinton’s favor throughout the Democratic primary, most notably by scheduling the debates during low-viewership timeslots and by shutting down the Sanders campaign’s access to its voter file database for 24 hours.

“The DNC needs to do what it says in its charter, which is to be even-handed and unbiased in response to the slate of candidates running for the nomination,” Beck told US Uncut.

Elizabeth Lee Beck, a senior partner at the firm who is helping to coordinate the lawsuit, said thousands of messages have poured in from Sanders supporters across the country.

“People use words like, ‘angry,’ ‘I feel cheated,’ ‘Thank you for giving us a voice,'” Elizabeth Beck said. “I’ve read comments like, ‘I would have gotten the same results as if I had flushed my money down the commode.'”

“The common thread among all these emails is they feel deeply aggrieved and cheated, which is a natural response to being defrauded,” she added.

Elizabeth Beck described the shock she felt at an email from a Sanders supporter that spoke to the depth of sacrifice that the Vermont senator’s donors made to support his campaign.

“I remember someone said, ‘I donated $35, but if I had known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it. That was a trip to the grocery store,'” she recalled.

According to Jared Beck, no venue has yet been picked to file the lawsuit, which he expects to be officially filed early next week to allow for a hearing before the Democratic National Convention on July 25. Under federal law, the DNC, as a defendant in a class action lawsuit, has 20 days to respond upon being served. He said there are several options the DNC can choose from in how it responds.

“They can issue a motion to dismiss or move to stay the case, which means they try to delay it. I don’t know what kind of strategy we’ll see from them,” Beck said. “There’s not a lot of precedent for this type of lawsuit, so it’s really hard to say what we’d expect from the defendant at this point.”

Jared Beck described this lawsuit as unique in that the goal is to not just secure financial compensation, but to fundamentally change the way the DNC exists and conducts business.

“You have people who say they’re homeless or unemployed, and they gave whatever was in their pockets to Bernie, and you have doctors and lawyers who have given thousands of dollars… We’re civil litigators, and usually our cases can be reduced to dollars and cents, but I don’t know if any amount of money could compensate for American democracy, which is priceless to me. I think anything short of a fundamental change in the way the DNC conducts itself is not acceptable… This isn’t a case that’s about money, this is a case about the fairness about the Democratic process.”

Beck and Lee is a civil litigation firm that has previously won multi-million dollar judgments in previous civil cases. While their firm is based in Florida, they have prior experience in nationwide class action lawsuits, with Elizabeth Lee Beck serving as co-lead counsel in a nationwide class action case against Unilever. Anyone wanting to join Beck & Lee’s lawsuit is encouraged to email dncfraud@jampac.us and follow the progress of the lawsuit on its official Facebook page.


Tom Cahill is a writer for US Uncut based in the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and environmental news. You can contact him via email at tom.v.cahill@gmail.com.



ABOUT THE LAWYERS --


http://jampac.us/

The SuperPac Funded By YOU

Who We Are

Husband-and-wife attorneys Jared and Elizabeth Beck founded JamPAC in February 2016. JamPAC is the first and only truly progressive grassroots Super PAC. It is powered by ordinary citizens to serve the people, rather than billionaires and corporations. JamPAC is fueled by donations from individuals from all over the country. JamPAC aims to hold politicians accountable to the citizenry. Its goal is to restore the voice of the people to government.

Jared and Elizabeth also run their own law firm, Beck & Lee Trial Lawyers. Since its founding, the firm has recovered millions of dollars on behalf of injured victims, consumers, investors, and small businesses. They opened their firm in 2007, after both quit their lucrative six-figure jobs at large corporate law firms.

Elizabeth holds a law degree from Yale Law School and a Bachelor’s of Science degree in mathematics from the University of California at Los Angeles. Before becoming a lawyer, Elizabeth worked in food service, retail, and was also a public school teacher in South Central Los Angeles. Jared has a law degree from Harvard, where he also received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, and served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

They live in Miami on an avocado farm with their two young daughters, Vesper and Myfanwy, and dog, Ruby.



EXCERPTS FROM USUNCUT.COM -- “Beck & Lee Trial Lawyers, a civil litigation firm based in Miami, Florida, is announcing the filing of a class action lawsuit against the DNC early next week, alleging fraud and collusion with the Hillary Clinton campaign. …. “We think that the DNC has been running absolutely out of control and completely disregarding their responsibilities, rights, and duties to the public,” attorney Elizabeth Beck told US Uncut. …. The basis for the lawsuit stems from DNC internal communications published by hacker Guccifer 2.0, who took ownership of the compromising of DNC servers and allegedly leaked their contents. Among other items, the leaks revealed emails showing the DNC had been actively working behind the scenes to boost Hillary Clinton’s profile in the media as early as May 26, 2015, nearly a month after Sanders had entered the race for the Democratic nomination. …. New leaks published this week showed the DNC spent time and resources assessing Clinton’s vulnerabilities as a candidate in the early summer of 2015, and the DNC even drafted talking points for campaign operatives to suggest as narratives to members of the media, attempting to inject their own phrasing into third-party stories. …. Beck said he believes the lawsuit will be successful, as Article 5, Section 4 of the charter and bylaws of the Democratic Party explicitly requires the chair of the DNC to remain impartial during the primary process …. Beck also said a fraud lawsuit is justified due to multiple actions taken by DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who served as co-chair of Clinton’s 2008 campaign. Wasserman Schultz repeatedly claimed neutrality throughout the primary season despite numerous allegations from the Sanders campaign and national media that she tipped the scales in Clinton’s favor throughout the Democratic primary, most notably by scheduling the debates during low-viewership timeslots and by shutting down the Sanders campaign’s access to its voter file database for 24 hours. …. I think anything short of a fundamental change in the way the DNC conducts itself is not acceptable… This isn’t a case that’s about money, this is a case about the fairness about the Democratic process.” …. According to Jared Beck, no venue has yet been picked to file the lawsuit, which he expects to be officially filed early next week to allow for a hearing before the Democratic National Convention on July 25. Under federal law, the DNC, as a defendant in a class action lawsuit, has 20 days to respond upon being served. He said there are several options the DNC can choose from in how it responds. …. Anyone wanting to join Beck & Lee’s lawsuit is encouraged to email dncfraud@jampac.us and follow the progress of the lawsuit on its official Facebook page.”


If it is true that Hillary’s camp did do these things I’m all for the lawsuit against them. I also reserve the right to write in Bernie’s name on my ballot in November. Of course the path that I will more likely follow is to vote Democratic to keep the Dreaded Drumpf out, and then immediately after the November election, delete my name from the Democratic Party rolls
. One of the comments above uses the term Red Shift. “In the case of HRC, it's still a "Red Shift." That is a physics and astronomy term, and that was the only usage I could find until I came to Daily Kos article below.

The following dailykos description of the several most salient points on the phenomenon called “Red Shift” in election results is so well phrased that I didn’t try to paraphrase it, and it shows clearly why the Sanders voters want to go so far as suing the DNC. Red Shift is a mysterious – or damning -- trend, which may or may not indicate computer tampering in computerized vote totals which occurs in a shockingly high number of cases, and in the overwhelming majority of the cases the bias went to the Republican. In this Clinton and Sanders case both are Democrats, but Clinton is suspected of cheating, so a Red Shift may have been involved. DailyKos: “… have consistently ‘shifted’ - often by a 5 percent to 7 percent margin disparity (sometimes less, but sometimes much greater) - in comparison to hand-counts and polling data votes. …. One of my favorite mathematicians is Richard Charnin, who on his website, using readily available public information, calculates the odds of the so-called ‘red shift” occurring from the 1988 to 2008 presidential elections. The red shift refers to the overwhelming pick up of votes by the Republican Party in recorded votes over what actual voters report to exit pollsters. …. How the corporate-dominated media deals with the issue is by “adjusting the exit polls.” They simply assume the recorded vote on easily hacked and programmed private machines are correct and that the international gold standard for detecting election fraud – exit polls – must be wrong.”

SO WHY DO WE STILL ALLOW COMPUTERIZED ELECTION TABULATIONS AT ALL? Yes, I know. Hiring humans to do that costs more money than a machine. Plus the possibility that the parties who are benefiting insist on the possibly bribed ES&S company may be tweaking the results.

This problem with computer counting was first discussed in the news, if my memory is correct, during the Gore/Bush election, and at that time some users followed the popular demand and went to paper ballots. Florida uses paper ballots, but they do use a scanning machine to enter the data – which means they are probably employing ES&S. I doubt if they do a hand count except in suspicious cases. In the Gore/Bush case, Gore challenged the results triggering a recount. Now that was an exciting election!!

See the skeptics.stackexchange.com, truth-out.org and the dailykos.com articles below. For lots of good information which is not repetitious. Have fun!



EXCERPT FROM SKEPTICS -- “… there is an inherent demographic of individuals who willingly choose to take polls and that same demographic tend to lean more Republican/Conservative in nature. That factor alone can account for everything in your model suggesting fraud.”

This is an interesting viewpoint. Are liberals more impatient than conservatives? It is true that I, a left leaning person, will rarely complete a poll unless it’s by telephone and the pollster claims to be brief about it. If I do enthusiastically complete a paper poll I almost never end up sending it back through the mail to be counted. On the Internet it’s easier, but I’m suspicious that they just want to put a virus or some adware on my computer, and over the telephone I assume they will before a couple of questions get down to their main point, which is selling me something I don’t need and don’t want. If Quinnipiac calls me, however, I will happily talk to them. They have a very good reputation.


EXCERPT FROM truth-out.org -- All this new information only bolsters the long-held position of the Election Defense Alliance (EDA), a nonpartisan citizen watchdog organization. EDA finally coined the term "red shift" to describe the persistent pattern of anomalous vote results predominantly benefitting the right wing, as described in the 2014 book Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century.



http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/6/16/1100706/-Red-Shift-why-it-s-important

“I think this comment puts the finger on something that many of us have been feeling: the game is rigged. As it turns out, that feeling is justified. We have not had fair elections in this country for some time now. And this is not some kind of conspiracy theory, there is real evidence of the problem, which goes by the name of "red shift". . . . .

"Red shift" refers to the systematic biasing of election counts toward conservative, Republican candidates. If we look at the actual statistics, it is shocking:

One of my favorite mathematicians is Richard Charnin, who on his website, using readily available public information, calculates the odds of the so-called ‘red shift” occurring from the 1988 to 2008 presidential elections. The red shift refers to the overwhelming pick up of votes by the Republican Party in recorded votes over what actual voters report to exit pollsters.

In Charnin’s analysis of exit poll data, we can say with a 95% confidence level – that means in 95 out of 100 elections – that the exit polls will fall within an statistically predictable margin of error. Charnin looked at 300 presidential state exit polls from 1988 to 2008, 15 elections would be expected to fall outside the margin of error. Shockingly, 137 of the 300 presidential exit polls fell outside the margin of error.

What is the probability of this happening? “One in one million trillion trillion trlllion trillion trillion trillion,” said Charnin....132 of the elections fell outside the margin in favor of the GOP. We would expect eight.

Now I should explain something about exit polls in the U.S. In recent years, the practice of the consortium of news organizations that run the exit polls of presidential elections has been to "adjust" the exit polls to match the final official count. It is assumed that the official count is accurate and that the raw data of the initial exit polls, if different, must be inaccurate. (Charnin, in the quote above, is comparing unadjusted exit poll data to the official counts.)

In this respect, U.S. elections are different from elections held in the rest of the world, where properly done exit polls are the chief means of finding electoral fraud--if the official count departs from the exit poll by a sigificant degree, that is evidence of vote rigging. As Bob Fitzrakis relates:

Here’s where U.S. elections become laughable. A couple of private companies count our votes with secret proprietary hardware and software, the most notable being ES&S [Election Systems and Software]. Every standard of election transparency is routinely violated in the U.S. electronic version of faith-based voting. How the corporate-dominated media deals with the issue is by “adjusting the exit polls.” They simply assume the recorded vote on easily hacked and programmed private machines are correct and that the international gold standard for detecting election fraud – exit polls – must be wrong.

The other private company that counts our votes is Dominion Voting Systems. (Their name has nothing to do with religion, by the way, but reflects the Canadian origins of the company.) To quote Wikipedia:
In August 2010, Dominion reported that it has contracts to provide electronic voting systems to 600 jurisdictions in some 22 states of the United States, and has deployed 80,000 Dominion ImageCast Precinct Optical Scan Tabulators around the world.

ES&S is bigger--the U.S. Justice department required them to sell part of their operations to Dominion Voting Systems on anti-trust grounds.

Is it wise to entrust the counting of our election votes to, essentially, two private companies, that do so with proprietary hardware and software? The question answers itself--the potential for corruption is obvious. And the motivation for corruption is also obvious, as the stakes of elections can be very high--just look at the recent recall election in Wisconsin. Corporate interests intervened on the side of Governor Walker to the tune of millions of dollars, outspending the opposition by more than 20 to 1. You can be sure that Walker's backers really, really cared about the outcome of the recall election--they put their money where their mouth was, as the saying goes.

(Reuters) - Exit polls show the Wisconsin recall election on Tuesday is essentially tied between Republican Governor Scott Walker and Democratic challenger Tom Barrett, CNN said.
The CNN data is based on interviews with voters after they cast ballots and not on actual results.
Indeed.
We have a problem. We cannot trust that our elections are being fairly counted. There is strong evidence that important elections are subject to "red shift", where the results are shifted in favor of Republican conservatives. The mainstream media pretends that the problem does not exist. Democratic candidates are also silent on the matter. And this web site does not see discussion of this problem either, despite the fact that we have the "extraordinary evidence" that Markos says is necessary for extraordinary charges. (Just look at the statistics in Fitzrakis' article)

I would think that any Democratic Party activist who wants to see progressive Democrats elected to office would be concerned about this issue. Isn't it time to discuss this?



http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/14813/is-there-a-red-shift-in-u-s-elections-a-significant-shift-to-republican-vote

Is there a “red shift” in U.S. elections — a significant shift to republican votes between polls and voting? Does this imply fraud?

This questions on Politics SE introduced me to the concept of the red shift. In short, the claim of a red shift boils down to a statistically significant difference between outcome of final exit polls and results of elections, which would then imply fraud. Some quotes of (effectively identical) claims from different sources:

America's Media Just Made Vote-Rigging Easier. By Victoria Collier, Truthout

The Red Shift has been detected in both state and federal American elections, where computerized vote totals have consistently "shifted" - often by a 5 percent to 7 percent margin disparity (sometimes less, but sometimes much greater) - in comparison to hand-counts and polling data. This mysterious seismic lurch invariably pushes votes to the right, and when the dust settles, it has inordinately benefitted GOP candidates and ballot issues

Wisconsin: None dare call it vote rigging. By Bob Fitrakis, The Free Press

One of my favorite mathematicians is Richard Charnin, who on his website using readily available public information, calculates the odds of the so-called ‘red shift" occurring from the 1988 to 2008 presidential elections. The red shift refers to the overwhelming pick up of votes by the Republican Party in recorded votes over what actual voters report to exit pollsters.

And perhaps the strongest claim of all, one used as a source for many others:

Election Fraud: An Introduction to Exit Poll Probability Analysis , Richard Charnin:

123 of the 126 exit polls in which the MoE [margin of error] was exceeded moved to the recorded vote in favor of the Republican (the “red shift”). Just 3 moved in favor of the Democrat (” the blue shift”). There is a ZERO probability that this one-sided shift was due to chance. It is powerful evidence beyond any doubt of pervasive systemic election fraud.

The titles of the three posts all state this implies fraud or vote-rigging, but a comment in the third link begs to differ:

The statistical analysis here is impressive, but it fails to address one major flaw in almost all statistics that involve exit polling and polling in general; there is an inherent demographic of individuals who willingly choose to take polls and that same demographic tend to lean more Republican/Conservative in nature. That factor alone can account for everything in your model suggesting fraud.

My question therefore consists of two parts:

Is there such a "red shift"?

If so, can this only be explained by fraud, or is there any evidence suggesting that this can be explained by other, such as demographic, factors? Studies addressing this question could look if such a "red shift", if measurable at all, depends on voter demographics, voting method (paper vs. machine), or other factors.



[Politics SE is: Politics Stack Exchange
politics.stackexchange.com/
Politics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people interested in governments, policies, and political processes. It's 100% free, no registration ...]



http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34607-will-the-2016-primaries-be-electronically-rigged

Will the 2016 Primaries Be Electronically Rigged?
By Victoria Collier and Ben Ptashnik, Truthout | News Analysis
Thursday, 28 January 2016 00:00

(Photo: Voting Machine via Shutterstock)


Truthout will never hide stories like this behind a paywall or subscription fee. Help us continue publishing free and uncensored news by making a donation today!

"You've heard the old adage 'follow the money.' I follow the vote, and wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that's an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to ... make bad things happen." — Steve Stigall, CIA cyber-security expert, in remarks to the US Election Assistance Commission.

Primary election rigging in the coming weeks and months is all but assured if American voters and candidates don't take steps to prevent it now. Evidence that US voting systems are wide open to fraud and manipulation should be taken seriously in light of the unprecedented high-stakes elections we're facing.

Not in recent history have American voters been presented with such radically polarized candidates, forcing a crucial choice for the direction of our future, and possibly upending long-established centers of power.

Local fixers, insider operatives, rogue hackers and even foreign countries could all rig US elections electronically.

It's no secret that US primaries have been tightly controlled by the two ruling parties, usually to the benefit of their favored candidates. If this internal manipulation (some might call it rigging) is not publicly condoned, neither is it loudly condemned.

This year, however, the primary season is shaping up to be a battle royal between the political establishment and outsider insurgencies who are challenging the party elites and defying their usual filters, money and manipulations. And it seems all bets are off.

As a brazen Donald Trump kicks down the door of the GOP, tens of millions in super PAC dark cash has (so far) failed to buy the candidacy for a lackluster Jeb Bush. Accusations abound that Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has stacked the deck for Hillary Clinton. Yet nothing - not even corporate media's censorship or outright hostility toward Bernie Sanders - has blunted his skyrocketing grassroots campaign.

You might ask: What is left, then, for the party powerful to ensure outcomes in 2016? Would any of them be so desperate as to actually rig the final vote count? Could they?

Indeed, they could.

But to be fair, so could a lot of other people. Local fixers, insider operatives, rogue hackers and even foreign countries could all rig US elections - in whole or part, in 50 states and most of the United States' 3,143 counties - electronically, and without detection.

Time and again, the beneficiaries of suspicious primary elections are establishment-favored candidates.
The potential for this vote-rigging cyberwar is the result of an ongoing crisis in US democracy - a silent coup of sorts. Over many decades, US elections have been quietly outsourced to a small group of private voting machine companies, some with extreme partisan ties and criminal records. They have now almost entirely replaced our publicly counted paper ballots with their secretly programmed, easily hacked electronic voting technology.

For example, the Diebold AccuVote-TS Touchscreen voting machine was recently analyzed by Princeton computer security professors. They found that malicious software running on a single voting machine can be installed in as little as one minute, spreading invisibly from machine to machine through a virus, while stealing votes with little risk of detection.

While recent laws have limited essential hand-counting audits - in some cases making them actually illegal - in 18 states voting machines are used that produce no paper ballot at all, making verification of the results impossible.

Threats to the 2016 Elections

In 2016, Americans will once again cast their votes into this lawless electronic void, and no, we can't solve the problem before these game-changing primary elections. But shining a light on our voting systems does make a difference - as does getting out to vote: Voter apathy and ignorance create the ideal conditions for election rigging. Huge turnout makes election rigging less feasible, particularly when the pre-election polls or exit polls diverge more than 10 percent from actual vote returns. Manipulations usually happen when the spread between candidates is smaller than 10 percent.

For more original Truthout election coverage, check out our election section, "Beyond the Sound Bites: Election 2016."

What evidence do we have that any election rigging has already taken place? As it happens, extensive documentation exists, compiled over decades by researchers, cyber-security professionals, statistical analysts and even government agencies.

If you haven't heard about it until now, thank the press. A longstanding mainstream media blackout on this issue has prevented the evidence from reaching the public and vulnerable candidates.

While the investigations into rigging are mostly nonpartisan, the results typically are not. Time and again, the beneficiaries of suspicious primary elections are establishment-favored candidates. In general elections, far-right and extremist Republicans have overwhelmingly raked in the "surprise upset" wins.

Why Watch the Primaries?

The primaries in particular should be a major focal point of scrutiny by all democracy advocates and supporters of grassroots, populist and insurgent candidates in both parties.

See the eye-opening statistical analysis of vote results from 2008 to 2012 compiled by citizen watchdog team Francois Choquette and James Johnson. Results showed a highly suspect, so far inexplicable gain of votes, only in larger precincts, only for Republicans (and in the primaries, only for Mitt Romney), and only when votes are counted by computers.

Choquette, an aerospace engineer and Republican, writes, "This substantial effect exceeds reasonable statistical bounds and we calculate that the probability of such election results happening by chance is beyond typical or even extreme."

The potential smoking gun is that the votes gained by Republicans or "chosen" candidates in each precinct increase as a function of precinct size (vote tally), not the precinct location, whether in cities or rural areas. This makes no obvious sense based on any known demographic. Once you factor in rigging, however, it starts to make a lot of sense; stealing votes from a bigger pool is less likely to be detected.

According to Choquette and Johnson's findings, Mitt Romney's ill-gotten gains in 2012 amounted to over 1 million votes "siphoned" or "flipped" from other GOP candidates.

Instead of the flat line expected for each candidate, this chart shows the votes gained by Mitt Romney in a 2012 California primary race, by siphoning votes from other candidates. This “Vote Flipping” is an exchange of votes between candidates, while keeping the total number of votes intact to deter detection.

(Chart: Francois Choquette)
(Chart: Francois Choquette)

Figure 6 charts the Vote Gained / Votes Lost results for all 50 states in the 2012 GOP primaries. Because candidate Romney has gained votes in the process, his count is shown in green. The other eight candidates who have lost votes to Romney are shown in red. The total number of votes exchanged between the candidates is approximately 1,233,576 votes. (Chart: Francois Choquette)

Even for the mathematically challenged, the anomalies are evident when you read the report, and certainly lead to some serious head scratching. Choquette, who also co-authored "Republican Primary Election 2012 Results: Amazing Statistical Anomalies," says any high school student with a basic understanding of statistics could verify the work, and he welcomes anyone to run the numbers themselves.

Recently, a Ph.D. statistician took up the challenge. Beth Clarkson of Wichita State University was skeptical at first, but finally announced that she can find no other explanation besides voting machines being used to rig elections to benefit Republicans in the races she analyzed: the 2012 Ohio presidential election, the 2014 Wisconsin gubernatorial election and the Kansas Senate elections. Less often, Clarkson found that votes appear to be shifted to Democrats as well, depending on the state and type of voting machine used.

Clarkson is now building a media campaign and suing her county election commissioner in an attempt to audit her county's 2014 paper voting records, which so far has been denied.

All this new information only bolsters the long-held position of the Election Defense Alliance (EDA), a nonpartisan citizen watchdog organization. EDA finally coined the term "red shift" to describe the persistent pattern of anomalous vote results predominantly benefitting the right wing, as described in the 2014 book Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century.

Recent History of Early Primary Rigging

Iowa Caucus 2012:

In the 2012 Iowa caucus, Mitt Romney, the favored candidate of the Republican Party's business elite, was declared the winner after a party-controlled vote count.

However, the true winner turned out to be Rick Santorum, an establishment outsider but the favorite of the party's evangelical and far-right wings.

Romney actually received fewer votes than were posted online by the state GOP, enough to swing the election. The wrong number was exposed by precinct vote counter Edward True. His protest garnered media attention and ultimately overturned the results, but it was too late for Santorum; Romney's momentum coming out of Iowa made him the "man to beat" going into New Hampshire.

The right-wing libertarian citizen group Watch the Vote was involved in overturning the Iowa caucus results, and was not convinced it was purely human error. They pledge to keep their eye on Iowa in 2016, stating on their website:

Clearly ... the Iowa GOP will be trying to cheat Donald Trump, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee. They will be trying to make Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich "win" or "do well" ... but we will be focusing on getting a fair count for everyone.
South Carolina 2010:

South Carolina's bizarre and clearly fraudulent US Senate race in 2010 is the subject of a new documentary on rigged elections, I Voted?

The winner, Tea Party-supported Christian evangelical Jim DeMint, won by a landslide thanks to his implausible Democratic opponent, Alvin Greene, whom it seems was served up by the Democratic primary as the ultimate fail-safe opponent.

Greene, described by the press as "incoherent," was unemployed, accused of a sex offense and living in his father's basement. He had run no visible campaign, posted not one yard sign, appeared at no Democratic events and couldn't even explain where he got the $10,400 needed to file as a candidate.

Yet that same Greene had miraculously flayed his opponent in the Democratic primary, a respected former judge, four-term state legislator and National Guardsman, Vic Rawl, by a whopping 18 percent margin.

Voters and campaign workers reported that the ES&S iVotronic Touchscreen voting machines "flipped" votes to Greene all day long.

A glaring 10 percent pro-Rawl disparity was found between the paper absentee ballots, which were hand-counted, and electronic votes counted by the secretly programmed machines.

Rawl's formal protest and request for a new primary was denied by the executive committee of the South Carolina Democratic Party. Cynics have attributed this to surreptitious support for DeMint from evangelical Democrats.

However, a disinterest in pursuing justice for candidates whose election might have been stolen has become common practice for the Democratic establishment.

Perhaps, fearing to discourage voters with ugly talk of election rigging, Democratic Party wisdom has consistently valued getting out the vote as a priority over ensuring those votes are actually counted.

New Hampshire 2008:

In 2008, election experts, candidates and conspiracy theorists questioned the vote results for both parties, particularly Hillary Clinton's victory.

In the GOP primary, for example, the campaign for popular libertarian crusader Ron Paul found these discrepancies between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted results to be a red flag:

Mitt Romney, Diebold AccuVote Optical Scan: 33.075 percent
Mitt Romney, Hand-Counted Paper Ballots: 25.483 percent
Ron Paul, Diebold AccuVote Optical Scan: 7.109 percent
Ron Paul, Hand-Counted Paper Ballots: 9.221 percent
Again in 2012, Paul's supporters made a strong case that he was being systemically and egregiously rigged out in the primaries by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and widely broadcast their accusations. Their protest had merit; the RNC apparently even went so far as to change the rules of the nomination process in midstream to block Paul.

In 2008, establishment candidate Clinton was pitted against insurgent Barack Obama, who had won in Iowa and was clearly leading in New Hampshire by a wide margin in pre-election polls, as well as in the exit polls on election night.

Yet the final Democratic results showed a 10 percent variation from the polls, every one of which had Obama winning for an overall average lead of 8.3 percent. But Clinton won by 2.6 percent, unaccountably gaining 10 points overnight.

New Hampshire Democratic Primary 2008.
New Hampshire Democratic Primary 2008.

A range of professional pre-election polls had been fairly spot-on in their predictions for all other candidates in the same race but had mysteriously miscalled the numbers for Clinton and Obama.

Again, the hand-counted paper ballot results favored Obama, while Clinton won in the districts where electronic voting machines secretly counted ballots.

Clinton: statewide optical scan tally: 52.73 percent
Obama: statewide optical scan tally: 47.27 percent
Clinton: statewide hand-count tally: 46.75 percent
Obama: statewide hand-count tally: 53.25 percent
Of course, conspiracy theories proliferated in the void where a public, transparent election should have occurred.

Hillary Clinton's upset win was imagined by some as a fix perpetrated by rogue elements among her more conservative New Hampshire Democratic backers. Others pointed the finger at Republican operatives who they believe may have orchestrated her victory, judging Obama the stronger horse against Romney (or any other GOP candidate).

As it happens, the Premier Voting Machine company, which controlled over three-quarters of the New Hampshire primary, was actually the same Republican-friendly Diebold Voting Machine Company involved in the controversial upset victory by President George W. Bush over John Kerry in Ohio in 2004. (The company had just switched names.)

Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell, who had publicly pledged to deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004, was later mired in widespread accusations of a conspiracy to rig out Kerry late on election night in Ohio. Top cyber-security experts charged that Karl Rove's online vote-gathering apparatus used a "man in the middle" hack to alter the results, in collusion with the ultra partisan Ohio secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Committee to Re-Elect George W. Bush.

The man who built the vote-tabulating system, GOP tech guru Michael Connell, died in a suspicious private plane crash after being subpoenaed and then compelled to testify against Rove. Two election officials were eventually convicted of rigging the Ohio recount.

Programming the counting for the 2008 New Hampshire primary was a little known company called LHS Associates, which used the same infamous GEMS software long proven to be easily manipulated by insiders to alter the outcome of the election and produce a matching, fraudulent poll tape report.

And the New Hampshire election officials knew. Computer expert Harri Hursti publicly demonstrated this fraud capacity to the New Hampshire State House Subcommittee on Election Equipment before the 2008 primary. The officials chose to use the fraudulent software anyway.

According to the Election Defense Alliance, had New Hampshire simply chosen to count a 10 percent sample of their ballots in precinct on election night, they could have avoided the need to recount all the Republican and more than half of the Democratic primary ballots by hand a week later, "in adversarial circumstances, and under a cloud of suspicion about chain of custody and the legitimacy of secret vote counting."

How to Protect the 2016 Primaries

In two of the three early primaries, some steps can be taken to deter or detect fraud.

Iowa 2016:

Monitoring the vote count at the Iowa caucus is essential as the parties are piloting a new online cloud-based app for reporting results.

Any new electronic voting system carries a risk of error or malfunction, and online reporting offers the opportunity for rigging the results en route if not carefully compared to the original vote counts at the precinct.

Iowa voters can ensure their votes don't get lost (or rigged) in the cloud by having many eyes on the ground at the precincts. Take pictures of how many people are present and get a physical count at each location. Use cell phones, video, pen and paper, anything to record the original precinct vote totals, and verify that they match the reported results.

New Hampshire 2016:

According to Verified Voting, New Hampshire widely uses the AccuVote-OS optical scanner to count paper ballots. Security concerns listed include quick-to-pick locks, "sensitive" memory cards, and easily introduced viruses causing the server to crash and falsify votes.

But New Hampshire is one of the rare states where hand counting is still a choice available to all towns and cities. Combined with a minimal 10 percent audit of the AccuVote-tallied ballots, machine fraud is likely to be detected or even deterred - but voters would have to demand it.

South Carolina 2016:

South Carolina continues to use the infamously riggable ES&S iVotronic Touchscreens, which produce no ballot or paper receipt, and cannot be audited. iVotronic machines were used to rig elections by a conspiracy of government insiders and election officials convicted in Kentucky in 2010, just one example out of many in which these machines were involved in fraud.

Some of the iVotronic machines that will be used in the primary are possibly the same physical machines that were used in Florida's highly contested Congressional District 13 race for the US Congress in 2006, when they inexplicably lost some 18,000 votes. After that election, Florida sent many of their faulty voting machines to the landfill. Others were sold to the State of South Carolina.

In sum, the 2016 primary in South Carolina cannot be protected. Democracy advocates in the Palmetto State have little recourse except to make these 100 percent non-verifiable systems illegal for future elections.

The good news is that voting machines are failing nationwide, 14 years after states bought most of them with $3.9 billion from the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

Most counties no longer have HAVA funds to replace their aged and malfunctioning machines. Citizens now have the chance to examine their voting systems anew, hopefully with the will not to repeat past mistakes.

Concerned voters and public officials should form task forces in every state and election jurisdiction to push for reforms that secure our elections. Only publicly controlled, transparent vote counting fulfills the conditions of democracy - if democracy is what we want.

Visit the National Election Defense Coalition's website to learn more about how to reform our elections process.

Former Vermont State Sen. Ben Ptashnik is a fusion movement strategist, and lifelong political organizer. He currently serves as executive director of the National Election Defense Coalition, and as policy director of the Justice Action Mobilization Network, a climate justice organization.

VICTORIA COLLIER

Victoria Collier is communications director of the National Election Defense Coalition, and the Justice Action Mobilization Network. She is the author of "How to Rig an Election," published in Harper's Magazine.

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