Donald Trump Warned Of A Rigged Election, Was He Right?

[Sancho]

http://www.mintpressnews.com/donald-trump-warned-of-a-rigged-election-was-he-right/224326/

Since votes are counted unobservably in the pitch-dark of cyberspace and our voting equipment and programming (unlike our footballs) are essentially off-limits to inspection, election forensics comes down perforce to indirect measures of patterns and anomalies, from which red flags may emerge to suggest “problems” with the vote counting process. Baselines commonly used for this verification process range from exit polls and pre-election polls, to hand counts (in the very few places where they still exist), to parallel contests too noncompetitive to be likely targets for malfeasance, to vote count patterns correlated with type or brand of counting equipment (e.g., paperless touchscreen vs. optical scanner or Dominion Voting vs. ES&S). In the 2016 primaries, it was primarily the exit polls that waved the red flags, although there were other strongly corroborating indicators.

Unlike previous eras, exit polls — or at least those in competitive elections bearing national significance — in the era of computerized voting have been so habitually “off” in the same direction (to the “left” of the vote counts) that many, having first presumed the accuracy of the vote counts, have come to dismiss the polls as faulty, the pollsters as biased or incompetent. This jaundiced view prevails despite the existence of studies confirming the demographic validity of exit poll samples.

But the pattern of exit poll and vote count results in the 2016 primaries was strange enough that it should have given pause to even the most hardened skeptics. While the exit poll results were consistently accurate throughout nearly all of the Republican primaries, they were wildly and broadly inaccurate in the Democratic primaries, exhibiting a pervasive intra-party shift to the detriment of Sanders (i.e., Hillary Clinton’s vote count percentages consistently exceeded her exit poll percentages, the disparity often far beyond the poll margin of error). It seems highly unlikely that the same pollsters employing the same methodological techniques and polling voters at the same precincts on the same days, would be competent and consistently successful with Republicans but somehow incompetent and consistently unsuccessful with Democrats. This second-order comparison of one set of exit polls and vote counts against another greatly strengthens the probative value of the exit poll/vote count evidence by providing in effect a baseline that testifies to the overall competence and accuracy of the exit polls as a secondary measure of collective voter intent.

This evidence was further bolstered by the curious outlier case of Oklahoma, where the exit poll to vote count shift was reversed, favoring Sanders in the vote count. Oklahoma was one of only three states to display this reverse shift, and it was by far the largest shift of the three. In considering what made Oklahoma such an outlier, it is worth noting that the Oklahoma state government prides itself for having taken over from the private vendors most of the tasks and duties related to the programming of the voting equipment. Thus, the method of and control over programming appear to correlate with the forensic outcome. It is an open question whether the difference in access to the programming process was responsible for the egregious reversal of the exit poll to vote count shift direction relative to the pattern in virtually all of the other states.

Jonathan Simon is Executive Director of Election Defense Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to restoring observable vote counting and electoral integrity. He’s also the author of “CODE RED: Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century.” His related blog can be found at www.CodeRed2016.com/blog.

[superpatriotman]

1. Yes

The polls could not have been so wrong.

Time for a do over. A revote on a Sunday. The UN overseeing the ballot boxes just like a third world country.

He loses the next one by ten million at least.