. . . our ASS.
Ok, let’s all back up a bit. We’re arguing about why Clinton lost. It’s her fault, it’s the party’s fault, it’s Bernie’s fault, it’s Bernie’s supporters’ fault, etc.
Meantime Trump is installing his Supremacist regime and getting ready to decimate everything we hold dear and destroy the lives of millions of people — immigrants, Muslims, women, LGBT, minorities . . .
But what if he didn’t actually WIN at all? Look, ban me for CT but let’s at least look at the situation. We KNOW that Russia hacked the DNC server and people’s private emails. We KNOW that more than one State’s voter data site was hacked. We KNOW that thousands of people’s voter affiliations were changed without their knowledge in several states, and although most were democrats switched to other things, not all were. The issue is that it’s proven to be possible.
We also heard Trump bait the Democrats into expressing their outrage over any questioning of the outcome of the election, effectively painting themselves into a corner where they have to be polite, not ask any questions, and lend legitimacy to this travesty.
But we also KNOW that Hillary Clinton is actually winning the popular vote by the widest margin anyone who ‘lost’ the Electoral Vote ever has. Sure, we can say that’s because California is so big, etc., just the Electoral Vote and unfortunate distribution of voters, but we’re talking a relatively small number of votes in states that supposedly delivered the election to this clown. Remember in 2004, Kerry gave up after ‘losing’ in Ohio, land of “We will deliver the state to Bush” Diebold? And a lot of us were wondering why he didn’t at least ask for a recount or something, some verification. It was 100,000 votes, something like that.
Why are we so quick to assume nothing untoward happened here? We’re talking about {Oy, I can’t hardly type his name again}, right? The man is not above doing whatever it takes to win, including lying and cheating. It doesn’t take much for me to believe some underhanded stuff went down, and it doesn’t take much underhanded stuff to turn the tide.
And it really makes me sick to see those images of folks like McConnell, who clearly have no respect for this jackhole, with that shit-eating grin, tagging after him like he pulled off a miracle. They’ll hitch their wagon to his no matter how odious his cabinet and advisors are.
Kos doesn’t like us to talk about voting machines, vote counting machines, election corruption, etc. I never really understood that except that there were implosions here and elsewhere with over-the-top CT and personal meltdowns that perhaps threatened the reputation/viability/stability of this and other liberal sites.
But now it’s more than a decade later, and electronic voting is prevalent and hacking is much more sophisticated even if the machines themselves are aging relics. In 2000 and even 2004, you had to physically insert code into machines like this; I’m no computer expert but can’t it be done wirelessly now? Voting machines aren’t connected to the internet, vote counts transmitted via network in some places. A decade ago there was no such thing as an iphone. How many State and Local voter registration databases could be accessed online a decade ago?
Over a decade ago, Bush got away with deleting millions of emails that no one was able to retrieve. I don’t know if it was even possible back then for someone somewhere as remote as Russia to actually hack into anyone’s emails and reveal them to the world, but I’d say it’s obviously not that much of a challenge to do it now.
Michael Moore says that 90,000 people in Michigan didn’t vote for President. Has there been time to determine that 90,000 paper ballots are missing those votes? Or is that according to an electronic machine count? Or were those votes cast on electronic voting machines?
That’s something I’d like to know. Some recounts and ballot v. EV voting comparisons could be informative.
During the CA primary one woman who was supervising a precinct noted that none of the presidential votes for one of the candidates were counted by the machine. In this case, they were 39 Democratic crossover ballots wherein NPP voters cast valid votes for President. However, the counting machine tallied the count at zero. Likely the machine was erroneously programmed to ignore presidential votes on crossover ballots. Not accusing anyone of anything, just pointing out that these are basically dumb machines that require programming, and the programming can cause erroneous results. The only link I could find to the video and images of this was the short documentary “Uncounted”, which would only create a reliving-the-primary flame war, and that is NOT what I’m trying to do here. I’m talking about the GE, where the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, won the popular vote by millions, and still “lost”?
Maybe it’s true we are just no longer the country that elected Obama twice by wide margins, and traditionally working class democratic-leaning states are now truly just filled to the brim with white supremacists and hate-filled ignoramuses or people in such dire straights they’re just gullible for the first con man to show up, and all those lines of early voters — women and people of color — were voting to install this dictator.
Or maybe someone had their thumb on the scales.
Unfounded specific CT aside (because I don’t really have any), isn’t it at least worth exploring the possibility?