HRC Campaign - Please challenge the vote in 4 States as the data says you won - NC, PA, WI, FL

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Sunday November 20, 2016 · 5:41 AM PST

2016/11/20 · 05:41

At least 5 reports and detailed stories now say HRC might have/did win and are calling for her to contest the States where the data says she most likely won. Most of the people working on these stories have 10 to 20 years analysing elections. I would take what they have to say very seriously for the good of the country and the HRC voters.

What Can You Do Today?

1) Call anyone you know on the HRC Campaign and ask them to get on this now — today — this weekend.

2) Sign the Petition calling for an 11-2016 Election Audit — Demand An Audit Of The 2016 Presidential Election

The Senate list of States does differ from the President List of States — see seperate dKos story today here — MO, PA, WI - Potential Senate States to Contest — Audit

What follows are links/parts of 5 of the best reports and stories about the election systems in the States that matter.

1) Did the GOP Strip & Flip the 2016 Selection?

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

Hillary Clinton's margin of victory in the 2016 vote count continues to climb, at this point well over a million.

But her impending defeat in the Electoral College comes with familiar signs that the election was stripped and flipped.

These indicators include the realities of pre- and post-election polling; the massive stripping of primarily black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters from computer generated registration rolls mostly maintained by private partisan companies; unverifiable "black box" electronic voting machines and central tabulators, also mostly manufactured and maintained by private corporations, and much more.

Were this election held in any other country, the US State Department and independent monitors from around the world would denounce it as a fraud, and contemplate international intervention.

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2) ELECTION 2016 A Fair Election? Serious, Hard-to-Explain Questions Arise About Trump Vote Totals in 3 Key States

Voting rights advocates are scrambling to see if recounts are feasible in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Voting rights advocates are scrambling to see if recounts are feasible in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

North Carolina

Election night’s official returns had Trump beating Clinton by 178,000 votes and the Democratic Senate candidate also losing by roughly the same margin. In other races in the state, however, such as governor and attorney general, the GOP lost and there is a controversial gubernatorial recount underway in which the Republican incumbent, Gov. Pat McCrory, has accused Democrats of voter fraud. …

“Was the shut-down of the electronic poll book system in Durham County the result of a benign malfunction or an intentional hack?” one attorney asked. “And, if it was the latter, who was behind the cyberattack? These questions must be answered immediately, especially if the answers lead to questions about the integrity of the election process in other jurisdictions.” Open link in new tab

Florida

Clinton was ahead in many pre-election polls, but lost in the results reportedafter Election Day by 120,000 votes. (Each state has a process where counties officially tally all categories of ballots and then the state certifies the results, which can take several weeks.)

As one attorney said, “Tallahassee-based VR Systems was also allegedly hacked. The company provides electronic poll books for a number of jurisdictions which communicate in real time with each county’s voter registration system. According to the company's web site VR Systems serves almost all of Florida's counties and 14 other states."

Wisconsin

Election night’s unofficial returns found Trump ahead of Clinton by 27,000 votes. But Clinton won only counties using all-paper ballots, the computer voting experts said. In the counties using a mix of electronic and paper-based voting systems that President Obama won in 2012, Clinton lost by 1-2 percent. In the Obama counties using all paperless machines, she lost by 10 to 15 percent. (Five percent of the state’s 4.6 million voters, or 230,000 people, cast their ballots on paperless machines, state officials said Wednesday.)

Wisconsin also saw a record numbers of absentee ballots, with 831,000 ballots cast, which was about 30 percent of this fall’s vote. In past years, it was about 20 percent. Of that overall amount, about 134,000 were from people who mailed them in, instead of turning them in at polling places, state officials said.

The questions raised by the election integrity team are twofold. First, did old-school hacking pad Trump’s margin in counties with all-electronic voting systems? Under that scenario, paperless voting systems would be breached and totals changed. Second, was there a sizable effort to pad the absentee ballot voting with phantom voters, created from last summer’s Russian hacks into voter registration databases in other states? Both of these scenarios would require sophisticated operations, a skeptical former state election director from another state said. Wisconsin’s paperless voting machinery is not online and isn’t programmed online, as a security precaution, meaning someone would have to access the system in key counties from the inside. Second, if hackers put fake voters into Wisconsin’s database and boosted Trump’s absentee totals, the discrepancy between returned paper ballots and electronic totals would be found in a post-election audit. On background, Wisconsin state election officials did not believe these scenarios were possible, describing many intricate steps they take to prevent election tampering. Should any recount go forward, it is likely the first recount would be in Wisconsin, because its three-day legal window to file for a recount is expected to start in about nine days—once its 72 counties finished their tallies. Those filing would have to pay for the recount, which could run into hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, apart from the litigation team costs and deploying trained observers.

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Pennsylvania

Election night returns found Trump beating Clinton by 68,000 votes. The state mostly uses older electronic voting machines with no paper trail (unlike Wisconsin, where a cash register-like paper receipt is printed). The concern is that 16 counties are still using aging countywide tabulators which Finnish computer security specialist Harry Hursti has shown can be easily hacked to change the reported results. These computers use old versions of Microsoft operating systems, which have security vulnerabilities that have never been fixed.

In Pennsylvania, November 23 is the last day the Secretary of the Commonwealth can order a recount. It’s also possible to initiate a recount on a precinct-by-precinct basis, as long as a petition is prepared with at least three electors for that precinct, said Marybeth Kuznik of VotePA.us, and a $50 per precinct fee is paid. The window for that petition, however, is within the five days after the counties complete their official canvass. In rural counties, that is quickly approaching.

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Michigan

see the story

3) In exit polls conducted by Edison Research, HRC won these States — NC, PA, WI, FL

According to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research, Clinton won four key battleground states (NC, PA, WI, and FL) in the 2016 Presidential Election that she went on to lose in the computerized vote counts. With these states Clinton wins the Electoral College with a count of 306 versus 232 for Trump. Clinton also won the national exit poll by 3.2% and holds a narrow lead in the national vote count still in progress.

Exit polls were conducted in 28 states. In 23 states the discrepancies between the exit polls and the vote count favored Trump. In 13 of these states the discrepancies favoring Trump exceeded the margin of error of the state. See Table and its footnotes below.

Readers may find the following answers to questions in the comments section very helpful:

Discussion on the suitability of exit polls conducted by Edison Research as an indicator of possible election fraud

Unadjusted exit polls may have shown much larger wins for Clinton

On margin of error (MOE) including its relationship with the confidence interval

Simple explanation on the application of the MOE in the table below

Important distinction between “election fraud” and “voter fraud”

On speculative theories

4) Still time for an election audit: USA Today

Ron Rivest and Philip Stark11:26 a.m. EST November 18, 2016

A full manual recount of the paper records would be definitive, but that’s unnecessarily difficult, expensive and time-consuming if the results are actually right.

There’s an easier way: an audit that manually examines a random sample of the ballots in a way that has a large chance of detecting and correcting incorrect results. This is called a “risk-limiting” audit. If the reported winner of a contest really won, a risk-limiting audit generally needs to examine only a small fraction of the ballots. But if the reported winner actually lost, a risk-limiting audit has a large chance of indicating that a full hand count is needed to set the record straight.

Risk-limiting audits are a crucial check on election integrity and accuracy even when elections are not controversial and margins are wide. They have been endorsed by the Presidential Commission on Election Administration and many organizations concerned with election integrity. Colorado law requires risk-limiting audits starting in 2017, and California law requires them for deploying some new voting systems.

There is no federal law mandating election audits. A number of states perform some kind of audit, but our research shows those audits have little or no chance of detecting and correcting erroneous results. To audit this election effectively will require immediate legal action.

Auditing surprisingly few ballots could give 95% confidence that the results are correct in every state: about 1.5 million ballots in all, a bit over 1% of the ballots cast.

The few states where the contest was tight would have to do more work. Michigan had the smallest margin among states that Trump carried. To get 95% confidence there would require checking about 11% of the ballots.

It does not take much technology to conduct these audits: dice (to select random ballots), a pencil and paper, and access to the paper ballots. The calculations are simple addition and subtraction. They could be done by a fifth-grader. No programming would be required.

This is an assurance of democracy our nation can afford and should perform routinely. Electronic-only voting systems should be replaced with systems that generate a paper trail, and election results should be audited against the paper trail to ensure that election outcomes are correct.

There is still time to audit this election — barely. States only have until Dec. 13 to give their final results to the Electoral College.

Americans should demand this simple step to ensure that the machinery of democracy worked. To add your voice, please sign this petition.

Ron Rivest is Institute Professor at MIT and was a member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Technical Guidelines Development Committee. Philip Stark, associate dean of mathematical and physical sciences at the University of California, Berkeley,was appointed to the board of advisers of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

5) Think There Was a WI Rural Voter Miracle for Trump? Think again.

Starter list of other irregularities researched out by Richard Hayes Phillips who also studied returns in the 2004 elections. He has noted extraordinary voter participation in rural towns in Wisconsin that suggest padding. Padding that was predicted by other familiar with election systems.

THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN WISCONSIN PRELIMINARY REPORT Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D. excerpts (sorry no link to this report yet).

WI Voter turnout, according to the latest unofficial figures, was highest in Sauk County, at 92.28% countywide (34,323 ballots cast, 37,195 registered voters). Upon closer examination, these numbers are not credible.

In the City of Baraboo, Sauk County, according to the latest numbers posted on official government websites, there were 8,390 ballots cast, and 6,923 registered voters, which equates to a voter turnout of 121.19%.

In the Village of Stockholm, Pepin County, voter turnout was 105.56% (57 ballots cast, 54 registered voters).

In the City of Wisconsin Dells, Sauk County, voter turnout was 102.30% (89 ballots cast, 87 registered voters).

In the Town of McKinley, Polk County, voter turnout was 100.00% (191 ballots cast, 191 registered voters. Nobody died or moved away. And everybody voted.

In the Town of Tipler, Florence County, previous figures showed a voter turnout of 101.96% (104 ballots cast, 102 registered voters). These numbers have since been amended.

In another 11 towns and villages, voter turnout was 95% or higher. In still another In another 11 towns and villages, voter turnout was 95% or higher. In still another 80 towns and villages, voter turnout was 90% or higher. (I will have more to say on these high-turnout towns and villages in a follow-up report). Either these voter turnout percentages are an historic achievement, unparalleled in my experience, or the unofficial results are not true and correct.

What Can You Do Today?

1) Call anyone you know on the HRC Campaign and ask them to get on this now — today — this weekend.

2) Sign the Petition calling for an 11-2016 Election Audit — Demand An Audit Of The 2016 Presidential Election

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HRC Campaign - Please challenge the vote in 4 States as the data says you won - NC, PA, WI, FL

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