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.
(Chart: Francois Choquette)
Instead of the flat line expected for each candidate, this chart shows the votes gained by Mitt Romney in a 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.
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? 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? 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?
http://www.ivotedmovie.com/
etc.
See the rest at:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...nically-rigged
Mass conditioning to be 'ruled' by your consent through (rigged) voting!
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Re: Mass conditioning to be 'ruled' by your consent through (rigged) voting!
!! Though this is only one method used by Republicans to steal US Elections. We must address them all. The VOTE is one of our most Important Rights in a Democracy.
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