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Tace

(6,800 posts)
Mon Oct 1, 2018, 09:35 AM Oct 2018

Election Fraud Prevention for the 2018 Midterms, And Beyond -- Dale Tavris

Dale Tavris is DU's Time for change.



Dale Tavris -- World News Trust

Oct. 1, 2018

There is a vast amount of evidence that election fraud in the United States has been rampant during the 21st Century, and that it almost always favors the Republican Party. It likely resulted in Republican victories in the Presidential elections of 2000, 2004, and 2016, as well as myriad Republican wins in U.S. House, Senate and state governorship races, even in years with net Democratic gains. (See links below this story to Dale's informative eight-part series Election Fraud in The United States 2004-Present.)

Although the capacity for right-wing-perpetrated election fraud in the United States today is substantial, it is nevertheless finite rather than infinite. Therefore, it can be overcome to some extent with large Democratic turnout AND by taking certain precautionary measures. With that in mind, here are some things (not a complete list) we can do to prevent election fraud in the coming midterms:



Prevention of illegal voter registration purging

The most egregious incident of illegal voter registration purging that I’m aware of is the Presidential election of 2004. In that election, George W. Bush won the state of Ohio (which Bush needed for his Electoral College victory) by about 110,000 votes. Later extensive investigation revealed the apparent illegal purging of approximately 165,000 votes from highly Democratic Cuyahoga County alone, in the months preceding the 2004 election. There was also evidence of illegal voter purging targeted against Democrats in other Ohio counties. With all that, and with more than 155,000 provisional ballots remaining uncounted when the final election results were tallied, it appears likely that illegal voter registration alone made a critical difference in the 2004 Presidential election. It is probably significant that Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio Secretary of State responsible for the conduct of Ohio elections in 2004, also served as a co-chair of the Bush campaign in Ohio that year.

The key to preventing this sort of thing is to make every effort to ensure that registered voters stay registered. Individual voters can contribute to this by periodically ascertaining their own voter registration status, and taking appropriate remedial action if they find that their registration has been purged. Beyond that, those concerned about election integrity can periodically check on the overall status of voter registration in their state. If they observe suspicious declines in voter registration in the run-up to an election, especially if it is found to disproportionately affect a specific political party, they should bring that to the attention of public figures in a position to do something about it prior to the election.



Prevention of central tabulator-mediated election fraud

On Election Day, every county uses a central county tabulator to tabulate votes from each of its precincts to arrive at total county results. Central tabulator fraud is where vote counts are altered at the central tabulator level. In that case, the pre-calculator results (i.e. the cumulative votes from every precinct in the country, prior to being sent to the central tabulator) would differ from the post-calculator results (i.e. the totals tabulated by the central county tabulator). There is evidence that this likely affected thousands or tens of thousands of votes in Ohio in the 2004 Presidential election, notably from Cuyahoga and Miami counties.

In theory, the prevention of this type of fraud is relatively simple. The final results at every precinct are supposed to be posted for public viewing shortly following poll closing. All we need to do is have one volunteer from each precinct in each country (in states or districts where elections are expected to be competitive) ascertain and photograph the results at their precinct. Then, if the results of an election seem suspicious, we need to compare the pre-calculator counts to the post-calculator counts. If discrepancies are found, they must be resolved.



Prevention of electronic vote switching fraud

The most secure voting system to prevent electronic manipulation of our vote is one where all counting of votes is done by hand rather than by machine. I say that because the process of ensuring that machines count our votes honestly is complicated, with many opportunities for failure. Consequently, we should not entrust the counting of our votes to corporations, using computers or any other means that produce results that cannot be verified. In order for votes to be verifiable, they must be available in a physical form – not just on a computer, which can be programmed to miscount the votes. However, it is probably too late to decide how our votes will be counted for the 2018 midterms. As best I can tell, that has already been determined.

As of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, 28 percent of registered voters lived in DRE only jurisdictions and another 19 percent lived in jurisdictions where both DRE and optical scan voting systems were in use. DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) voting machines are those that directly record the voter’s vote electronically. Some DRE machines produce “voter-verified paper audit trails” (VVPAT), along with the electronically recorded vote, and others produce no such paper trail. Where DRE machines without paper trails are used, there is no way to do recounts for close or controversial elections, except to re-run the same machines that gave us the original count. Such systems are often referred to as black box voting because the American people have no way to ensure that the votes counted by such machines are counted honestly. When election integrity activists have asked to examine such machines for malicious software codes (for example, in the Presidential elections of 2004 and 2016, where large and highly suspicious deviations were identified between exit polls and official vote counts in critical states), they have routinely been denied access to the machines on the grounds that they are “proprietary” -- i.e. privately owned. There are currently five states that use only paperless voting systems: Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey, and South Carolina. And there are currently eight additional states that use paperless DREs as the primary voting method in at least some jurisdictions: Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

Even where paper trails do exist (mostly DREs with VVPATs or optical scan machines), they are of little or no use unless valid hand recounts of the paper ballots are done. Yet, whenever election integrity activists have attempted to obtain hand recounts for controversial elections they have faced tremendous obstacles. Either the recounts are fraught with nearly impenetrable barriers or they have been conducted in a way that inspires no confidence. For example, in 2016, the effort to obtain recounts in five states that were surprisingly won by Donald Trump fell to Jill Stein (because the law says that only Presidential candidates can request recounts, and Hillary Clinton did not request any). In order to obtain recounts of those states, Stein had to quickly raise several million dollars, and even the several million dollars she raised was only enough to meet the costs for three of the five states (She had no money left for recounts in Florida or North Carolina).

The Trump campaign then fought her efforts to obtain recounts in the three states where Stein met the cost requirements. The end result was that courts in Pennsylvania and Michigan supported the Trump campaign’s effort to block the recounts, while a Wisconsin court agreed to a recount, but specified that individual counties could elect to simply “recount” votes by re-running the same machines that provided the original count, rather than do hand recounts of paper ballots. This invalidated the whole recount in Wisconsin because any serious errors that might have occurred in the machines were likely limited to those counties that elected to recount the votes by machine rather than to perform hand recounts of paper ballots – which was the case in about one-half of the Wisconsin counties.

Consequently, the process of vote counting in the United States is not at all transparent, whether or not paper audit trails are potentially available for vote recounts. As noted by the Brennan Center for Justice, “Paper records of votes have limited value against a cyberattack if they are not used to check the accuracy of the software-generated total to confirm the veracity of election results.”

Therefore, if we are to prevent this kind of election fraud we must have the right to demand and receive hand recounts of paper ballots in elections that are suspicious. Our suspicions should be aroused, among other circumstances, in elections where results differ substantially from exit polls or post-election audits, or, when these are not available, from pre-election polls.

***

It is a terrible mark against our democracy that, as noted above, it is so difficult to obtain hand recounts of paper ballots in our country. That must be changed if our democracy is to survive. Our election system must be oriented towards obtaining accurate vote counts above all else. That means facilitating and paying for, rather than obstructing valid hand recounts of paper ballots for all suspicious election results.

Elections are a public, not a private matter. To the extent that private individuals or corporations have any role to play in our elections at all, they have no right whatsoever to restrict the public from examining any and all evidence pertaining to the counting of our votes, before, during or after elections. The fact that in a nation that calls itself a democracy, we have allowed private corporations (usually with obvious vested interests in the outcome of the elections) to count our votes and then successfully restrict the public from examining evidence that could help to resolve questions about the integrity of the election, is absurd.

***

Election Fraud in the United States: 2004 to Present (Eight Parts)

PART I: Vulnerability of Electronic Vote Counting in U.S. Elections

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-i-vulnerability-of-electronic-vote-counting-in-u-s-elections-dale-tavris

PART II: Evidence for Election Fraud in Exit Poll Discrepancies from Official Results

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-ii-evidence-for-election-fraud-in-exit-poll-discrepancies-from-official-results-dale-tavris

PART III: The Validity of Exit Polls for Monitoring Elections

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-iii-the-validity-of-exit-polls-for-monitoring-elections-dale-tavris

PART IV: Untimely Deaths Associated with the 2004 Presidential Election

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-iv-untimely-deaths-associated-with-the-2004-presidential-election-dale-tavris

PART V: Disallowed and Corrupted Vote Recounts in Presidential Elections

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-us-2004-to-present-part-v-disallowed-and-corrupted-vote-recounts-in-presidential-elections-dale-tavris

PART VI: Evidence for Election Fraud in Election Machine "Glitches"

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-us-2004-to-present-part-vi-evidence-for-election-fraud-in-election-machine-glitches-dale-tavris

PART VII: Voter Suppression

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-vii-voter-suppression-dale-tavris

PART VIII: The Way Forward

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-viii-the-way-forward-dale-tavris

***

Dale Tavris, M.D.

Dale Tavris has worked as a public health physician/epidemiologist for 40 years, with state departments of public health, the U.S. Air Force, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and the Food and Drug Administration. In that capacity, he has authored 39 publications in peer-reviewed medical or public health journals.

Since 2004 he has been actively involved in the national election reform movement, serving in a volunteer capacity with the Election Defense Alliance for a few years as their data coordinator.

He has written dozens of online articles about election fraud. In 2007 he co-authored a journal article on election fraud: “Fingerprints of Election Theft: Were Competitive Contests Targeted.”

Tavris has written and published three books, including two of a political nature: “The Unfulfilled Promise of the American Dream: The Widening Gap between the Reality of the United States and its Highest Ideals,” 2011; and “Democracy Undone: Unequal Representation, the Threat to our Election System, and the Impending Demise of American Democracy,” 2012.

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rainy

(6,083 posts)
2. If these are facts then why isn't anything being done about it?
Mon Oct 1, 2018, 10:14 AM
Oct 2018

We are losing our country and our supposed leaders are doing NOTHING to secure our only right that matters the most, the right to vote!!!!!
This is whe people give up and say my vote doesn’t matter because according to this our votes don’t count.

Tace

(6,800 posts)
7. Time for change is committed to raising awareness on this issue
Mon Oct 1, 2018, 02:52 PM
Oct 2018

He's open to any ideas you have for what we can do. --Tace

rainy

(6,083 posts)
8. Calling them on the cheating and
Mon Oct 1, 2018, 03:33 PM
Oct 2018

proving it and making sure it’s covered in the press. Stir up the people to demand paper trails and counts that do not outnumber voters in districts.

brooklynite

(93,873 posts)
9. Because they're not facts...
Mon Oct 1, 2018, 03:38 PM
Oct 2018

...of vote hacking. They're facts about vulnerabilities. No losing candidate, campaign manager or Party official claims a loss was due to vote hacking. The same voting machines that lost us 2004, 2010, 2014 and 2016 won us 2006, 2008 and 2014.

Republicans don't have to go through the incredibly complex steps reequired to hack votes when they can steal elections the old fashioned way.

 

mythology

(9,527 posts)
10. Because they aren't facts. Any time you see somebody talking about unadjusted exit polls,
Mon Oct 1, 2018, 03:52 PM
Oct 2018

They aren't dealing with facts. It's literally inaccurate garbage as the adjustment is done scientifically and is done in every form of polling.

https://www.thenation.com/article/reminder-exit-poll-conspiracy-theories-are-totally-baseless/

When the polls close, pollsters don’t adjust the data to “match the official results.” They use the official results from the relatively small number of polling places where they conducted interviews to refine their sample. For example, if their model assumed that 30 percent of voters at a polling place would be black, and that number actually turns out to be 20 percent, or 40 percent, then they’ll weight the data accordingly. During this period, they’re also entering any surveys that were sent in late (again, this is all based on incomplete data).

These adjustments, and the inclusion of those late surveys, can account for significant shifts between the preliminary numbers posted when the polls close and the release of the final exit polls an hour or so later. But the important point here is that the final results are more accurate, not less so.


Additionally the Washington Post reported on the recounts in Wisconsin and Michigan and found no difference between hand and machine recounts. Kind of obliterates the specious claims that there is vote changing, unless somehow the alleged hackers magically made it match the hand recounts.

Time for change

(13,714 posts)
13. That is wrong. The exit polls are always adjusted to match the official results before being
Mon Oct 1, 2018, 04:17 PM
Oct 2018

published for the public. If you disagree, find one example where they weren't. This is letter I wrote to the editor of The Nation about Joshuah Holland's misinformed article:



Dear Ms. vanden Heuvel,

I beg you to please check into the accuracy of Joshua Holland’s statements disparaging the use of exit polls to monitor elections. I’m sure he believes what he says, but he really doesn’t understand what he is writing about, and the misinformation that he delivers is not helping the effort to do something about the woeful and dangerous state of our election system.

I am a recently retired public health physician/epidemiologist who has been very concerned about election fraud in our country for many years. I did volunteer work for the Election Defense Alliance, as their data coordinator for a few years. I wrote and had a book on election fraud published by Biting Duck Press in October 2012: Democracy Undone: Unequal Representation, the Threat to our Election System, and the Demise of American Democracy.

I will concentrate here on the main theme of Holland’s June 2016 “Reminder: Exit-Poll Conspiracy Theories Are Totally Baseless”. He makes several related statements that are dead wrong about an issue that isn’t even arguable.

He says “The laziest iteration of these claims is that the exit polls have diverged significantly from the final vote tallies in many of the states that Clinton won, and the same pattern isn’t evident in Republican contests. That’s simply untrue….”. That’s his main theme. I’ll get to his rationale for that statement shortly. For now I’ll just refer to one of the articles that shows that the exit polls have indeed significantly diverged from final vote tallies – “Exit Polls versus Reported Vote Counts. 2016 Presidential Primaries” by Theodore de Macedo Soares. In the reported table, of the 23 states with exit poll data (not counting Wisconsin and Connecticut, for which confirmation was “pending” at the time of the article – and I’m not sure how that turned out), 20 demonstrated red shifts that favored Clinton in the official vote count compared to the exit polls, and 10 of those demonstrated discrepancies with the official results that were beyond the margin of statistical error. Of the 3 states that showed discrepancies in the other direction (in favor of Sanders in the official vote count), none were beyond the margin of statistical error.

To support his claim, Holland then says that “Their claims are based on obsessively parsing preliminary exit poll data…” Reading further, it turns out that what Holland refers to as “preliminary data” is actually the final unadjusted exit poll data (or the last unadjusted exit poll data that the election integrity activists can identify). This represents a critical misunderstanding on Holland’s part. He continues, “They say that the preliminary data are then adjusted to conform to the official results”. After some more discussion on this issue, Holland concludes “Every single part of that is 100 percent wrong”.

But it is not wrong at all – notwithstanding what Holland thought he understood from his talk with Joe Lenski. It is right on target. The exit polls published by CNN using the data from Edison Media research are adjusted/forced to fit the official election data before they are presented publicly -- always. If you don’t believe me, try analyzing any of that data from any election presented as exit poll data by CNN, to see how closely the exit poll data fit the official election data. In every case, they fit exactly (not counting rounding errors, of course). If that isn’t proof enough that the exit poll data is forced to fit the official election results, those who are involved in the exit poll operations do not deny this, nor do they attempt to argue that these adjusted exit polls indicate a close fit (other than one that is statistically forced) to the official results.

Instead, their argument (which I and many other knowledgeable people disagree with for reasons based on a good deal of research, but that is beyond the scope of this letter or anything that Holland has to say in this particular article) is simply that their exit polls are not useful for monitoring elections. Taking this further, the only potential reason that they can supply for why their exit polls diverge so much from the official results (and they do not deny the divergence nor the fact that so many elections have diverged – and always favoring the more conservative candidate in the official results compared to the exit polls) is response bias. In the case of the 2004 general Presidential election, they referred to this response bias as the “reluctant Bush responder” syndrome, otherwise known as the “shy Bush voter” syndrome. In other words, Bush voters were said to be less likely to respond to or respond accurately to the exit pollsters than Kerry voters. And presumably, regarding the continuing, large, and consistent red shifts we’ve seen since then in Presidential, Senate, House, and Governor races, it’s the more conservative voters who are always more likely to shy away from providing an accurate response to the exit pollster.

Holland’s misunderstanding on this can be very easily proven, for the reasons I discussed above. Election Fraud is strangling our democracy, and it will continue to worsen unless and until the American people understand what is happening and force corrective measures. Please don’t contribute to this terrible problem. I know you don’t want to be on the wrong side of this issue. I would love to talk with you or someone on your staff about it if you’re interested...


But even if you don't believe that we have been besieged by election fraud via electronic manipulation of the vote repeatedly during the 21st century, that is no excuse for allowing elections to be determined by vote counts that are unverifiable.

Tace

(6,800 posts)
15. Time for change: Thanks for your input on this
Tue Oct 2, 2018, 10:46 AM
Oct 2018

It's good for you to explain some of the details of your research.

Time for change

(13,714 posts)
14. Reason #1: Our Republican President and Congress don't want to do anything about it.
Mon Oct 1, 2018, 05:31 PM
Oct 2018

In fact, Trump, after incessantly complaining about election fraud prior to the 2016 election, successfully fought off vote recounts following his surprising victory, with lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Losing candidate Jill Stein raised several million dollars for recounts in those states before Trump intervened to quash them. Because of the ridiculously high costs, Stein was unable to raise enough money to request recounts in North Carolina or Florida. Exit polls very near to the time of poll closing showed Clinton winning all five of those states.

That leaves the question as to why Democratic politicians have not been more aggressive about demanding election reform and complaining about election fraud. That is a difficult question to answer, and I don't know the answer. Jonathan Simon makes an educated guess to the answer in his book, "Code Red: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy". I'll give a summary of what he says about it, because I can't think of a better answer, except to suppose that maybe they've been taken in by the same bogus arguments that most of the American people have bought into (which is hard to believe, but who knows?):

1) There is enormous pressure on the losing candidate to concede.... For many such candidates, challenging an election, no matter how suspect the results, can understandably be seen as an act of political suicide...

2) As for the Democrats successfully elected and serving in office, it would take a rare politician to challenge, or even support a challenge to the legitimacy of the very system that brought him or her into power. (Although, Hillary Clinton did support Jill Stein's request for recounts in PA, WI, and MI in the 2016 elections).

3) Democrats depend upon and are obsessed with turnout (understandably). Democratic strategists fear that playing up any concerns about the honesty of elections and vote counting will discourage and lost potential voters...

4) Democrats are firmly entrenched in the corridors of power and would remain so even as a minority Party.... Election rigging... can transform (and copious evidence suggests, has already transformed) the American political spectrum, sliding it further and further to the right, without disturbing the two party system and the power duopoly it bestows on both parties... It is not at all clear that corporate trough-feeding Democrats would like to jeopardize that arrangement, opening the electoral doors to progressives, mavericks, and third parties. The true victims of election rigging in America is not the Democratic Party, but the American people...



Simon goes on to say that there seems to be an almost religious belief, even among professionals, concerning the integrity of our elections -- i.e. an irrational failure to acknowledge the extent of the problem even in the face of abundant evidence. He recounts a conversation he had with Cornell Belcher, chief pollster for the DNC at the time. Belcher would not buy into Simon's arguments about the extent of electronic vote rigging in our country. But Belcher did say, "You know, we have the same problem with our own internal polling. In important races, when polls show our guy up by 10%, we've learned that we need to regard the race as a dead-heat toss-up." Simon wonders about how Belcher can acknowledge that about internal polls (which presumably he regards as accurate) without being suspicious of vote rigging. Simon goes on to say:

When such internal polls (for important races) are consistently "off" in the neighborhood of 10%, all sorts of alarm bells should be ringing and ringing loud. It takes a religious belief in the sanctity of an entirely unseen process... to be deaf to those bells.


JudyM

(29,122 posts)
3. Essential priority for our congresscritters.
Mon Oct 1, 2018, 10:52 AM
Oct 2018

Along with fighting back against Citizens United. Fundamental ruptures in our democracy.

karin_sj

(805 posts)
4. This is of the utmost importance
Mon Oct 1, 2018, 11:41 AM
Oct 2018

It's horrible that it has been going on so long without any meaningful and effective efforts to stop it. And it will continue as long as they can get away with it.

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