Election: Will the 2016 Primaries Be Electronically Rigged?

Article author: 
Victoria Collier and Ben Ptashnik
Article publisher: 
Truthout
Article date: 
5 February 2016
Article category: 
National News
Tags: 
Medium
Article Body: 
...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.
 
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...
 
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...
 
Voter apathy and ignorance create the ideal conditions for election rigging...

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, 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...

South Carolina's bizarre and clearly fraudulent US Senate race in 2010 is the subject of a new documentary on rigged elections, I Voted?...

In the GOP primary, for example, the campaign for popular libertarian crusader Ron Paul found these discrepancies between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted results to be a red flag...

Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell, who had publicly pledged to deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004, was later mired in widespread accusations of a conspiracy to rig out Kerry late on election night in Ohio. Top cyber-security experts charged that Karl Rove's online vote-gathering apparatus used a "man in the middle" hack to alter the results, in collusion with the ultra partisan Ohio secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Committee to Re-Elect George W. Bush.

The man who built the vote-tabulating system, GOP tech guru Michael Connell, died in a suspicious private plane crash after being subpoenaed and then compelled to testify against Rove. Two election officials were eventually convicted of rigging the Ohio recount...

Visit the National Election Defense Coalition's website to learn more about how to reform our elections process.


 

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Microsoft volunteered to provide the technology to help tally up the results of Iowa's caucus, free of charge… The contests in both parties are expected to go down to the wire… Pete D'Alessandro, who runs the Sanders operation in Iowa, last week questioned the tech giant's motivations… Other aides to Sanders noted that Microsoft employees have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Clinton campaign, according to MSNBC. "You'd have to ask yourself why they'd want to give something like that away for free," D'Alessandro said.

Is This How Rubio Got 23%?, Information Liberation, February 2, 2016.

 
 
 

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