CODE RED-Computerized Election Theft

CODE RED-Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century

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Notes on Election Forensics, Exit Polls, and Baseline Validation

August 8, 2018 By Jonathan Simon

As an election forensics analyst, I have frequently been called upon to explain and defend pattern evidence indicating the targeted mistabulation of votes as a probable cause of pervasive anomalies and disparities. While far more detailed explanations can be found in a number of studies my colleagues and I have conducted, I think it may be useful to set out the fundamental bases for reliance on the approaches we have taken and the conclusions we have reached.

First a word about the need to rely on such “indirect” methods of election verification. It is not something that has been thought about or talked about much, but the vote counting process in the United States is designed for concealment. Most absurdly, the code that counts or miscounts votes has been ruled a corporate trade secret that cannot be divulged or examined under any circumstances.

Nor does the concealment stop with the code. All the “hard” evidence—memory cards, programming code, server logs, and actual cast ballots—is strictly off-limits to the public and, in most cases, to election administrators as well. Given that two corporations supply nearly 80 percent of the hardware and software used to count votes in the U.S., and given that the handful of equipment suppliers and their handful of programming/distributing satellite contractors actually constitute a consolidated and easily targeted closed (indeed virtually hermetic) system, no comfort should be taken from erroneous reassurances that the process is somehow too “decentralized” to be vulnerable to either hacking or insider manipulation.

It is precisely because of the secretive nature of the American vote counting process and because all the hard evidence is inaccessible, that the forensic investigation of election security and authenticity perforce has come down primarily to numerical, statistical, and pattern analysis. Following along after the election circus with a forensic pooper-scooper may not strike you as the best way to try to insure democracy; but until the public reclaims its right of access to voted-on ballots and the counting process, it just happens to be the only way we’ve got.

That said, such numerical, statistical, and pattern analysis is relied upon routinely in fields ranging from aerospace to economics, climate study, epidemiology and disease control. It is also routinely applied, often with the sanction of the government of the United States, to elections pretty much everywhere on Earth other than in the United States, periodically leading to official calls for electoral investigations and indeed electoral re-dos. Exit poll disparities have factored in the overturning of elections from the Ukraine to Peru and are relied upon for validation of votecounts in Western democracies such as Germany.

Disparities, whether in a bank audit or in an election, require explanation. Which is to say, when measurements of what is ostensibly the same phenomenon fail to agree, there exists some cause: one or both of the measurements are inaccurate. In the case of elections, it has generally been assumed that the votecounts are accurate and any other incongruent measure is therefore erroneous. There is, however, given the known vulnerabilities of the vote counting process to manipulation, little or no basis for that assumption of accuracy. As for the other, incongruent measures, there is also no reason to assume their accuracy. If they are to serve as baselines for assessing the accuracy of vote counts, these other measures must themselves be validated. Much of our work as forensic analysts goes into that process—and it is that work that is often ignored or misunderstood in the rush to dismiss red flags and “protect the shield” of our elections.

When official votecounts come out to the right of other measures of voters’ intent—such as exit polls, pre-election polls, post-election polls, and handcounts—forensic analysts refer to it as a “red shift.”1 Since 2002, when the computers took over the counting, the red shift has been pervasive: election after election, in competitive contests bearing national significance,2 the official votecount has been to the right of every baseline measure. We very rarely see the reverse, which we would call a “blue shift.” There is a tremendous amount of data and it all points in the same direction.3 It is critical to grasp the enormous difference in probative value between a single statistical red flag and this years-long parade of unidirectional red flags. The latter rules out chance, glitches, flukes as cause, leaving only systemic inaccuracies and distortions of either the votecount or the baseline measures as possible explanations for the pattern.

From a forensic standpoint, as noted above, much of our work goes into determining whether those baselines from which the official votecounts keep diverging are themselves valid. Naturally, if you simply assume all votecounts are valid, you would then look for reasons to dismiss any data that disagrees with them. You could, for example, disparage all the incongruent exit polls as “off again” because they “oversampled Democrats.” However, we have examined exit poll samples and other baselines closely and found that such is not the case—the problem is definitely not that all these other measures of voter intent are chronically incompetent or corrupted.

In 2006, for instance, we examined the national exit poll sample and found that it was to the right of every other independent measure of the national electorate. We knew, therefore, that the massive red shift we found in the 2006 election could not have been a function of a faulty (i.e., left-skewed) exit poll baseline, leaving mistabulation of the votes as the only explanation for the shift that could not be discounted.4 We went further in 2006 (and again in 2008) and, recognizing that competitive races are natural targets for rigging (the outcome can be altered with a modest manipulation, yielding a high reward/risk ratio) while noncompetitive races are not (much higher risk factor: to alter the outcome you have to shift too high a percentage of votes to pass the smell test), we compared competitive with noncompetitive races relative to an identical baseline. We found that the more competitive a race the more likely it was to be red shifted—the correlation was dramatic.5

In 20106 we were able to compare hand-counted to computer-counted ballots in a critical U.S. Senate race (Massachusetts: Coakley vs. Brown) and again found an outcome-altering red shift of the computer-counted votes, one that we were unable to explain by any factor other than strategically mistabulated votecounts.7

More recently, in 2016, our analysis of the respective party primaries found that, while the exit poll results were consistently accurate throughout nearly all the Republican primaries, they were wildly and broadly inaccurate in the Democratic primaries, exhibiting a pervasive intra-party “red shift” to the detriment of Bernie Sanders. It seems very unlikely that the same pollsters, employing the same methodological techniques and interviewing voters at the same precincts on the same days, would be competent and consistently successful with Republicans but somehow incompetent and consistently unsuccessful with Democrats.

In the 2016 general election, the critical “swing” states that provided Trump’s electoral college majority—including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina—were among the most egregiously red-shifted of all the states, with poll-votecount disparities far outside the margins of error.8 As in the election of 2004 and the 2016 primaries, it was the overall contrasting pattern that was most remarkable—as the National Exit Poll, which impounded the many “safe” states where manipulation was not suspected, was not red-shifted outside the margin of error. That is, the pollsters “got it right,” except in those states with close Trump victories that produced his Electoral College majority. We can of course choose, at our peril, to believe that, election after election, such things “just keep happening.”

E2016 in fact offered up a quintessence of what is wrong with whatever debate there is over indicators of electoral foul play, and the general under-appreciation of the subtlety of forensic analysis. Much was made of the apparently egregious over-representation of college graduates in the National Exit Poll sample. With an “Aha!” that could be heard on Mars, the poll was declared “garbage” and tossed hastily and permanently in the shredder because 50 percent of its respondents had declared themselves to be college grads. The impact of education level on candidate choice was modest (about the equivalent of gender and far below race), but this did not stop the critics from fastening on the 50 percent figure (which it must be said would not even have been available to fasten on were the exit polls as opaque in their revelations as are the votecounts), which they calculated implied an unrealistic rate of turnout among college grads.

What the scoffing and whewing herd apparently failed to notice was that the exit poll they had just trashed—along, it soon became clear, with every other exit poll ever conducted or to be conducted in the United States—was accurate! That’s right, accurate. The unadjusted National Exit Poll approximated Clinton’s popular vote victory margin within 1.1 percent. It was accurate enough as to require hardly any adjustment—and, if it hadn’t been for the major disparities in the Trump table-run battleground states, would not have required any adjustment at all.

How, then, to read this riddle? How could a poll with such an apparent demographic goof wind up so close to the mark? What no critic apparently understood, or wanted to understand, is something very basic and essential to exit poll methodology: multiple stratification (weighting). Exit pollsters know enough not to expect equivalent response rates across race, age, gender, income, education, and partisanship groups. They use data-rich models, as in many other sciences, to weight their samples accordingly. It has been my observation that the aggregate impact of these multiple weightings—because they are grounded at least in part on demographic data derived from prior elections’ exit polls that have been adjusted rightward to congruence with red-shifted votecounts—tends to be rightward. That is, there are factors in the exit pollsters’ weighting algorithm that tend to chronically push the sample a few points to the right. The over-representation of college grads pushed the sample a point or two to the left. Such weightings tug against one another—so, for example, the sample might wind up over-representing the college-educated but under-representing non-white voters. The art and science of exit polling lies in getting those balances right, and they’ve sure enough had a lot of practice (in fact, prior to the computerized voting era, the main problem with exit polls was that they were so accurate that the pollsters had to agree to withhold their results until polls had closed in order not to discourage late-day turnout).

It’s a complex process and you could say, I suppose, “the secret’s in the sauce” (although, again, this sauce is far less secret than the votecounts themselves—the numbers are there to inspect and compare, at https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls/national/president for the adjusted National poll and on this website for the unadjusted screencaptures, along with a more complete analysis of the polling methodology).

But you can also say “the proof’s in the pudding.” The fact is that the National Exit Poll—the one torn apart by a posse of critics sorely lacking in understanding of exit poll methodology, many of whom have been hell-bent on discrediting exit polls as a verification tool since 2004—got it right, while the exit polls by the same firm, using the same methodological “sauce,” in the critical battleground states table-run by Trump, were way off, all in the same direction. That is a damning second-order comparative, and the best evidence we can get from a system determined to withhold all its “hard” evidence, a process designed for concealment. So far, to my knowledge, no one has established a benign explanation for this, or numerous other, telling patterns of disparity.9

I hope that any reader troubled by the evidence summarized here, and/or by its facile dismissal by those who would prefer not to grapple with its implications, will take the time to examine the studies included in the “Evidence and Analysis” chapter of CODE RED, all of which are fully accessible to the non-statistician. In conclusion, the key point is that it is not just a few instances or an equivocal pattern, nor can it be attributed to skewed baselines—it is pervasive. It is difficult to look at all this data gathered together and not emerge gravely concerned that elections have been systematically manipulated and strongly moved to further investigate that possibility.

Careful! The Danger of Tuesday’s Democratic Sweep . . . To Elections and To Democrats

November 9, 2017 By Jonathan Simon Leave a Comment

With no apologies for being the turd in the punchbowl, I want to share my reading of yesterday’s election. There’s a lot of undisguised celebrating going on – even among the nominally and professionally impartial – and I have already had to respond to a fair number of “See I told you there was nothing to worry about!” pokes. However . . .

Lest anyone for a minute believe that yesterday’s results – the Democratic sweep and thump of #Trump – provide assurance that our elections are now secure and that no one is targeting 2018 or 2020 for votecount manipulation, please understand that that is seriously wishful thinking. There are very good reasons that entities with capacity to interfere with the counting process in these particular contests would have taken a pass, which it appears they did.

1) The actual victory margins in key contests were large – altering outcomes would have brought the smell test very much into play.

2) The prizes, significant as they may be, were a drop in the bucket compared to what is on the table in 2018. Given the now-heightened scrutiny of our election processes (and of course concerns about “the Russians”), it would make little strategic sense to trigger red flags now – thereby putting urgency into the effort to button-up election security before 2018. Indeed it would have been a gross strategic blunder.

3) Virginia had decertified its paperless machines (DREs), so that, unlike GA-6 this summer, voting was entirely on paper and recounts/audits would have been in play in the event of “issues” with the count (anomalous results, exit poll-votecount disparities, etc.). In fact, five state legislative elections are being recounted, with control of the Virginia House of Delegates in the balance. Election administration at the state level was, crucially, under Democratic control. New Jersey, although using DREs, was simply too big a margin – a Guadagno win would have failed the smell test spectacularly.

Even for those contests within smell-test range, the overarching analogy here is to the pool shark: missing makeable shots is part of the hustle, indeed essential to the hustle. Same for a poker cheat. If you win every hand, either no one will play or they will start making you play in short sleeves. You save those up-sleeve aces for the big pots.

We’ve been around this block many times. People can’t wait to say “There! You see, it’s all good now!” When Democrats win, whether it’s Obama in 2008 and 2012 (the mechanisms for which are explained in detail in CODE RED or in E2017 this Tuesday, the reflex assumption is that it proves U.S. elections are safe and secure. This is, ironically, because virtually every piece of evidence collected over the 15 years of the computerized vote-counting era points to distortions or manipulations favoring the more right-wing candidate or position. If some champion of the Right is so good at rigging, goes the thinking, and if elections could still be rigged, why would he/she/it ever, in a competitive election, allow the Democrat or left-winger to win? Ipso facto, Tuesday’s result prove rigging is not possible, so the thinking goes.

Strategically, rigging Tuesday night would have been idiotic, but we will have to spell this out over and over again, so strong is the desire to seize upon any apparent evidence that things are on the up and up.

Yesterday’s results should do nothing to reassure anyone about the security of our elections or diminish by a hair the urgency of our efforts to restore public and observable vote counting. We have seen way too many aces drop out of sleeves to think for a minute that this game is being played straight. If we do, we’re the perfect mark.

To me, ironically, the takeaway from yesterday is that this is more or less what elections in an observably counted United States would look like: Unadjusted Exit Polls, for the first time in 15 years, spot-on wherever conducted; no “red shift;” no head-scratching, against-interest, right-wing victories.

But anyone who draws the conclusion, based on yesterday’s results, that 2018 won’t be rigged is someone I’d love to play poker with.

Yesterday’s results speak volumes about the truth of our country and are worth real celebration. Then . . . back to the task at hand.

GA-6 Handel Campaign Flyer w/Absentee Ballot App

July 11, 2017 By Jonathan Simon

Jon Ossoff won the GA-6 June 20 runoff Mail-In Vote 64% to 36%. Some speculated that it was because his campaign had promoted mail-in voting among supporters. No Ossoff campaign literature linked to mail-in voting could be found, but the above flyer was sent by the Handel campaign.

19 Big Myths About Our Elections That Government and Media Hope You’ll Believe

July 4, 2017 By Jonathan Simon

Donald Trump was right. In a twisted way.

Trump claimed that the presidential election was “rigged” against him. His advance declaration that he wouldn’t vow to accept the results of the election was met with loud efforts to reassure the public that our elections are safe, and rigging is not possible.

That’s where the politicians and the media had it wrong.

Politicians and the media want you to trust our election system and Americans do deserve that. But the solution is to make our election system trustworthy, not just to claim that it is. The truth about our vote-counting process is that it is computerized, privatized, outsourced to a few corporations and, above all, unobservable. Which means that it is vulnerable to systemic fraud and it cannot prove or demonstrate that it is fraud-free.

Our elections are not safe. Rigging is possible. Computerized vote counting, taking place in the pitch-dark of cyberspace, is open to manipulation and election theft by outsiders, including foreign state actors like Russia, and even more open to insiders with easy access.

In thinking about our elections to come and how our votes are counted, there are some myths and facts we all should consider. As you read through the Myths and Facts below, judge for yourself how secure and worthy of trust our current election system is and how critical it is that we collectively take the necessary steps to fix it.

Myth 1:

If we trust ATMs with our money, we can trust computers to count our votes

Fact:

These two uses of computers are radically different. If an ATM “made a mistake” or was programmed to take your deposited check and add it to the account of someone else, you’d notice the missing check on your next bank statement. You’d go down to the bank and ask politely (or not) what had become of it. You’d know there was a problem, and so would everyone else who was being scammed. This deters banks and their employees from trying to steal your money.

Any “broken” ATM would quickly be discovered and fixed.

With voting, however, if the touchscreen or scanner or central tabulator “made a mistake” or was programmed to delete your vote or flip it to a different candidate invisibly, you would have no idea that this had happened. Thousands, ultimately millions, of votes could be affected without knowledge of voters or election officials. Voting on computers, unlike using an ATM, is 100% “faith-based.” We have just come to assume that because America is a great democracy, computerized election theft could never happen here.

Myth 2:

My vote didn’t “flip” on the screen, so everything’s OK

Fact:

It is child’s play to program a touchscreen computer to display a vote for “A” on the screen and record a vote for “B” on its memory card. Same with the new barcode ballot-marking devices (BMDs), which are currently being rushed into deployment in many key states: the human-unreadable barcode or QR code is the vote of record and can easily be programmed to differ from the readable choices printed on a “summary card.” As for counting, it takes three inserted lines of code (out of 500,000 or so lines of code already on a memory card) to offset the “zero counters” to start the count for “A” at, say, +100 and for “B” at -100. At the close of voting the machine shows the “correct” number of total votes (+100 – 100 = 0) and the election administrator sees and certifies a clean election, even though a net of 200 votes were shifted. This and many other games are what make vote counting on computers so vulnerable and so dangerous.

Myth 3:

As long as I hand-mark a paper ballot, my vote is safe

Fact:

98% of paper ballots, whether cast at your precinct or mailed in, are counted by computers known as optical scanners (“opscans”). Inside is a memory card, smaller than a credit card, programmed with over 500,000 lines of code. Opscans read ballots and count votes according to the way they were programmed by the corporation that produced them or whoever hacks into them. They even break some votes down into little pieces, hundredths of a vote. As noted in Myth 2 above, sneaking three lines of code into the 500,000+ lines on the memory card can completely change the election results. Such rigs are easy and could be done by a high school-level coder.

Myth 4:

Election audits protect our vote by catching any errors

Fact:

There is no uniform audit of American elections. Many states, including some of the key swing states in this year’s election, have no audits at all. Others have audits that are ineffective owing to one or more of these factors:

  • the sample is way too small
  • the places to be audited are tipped off in advance
  • with BMDs, what’s being audited are the computer’s choices, not necessarily the voter’s
  • the audit is conducted in private, days after the election
  • the chain of custody of the ballots has not been maintained

Unless audits are made uniform, performed truly at random on Election Night before the ballots are moved, and given real teeth, they offer nothing but a false sense of security.

Myth 5:

The fact that each state runs its own elections and uses different equipment makes major election theft impossible

Fact:

There are actually very few voting equipment vendors and very few types of equipment. Virtually all of it is vulnerable to rigging and virtually all of it is under the technical control of the manufacturers and their sub-contractors. State and local election administrators rarely have the technical capacity (the “chops”) to “look under the hood” and know what the contractors are doing or how the programming works. The public is told to take on faith that everyone with access to the computers, their programming, maintenance, and distribution, is serving the public interest rather than a private or partisan agenda. Given the ethics of politics and of our time, that is asking a lot.

Myth 6:

Polls are just predictions and have nothing to do with protecting our elections from fraud

Fact:

A specific kind of polling—exit polling—is the main way that countries around the world are alerted to the presence of fraud in their elections. Before vote counting was handed over to the computers, exit polls in America were consistently accurate. They are still accurate in countries like Germany that use hand counting. In the 2016 presidential primaries, the exit polls got nearly all the Republican primaries right and all the Democratic primaries wrong (nearly all in the same direction!), using the same methods, at the same precincts, on the same days. Then, in the general election in November 2016, while the National Exit Poll was accurate to 1.1%, the red shifts (disparity between exit poll and votecount) in the key states that Trump swept by tiny margins for his Electoral College victory were well outside the margins of error and outcome-reversing: 2.5% in Florida, 4.6% in Wisconsin, 5.1% in Pennsylvania, and 5.6% in North Carolina! A single exit poll isn’t perfect, but when we keep seeing egregious telltale patterns like that, it’s time to look at the votecounts and see what might be “off” with them. Put another way, on what basis should we have more faith in secret computerized votecounts than we do in far more transparent exit polls?

Myth 7:

The biggest danger to our elections comes from outside hackers like the Russians

Fact:

There’s a lot of worry of late that some foreign country might take advantage of the security holes in our voting system to mess with our elections. That’s certainly not impossible but … it is even easier for the insiders programming and distributing the computers to shift votes and change results. While outside hackers have relatively limited access to the vote counting process (only where it goes through the internet), insiders working anywhere within the secretive outfits that count our votes have total access to the whole vote counting system. So it’s as if, worried about the security of our “electoral house,” we’re going around checking windows for signs of forcible entry–all the while completely ignoring the folks with keys to the front door, who are sitting around the kitchen table drinking a beer! With so much at stake in our elections, the Russians are obviously not the only ones with a motive (and cash) to dictate outcomes. Yet the mainstream media absolutely refuses to say a word about the domestic danger. Why?

Myth 8:

Voting machines are tested to make sure they’re counting accurately

Fact:

Where voting machines are tested, it is often by the vendors themselves or by outfits paid by the vendors, an obvious conflict of interest. Even when the testing is done by well-meaning election officials, it is not difficult to program a computer to pass a pre-election test (and a post-election test) with flying colors but tabulate the votes inaccurately when it counts on Election Day. The automobile manufacturer Volkswagen was caught doing exactly this with their cars—programming them to pass emissions tests and then pollute up a storm once they were sold and on the road for real. Election rigging is cybercrime. Like other types of cybercrime, it’s easy to do and difficult to prevent or detect.

Myth 9:

Ballots are always public records and, if there is any question, candidates or voters have a right to examine them

Fact:

State after state has been passing legislation to remove ballots from the reach of public records laws like the Freedom of Information Act. Again and again, investigators have been denied access to voter-marked ballots and to memory cards and computer code used to count them. The whole process is becoming less, not more, transparent. Even in the most suspect elections, citizens almost never have the right to an observable count of the ballots. Where candidates might technically have such a right, it is made too expensive for candidates–their war chests depleted at the end of their campaigns–to afford. The ballots, like the memory cards that do the counting, are regarded as strictly corporate property. All that investigators of suspect elections can do is try to bring attention to the recurring data patterns that don’t fit with honest and accurate vote counts. That evidence is almost always ignored or discounted by government and media alike.

Myth 10:

Election thieves are so focused on the White House that they don’t pay much attention to other contests

Fact:

There is pervasive evidence of electoral cyber-theft all the way down the ballot. With down-ballot contests like the U.S. House of Representatives and state legislatures, the risk of detection is super low (no exit polls, very little attention and scrutiny) but the reward is huge: long-term control of American politics. State legislatures can pass restrictive Voter ID laws, gut any campaign finance regulations that have been left in place by the Supreme Court, and lock in permanent majorities through gerrymandering. This is exactly what has happened. The media focuses 99% of its attention (and the public’s attention) on the presidency, but election thieves are smarter than that.

Myth 11:

Obama’s victory in 2012 proves that US elections are secure

Fact:

When Ohio’s official state vote counting computers “went down” late on Election Night (at just about the same time as they “went down” in 2004, sending the votes to backup servers set up by Karl Rove’s late “IT guru,” Mike Connell), Rove was on FOX News publicly disputing his own network’s call of Ohio and the presidency for Obama. He ominously referred to “server problems” and predicted a late-night turn-around in the results. But the organization Anonymous revealed that it had infiltrated Rove’s “ORCA” operation and changed the passwords, locking Rove’s techies out of the computers set up to do what many forensics specialists believe Connell’s had done in 2004—flip the votes. “May the best cyber-thief win” is not what you probably think of as a “secure election.”

Myth 12:

The Voting Rights Act protects people of color from discrimination in elections

Fact:

In a 5-to-4 party-line decision the Supreme Court recently gutted the key provision of the Voting Rights Act that protected minorities from Jim Crow discrimination and cynical voter suppression laws and regulations. Making it harder to cast a vote has become a big part of winning elections (or at least narrowing the gap to the point where vote-shifting computers can reverse the result while passing the smell test). One trick played in many red and swing states is to close local precincts and combine a whole bunch of them into “voting centers.”

That’s fine, as long as you have a car to get to voting places miles away and lots of leisure time to wait for hours to vote. This is not random or geographical or budgetary—it is a deliberate tactic that effectively suppresses the vote of the poor, the young, the elderly, and minorities. The less effectively you govern and the less popular you become, the more thumbs it takes on the electoral scales to keep your hold on power. Both STRIP (targeted voter suppression) and FLIP (targeted votecount manipulation) become necessary elements of the game plan.

Myth 13:

Election theft is obviously taken more seriously than the air pressure in footballs

Fact:

Millions of dollars were spent investigating “Deflategate.” Footballs and cellphones were impounded, possible perps and witnesses grilled. The science of air pressure, the character of everyone from Tom Brady and Roger Goodell to Ted Olsen, every forensic finding and legal maneuver, were national headline news for months. Memory cards and code used to program voting computers are never impounded, never examined—no matter how suspect an election’s result. Neither are the actual voter-marked ballots. Is this because in America football matters more than the results of our elections and the direction of our country?

Myth 14:

Election rigging and hacking may be possible, but those things haven’t happened yet.

Fact:

With cheating everywhere from athletics to academics to Wall Street, do you really believe that super high-stakes and super vulnerable American elections would be immune? A great deal of forensic evidence indicates that election theft has happened throughout the computerized vote counting era. Because all “hard” evidence—like memory cards, code, and voter-marked ballots—is strictly off-limits to public inspection, almost all of the tell-tale evidence involves numbers and comparisons, and consistently bizarre patterns. The complex nature of the evidence makes it possible for those who don’t want to check the air pressure in our electoral footballs to dismiss it or ignore it.

Myth 15:

Hand counting ballots only works in small towns, there are just too many voters in big towns and cities

Fact:

Where there are more voters and more ballots, there are more counters to count them. It’s proportional. Humans counted votes in America for the better part of two centuries. It would take four hours once in each voter’s life to restore an observable vote counting process with hand-counted ballots. We’ve spent $2 billion a week on our mission to bring “democracy” to Iraq and Afghanistan. A month of Iraq/Afghanistan would buy us 30 years of hand-counted elections at a pay rate of $20/hour here in America. And it would actually cost less than continuing to use the computers.

Myth 16:

“Voter fraud” is a huge problem in U.S. elections

Fact:

Voter fraud is extremely rare and has virtually zero impact on election outcomes. Proponents of Voter ID laws tried mightily to support their legislation with examples of the voter fraud it was supposedly intended to prevent. They couldn’t find any. Donald Trump continues to search for the five million “illegal” voters who cost him the popular vote victory he still craves. But he and the short-lived Commission he appointed (led by CrossCheck architect and Vote-Suppressor-In-Chief, Kris Kobach, and including of all people the notorious J. Kenneth Blackwell) never found any. Unlike fraud by individual voters, computerized rigging or hacking can change massive numbers of votes and the outcomes of many contests up and down the ballot.

Myth 17:

It would take a vast conspiracy to rig an election

Fact:

A very small operation, even a single individual, can change the results of hundreds of contests. It’s a pattern we’re seeing with all cyber-crime: no big operations, just a few bad actors. That’s the nature and the vulnerability of computers and cyberspace—it’s the trade-off for all that speed and convenience we love so much.

Myth 18:

The reassurance, by Homeland Security and other investigators, that although attempts were made to hack the 2016 Election “no evidence of actual votes being affected has been found,” comes after a thorough examination of equipment, memory cards, and other “hard” evidence

Fact:

The Department of Homeland Security has very quietly acknowledged that it has found no evidence of actual vote manipulation because it hasn’t looked for any! (see http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/dhs-doesnt-want-to-know-about-vote-hacks). That’s right, making a you-can’t-handle-the-truth command decision, in the wake of the 2016 election DHS blankly refused to obtain and inspect a single piece of voting equipment, a single memory card, a single string of code, or a single voter-marked paper ballot (which by federal law must be retained for 22 months following an election)! This is an excellent way to not find evidence. Colonel Nathan Jessup meet Inspector Jacques Clouseau.

Myth 19:

There’s nothing we as citizens and voters can do to change the voting system

Fact:

Other countries—like Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Ireland—have made big changes, including return to hand counting. In America, we’ve been sold on the speed and convenience of computers and on elections as entertainment. But just look at what has happened to our politics! The American people deserve better, but only if we are willing to stand up and fight for it. All over the country, advocates for election justice are doing just that.

The system has proven unresponsive—the government and media simply ignore evidence of electoral cybercrime (and if there is any, it must be “the Russians;” it couldn’t possibly be domestic!). The real issue comes down to information control: Whose ballots are they? Do they belong to the public—with a right to review them, count them, observe that count—or to a few secretive corporations? We have a right as citizens to reclaim our elections and our sovereignty.

Find out how we can turn that right into a reality. Begin reading CODE RED now for free at CodeRed2014.com

CODE RED bookcover image

Donald Trump Warned of a “Rigged” Election: Was He Right?

June 27, 2017 By Jonathan Simon

With Donald Trump formally installed in the Oval Office, election integrity activist Jonathan Simon crunches the numbers and reflects on Election 2016, the death of electoral transparency and the thwarting of public will.

As Published in MintPressNews
By Jonathan D. Simon @JonathanSimon14 | January 24, 2017

Whether viewed in terms of outcome or of process, the story of the 2016 presidential election is one so grim that it calls for a trigger warning for anyone of ethical sensibilities or faith in the workings of democracy. In a year that will be remembered by many for the number of revered individuals we lost, it is an open question whether our democracy itself should top the list of the dearly departed, or whether rumors of its demise are exaggerated and it is with us still, lingering on in the ICU and facing a long and arduous road to recovery. If one of democracy’s vital organs is acknowledged to be an electoral process that permits the undistorted translation of collective public will into the electoral results that determine leadership, policy, and national direction, then 2016 goes down as the year that this vital organ, long diseased, finally failed. If the patient is to be nursed back to health, our search for a cure begins with a thorough case history and an unblinking examination of our stage-4 electoral pathology.

How did we get here?
An election year is made up of innumerable events and constant flux. If we take an alpha-to-omega overview of the 2016 presidential election, the first thing that jumps out from the thousands of event pixels is the fact that America entered 2016 with the near consensus recognition that something serious needed to be done to deal with runaway economic inequality. The year ended, however, with a president-elect and Cabinet representing not the “1%,” but the “0.1%,” portending not merely a step but a giant leap away from economic equality and toward outright plutocracy. The nation that came into the year coalescing around the need to seriously address climate change and the easy availability of guns, exited it in the hands of a climate change denier and new darling of the NRA. A nation that seemed anxious about the relatively mild pay-to-play concerns raised by the Clinton Foundation, wound up with an all but branded White House, its chief and ancillary occupants boasting more and deeper conflicts of interest than any in our long history.

In reviewing the elections of the year 2016, we will want to ask how we wound up, in virtually every dimension, zigging when we meant to zag. How did such a seemingly fundamental reversal of public will (and taste) come to pass? How did the gears of our electoral process mesh (or slip) to lead us to such a bleak moment in our national journey, as we rang in the New Year in our hospital bed, a forlorn “Get Well Soon” balloon bobbing from the bedpost.

Emergence of the politics of disgust
In the dog days of 2015, the ho-hum assumption was the “inevitability” of a Jeb Bush/Hillary Clinton matchup, or at least some tight variation on that theme. But as the campaigns got started in earnest and the public began to displace the pundits and weigh in with their votes, a very different picture began to emerge. It seemed that “upstarts” like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were pulling bigger crowds and generating far more enthusiasm than any of the “establishment” candidates, wherever those candidates attempted to position themselves on the traditional political spectrum. Voters — right, left, and center — registered their distress at the dysfunctionality and unresponsiveness of the political hierarchy by turning to candidates promising some sort of fundamental change.
Trump, who promised change from the right, melted his various, more conventional opponents and became the Republican nominee. Sanders, who promised change from the left (and who consistently far out-polled both Trump straight-up and Clinton when tested in matchups against Trump), was sent packing. Was there any more to that primary season outcome than simply one upstart winning and another upstart losing? The forensic answer to this question was troubling.

Attempting (and failing) to verify computerized vote counting in the primaries
Since votes are counted unobservably in the pitch-dark of cyberspace and our voting equipment and programming (unlike our footballs) are essentially off-limits to inspection, election forensics comes down perforce to indirect measures of patterns and anomalies, from which red flags may emerge to suggest “problems” with the vote counting process. Baselines commonly used for this verification process range from exit polls and pre-election polls, to hand counts (in the very few places where they still exist), to parallel contests too noncompetitive to be likely targets for malfeasance, to vote count patterns correlated with type or brand of counting equipment (e.g., paperless touchscreen vs. optical scanner or Dominion Voting vs. ES&S). In the 2016 primaries, it was primarily the exit polls that waved the red flags, although there were other strongly corroborating indicators.

Unlike previous eras, exit polls — or at least those in competitive elections bearing national significance — in the era of computerized voting have been so habitually “off” in the same direction (to the “left” of the vote counts) that many, having first presumed the accuracy of the vote counts, have come to dismiss the polls as faulty, the pollsters as biased or incompetent. This jaundiced view prevails despite the existence of studies confirming the demographic validity of exit poll samples.

But the pattern of exit poll and vote count results in the 2016 primaries was strange enough that it should have given pause to even the most hardened skeptics. To continue reading, please click HERE.
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When Push Comes To Shove: Polls, Petitions, Protests, Parades, and Elections

June 27, 2017 By Jonathan Simon

Adapted from Article Published by Truthout, April 4, 2017

by Jonathan D. Simon

If we are to go by the polls, Donald Trump has the look of a one-term president. After two tumultuous months in office, Trump’s approval rating hovers around 40%, an historic low for this stage of a presidency. And the eye test confirms what the numbers tell us: floods of letters and petitions, massive protests, packed town halls, parades, and relentless media reportage of and comment upon daily, if not hourly, missteps, lies, and scandals. It is a multi-dimensional train wreck of undeniably epic proportions, with some already openly speculating about rescue via impeachment or perhaps the removal provisions of the 25th Amendment.

But American democracy does not run on polls, or on the eye test. It runs on elections, the periodic and infrequent right of review granted to (or reserved by, depending how one looks at it) the people. When the people vote and the votes are counted, that is the reality and in a sense the only reality, the push-come-to-shove of American politics. As we just witnessed in 2016, everything else, like a murky abstract or impressionist painting, gives way before this biennial Election Night portrait painted by a photo-realist working in reds and blues. Polls (“RIGGED!”), investigations and reports (“FAKE NEWS!”), protests and parades and whole libraries of criticism (“THE CHATTERING CLASSES!”), are subject to jeering dismissal: “WE WON. YOU LOST. GET OVER IT!” This is the power of elections and of the tally of the votes, and it is all but absolute. Given what is now all too obviously at stake, one would think that Americans of all persuasions would be hell-bent on maximizing the chances that the votes are counted honestly and accurately at their next opportunity to weigh in—when it counts.

Advocates for election integrity are prone to ask anyone who might be listening whether he or she would trust an election, say for a union rep, where all voters in the room handed their ballots to a man who took them behind a curtain to count them, emerging sometime later to announce who won. Hardly anyone answers that they would trust such an election or accept its results, even if the man later went back behind the curtain and brought out a stack of ballots for “recounting” in front of everyone: how would the voters know that the original stack had not been replaced by a new one?

The computerized process by which America now counts virtually all of it votes strongly resembles the man-behind-the-curtain scenario, writ large. Votes are tallied not in public but in the pitch dark of cyberspace. A lot can happen in cyberspace, from foreign meddling to home-grown malicious programming. Although we regard ourselves as the “beacon of democracy,” according to the Harvard-based Electoral Integrity Project, US elections now rank very low on the security and integrity scales. A major contributor to our dismal ranking is the absence of uniform and effective protocols for publicly verifying computer-tabulated results.

The fix for this is not difficult or unduly burdensome—it is not like bringing about nuclear disarmament or implementing the solutions to climate change! We could simply join the Canadians, the Germans, and now the Dutch (inspired by our recent electoral fiasco) in counting our votes observably in public by hand. Or if, given the greater length of our ballots, we would deem the labor and delay to be deal-breakers, we could institute risk-limiting audits (RLAs), performed in public view on Election Night, to detect (and deter) any outcome-altering mistabulations that might occur behind the cyber-curtain.

Risk-limiting audits are an especially easy and convenient fix because they are designed to sample and count very few ballots (often just a few hundred for a whole state) except in the rare cases in which the apparent margin of victory is very small. Experts agree that they would be easily implemented, effective, and cost-efficient. What has been missing up until now is the political will to restore this essential component of transparency to our electoral process. Positive and meaningful electoral reform requires an extra helping of public insistence, precisely because elected officials, especially those in the majority, tend to be reluctant to alter a system that put them in office. Public insistence, in turn, might take the form of ballot propositions and/or the newly rediscovered economic leverage of mass consumer, labor, and tax-related actions—hitting hard below the national and corporate money belt. For better or worse, modern America is about money, and corporate bottom-lines are exquisitely sensitive to targeted actions. If organized effectively, the people have far more power than most of us realize.

Now, with vulnerability to foreign interference a new and grave concern, with overall trust in the electoral process slipping fast, and with Donald Trump himself keeping the issue front and center by insisting that he would have won the popular vote but for electoral fraud, the time may finally be ripe for change. If we can effectively channel some of the roiling new political energy into insistence upon this very basic reform, we will greatly increase the likelihood that the voice of the people will be heard and counted when it really counts.

What Would Trump Do? How We Respond to a Suspect Election

June 6, 2017 By Jonathan Simon

Alternet

What Would Trump Do? How We Respond to a Suspect Election

What can the nation do to awaken from this bad dream? photo_1351097465034-2-0_0This one was for all the marbles. A glib way of putting it, perhaps, but I have yet to find anyone who believes that Election 2016 was an ordinary election or that it will bring in its wake anything resembling “politics as usual.” This was not Carter-Ford, not even Carter-Reagan, Nixon-Humphrey, Bush-Gore, Obama-Romney, or any of a parade of elections stretching far back down the street of American history. The direction of America, and likely of the world, has taken a sharp and possibly irrevocable turn. With Donald J. Trump two months and a coronation away from becoming the most powerful person in the world, the shockwaves are still spreading: protestors are massing in the streets, flights to the United States have fallen off sharply, the calamitous question “What went wrong?” keeps reverberating from NY Times to water-cooler to dinner table (the Dow, anticipating new vistas of business and environmental deregulation, has held its own). Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, has put his critics on notice to “be careful what they say.” Alt-right white supremacist Steve Bannon has been brought into Trump’s White House as his “chief strategist.” The young woman who served me an ice-cream cone yesterday at Baskin Robbins (some have hit the bottle; I have sought comfort in ice cream) had tears running down her face. When I asked her what was wrong, she spread her hands wide and said only, “You know.” America gruesomely divided, at least half of it in shock. Hillary Clinton conceded; President Obama promises a “smooth transition;” the media busies itself covering the coronation, the cabinet picking, and the demographics and psychologies that fooled every pollster and pundit and delivered this shocking victory. But the victory itself is self-evident; America “moves on.” Soon the protests will have died down, the tears will have dried, the shock will have dissipated, and the moment will have run its course, leaving all the marbles in the gutter where they fell. This is something we have always celebrated about our democracy, the 1860 election and the ensuing Civil War being the one cautionary historical blot. Before we all move on though, I want to suggest a thought experiment. Click Here to Read More of the Article

When is a Recount NOT a Recount? Rendering Paper Ballots Useless

May 6, 2017 By Jonathan Simon

Recounts Are Only as Good as They Are Allowed to Be

Published by WhoWhatWhy.org

by Jonathan Simon
December 15, 2016
COMMENTARY

The existence of paper ballots is generally touted as the ultimate backstop guaranteeing the integrity of American elections, because “if there is a problem or any doubts, those ballots can always be recounted.”

They can be — but will they be?

Now we have seen three “recounts” up close and learned that, in practice, this amounts to a false and dangerous assurance. The effort to recount these ballots, where they do exist, has been blocked, subverted, and turned into a sham in each of the three states in which it has been attempted this month. The sheer number (and variety) of obstacles that have been thrown in the path of the recount efforts in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania begs the question: What evidence are these blockades trying to hide?

In the same spirit that Rosemary Woods managed to erase just those 18 minutes of an hours-long Nixon tape that many believe to contain the “smoking gun” about the Watergate scandal, so we are led to suspect the Election 2016 smoking guns may be in places that refuse to recount by hand — counties that destroy or prevent the creation of ballot images by scanners; states that rule against recounting in precincts where ballot bag seals are broken, or the number of voters does not match the number of ballots (the very red flags that should trigger recounts); and states whose courts, by partisan majority, simply rule that the recount cannot go forward at all.

A combination of administrative, financial, judicial, and operational tactics were used to hamper or stymie the recount effort in each state in which it was undertaken. A few examples of these tactics: • Refusal to hand count in Wisconsin in the very counties with the brightest forensic red flags — Outagamie, Brown, Rock, e.g., where Trump vote shares dramatically exceeded expectations. Click Here to Continue Reading

Does Honest Vote Counting Matter Anymore? Why the Answer May Still Be “Yes.”

April 4, 2017 By Jonathan Simon

Published in Truthout

Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century

Is it futile to combat computerized vote-counting fraud, given the more general disenfranchisement of the American public? This and the emerging battlefield of corporate versus public interest is explored in this article by Jonathan Simon, author of CODE RED: Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century: POST – E2014 Edition.

Many despairing observers of The New American Century have asked me whether – given the recent revelations about NSA surveillance, along with other signs that American democracy is deteriorating irrespective of which party governs – an honest vote counting system would even matter anymore. A fair question to which I believe the ultimate, if uneasy, answer is “Yes.”

There was a brief glimpse during the Occupy movement of what public anger at American Systemic Injustice might come to if it found a way to assemble, to come out of its isolated private homes and apartments and shelters and cubicles into the public squares of the nation. It was a powerful image, one that so shook US rulers in their corporate and governmental corridors of power that they soon resorted to a federally-coordinated blitzkrieg to empty those squares and kill Occupy before it multiplied any further and before the Bastille was in any real danger. full article here: Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century

Thank You For Your Patience

February 13, 2017 By Jonathan Simon

The Code Red website was hacked and the Blog and its recent contents are in the process of being restored. We thank you for your patience.
-Jonathan Simon

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