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 extremely easy to program a touchscreen computer to display a vote for “A” on the screen and record a vote for “B” on its memory card. It is also similarly easy to set 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 vote on 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. 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 due to one or more of these factors:

• the sample is way too small
• the places to be audited are tipped off in advance
• 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 (all in the same direction!), using the same methods, at the same precincts, on the same days. A single exit poll isn’t perfect, but when we keep seeing big 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 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 not impossible but … it is a whole lot 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 real 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 any 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 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 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 of 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.

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 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. So far, he and the Commission he appointed (led by CrossCheck architect and Vote-Suppressor-In-Chief, Kris Kobach, and including of all people the notorious J. Kenneth Blackwell) haven’t 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 elections. 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, DHS has 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, 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 CodeRed2016.com

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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.

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

What can the nation do to awaken from this bad dream? This 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

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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

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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

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All over the world, exit polls are considered to be the gold standard in detecting the presence of election rigging. When the votecounts and the exit poll results are very different, it’s an indication that the vote counts may be wrong. It’s not proof of election fraud, but it does mean the election should be investigated. A disparity between votecounts and exit poll results is exactly what we’re seeing in the November 8 election. You can see the comparison at the links below. Presidential Race Senate Races In the images at the links, the right hand column lists the percentage of shift from Clinton to Trump in the Presidential race, and from Democrat to Republican in Senate races. We call a shift towards Republicans a “red shift,” and a shift toward Democratic candidates a “blue shift.” We are seeing no blue shifts in this election.

Outcome-reversing shifts are highlighted in red.

This is a familiar pattern, indicative of electronic rigging, but in this case even more dramatic than usual. With all that has been said and written about the vulnerability of the computers that count our votes in secret, one must ask why these votes and states shifted? And why the outcome-changing results are simply accepted as accurate and honest.

There is every reason to investigate and then recount key states by hand where possible. This is too often not possible, because some of these results come from paperless, touchscreen computers.

And even where possible, with optical scanners, it is just not done. Is it a patriotic service to our country — and the world — to passively and quietly accept the results from this election without review or inquiry? Let’s take responsibility and investigate where the evidence gathered places the validity of these results in doubt.

Where did this data come from?

The exit poll numbers are transcribed from screen captures of time-stamped CNN exit polls. Immediately after the polls close on election night, these figures were posted at the CNN website and other media websites.

The votecounts in most of the states in these tables are near 100% reporting, though some will have to be updated as remaining votes are tabulated. The red shift numbers may therefore change slightly by the time the final counts are available, but the general pattern is well established.

After the initial posting, exit poll totals are adjusted to match the votecounts. If you visit the CNN website now, it is the adjusted exit poll numbers you’ll see displayed there. The role of exit polls in fair elections is discussed in depth in my book, Code Red: Electronic Election Theft and the New American Century. View on Amazon Based on these preliminary but alarming forensic results, I call on County Election Directors, Secretaries of State, the United States Congress, and President Obama to initiate an investigation into the outcome of the 2016 election. [Image source: Derivative of image from CanStockPhoto/McIninch]

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