Please Let’s Give Democracy a Chance

[Time for change]

Our country is locked in a vicious cycle characterized by almost unlimited money in politics, exacerbated by a psychopathic right wing Republican majority on our Supreme Court. The result is a government that has turned so far to the right that our country is hardly recognizable as a democracy any more. It is better characterized as an oligarchy, meaning that it is ruled by a small elite of wealthy and powerful individuals, where the vast majority of Americans have very little say in how their country is run. Both major parties are at fault, and yet they are currently the only viable parties in our country.

Some of the most powerful institutions in our country today are a military industrial complex that profits from war so is always eager to start another one; a fossil fuel industry that denies the reality of a climate change that threatens to make life uninhabitable for most humans and is gradually becoming irreversible; a financial industry that has cheated the American people out of trillions of dollars in the past few years, causing levels of income inequality not seen since the 1920s, but is considered “too big” to be prosecuted and instead is bailed out of its crises by the American taxpayer; a health care industry that works more to make profits than to help the sick; a prison industry that lobbies Congress to produce more prisoners and has resulted in by far the highest imprisonment rate in the world; a right wing corporate national “news” media that contributes to all these problems by not reporting them in an honest way; the privatization of education to the point where ordinary Americans can no longer afford a decent education, and; perhaps worst of all, a rabidly corrupt election system, which prevents us from electing a government that will serve us rather than those who fund their campaigns and control our elections, which is the main subject of this post.

Despite our irresponsible national news media, this has not gone unnoticed by the American people – as reflected by favorability ratings for Congress in the last few years that rarely go above 20%, and sometimes dip into single digits. Yet because of our corrupt election system we can’t seem to get rid of them. The American people are far far to the left of their government.


Our corrupt rigged election system

Our country’s election system is ranked last among the 47 long established democracies, by the Election Integrity Project founded by the Kennedy School of Government. There are many reasons for this, and they are worth considering:

We have privatized our elections by allowing private corporations to count our votes with little oversight
Verified Voting, a non-partisan, non-profit organization has this to say about the electronic machines that are so commonly used in our country today to count our votes:

Far too many states use unreliable and insecure electronic voting machines, and many states have made their situation worse by adding some forms of Internet voting for some voters, which cannot be checked for accuracy at all. Even in states where verifiable systems are used, too often the check on the voting system’s function and accuracy is not done.

To be more specific, 30 states in the United States use these machines today in some or all parts of the state. In 17 of those states there is at least some use of those machines which leave no voter-verified paper audit trail. In other words, votes from those machines cannot even be audited. The other 13 states that use these machines uniformly leave a paper trail by which the machines can be audited (by hand counting the paper trail). But that doesn’t mean very much because auditing of elections in this country is rarely done except in extremely close elections. Significant manipulation of the machines to produce a desired outcome too frequently produces election results that are not close enough to consider auditing them.

All election experts agree and frequently comment that these machines are very unreliable because they can be hacked and rigged to produce a desired outcome. That doesn’t concern me as much as the fact that the voting machine companies themselves can easily program their machines to produce their desired outcome. All of the electronic machines that count our votes are produced and run by corporations that are very right wing and have ties to the Republican Party. Worse yet, they do not allow government officials to even inspect their machines to identify fraud, on the excuse that their machines are private and “proprietary”. And our government lets them get away with that excuse and continues to hire them to run our elections! 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 done honestly. Michael Parenti writes:

Companies like Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S that market the touchscreen machines are owned by militant supporters of the Republican party. These companies have consistently refused to allow election officials to evaluate the secret voting machine software. Apparently corporate trade secrets are more important than voting rights. In effect, corporations have privatized the electoral system, leaving it susceptible to fixed outcomes.

How can we justify the use of such machines?

The result has been predictable. Since these machines came into existence, exit polls, long considered the gold standard for monitoring election results, now very frequently deviate from the official vote count – ALWAYS with the more right wing candidate favored in the official vote count compared to what is predicted by the exit polls.

In the Presidential election of 2004, George W. Bush won the official national vote count by 2.5%, while the exit polls indicated a lead by John Kerry of 3.0%, a vast exit poll discrepancy of 5.5%, higher than had ever been seen in a U.S. Presidential election before. The exit poll discrepancies were especially high in the swing states that were thought before the election to be the states most likely to determine the winner. In Ohio, which actually was the deciding state, Bush won the official count by 2.5%, while Kerry won the exit polls by 4.2%, a vast discrepancy of 6.7%, which led to many investigations by independent groups and persons. Following numerous investigations by untold numbers of individuals and groups, eventually a hearing was to be held at which Michael Connell, Karl Rove’s “IT guru”, was to testify as to how he helped to orchestrate a massive electronic switching of votes in Ohio from John Kerry to George W. Bush on Election Day 2004. He had already signed an affidavit to that effect. Unfortunately, he died in a plane crash shortly before he was due to testify.

The Election Defense Alliance (EDA), which I used to work for, is an organization came into existence largely as a result of the stolen election of 2004 and is very concerned about this issue. Because our own government appears to be so little concerned about the integrity of our elections, and because the TV networks that hire exit poll firms to help them call elections always “adjust” the results of the exit polls after the vote count is in to mimic the official vote count before showing them to the public, EDA conducts, studies, and analyzes its own exit polls. They refer to an exit poll discrepancy that favors the Republican candidate in the official count compared to what the exit poll predicts as a “red shift”. In 2014 they polled (See tables at link) 21 U.S. Senate races. 19 of the 21 were red shifted, most of them by more than 4%. Two of them, in Georgia and North Carolina, were red-shifted enough to change the winner of the election if we assume the exit poll to be correct. They polled 21 gubernatorial races and found 20 of them to be red shifted, with an average red shift of 5.0%. Red shifting in the House averaged 3.7%.


Partisan control of elections
The stolen election of 2000 in Florida, which made George W. Bush President, was greatly aided by the Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, who made numerous decisions that affected the election results and also played a prominent role in the Bush campaign. The stolen Presidential election of 2004, which maintained Bush as President, was in large part orchestrated by the Ohio Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, who oversaw the massive voter purges in Ohio and also played a prominent role in the Bush campaign. Pollsters such as Nate Silver accordingly adjust their pre-election predictions in part based on who has control of the state voting system, without acknowledging that such control often involves unethical and/or illegal manipulation of election results.


Money in politics
Campaigns are expensive. Money has always been involved in politics and has always affected elections for the worse, favoring those who have the money to buy politicians. But in the past, at least we had campaign finance laws that ameliorated the effect of money to some extent. But recent decisions by our far right wing Supreme Court have severely weakened our ability to ameliorate the effect of money on our elections. Consequently, both major parties have moved farther and farther to the right, in order to attract more and more money from wealthy and powerful corporations and individuals who fund their campaigns. Once in office, they make decisions that further increase the wealth and power of those corporations, at the expense of everyone else, creating a vicious cycle of bad government.

Gerrymandering of our Congressional Districts
In the past several years, our Congressional Districts have been so badly gerrymandered to help Republicans that today the Democratic Party has to attain 6% more of the national vote than the Republican Party in order to win a majority in the House of Representatives. That is a major reason for Republican control of the House and why it will be terribly difficult to reverse that majority. That is not democracy. The gerrymandering has been engineered by the Republican Party, but much of the Democratic Party has been complicit in that gerrymandering, refusing to fight it, because it helps them as individuals retain their office much more easily, though it prevents their Party from gaining control of Congress.

Voter suppression
There has been a flurry of voter ID laws passed in many states in recent years, with the sole purpose of suppressing the vote of the poor and minorities, to the great advantage of the Republican Party. These laws are similar to the old Jim Crow literacy tests and poll taxes, which were made illegal in this country a long time ago, but are now on the rise again, disguised as voter ID laws.

In addition, massive purging of voter registration has been orchestrated in recent years. Notable examples are the voter purging in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004, both which were instrumental in helping George W. Bush to win those states, both which were needed for him to win the Presidential elections of those years.

President Obama has said:

We really are the only advanced democracy on Earth that systematically and purposely makes it really hard for people to vote…We sort of just assume, yeah, that’s I guess how it is. There’s no other country on Earth that does that.

Election fraud in the 2016 Democratic primaries

There is a great amount of evidence accumulating of election fraud in the Democratic primaries this year, all of which appears to hurt Bernie Sanders. I would like to emphasize that I am not saying that this is the work of Hillary or her campaign. I’m not saying it is, and I’m not saying it isn’t. I do not know who is responsible for this.

It very well could be the work of the Republican Party or of right wing individuals or organizations, especially the corporations that manufacture the machines that count our votes, program those machines, and oversee their performance in our elections. I say this because it would greatly benefit the Republican Party or any right wing organization to have Hillary rather than Bernie receive the Democratic nomination. Bernie nationally has about a 20% edge over Hillary in favorability ratings, and he polls far better than her in head to head competition against all the major Republican candidates. Not only that, but the more people get to know him the more they like him and approve of his policies, whereas Hillary’s popularity is on the decline and could get a lot worse if an indictment is recommended against her. It would take a lot more election fraud to beat Bernie in a general election than it would take to beat Hillary.

Consider the following evidence of election fraud in the 2016 primaries:

Arizona
In the Arizona 2016 Democratic primary, Maricopa County, the largest county in Arizona, reduced the number of polling places open on Election Day compared to 2012 from over 200 to 60, and consequently people spent entire work days waiting in line to vote, as voting lines stretched for over half a mile. Undoubtedly, many of them had to leave before voting, in order to avoid missing work.

According to The Maricopa County website statistics Clinton won the early voting part of the election in Maricopa County 118,832 to 71,019, over Sanders, a margin of 66.1% to 33.9%. The Election Day voting, which Bernie won by 19,883 to 12,802, shows us two very significant things. First, that Bernie won the voting on Election Day over Clinton by 60.8% to 39.2% in Maricopa County, quite a difference from the early voting margins. And second, it shows us that Election Day voting in Maricopa County accounted for only 14.7% of the total vote.

In addition, there were tons of Democratic voters who were not allowed to vote because election officials claimed that they were not registered as Democrats, even though the voters knew themselves to be registered as Democrats before coming to the polls. An investigation, reported in an article titled: “Anonymous Report: Was Arizona’s Voter Registration Hacked and Changed?”, searched the Internet to find all the claims that they could of voters who were disenfranchised in this way, and they attempted to ascertain their preferred candidate, by phone if they could, and otherwise from the Internet claim. The investigation identified 113 Sanders would-be voters who reported their registration being purged or changed, 2 Clinton would-be voters, and 12 Republican would be-voters.

Keep in mind that this is not the extent of those who were disenfranchised in this way. These are only the claims that Anonymous could find on the Internet. Anonymous gives an example of the extent of the disenfranchisement by pointing to Phoenix (a big part of Maricopa County), which has a Democratic mayor, where 80,000 Republicans voted on Election Day, compared to only 33,000 Democrats.

The purge was clearly targeted at Sanders.

New York
Election Justice USA filed an emergency lawsuit in New York the day before the primary, due to numerous reports by NY voters who had been registered to vote and were either purged completely or had their registration changed from Democrat to Republican or “unaffiliated” without their permission. The lawsuit requests the “immediate restoration” of voting rights for all of those New York voters. Shyla Nelson, spokeswoman for EJUSA, said:

We have heard hundreds of stories, with desperate pleas for help… For these voters to be systematically and erroneously removed from the rolls or prevented from voting in their party of choice is devastating to them personally and has sent a wave of doubt and worry through the voting public.

In New York, more than 120 thousand voters were purged from Brooklyn alone since last fall. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said that his office received more than a thousand complaints about the election.

Some have asked why the lawsuit focuses on Democrat voters only, not Republicans. The answer is that all of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Democrats.

Voter purging across the country
But this isn’t limited to New York. According to an article titled “Election Fraud: Why are Voter Registrations Changing?”

Huge voter registration problems are plaguing states with closed primaries, leading to allegations of election fraud around the country. People who said they were previously registered Democrat or Republican suddenly found their registrations inactive or their party affiliations dropped, and now they can’t vote in their primary. These problems were a big issue in Arizona, and now they’re being seen in New York, California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and more…These baffling voter registration problems seem to be widespread, occurring in states across the nation… The issues seem especially prevalent among Sanders supporters.

Exit poll discrepancies consistently favoring Clinton in the official count compared to exit poll predictions
In 17 of the 19 states where exit polls have been taken for the Democratic primaries this year and are known to the public, they favor Clinton in the official count, compared to what is predicted by the exit polls, usually by substantial amounts. The odds against that happening by chance are astronomical. In New York the discrepancy was 11.6%. For more details on this, see this post in the section “Exit poll discrepancies in the Democratic primaries”.

Sanders has won 12 of 13 caucuses but only 4 of 22 primaries. Clearly it is far more difficult to rig the vote in a caucus than in a primary, because there are so many people there watching the process at a caucus. In primaries, Sanders has done far worse in precincts that are counted electronically than in ones where the vote is hand counted. For example, in Massachusetts, Sanders led by 17% in hand counted precincts, though he lost the election in that state.

Michael Parenti writes:

Exit polls are an exceptionally accurate measure of elections. In the last three elections in Germany, for example, exit polls were never off by more than three-tenths of one percent. Unlike ordinary opinion polls, the exit sample is drawn from people who have actually just voted. It rules out those who say they will vote but never make it to the polls, those who cannot be sampled because they have no telephone or otherwise cannot be reached at home, those who are undecided or who change their minds about whom to support, and those who are turned away at the polls for one reason or another. Exit polls have come to be considered so reliable that international organizations use them to validate election results in countries around the world

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes:

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable.

Dick Morris, who has worked as a political consultant for both major parties, wrote of the massive exit poll discrepancies in the 2004 Presidential election:

Exit polls are almost never wrong… Such surveys are so reliable that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.

Vote tampering revealed by exit poll discrepancies in Georgia in 2003 forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down as President.

And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine — paid for by the Bush administration — exposed election fraud that initially denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency and required another round of voting, which he won. (It’s ironic that that was the same year and month that exit polls revealed Bush’s stealing of the 2004 election – talk about a double standard).

All of this contradicts proclamations by our national corporate news media, which consistently ignores or aggressively criticizes the reliability of exit polls. The reasons for their harsh criticisms are not hard to understand. Our corporate news media are very right wing compared to the American people. Exit poll discrepancies always favor the more conservative candidate in the official count relative to the exit poll predictions. So national TV networks routinely erase all traces of exit poll discrepancies and “adjust” them to fit the official vote count as soon as the votes are tallied. In 2004, nobody would have known of the vast exit poll discrepancies in the Presidential election if not for two vigilant citizens who took screen shots of them before they disappeared forever.

Some of their criticisms have to do with the assertion that exit polls are not performed properly in this country. Are we to believe that the wealthiest country in the world can’t afford to do properly designed exit polls? And if they don’t believe they are accurate, why do our TV networks routinely use them to assist in the calling of elections before the vote is in? For example, the Democratic primary in Maryland was called for Clinton with 0.0% of the vote counted. What do you think they used to call the election so early?

And if exit polls are so inaccurate, why is it that they have been spot on in every Republican primary this year? That begs the question, why aren’t the Republican primaries being rigged? I can only guess at that, but my guess is that whatever right wing group is responsible for this (I strongly suspect that the electronic voting machine companies are involved) doesn’t much care who wins the Republican nomination. Whoever wins the Republican nomination will be just fine with them. But if Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, the current established powers will be extremely unhappy about that because it may take more election fraud than they can manufacture to prevent a Sanders win this November.


My feelings about all this

As I think I have made obvious, I am terribly upset about the state of our government and the election system that put it in power. I am a liberal – meaning that I believe that everyone, not just the wealthy and powerful, deserve the opportunity for a good life. When election systems get corrupted, the chances of electing a government that works for ordinary citizens decline proportionately to the degree of corruption. One could say that for a democracy, its election system is more important than anything else.

I am not at all trying to imply that the massive exit poll discrepancies we’re seeing in the Democratic primaries this year should alone reverse the results of those primaries. I’m just saying that they should serve as screaming red flags which beg for hand counted audits to see how well the hand counts comply with the machine counts that we’re seeing. We’ve already seen substantial discrepancies between hand counts and machine counts in the Chicago audits, which would have been entirely missed if not for the fact that a citizens group observed the initial results of the audit and then observed the auditors change their own hand count to comply with the machine count. Do you think that the auditors did this on their own initiative, or that they did it because of pressure from above?

I am so glad to hear that Bernie will be contesting this election at the Democratic Convention. I believe that he is the only candidate in either party who will fight for the American people above the wealthy corporations that fund the campaigns of so many candidates. We could argue all day about how accurate exit polls are. But would any sane person believe that they are likely to be less accurate than elections results that rely on machines run by right wing private corporations with woefully insufficient government oversight to detect election fraud? I’m not asking anyone to believe without doubt anything I’ve said about the accuracy of exit polls. I’m just asking that we give democracy a chance by doing enough hand counted audits (with citizen oversight) to see how much our black box voting machine counts differ from the intentions of the voters, and that all would-be voters who were wrongfully purged or otherwise prevented from voting be given a chance to vote before the Democratic Party chooses its nominee.

[JimDandy]

1. I skimmed through your post

and agree with what I read. Thanks. Bookmarking to finish reading later...

[Baobab]

6. Give Peace a chance!

[dubyadiprecession]

2. As posts go, less is more.

[Time for change]

5. There was a lot that I wanted to say

I feel that if Bernie loses the nomination like this, without adequate investigation and remedy for all the things that point to election fraud, our democracy is gone. I wanted to be real clear about why I feel that way.

[dchill]

9. It's a great post.

[dchill]

3. I was already suspicious, then I read...

"Pollsters such as Nate Silver accordingly adjust their pre-election predictions in part based on who has control of the state voting system, without acknowledging that such control often involves unethical and/or illegal manipulation of election results."

That's what I suspected when yesterday I saw that 538 gave Hillary a 92% chance of winning Indiana. The actual results were basically flipped.

Hmmm.

[Time for change]

8. Yeah, it's worse than that too

They build voter suppression into their models for pre-election polls.

Pre-election polls aren't just random samples of voters, they rely on statistical models that predict who are likely voters. Since voter suppression results in some demographics of people not being able to vote, they are considered unlikely to vote by the pollsters, and are weighted accordingly in the statistical models.

[Armstead]

4. Epic Post

[LWolf]

7. It's beyond ironic how many "Democrats"

don't want democracy.

[Time for change]

11. Yeah, it seems that DU has changed quite a bit since 2000 and 2004

when there was very little opposition to the idea that massive election fraud was involved in the Bush "victories".

[LWolf]

12. neo-liberal evolution, or

hypocrisy, or both.

[dchill]

10. Bottom line: Liars and thieves win...

Truth and democracy lose.

[Tarc]

13. Such a long-winded post that never even uses the word "delegate". Not even once.

Y'know, that thing that having the most of determines the winner of a democratic election?

The voters preferred Hillary's vision over Bernie's, by ~3 million. It's time to start accepting that rather than hysteric hype and half-baked excuses.

[Time for change]

14. So the massive evidence of election fraud doesn't bother you at all?

If not, I'm not the least bit interested in discussing anything with you.

If you disagree with any of the evidence I presented then let's talk about it.

If the only thing that you're intelligent enough to do is make assertions about "hysteric hype" and "half baked excuses", then we have nothing whatsoever to talk about.

[Tarc]

15. Other than the GOP intentionally limiting polling places in AZ, you're kinda full of shit

[Time for change]

16. If you had an ounce of intellegence or common sense

you'd back up your opinion with something other than your own blabbering.

Are you a child or an adult? If your a child I apologize for the insult.

Did you even read the evidence I discussed in the OP? Do you have enough intelligence to even discuss any of it if you disagree with it? If so, let's discuss it.

If you only have enough intelligence or common sense to blabber your own opinions without backing them up with anything, then shut the fuck up, ok?