I admit that I want it to be true, because I don't want to think that badly about so many of my fellow citizens, but how can you think that Russia could hack into 20 states' voting systems and NOT change anything.

I have believed it from day 1 also.

Shaken, may have been an Intelligence briefing with such information.

Known from that moment.

They have publicly stated that votes were not altered.

"There is no evidence that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election affected the actual vote count, according to the first installment of the Senate Intelligence Committee's Russia report, released Tuesday."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/05/08/senate-report-no-evidence-russians-changed-vote-tallies-2016/592978002/

Please note: Whether that is true or not is up for debate. The fact that they have publicly stated it is not. The Root's statement to the contrary is false.

it's because they did not need to. But they did find out how to get in. Were the systems hardened for 2018? Or do they only care about hacking presidential results?

When it comes to changing results it would seem to me that you would not get greedy, only make sure your boy wins by a thin margin. Of course the republicans do some of the work by disenfranchising voters.

Such a precisely and adept run campaign knew they had the election and it was a surprise late in the evening that HRC did not win. I am sure they changed votes along with all the other stuff.

There have been many comments from 2004 by insiders including Kerry, that they knew they hit every target they had in GOTV in swing states and they did get 9 million more votes than Gore did - far more than the expected increase from 4 years before. While I think that had there been no voter suppression by putting a ridiculously small number of voting machines in Ohio cities, Kerry would have won Ohio and the Presidency. As to the national count, where Kerry did greatly increase turn out, the anti LGBT referendums pulled out millions of evangelicals who rarely voted.

Another example -- the staff with Romney were stunned when he lost. (This I know from a NJ neighbor whose son was on the campaign.)

donating money to Republican candidates. That's a huge conflict of interest.

The only solution is to have paper ballots and an equal number of Democrats and Republicans to count and verify results.

and why I have zero confidence in the results of 2020. R’s have shown us there is no bottom to their depravity, there is no limit to their hunger for power. I’d even bet vote changing happened before 2016.

One of my daughter's college professors has a Ph.D. in statistics, and is well-respected in that field. I am looking forward to meeting her soon because she is a Democrat who supports Bernie (people in either category are rare as hen's teeth around here).

Plus I want to ask her a question about statistics. Was the election outcome an anomaly? It makes no sense to me at all. We were all shocked (in the most impactful sense of the word) when HRC was not elected. Did the numbers (poll results) lie? (I think the vote was rigged.)

It is rare for a president to be elected who won the electoral college, but did not win the popular vote.

It happened in 1876: "However, the election was riddled with voter fraud and suppression in the post-Civil War south. After the election, the validity of the votes in Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina and Oregon was challenged."

It happened in 1888: "The election of Benjamin Harrison, an Indiana Senator and Republican, over Democratic President Grover Cleveland was also riddled by corruption. Both parties were accused of using “floaters” — citizens who were willing to sell their votes — to sway the election. Public attention was drawn to the practice after an Indiana newspaper published a letter, apparently written by a Republican National Committee official, which instructed party workers on how to handle floaters.'

It happened in 2000 (Bush v. Gore).

It happened in 2016.

In each case, corruption was the hallmark of the election results, IMO.

https://time.com/5579161/presidents-elected-electoral-college/

The failure with the polls was not in the polling for the reputable pollsters, but with the media and public's ignorance of how polls work. Polls are nothing more than statistics, and statistics follows specific mathematical formulae.

In the case of the 2016 election, the key thing to know from stats is this: Hillary rarely polled outside the margin of error. The margin of error says that a poll could swing +/- a given value based on the number of people polled, with a 95% confidence interval (meaning that the poll is 95% accurate, which is extremely good in polling). The MOE is a precise number, based on a specific formula. Without getting into the math involved, it simply means that a poll has a range of results possible, and not a 100% certain value. No reputable pollster will ever claim this.

Anyway, this is how MOE works: If the margin of error for a particular poll is 3 percent, and Hillary was polling 52% while the treasonous scumbag was at 48%, then that means that Hillary's actual range of values for people voting for her was 49% at the low end and 55% at the high end. Meanwhile the treasonous scumbag's actual range of values could have fallen anywhere between 45% to 51%.

I think you can see the problem here, if the above ranges of values for the candidates applied for a poll in, say, Michigan. Let's speculate that the voting results, which do NOT have a margin of error, actually showed that 50.1% of the tally went for the treasonous scumbag, but only 49.9% for Hillary. Guess what? That would have been perfectly within the margin of error for that exit poll. Meaning the poll was right, NOT wrong. Because margin of error.

Every reputable poll lists the margin of error, among other factors of methodology. Most legitimate media outlets post the MOE somewhere close to the results of the poll, but if they don't, it's easy to find by going to the actual poll and looking for a methodology report. ALL reputable pollsters provide this data.

So when you see the margin of error from now on, automatically add or subtract that number from the stated result, to get an idea of the swing that the actual vote could go. If your candidate is above 50% at the low end of the margin of error, then it's highly likely that said candidate will win. If the lower end of the range dips below 50%, though, then you need to brace yourself for the chance of a loss. Because the possibility is there.

And that MOE works for any kind of poll, not just voting polls. Approval ratings, Nielsen ratings, stats about where people stand on issues--the MOE works the same for those as they do election polls.

An intro course in statistics should be required in every high school, or at least every college degree plan. If people understood the basics of stats, they would realize how silly they sound when they say polls are wrong. Because stats done properly are not wrong all that often.

after Gore they said they had fixed the polling errors. I agree with you, the polls don’t lie.

Read Richard Hayes Phillips, Witness To A Crime
There are pictures of doctored ballots, where votes for Kerry/Edwards had white circle stickers covering up and GWMcIdiot/McEvil circle ⭕️ colored in.
https://www.amazon.com/Richard-Hayes-Phillips-Witness-Crime/dp/B00SB275ES

This book proved that you don’t have to electronically vote/flip as long as the number of votes matches the number of voters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=LkH2r-sNjQs&feature=emb_logo

The Ohio Secretary of State was also the state chairman of the re-elect Bush committee. Diebold was based in Ohio, and one of its top people boasted he would "deliver Ohio for Bush."

Exit polls in Ohio said Kerry won the state, and with it, the presidency. But neither Diebold nor ESS would let their machines be forensically examined for accuracy. Only one such machine was ever examined, as it was in a remote area, and the company didn't get to it before it was looked at. In a precinct with 600 registered voters, the machine gave 3000 votes to Bush. The incident was labeled a "glitch," but not enough of one to make them let the rest of the machines be examined.

Only one Republican ever publicly admitted outright what they were doing, and he was somewhat inebriated at the time. Here is the famous clip from 2004:

Kerry Won. Here are The Facts
https://www.gregpalast.com/kerry-won-rnheres-the-facts/

and nearly became apoplectic when it didn't.

Later the group, Anonymous (whatever became of them), claimed they prevented the Ohio count from being altered.

Seems pretty suspicious that one party favors them, HHmmm..???

I have long thought Russia blanked out a lot of ballots there and since Detroit is so heavily Democratic that would allow for more than enough votes to flip Michigan. By law though undervotes could not be reviewed for clear intent so a perfect storm.

According to the Wayne County election results on their website, there were 19,476

Ballots cast 802,195

Trump 228,993
Clinton 519,444
Johnson 18,801
Castle 1,718
Stein 7,784
Soltysik 437
Write In 5542

Total # of votes for President =782,476

That makes 19,476 undervotes. Write In votes in Michigan are ONLY counted if the candidate pre registers as a "Write In" Therefore any votes for Bernie Sanders, Elvis, Mickey Mouse, Beyoncé, Kid Rock, or Lady Gaga are recorded as undervotes. Given the popularity of Sanders, it would stand to reason that most of these undervotes were likely write in votes for Sanders, but since they are not counted no one can say for sure.


2012 for comparison

Ballots cast 822,575

Romney 213,814
Obama 595,846
Goode 1830
Stein 2732
Anderson 692
Write In 3,206

Total # of votes for President = 818,140

A couple observations;

1) Turnout in 2016 was down approx. 20,000 compared to 2012.

2) 3rd party votes were substantially higher in 2016 with 29,000 compared to only 5,250 in 2012

[link:https://www.waynecounty.com/elected/clerk/november-8-2016-general.aspx|

But here is a site that claims nearly 85,000 undervotes statewide. Plus it has some other interesting analysis comparing to 2012 when there were fewer than 50.000 undervotes so nearly double.

https://www.mlive.com/politics/2016/11/michigans_presidential_electio.html

I wonder how many undervotes state wide were write in votes for Bernie ? In Michigan, those would have all been recorded as no votes.

Last edited Mon Dec 23, 2019, 10:42 PM - Edit history (1)

It does say Detroit rather than just Wayne County but the number is 70,000. Can't confirm if this is a different or same site from memory. It doesn't go into technicalities of what an undervote is but it sure implies no ballot cast rather than a flawed ballot cast.

https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/national-party-news/311099-skeptical-70000-black-voters-abstained-from

I posted the link to the vote totals on the official county web site. Personally, I accept that the vote totals supplied by a county with 100% Democratic elected officials is accurate, but if you wont believe their own website over some blog, I give up.

I guess the county must have undereported their own vote totals by 50,000 on their own website then.

There are a lot of legitimate issues that can be discussed regarding the 2016 election without people making stuff up.

But in most states the party of the Governor appoints all of the County election commissioners. Since Snyder was Governor the Wayne County election commissioner would be a Republican if Michigan law was like the law in most states. Sure, there would be a Democrat that is deputy commissioner but they have little power.

Chief Judge of the Wayne County Probate Court

Wayne County Clerk

Wayne County Treasurer

All three are elected office holders

Last edited Sun Dec 22, 2019, 08:45 AM - Edit history (1)

Hillary was winning easily in many of the states by the exit polls but somehow
she lost when the votes were counted. Vlad was into all 50 states but he was
there just "to look around."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-13/russian-breach-of-39-states-threatens-future-u-s-elections

What is their agenda? Hillary's emails?

Watch for grammar/syntax "things" in their posts.

Bottom line the GOP has kept power by cheating by both external and internal operations.

The data, #s, and evidence is all "out there" and this shit has been ongoing for years.

Campaigns get exit polls on election day. In fact, after 2004, the networks were far more hesitant to show the exit poll results or to base predictions on them. Now, they tend to be used more for after the fact demographic analysis and analysis like finding in 2016 that the people who disliked both HRC and Trump, broke for Trump.

In 2016, we went into town to join the Democrats in Burlington to see the results. The first hint that my husband and I had that it was not going to be good was between 7:30 and 8:00, we saw Madelyn Kunen, the former governor of Vermont. We know her reasonably well and were surprised that she looked stunned and extremely unhappy. She had her coat on and was leaving. This was before the 8:00 results, where other than the sure thing states, were too close to call. From the news feed, we could see it was not going to be the landslide for HRC that some expected.

Later, we heard the stories told by the HRC insiders. Early in the day, they were concerned with some turnout numbers. As the results came in - and they saw where they were from, they were increasingly seeing bad news.

No new evidence. In fact, no really new opinions either. As a matter of fact, not a single word of the story has changed. This has to have happened (despite many people saying it didn't) because it just doesn't make any sense that it wouldn't have.

for the information about our election insecurities.

The neat thing about programmable devices, such as electronic voting machines and other computers, is that they are programmable. You can't see eraser marks inside DRAM modules. You can 'erase' the virtual eraser marks on the platters of hard drives using exactly what is used to 'write' to them normally.

People can see paper ballots, guard paper ballots, and count paper ballots. Elections are too important, too valuable to rely on electronics. People can't see what those electrons have been up to.

History will absolve me - they were all in this together=]]

did was look around and then back quietly out without touching a thing!

EVERYONE says so!

I have been castigated right here on DU for pushing conspiracies when I have tried to argue that the scenario described above is absurd.

More at link.

I believe it 100%.

I think we are all pretty smug saying his defeat is imminent. I think there is an excellent chance of another five years of hell on earth. If fact I wouldn't bet against it.

controlled by Republicans who knew what the outcome would be. That is why Republicans deny elections tampering and why they are protecting the Russian meddling. They are guilty.

Same is happening now and that is why Democrats, Indies and never trumpers must come out is huge numbers.

Because it would be worse than a propaganda initiative. It would be a direct attack on our nation. It would also have consequences on people's trust in our electoral system, which we know many are already experiencing. They can not hack paper ballots, but yet state governments are in denial. I'm sure Putin knew the fix was in.

I became convinced counts were hacked quite a while back after both the House & Senate had top secret briefings about the 2016 election.

Maxine Waters came out of the House meeting spitting tacks but unable to really say anything about what they'd heard. Grassley & Finestein came out of the Senate meeting with Grassley looking green and, most telling, he let Feinstein do all the talking - not that she could say much either.

They weren't that upset over hearing about bots posting on Facebook.

Many of them work as freelancers for hire, and they write excellent code for anybody including criminals. Including rightwing nutjobs with very deep pockets. Including Robert Mercer and Cambridge Media. Sorry I have to stop there, but we'll never see the bottom of this in our lifetimes. This story is far from over.

intent on all using that qualifier "I am NOT saying any votes would have changed.". It made me scream Everytime I heard it.

At the very least, people should have said "no one knows the answer to that." But any reasonable person could deduce that it hurt our vote count. "Imagine repukes and Russians breathed a sigh of relief on that.

NEVER get voters to the polls again if they believe their vote would be manipulated? It's hard enough now with so many saying "my vote doesn't matter". If the info gets out that such tampering existed BO GOTV will work!

figure it out? If Russia posted ads falsely trashing Hillary, some people might believe them and not vote for her. "Winning" under false pretenses.

Likewise, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know it will happen again:

1). No laws ever passed to protect vote.

2) Nothing done to stop a Russian repeat performance and a president who abets it all. What Mueller said should be mission one.

motivation. If he loses he may end up in prison. He wasn't in that position in 2016 and look what he did. He will step it up a bunch of notches this time.

Someone without a soul, willing to sell their soul, or with a soul already funded/paid for. Indifferent to the Constitution, the People, the country, the history, the present, the future, the "dream,".....

When the People have no vote, they have no say. Then you get Trump and find everything that was wrong is right and everything that was right is wrong.

Where's the Tylenol!?

When you need to create a conspiracy theory to defend a conspiracy theory...

If you changed one out if every 50 votes from Hillary to Jill Stein via hacking...then change every 120th from Hillary to blank in say...3 or 4 key swing States. Pick a small percentage to the libertarian, say one in 200...what would the math look like?

Don't change Hillary to Trump..that will stand out. Since it is winner take all, siphon Dem votes to throw away , whether it be blank or third party.

And of course Uncle Vladdy.

in these past presidential elections? Just enough to make the Democrat loose. Am I wrong to think that is what Tulsi is being groomed for?

Well, in fact .. according to the official reports (gleaned from our own intelligence community) it IS true.

If you chose to believe otherwise that is (as always) you prerogative. But the story, and the known facts, have not changed.

Thank you for finding and posting this.

The by-now obvious fact that Russians and Isrealis electronically flipped votes in 2016 has been reported on since, well, 2016 - but many just don't want to believe it (even here on DU).

But like a gambling addiction or alcohol problem in a loved one, everyone affected had better come to terms that it is, in fact, a problem - or it inevitably gets worse.

Just what Cheeto and Bitchy Mitchy want.