The variance from the polls is suspicious, but the real convincing factor is the "down ballot" voting. The governor's contest is on top of the ballot, of course, with other state offices below. It seems people voted for Democrats further down the ballot in far greater numbers than they voted for the Democratic candidate for governor. That is close to impossible. It looks like they rigged the governor's election, but didn't bother to rig other elections to "balance things out."

This could be like Coakley massively underperforming the rest of the Democratic ticket in MA.

Polls are rapidly becoming less and less accurate in all elections, including ones that don't arouse suspicions. There could be something nefarious here, but I'm hesitant to say so based only on polling.

That's why more than 90% of the time when voting is out-of-line with the pre-vote and exit-polls, it is in Republican's favor. It's called the Red Shift, a well documented phenomenon. Google it up.

Here's a reference:

https://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/election-fraud-an-introduction-to-exit-poll-probability-analysis/

There is zero percent chance that the red shift phenomenon is due to chance. Republican's have been stealing our elections for the last 17 years and so many of us continue to bury our heads in the sand. It's late. It's an emergency. democracy is nearly dead in the United States.

The GOP practically ran the table.

.....at getting the results they want. If the vote is close, the republican wins. I really think our voting machines have been "gerrymandered" as well. Alison Grimes ran a campaign running away from Obama but she shouldn't have lost by such a large margin. Same for Bevin and Conway. I think we're suffering from Wisconsinitis and I fear for the sanctity of the vote.

At some point, polling is going to have a sample so far off from the actual electorate that it is meaningless. For example, the majority no longer has a landline.

We may have reached that point. Or not. We can not rule out something nefarious, but we also can't assume polling is accurate either.

Averages:

Conway 45, Bevin 39

Actual:

Conway 44(-1), Bevin 53(+14)

Something is not right here. At minimum the polling firms were dead wrong on turnout.

Support polls (who do you like?)
Likely Voters Polls (who do you plan to vote for?)
Registered Voters Polls (As a registered voter who are you voting for?)
Exit Polls (who did you vote for?)

What type of polls were they averaging?

Being polled and showing up at the polls are two different things. Telling a pollster you will vote for a candidate means Jack Heronymous Squat if you don't actually vote on election day.

Sorry, fraud at that level would be pretty damned hard to hide.

Election fraud is very hard, and frightfully illegal.

Voter suppression on the other hand, is generally legal, and hard to prove a crime where it is illegal. The kind of fraud needed to swing an election that far would next to impossible to pull off.

Maybe paper ballots are hard to fake, but computer votes are not so hard to fake and give me a break about it being 'frightfully illegal'. You would think starting a war based on known lies would be such...but we are far past that. The GOP laughs at court cases.

leave much to be desired in the way of security, it is still easier, cheaper, and legal to suppress voters than get involved with the skulduggery required to rig voting machines.

I am not saying it can't happen, I am simply saying that if presented with two tactics, one legal and one not, one easy one not, why would you pick the illegal/hard one instead of the legal/easy one?

or they get cases tied up in court forever...much better to make sure you own the votes. I agree with it being easier to use classical methods of suppression, but the GOP moved into this century as far as IT goes.

Again, if we followed the laws of the land the GOP would probably not do near as much criminal activity as they do now. Yet we live in post-ALEC, $COTUS and various billionaires trying hard to own state and congressional offices.

Their options are far more vast then they were 20 years ago. They have more control over mass communication then ever before.

Thinking they will not do something illegal is giving them the benefit of the doubt. Bad move imo.

as a volunteer or observer? Have you ever read your local election laws? Are you familiar with the anti-fraud procedures in your county? Have you sat in on a recount? Have worked with computer scientist evaluating voting machine code? Have you helped draft laws to guard against electronic vote tampering? Have you listened to a few hundred hours of testimony at public hearings on electronic voting? Have you spoken with voting machine vendors, local/state election officials, party officials about the issue?

I hear a lot of theories about how simple it is to rig voting machines from folks who have never really worked in any of these areas. It is not as simple as some people claim, and believe it or not, a lot of election officials and volunteers take the sanctity of the election process with the utmost seriousness.

I live in a state where a billionaire (Art Pope) bought the government (NC). He did it the old fashioned way, with money spent to suppress votes and gerrymander the districts so that seats were guaranteed. I can tell you he definitely didn't do it by rigging the voting machines.

I work in the IT field and know someone that can hack anything Diebold makes including their super secure ATM machines. He gets paid to do it. What do you got? Oh right the bureaucratic part. Gotcha.

They sold off their voting division in 2009. Lost their shirt doing it too.

I also work in the IT field. I also was one of the people who was right at the center of the whole BBV issue over a decade ago. I helped expose Diebold's lies and was part of the team that exposed their emails to the public. I also sat on the NC Select Committee on E-Voting and helped craft NC S223, The Public Confidence in Voting Act, passed unanimously by the NC legislature in 2005. My key contributions were fighting for inclusion of language that required random post election audits, a voter-verified paper trail with ALL touch screen voting machines, that source code be presented for examination before elections, and that voting machine CEO's had to sign a sworn statement that the code supplied for examination was the same code used on election day. Perjuring yourself on that statement was made a felony. Diebold quit NC rather than comply with the law after they were unsuccessful suing to get it overturned.

I came to DU to work and discuss this very issue back in 2002. So, I know a little bit about the topic.

You can buy the TSX on ebay btw. They are still in use, sorry if you did not about the companies current events.

Oh I see...you are just talking about NC, I am talking about all the states.

EDIT - that is good that NC took matters seriously, I wish Texas would they LOVE Accuvote.

They sold it in 2009. Prior to selling it, they changed the name to Premier. ES&S bought the company. ES&S then sold it off to Dominion Voting Systems (of Toronto) a year later due to monopoly objections.

I also worked with folk to try and get a federal law on the books, but that effort failed. A number of states have copied North Carolina's actions, but some notably have not. Of course if people want their state to have such laws, then they need to get out and actually do all the hard work needed to change the laws in their counties/states.

I will warn you that it involves a lot of driving around, talking to people for hundreds of hours, getting insulted by cranks, and having to actually learn the laws and processes of your local/state elections.

A lot of people here at DU were instrumental in fighting Diebold, it's lawyers, PR flaks, and lies. We took on a multi-billion dollar corporation and BEAT them so badly, they sold a company they paid over $200 million for in 1999 for about $15 million.

Please understand, I am not trying to insult you, I am simply trying to alleviate your concern so that you can worry about issues that are real dangers.

I have played with TSX units. I also sat in for factory training on the ES&S optical scan machines to provide tech support on election day back in 2006. The local ES&S rep thought it was a great idea having an e-voting activist watching over the machines. The parent company had a cow, and pressured the county to send me away.

I also don't say any of this to brag, but to help people understand that they can take on a soulless corporation and win. Years ago, DU and its members were ground zero for this fight.

They had them in use on the 3rd. Makes me cringe to see people using them. Paper ballot all the way for me. I agree with you and can see your point in NC using more vote suppression now that you and others shined a light on electronic vote tampering.

I must tell you I think Texas might be hopeless. I did not think we could vote in a bigger idiot than Perry and boy was I wrong.

You think election fraud is not possible? and what in the hell is our vote count doing in PRIVATE hands? Australia has open code for voting and Americans don't know how to do the same? come on

No, I did not. I am fully aware the problems of vote counting and vote fraud and have some actual experience with the question at the national and state level.

My point is, and still is, that it is far less problematic from a legal standpoint to suppress the vote than rig an election.

given access to the codes of the machines.

And you actually have to have a body willing to check for vote tampering. Something that can be bought and sold on the political market.

it really isn't that simple. And again, it is incredibly dangerous to your personal freedom. While it is easy to claim you accidentally erased a file (see Rosemary Woods), it is a lot harder to claim you accidentally sat down and rewrote a few thousand lines of code. You have to have either access to the master code or access to a LOT of machines. Too many people have to be in on the conspiracy and keep their mouth shut and that means a lot of luck and a lot of money.

One more time, voter suppression is easy and legal, ballot tampering is illegal and hard.

verifications and testing before 2016 they own their losses. This is the same shit that happened in 2000 and we knew it because it was paper ballots that were thrown away.

You think voting code cannot be hacked? It is logical that votes can also be hacked (but who cares about logic and critical thinking, right?)

He goes out of his way to make himself not sound liberal. Democrats seems to have stood home. DLC in action again.

They tried in 2012 but something must have went wrong. I believe that is why Rmoney and KKKarl Rove were so surprised when they lost.

EOM