A Fair Election? Serious, Hard-to-Explain Questions Arise About Trump Vote Totals in 3 Key States

by Steven Rosenfeld | November 18, 2016 - 7:46am

A series of explanation-defying questions surrounding Donald Trump’s victories in key 2016 swing states has prompted a cadre of voting rights attorneys and electronic voting machine experts to consider formally filing for presidential recounts in coming days.

These recount-justifying anomalies go beyond the discrepancies in media exit polls predicting a Hillary Clinton victory on November 8 and subsequent vote counts where Trump won states that have not backed Republican presidents for decades. Recounts could clarify or verify whether several different forms of electronic hacking could have padded state voter rolls and altered resulting counts.

Former state election directors contacted by AlterNet were extremely skeptical of the election theft theories that accompanied the troubling vote-count patterns. They added that the courts would not change election results unless there was overwhelming proof. Spokespeople for election departments in possible recount states also said their voting systems were designed to block hacking, especially after federal intelligence officials this summer said Russia hacked into two state voter registration databases (Illinois was named) and warned states to be vigilant. Russia also was reportedly behind hacks of DNC and Clinton campaign emails.

The count anomalies and possible explanations cited by the team of voting rights attorneys and electronic voting machine experts, whose experience in these issues dates back to the 2000 and 2004 elections, combined a mix of old and new threats. In some cases, known electronic voting machine vulnerabilities may have been tapped to inflate county-level vote tabulations, they said, suggesting those machines should be impounded and examined. Where Russia may have been involved, their theory goes beyond anything imagined in past elections. They posited that last summer’s Russia hacks of voter registration databases could have yielded sufficient information to create large numbers of phantom absentee ballot voters, inflating the Trump vote in certain swing states that helped win the Electoral College.
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Computer experts who have tracked electronic voting issues subsequently noticed the Florida-based contractor who managed North Carolina’s voter registration database was VR Systems. Earlier this fall, CNN reported that an unnamed Florida-based voting system vendor was hacked by the Russians. To the best of these experts’ knowledge, VR is the only Florida-based voting system vendor. It also has contracts in Virginia, New York, Illinois, Indiana, California and other states, according to the company’s website.
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more: http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/steven-rosenfeld/69910/a-fair-election-serious-hard-to-explain-questions-arise-about-trump-vote-totals-in-3-key-states