In Response to Joshua Holland at Raw Story

Joshua Holland at Raw Story recently wrote an article about Tim Robbins posting a tweet questioning the results of some of the recent Democratic Primaries. Robbins said that journalists should investigate the differences between the unadjusted exit polls and the actual election results. Holland went on to investigate where the unadjusted exit polls, that Robbins referenced, came from and it led him to a statistician, Richard Charnin. Holland spent the rest of his article debunking Charnin’s assumptions and deriding him as a conspiracy nut. Holland has a point in this very narrow review of the election fraud issue but he totally misses the big picture.

Richard Charnin used to post in the Election Reform Forum at Democratic Underground after the 2004 Presidential Election. I debated him a few times on that forum and found that he would make assumptions that could not be proven and then use these assumptions to “prove” election fraud. In most of the elections that he reviewed there was enough evidence to warrant further investigation but it was impossible to prove fraud based on the limited information available to the public. When Holland accuses Charnin of “pulling an assumption out of your ass” I don’t disagree. Charnin has made a name for himself in the Election Reform movement but his absolute conclusions hurt the credibility of the movement, in my opinion.

Holland goes on to explain the difference between the “adjusted” and “unadjusted” exit poll data after he had a conversation with Joe Lensky from Edison Media Research, the company that conducts the exit polls. This is a complex issue that deserves an in depth study and I will not address it here. What I will say is that the Exit Polls are not as black and white as Holland, acting as a stenographer for Edison Media Research, makes them out to be.

While Holland has a point about Charnin he does not even mention the problems with the paperless touch screen voting machines that millions of voters use across the United States. These machines have no paper trail and cannot be audited. In addition, they are the most expensive way to vote. Many voters feel better with optical scan machines since they complete a paper ballot before a scanner records the vote. However, unless there are audits to compare the paper results to the machine totals, this system isn’t much better than the touch screen machines. Central tabulators are another source of concern in the voting process. Holland does not mention any of this in his article.

To illustrate the problems in our election system lets look at the 2016 and 2010 Democratic primaries in South Carolina. Nearly all voters in South Carolina cast their ballots on paperless touch screen voting machines. Hillary Clinton recently won South Carolina by an overwhelming margin. In fact, she exceeded President Obama’s margins over her in 2008. From the New York Times:

She has won South Carolina in a rout, 73.5 percent to 26 percent, exceeding Mr. Obama’s own 29-point victory in 2008. She did it the same way that Mr. Obama did: with overwhelming support from black voters, who favored Mrs. Clinton over Bernie Sanders by a stunning margin of 87 to 13, according to updated exit polls — a tally that would be larger than Mr. Obama’s victory among black voters eight years earlier. Black voters represented 62 percent of the electorate, according to exit polls, even higher than in 2008.


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/upshot/hillary-clintons-winning-numbers-in-south-carolina-suggest-sweep-in-south.html?_r=0

Keep in mind that delegates are allocated proportionately so the margin of victory is critical. Clinton’s margin was 47.5% or 18.5% more than Obama won by in 2008. And it is hard for me to believe that she won more of the black vote in 2016 than Obama won in 2008. The Real Clear Politics pre-election poll average showed Clinton ahead by 27.5% so she beat this metric by 20%. After this primary I was surprised that no election reform activists pointed out these anomalies. Does any of this prove fraud in South Carolina? No, but the results should be questioned and researched in my opinion. However, since almost all of the vote is done on paperless touch screen machines any review would be severely limited.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/sc/south_carolina_democratic_presidential_primary-4167.html

So you may say that Hillary had a great ground game and black voters strongly prefer her over Senator Sanders to explain her incredible results. Those could be the reasons. But before you come to any conclusions, let’s look back at the 2010 Democratic primary in South Carolina where an unknown candidate, Alvin Greene, beat an established Democratic politician, Vic Rawls. From Wikipedia:

Controversies surrounded the Democratic nominee, Alvin Greene. Greene's primary election win and his margin of victory surprised pundits. As of the primary, he had held no public campaign events, raised no money, and did not have a campaign website. A review of the primary election showed that of the state's 46 counties, half had a significant gap between the absentee and primary day ballots. For example, in Lancaster County, Vic Rawl won the absentees with 84 percent, while Greene won primary day by a double digit margin. Rawl's campaign manager also claimed that "In only two of 88 precincts, do the number of votes Greene got plus the number we got equal the total cast."[4]

U.S. Congressman James Clyburn recommended Greene drop out of the race or he would face a federal investigation into his candidacy – even as he faces a felony obscenity charge in Richland County from November 2009. Clyburn said "There were some real shenanigans going on in the South Carolina primary. I don't know if he was a Republican plant; he was someone's plant."[5] Political blog FiveThirtyEight's Tom Schaller suggests three possibilities: a legitimate vote, the vote was rigged, or the vote-counting software was corrupted. Schaller ruled out the possibility of Republican infiltration, similar to Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" in 2008.[6]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_South_Carolina,_2010

Shortly after this primary Greene appeared on Keith Olbermann’s television show and he was barely coherent. Greene could not explain where he got the $10,400 filing fee to run in the Primary. There was an investigation of Greene to see where that money came from and he was cleared of any wrong doing. I could not find any investigation on the 2010 South Carolina primary election process. It seems anything goes when it comes to primary elections.

The point of all this is not to pick on South Carolina, since there have been many questionable results across the country in recent years, but to point out serious problems in our election process. This is not about Clinton verse Sanders nor Democrat verse Republican. This is about a broken election system that is easily manipulated in undetectable ways. And as long as the system doesn’t change there will continue to be vast distrust in the way we elect candidates in the United States.