I find it hilarious that when Doud Mastriano tweets:
“There is mounting evidence that the PA presidential election was compromised. If this is the case, under Article II, Section 1.2 of the US Constitution, the state legislature has the sole authority to direct the manner of selecting delegates to the Electoral College. (1):
Twitter jumps in immediately to say “this claim about election fraud is disputed.”
https://twitter.com/SenMastriano/status/1332666825490968578
If you click twitter’s link, you see “Voter fraud of any kind is exceedingly rare in the US, election experts confirm” with a picture from VOAnews. Voice of America’s whole purpose is to spread American government propaganda around the world. After Smith Mundt was amended to allow propaganda to be aimed at Americans, well, this looks like a perfect example of it.
Despite Twitter’s reassuring headline (and the unnamed “experts”), there actually is plenty of evidence that fraud exists and has existed for some time, and has been made even easier with electronic voting machines.
Espectially for readers too young to recall these eariler scandals, here’s a walk down memory lane.
2000 (Bush/Gore).
Remember hanging chads? Remember Diebold?
https://www.opednews.com/fitrakis032204_diebold.htm
“A joint study by the California and Massachusetts Institutes of Technology following the 2000 election determined that between 1.5 and 2 million votes were not counted due to confusing paper ballots or faulty equipment. The federal government’s solution to the problem was to pass the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002.”
The Help America Vote Act seems to have been intended to help America vote *electronically.* Hmm…..
“One of the law’s stated goals was “Replacement of punch card and lever voting machines.” The new voting machines would be high-tech touch screen computers, but if there’s no paper trail, how do you know if there’s been a computer glitch? How can the results be trusted? And how do you recount to see if the actual votes match the computer’s tally?j”
“Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, argues that without a paper trail, these machines are open to massive voter fraud. Diebold has already placed some 50,000 machines in 37 states and their track record is causing Harris, Johns Hopkins University professors and others great concern.
“Johns Hopkins researchers at the Information Security Institute issued a report declaring that Diebold’s electronic voting software contained “stunning flaws.” The researchers concluded that vote totals could be altered at the voting machines and by remote access. Diebold vigorously refuted the Johns Hopkins report, claiming the researchers came to “a multitude of false conclusions.”
So we can see there was already a big problem, and plenty of suspicion, in 2000. (My favorite line from the above article:: “[Diebold CEO] O’Dell is on record stating that he is ‘committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President’ this year.” And he did!
2004 (Bush/Kerry):
This was the year that Kerry led in all the exit polls, and yet to the consternation of some, and astonishment of many more, Bush won the election.
Exit polls had been conducted for several years by Edison/Mitofsky.
https://www.edisonresearch.com/view_election_2/
The news agencies explained the discrepancy by saying Kerry voters had been over-, and Bush voters under- represented in these polls.
But a year later, a group of prominent academic statisticians looked at the odds and said, “No Way.”
https://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/01/prweb203331.htm
“There are statistical indications that a systematic, nationwide shift of 5.5% of the vote may have occurred, and that we’ll never get to the bottom of this, unless we gather the data we need for mathematical analysis and open, robust scientific debate…”
https://stolenelection.blogspot.com/
“The new Edison/Mitofsky report fails to provide any evidence to substantiate the hypothesis that Kerry voters participated in exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters, or that exit polling errors caused exit polls to favor Kerry by 3% when Bush won the election by 2.5%,” said Kathy Dopp, President, US Count Votes. “The possibility that the overall vote count was substantially corrupted must be taken seriously and investigated thoroughly.”
I remember hearing about that report, and the odds were astronomical, but initially I had trouble finding it.
Found it here, along with many other interesting studies:
https://electionmathematics.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=4&MMN_position=4:4
Here’s the statisticians’ report,
https://www.electionmathematics.org/em-exitpolls/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf
and yes, the odds of the polls being wrong (and Kerry actually losing) were astronomically small:
“This information allows us to determine the implied standard deviation for this sample and find what the probability is that the national exit poll would overestimate Kerry’s vote share by 2.7%. The odds of this occurring by chance are one in 16,496,696>”
So what happened?
Bev Harris’s website, Black Box Voting, still exists: https://blackboxvoting.org/
and you can freely download a pdf of her book there.
She demonstrated how easy it was to hack the vote to then-DNC Chair Howard Dean on national television. It’s no longer possible to find that specific show on youtube, but it did get a little attention:
https://bradblog.com/?p=2724
http://www.crocuta.net/Dean/Dean_Host_TopicA_Aug8_2004.htm
https://www.inquisitr.com/3369838/what-happened-to-howard-deans-voting-machine-interview-with-bev-harris-exposing-election-fraud/
It should have been, and remained a huge story, especially after the statistcians’ report, but Howard Dean moved on and his priorities changed, and there didn’t seem to be much appetite in the Democratic party to investigate. Even Kerry didn’t. Why? I wondered then if the Dems actually might find this kind of system useful. What if someone gained popularity within the party they really didn’t like? They’d want to keep that person from gaining speed. I figured someone must have sat on Kerry, and his political viability was at stake. Maybe a payoff later on?….
2016 (Sanders/Clinton)
Unless you were a Bernie supporter, you probably didn’t really care that he lost the nomination to Clinton, but the emails Wikileaks exposed showed that the fix was in at the DNC for her even before Bernie began his run. With these “smoking gun” emails, attorneys Jared Beck and Elizabeth Lee Beck, passionate Bernie supporters, sued the DNC for fraud on behalf of Bernie’s contributors. The judge declared they didn’t have standing, and their only remedy was to reform the corrupt party. (Lawyers for the DNC frankly admitted the party could choose whomever they wanted; wishes of the voters did not matter.)
Jared wrote a book about the suit:
https://twitter.com/ai_jared/status/1090801867226005506
They are characters for sure, but have a lot of integrity and are fascinating to listen to. (imo).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnhrG5Aaw6U
Bernie had HUGE crowds at his rallies; Clinton….. did not.
There is reason to believe machines were fixed to take from Bernie and give to Clinton:
https://newspunch.com/election-fraud-15-of-votes-switched-from-sanders-to-clinton/
Given what happened in 2016, I really can’t blame people for their suspicions in 2020.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/481448-iowa-chaos-highlights-new-misinformation-threat
And that was well before the election.
So, readers, who ya gonna believe? Twitter “fact” checkers, or your own lyin’ eyes? ?
Sharyl, thanks for this growing list of links and for including knowledgable citizen journalists. Mainstream media is becoming like Pravda, and those citizens are our Samizdat truth tellers!
