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Clinton Urged To Challenge Election Results Due To Possible Hacking [Update] (cnn.com)
Reader Bruha writes: After examining results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin computer scientists have discovered Clinton averaged 7% worse in counties with e voting machines vs. counties with only paper or optical scan ballots.From a CNN report:The computer scientists believe they have found evidence that vote totals in the three states could have been manipulated or hacked and presented their findings to top Clinton aides on a call last Thursday. The scientists, among them J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, told the Clinton campaign they believe there is a questionable trend of Clinton performing worse in counties that relied on electronic voting machines compared to paper ballots and optical scanners, according to the source. The group informed John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chairman, and Marc Elias, the campaign's general counsel, that Clinton received 7% fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic voting machines, which the group said could have been hacked.Halderman wrote more about it on Medium today in an article titled, "Want to Know if the Election was Hacked? Look at the Ballots"
Update: Green party candidate Jill Stein is asking for donations to fund a recount of her own in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which are the states key to Hillary Clinton's surprising loss. Stein says she must raise $2.5 million by Friday 4 pm central time to proceed.
Editor's note: the story has been updated and moved up on the front page.
Update: Green party candidate Jill Stein is asking for donations to fund a recount of her own in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which are the states key to Hillary Clinton's surprising loss. Stein says she must raise $2.5 million by Friday 4 pm central time to proceed.
Editor's note: the story has been updated and moved up on the front page.
Yeah. They looked like pretty typical cases of a broken touch screen to me; the lack of any reports of Democratic votes changing to Republican might be reporting bias.
If you're going to rig a machine to change a vote, you'd be pretty dumb to make it show it changing.
I'm going to have to disagree with your assessment. I work in the audiovisual department of a large multinational corporation. In my specific building, we have about 50 Crestron AV control panels that use resistive touch screens. Calibration issues run rampant with these; in any given week, I am re-calibrating at least 5 of the panels. Every single time it is the same: you will touch a button, and the actual selected area will be to the left of your finger. Every. Single. Time. Sometimes we have panels shipped off for repairs if they need to be recalibrate more frequently than the others, and even after that, sometimes the calibration will slowly slip in the same direction. So it certainly is possible that with the touchscreen voting machines, all of the panels that have calibration issues are doing so in the same or a very similar manner.
but I'm baffled where all the Trump supporters came from.
There are a few different groups. Lets get the KKK, Nationalists, etc out of the way. Yes they voted for him (Like they would have voted for Clinton) but their numbers are so small they're really not worth discussing on a national scale.
In the Midwest:
In large part it's blue collar salt of the earth people in the middle. Come out and visit 'us'. (I didn't vote trump but my state and county did). If you make a joke about flyover country you'll probably get punched the 10th time you say it. Most of the people out here are the nicest people you'll meet. If you ever needed anything (Flat tire, etc) they'll be the first to stop and lend a hand. Everyone has had a job that was affected by NAFTA. (Real or perceived, most people think they were affected by NAFTA)
50% of household earning less than $35k don't have Internet. Some townships are on Dialup alone. [Despite having our tax money go to help fix that]. Our infastructure is literally falling apart around us. We don't have enough population in any single county to warrant people paying attention to us. When it comes to 'social' issues most of us are "I don't see it I don't care". When asked where a transgendered person pees it's probably in the woods like everyone else. But we really, really hate being dictated to about 'how it is' from the coasts.
Some of us tried the high road, my county went very Bernie in the primaries. Polls had both WI and MI completely wrong. We saw Bernie as the democratic way to 'make america great again' and were told, literally, "You aren't needed in November" despite filling stadiums and waiting in lines to see Sanders.
Republican votes per county have held flat 2008-2012-2016. Jill stein saw a 'huge' jump between 2012-2016. And Democratic voters more or less just stayed home.
The second group is a bit more entertaining to watch:
It's /r/The_Donald. It's the angry, contrarian young male vote. It seems to be a melting pot of RedPill, 4Chan, and a bunch of other places that demographic hangs out, online equivalent of a bag of cats.
Milo Yiannopoulos seemed to gain a lot of traction and followers out of the GamerGate. They have less in common other than they really really hate the "SJW" type and saw trump as the anti PC candidate. I'm fascinated by people watching so I've dug through some profiles. Most are just 18-25 year old males that feel something about Obama or Clinton gave them the short end of the stick.
The recruiting techniques are pretty much follow gang recruiting techniques that have been used for centuries and are used now to radicalize people for ISIS. "Did those people wrong you? It's this persons fault. Join us and we'll "fix" it".
Beyond that there's really nothing that binds them. (Other than some don't know how to create new Reddit Profiles).
For example one user is a ~20 year old 2nd generation Muslim Indian immigrant. Follows soccer and Cricket, loves cats, smokes cannabis lives in NY, drives around a BMW 435i and used to drive an Audi S5. And is all on the trump train ... because.
Not all Trump voters are racists.
But every single racist person I know voted for Trump.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
She really is that unpopular. Look, even if you presume the popular vote is the right tracker of popularity (hard, because people decide their votes based upon the EC system), she's only 2% more "liked" (or 2% less disliked) than a crazy narcissistic posterchild for the 0.1% who keeps spouting fascist rhetoric.
Trump's negative campaign against her is merely a few years old. Clinton's opponents have been running a smear campaign against her for 25 years, and after a while, some of the mud sticks, no matter how unfair. Also she's a neo-conservative who pals around with Henry Kissenger, and is associated with international trade treaties widely - if unfairly - associated with the decline of US industry*. Her husband, who she's assumed to be close to, spent a significant amount of time reinventing the Democratic Party to be less concerned with social justice, neutering welfare, and introducing draconian "law and order" laws that devastated communities.
So, she's not popular with the left, and according to the right she's a murdering real estate fraudster who runs secret email servers so she can hide her secret ISIS plot to kill Heroic American Gamers in Benghazi.
Why would you think she's popular?
* Footnote: that decline actually dates back to Reagan, but people always think the bad stuff happened in the short term - witness the amnesia about how high gas prices were during Bush's eight years, for example. The novelization of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, Primary Colors, actually has him winning over his future campaign manager when he makes a speech to some out of work factory workers, telling them he can't bring back those jobs, that they're pretty much permanently moved overseas at this point, but that he'll fight every day to create new jobs for them.To bring this closer to home as we're all nerds here, Commodore, which went bankrupt in the early nineties, was widely criticized for its policy of domestic computer manufacturing, virtually everyone else was hiring companies in the far east to manufacture their computers for them, with only superficial assembly in the US, if any.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I'd like to see it looked into, but unlike you I won't propagandize on some fantasy of what the results say. I just think statistically significant routine random audits should be performed as a matter of course, and am interested in the academic side of things.
The Clinton campaign has to walk a fine line here because as a stakeholder, they are the people in a position to petition to get the audits done should it involve the courts. They are damned if they do, because it may be the case (depending on the laws in said states) that they have to talk out two sides of their mouth, saying they think the recount might change something to the courts, so they have grounds, but saying it won't to the public so as not to create a commotion. They are damned if they don't, by people like you (I'd point out if there was shenanigans in the primary it is just as likely Republicans thought Bernie was more of a challenge in the general than Clinton, and they did the deed.) Also die-hards in the party won't like it if they do not pursue this.
We can't look to Trump to ask for a recount, as he has nothing to gain from it (i.e. he lost nothing) and thus may lack legal standing. If one of the third parties can say that this could tip them from having met the threshold for ballot access in that state for future elections, they could initiate the recount (Nader made his campaign useful in this respect ISTR at points in the past.)
Someone had to do it.