Slashdot Mirror
Green Party Calls For Recount, Wants To Push For Open-Source Voting Machines (nbcnewyork.com)
The Green party candidate in the U.S. presidential election, Jill Stein, has raised over $5 million in donations to fund a recount in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which are the states key to Hillary Clinton's loss on November 8th. She is seeking a recount in these three states after computer scientists discovered Clinton averaged 7% worse in counties with e-voting machines vs. counties with only paper or optical scan ballots. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: On November 23, the Stein/Baraka Green Party Campaign launched an effort to ensure the integrity of our elections," calling for "publicly-owned, open source voting equipment." In approximately 48 hours (as of 1:20pm EST (GMT-5) on Nov-25-2016) $5,026,516.15 has been raised to pay for a recount in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and [they are] currently collecting towards a recount in Michigan. The Green party also states: "The Green Party Platform calls for 'publicly-owned, open source voting equipment and deploy it across the nation to ensure high national standards, performance, transparency and accountability; use verifiable paper ballots; and institute mandatory automatic random precinct recounts to ensure a high level of accuracy in election results.'" More details can be read on MSNBC news. The Washington Post asks: Why are people giving Jill Stein millions of dollars for an election recount? UPDATE 11/25/16: Washington Examiner is reporting that Green Party officials have filed for a presidential vote recount in Wisconsin.
UPDATE 11/26/16: Hillary Clinton's campaign said Saturday that it will take part in the recount in Wisconsin.
UPDATE 11/26/16: Hillary Clinton's campaign said Saturday that it will take part in the recount in Wisconsin.
Electronic voting as a whole is a gigantic boondoggle. There are only three reasons for it to exist: People who are too impatient to wait for manual counting, people who are looking to make a tidy profit selling a broken solution to a problem that doesn't need solving, and people who are interested in a way to fuck with the polls without getting caught.
You forgot: It exists to make a lot of money for those who sell machines.
The standard of integrity and validation is higher for slot machines. When the average Vegas casino is more transparent than election machines, there's a pretty serious problem.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Look at the Russian hacks, they were targeting the vote registration data. From that data you get the list of absentee voters and the list of habitual non-voters. When Florida is busy receiving all those faxed votes, it has no way of telling they come from a US military base in Afghanistan or a Russian propaganda base in Moscow. They simply don't validate the origin of absentee votes sent by post or fax.
Ohio didn't send out 1 million absentee ballots (the Republican governor withheld absentee ballots from people who moved within Ohio, i.e. renters not home owners), yet Ohio had a record year for absentee ballot voting.
And it was Russia:
http://time.com/4472169/russian-hackers-arizona-voter-registration/
"Russians Hacked Arizona Voter Registration Database -Official...Russians were responsible for the recent breach of Arizona’s voter registration system, the FBI told state officials in June. He said hackers gained access after stealing the username and password of an election official in Gila County, rather than compromising the state or county system."
This is Illinois's hack:
http://time.com/4471042/fbi-voter-database-breach-arizona-illinois/
Florida was also hit, and likely many more too.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/12/politics/florida-election-hack/
"Feds believe Russians hacked Florida election-systems vendor"
So, maybe I'll do a blog post about this, but the data is surprisingly easy to find. Buffalo county, which uses exclusively e-voting touchscreen machines, and voted for Obama in 2012, ended up voting for Trump by a huge percentage in '16. La-fayette county, Obama '12, Trump '16, all e-voting machines, huge discrepancy in vote. Door County, Obama '12, Trump '16, but much much closer in vote count; optical scanning of paper ballots and not a touchscreen machine.
This is literally the first 3 counties that voted Obama in '12, Trump in '16 that I selected pretty much at random. It does nothing to dispel the claims of potential fraud, nor do the many demonstrations of e-voting machines being easy to hack. That a bunch of experts have claimed it would be hard to do so because the machines aren't on the internet only shows that the only expertise they have is manipulating things on the internet. There are plenty of actual, physical manipulations of vote counts in US election voting history, New York in the 19th century was rife with it for some time periods. Not everything, surprisingly, has to be done through the internet.
There's nothing wrong with seeking not just a re-count, but in checking the machines used for signs of tampering which is an incredibly necessary idea. Secure elections are a cornerstone of democracy, and double checking one already rife with hacking and blatant media manipulation is an obvious idea.
Stein has no legal standing for a recount in Michigan: "A candidate for an office canvassed by the board of state canvassers or is the office of representative in Congress, state representative, or state senator for a district located wholly within 1 county may petition for a recount of the votes. The petition must allege that the candidate is “aggrieved on account of fraud or mistake in the canvass of the votes by the inspectors of election or the returns.” " Mich. Comp. Laws 168.879(1). Since Stein has no chance of winning, from a legal perspective, she can not be "aggrieved." Hillary is the only candidate that would be "aggrieved" if there are irregularities in the vote, and thus, she is the only one who can petition for a recount. Republican legal teams are already drafting motions for injunctions due to standing.