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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.
There is no way to verify the integrity of the machines on voting day, nor to safeguard the integrity of the polling data between the voting machine and the final tally. Open source means nothing here.
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.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a slip of paper and a pen. Or have people dip their finger in ink like we've all seen done...
=Smidge=
Jill Stein is calling for recounts in three states where Hillary lost and not calling for recounts in New Hampshire, Minnesota & Nevada, three states where the results were even closer but in those states Hillary "won". Somehow Stein has gained more money for recounts ($4.7 m) than she managed to raise in her entire campaign ($3 m), even though clearly no Stein supporter believes that she will pick up enough votes to win any state. Gee Hillary, we wonder where all that money is coming from.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
yeah... its "over"... but they have the right to request the recount, so they are taking them up on that option.
And... it's not the dems requesting it, which is surprising.
Oh well, if the Greens want to waste their money, let them.
To the ACs whining about "They can't accept the outcome"... they are using legal avenues to make sure its right. It's not like the Greens are asking for special consideration because "AWMG RIGGED!!!"
Trump was crying like a 2 year old about everything (CROOKED, RIGGED, WAHH) was so unfair and as soon as he got his way, he smiled and sat contently in the corner. Just like a two year old that got his way.
Let them, they are allowed to request it and they did.
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"
In PA you need to show proof of it and what they provided was nothing close to be counted as proof.
Just like in PA where the claim of "massive" voter fraud has been tossed about for years despite not a single case being shown as proof. Yet apparently not providing proof was sufficient enough for the legislature to pass a law to prevent this "massive" voter fraud.
If no proof of "massive" voter fraud was sufficient to get the gears rolling then there's no reason not to recount the ballots despite the limited amount of evidence presented. You can't have it both ways.
Also, while Michigan may use paper ballots, it still uses a computer to record the votes. Straight from the Michigan Secretary of State web site:
All voters in Michigan use optical scan ballots. Optical scan voting requires voters to either darken an oval or connect the head and tail of an arrow next to each of their choices on their ballot. Completed ballots are fed into a tabulator, which scans and records the votes. (italics mine)
That right there is the rub. How does one know the electronic machine is correctly recording the votes? Just because a vote is registered does not mean it was registered correctly. Since Michigan has paper ballots, hand count them. It's the easiest way to see if there are any irregularities.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
There's so much hypocrisy in this. On the one hand they don't really give a shit about election integrity and very important things to ensure that our elections really are meaningful and accurate. They don't support biometric voter registration which is standard in many countries now. They don't give a shit about vote weight disparity (in Japan some elections have actually been invalidated in their highest court because of such disparity). They don't really give a shit about meaningful election forensics.
Basically this is just more bullshit from people who engage in nothing but bullshit.
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.
> You really do just make shit up, don't you?
I just love these post-fact "refutations" where you don't actually bother to cite sources or anything, even though this information is stupidly easy to find online.
Let's look at the important factual claims here, shall we? There are basically two: that she raised more here than in her presidential campaign and that the vote totals were closer in other states that Hillary won and that she's challenging states that would help Hillary win. This leads people to form the opinion that it's Hillary & co. funding this because it benefits Hillary more than Jill Stein. If we just want more confidence in the final results, then all the close states should be recounted, not just those which benefit Hillary.
That said, feel free to suggest improvements to how we vote for the future. We really should prevent vote fraud of every kind. I still remember just a few months back when Tim Kaine was saying stuff like this:
Source: http://www.npr.org/2016/10/20/498676187/vp-candidate-kaine-trump-is-attacking-central-pillar-of-our-democracy
Claim 1 - Jill Stein got more money for a recount than her campaign:
Here's an image for easy comparison, but $5M > $3M. How do we know she got over $5M for this campaign?
"Green Party Candidate Jill Stein Files for Recount in Wisconsin, Raises More Than $5M for Recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania"
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/politics/Green-Party-Candidate-Jill-Stein-to-Seek-Recount-in-Battleground-States-402731286.html
Now, how much did her presidential campaign raise? The FEC has that info here:
http://www.fec.gov/fecviewer/CandidateCommitteeDetail.do?candidateCommitteeId=P20003984&tabIndex=1
This currently gives us about $3 million dollars ('net contributions') as can be seen below:
Claim 2 - The challenges are in favor of Hillary
States where we need recounts: WI, MI, and PA - source was quoted above. States NOT on the recount list NV, CO, MN, or NH - I can find no reports of recount requests here. Feel free to give sources if someone is recounting any of those.
NV is closer than PA & WI. MN is closer than PA. NH was won by just 2,732 votes - far less than any state on this list. CO had a pretty small margin too, but it was slightly larger than the three recount states.
I will also leave this here, because of all the #fakenews about "hacking" the election... never mind that MI (one of the recount states!) uses only paper ballots: