James_Madison_Lives
Member
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2010
- Messages
- 2,806
https://evidence2020.wordpress.com/...vote-flipping-against-bernie-sanders-in-2016/
Evidence of Dominion Vote-Flipping Against Bernie Sanders in 2016 Boosts Trump Charges
“Someone is hacking into these computers that tabulate the votes” – US Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA)
It was April of 2016 when Georgia Democrat Hank Johnson saidthese words, in a House Judiciary Committee hearing. Officially, the topic was something bland-sounding, having to do the with voter suppression and insecure elections blah blah.
But the real topic in the air of the packed room was the feeling of many, that Bernie Sanders had just been cheated in the primaries.
Johnson said:
Shockingly, both ES&S and its main competitor, Dominion Voting Systems, manufacture vote-counting machines that security experts say can add votes to paper ballots after they are cast by voters.
That July, a team of statisticians and election integrity activists, one of whom was a former president of the American Statistical Association, published a paper that shook many Sanders supporters.
In the first place, the statisticians were concerned that in key counties in all-important New York, such as Kings County in the chart below (Brooklyn,) Hillary Clinton just happened to do much better where the votes were counted by machine, rather than by hand. Kings County uses a combination of Dominion and ES&S vote-counting machines.
The authors of the paper wrote that in New York, a key battleground in Democratic presidential primaries:
Kings County, NY (Brooklyn) hand versus machine-counted ballots
Click to expand image
In the second place, the mathematicians found patterns which violated numerous statistical laws.
The authors wrote:
Vote-counting machine hacking demonstration from HBO documentary Hacking Democracy
The mathematicians had two problems with the “irregularities.” One, they were not to supposed to exist, and because they did exist, they were evidence of machine-hacking at work. Two, not only did they exist, but in each case, they overwhelmingly favored Hillary Clinton.
It would be as if not only were unlikely hands being dealt from a deck of cards, one after the other. In addition, they always broke in one player’s favor.
Five royal flushes in a row would raise eyebrows across the saloon. All of them for one player would start a gunfight.
In the research paper, charts called cumulative vote tallies (CVT) were constructed. Simply, along the X-axis, the chart lined up a county’s precincts according to the total number of votes in that precinct, going from small to large, left to right. On the Y-axis was the total percentage of the vote won by each candidate.
Without diving too deeply into statistical jargon, the pattern showed Hillary’s share of the vote going up as the precincts got larger, in an unnaturally smooth curve, which betrayed the presence of an algorithm. The algorithm stole votes in a methodical manner from larger precincts, where it would be harder to detect. The statisticians attempted to explain it demographically, but could not.
Below, the top chart is of a normal CVT vote distribution, in hand-counted Columbia County, New York. Something called the “Law of Large Numbers” says a candidate’s vote percent tends to flatten out.
But in the two charts below that, for Illinois and Louisiana, Hillary Clinton’s numbers, in violation of this law, go up, while Bernie Sanders’ go proportionately down. Not in a jerky, roller coaster manner, but as smooth as an algebraic formula. If there is one thing computers are good at, it is executing formulas.
Directly below: Columbia County, NY, hand-counted ballots
Click to expand image
Two charts below, machine-counted ballots
Click to expand image
Click to expand image
In Illinois and Louisiana, both Dominion and ES&S have a strong presence.
In the paper, (titled “An Electoral System in Crisis,”) it was noted that the same type of statistical forensics had been applied to Ron Paul’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, and found the same patterns. A Wichita State University statistician and Chief Statistician at the National Institute for Aviation Research said of those findings:
Click to expand image
The researchers looked into the past for examples of the strange statistical pattern. What they saw was that the patterns did not seem to exist before 2004. The researchers wrote:
This was astonishing. The year 2002 is remarkable in elections history for one thing: the passage of the HAVA “Help America Vote Act” in Congress. The act began the disbursement of billions of dollars to the states for upgraded voting equipment, most notably ushering in the modern era of hackable vote-counting machines.
Among the other interesting findings which emerged is that some machines even seemed to have a predilection for a particular party. In the below chart for the 2012 presidential race, although the Republican vote percentage meanders fairly normally for most types of machines, the ES&S DS200 seems to develop a distinct liking for the Republican as the precincts increase by number of voters (red line at bottom.)
Click to expand image
As if all of this were not enough, in the same year a computer programmer made the discovery that vote values in most vote-counting machines could be stored as decimals, rather than only as integers. Probing the discovery further, the programmer and others concluded that all of the reasons for this were bad. There is no such thing as a fractional vote. The only reason for not “declaring” the vote values as integers, as programmers say, would be to be able to decide on a race result beforehand, and be able to work the math backwards. The programmer dubbed his discovery “fraction magic.”
The recommendations of the research team for instilling confidence in voting results are, in essence: verification, transparency, and…more verification.
The authors wrote in 2016:
The writers recommend what this blog has recommended, making the ballot images public, and every possible measure for transparency taken, simply as a matter of course. This is the opposite of the posture many courts have adopted in Trump’s pursuit of transparency and verification, where the burden has been placed on the Trump campaign to show sufficient evidence.
The authors of the report say:
The authors of the report wrote in 2016:
This is the danger of bypassing full transparency and verification. When fully one-half of the electorate believes an election was a sham, and the other half can do no better than to repeat “no evidence,” then perhaps the safety valves written into the Constitution, which allow state governments to send anyone they want as electors, should be invoked. Until the system is fixed.
Sometimes the system is fine, and it is prosecution of officials that is needed. In 2016, a Democratic primary challenger to Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz found out, in the middle of challenging the results, that the county election supervisor had illegally destroyed all the paper ballots in the race, which the challenger had requested to see. No state or federal action was ever taken against the supervisor, Brenda Snipes, who was an open ally of Wasserman-Schultz and Hillary Clinton.
Destruction of evidence is the strongest evidence of wrongdoing there is. It should automatically award the election to the wronged party.
Far from media parrotings that doubts about the election system are “baseless,” this Florida episode alone tells voters, of any party, that the fix could be in. This was a major congressional primary involving a powerful former chairwoman of the DNC, in which a Sanders-backed candidate was on track to win.
If election authorities are frustrated that no one trusts their elections, they made their own bed.
As of September 2019, Dominion voting machines are used in 2,000 jurisdictions in 33 U.S. states and Puerto Rico. They are used significantly in all the key swing states of GA, AZ, PA, NV, and MI.
Most advanced democracies have already reverted to systems of 100% hand-counted paper ballots, including Germany, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, Denmark, Finland, and 53 other countries.
In 2004, a computer programmer named Clint Curtis testified under oath before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, that he had hacked an election on behalf of Congressman Tom Feeney, a Florida Republican. Under oath, Curtis testified that he:
MORE READING OF INTEREST
Here is Bill Gates’ Injectable Biochip, for Those Who Think it is Conspiracy Theory
Evidence of Dominion Vote-Flipping Against Bernie Sanders in 2016 Boosts Trump Charges
“Someone is hacking into these computers that tabulate the votes” – US Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA)
It was April of 2016 when Georgia Democrat Hank Johnson saidthese words, in a House Judiciary Committee hearing. Officially, the topic was something bland-sounding, having to do the with voter suppression and insecure elections blah blah.
But the real topic in the air of the packed room was the feeling of many, that Bernie Sanders had just been cheated in the primaries.
Johnson said:
“There is a very insidious, treacherous and deceitful method of voter suppression, and it has to do with the integrity of the voting process itself.”
Johnson was taking about a kind of election fraud that is hard to see. No boxes of ballots disappearing or magically appearing in the middle of the night. A kind which can take but a few keystrokes, once access is gained. A few lines of code. The only way to prove or disprove it conclusively is to hand-count the paper ballots.
Shockingly, both ES&S and its main competitor, Dominion Voting Systems, manufacture vote-counting machines that security experts say can add votes to paper ballots after they are cast by voters.
That July, a team of statisticians and election integrity activists, one of whom was a former president of the American Statistical Association, published a paper that shook many Sanders supporters.
In the first place, the statisticians were concerned that in key counties in all-important New York, such as Kings County in the chart below (Brooklyn,) Hillary Clinton just happened to do much better where the votes were counted by machine, rather than by hand. Kings County uses a combination of Dominion and ES&S vote-counting machines.
The authors of the paper wrote that in New York, a key battleground in Democratic presidential primaries:
“In every single assembly district we examined, except one, Hillary Clinton performed better when the votes were counted by machine; Sanders performed better when the votes were counted by hand. The graph shows eight of the districts that were included in the study. This is a small sample of the overall ballots cast, but the consistency of the results makes a convincing case that something is amiss.”
Kings County, NY (Brooklyn) hand versus machine-counted ballots
Click to expand image
In the second place, the mathematicians found patterns which violated numerous statistical laws.
The authors wrote:
“The overwhelming majority of the almost two dozen states that we analyzed, demonstrate irregularities. In almost every instance the discrepancies favored Hillary Clinton. In all likelihood the current results have assigned her a greater percentage of the vote than she may have actually received, while simultaneously under-reporting Bernie Sanders’ legitimate vote share.”
Now Trump is alleging exactly the same thing, machine hacking, not just of Dominion machines, but of others using the same latest generation of technology. This is something that election integrity activists have long been aware of.
Vote-counting machine hacking demonstration from HBO documentary Hacking Democracy
The mathematicians had two problems with the “irregularities.” One, they were not to supposed to exist, and because they did exist, they were evidence of machine-hacking at work. Two, not only did they exist, but in each case, they overwhelmingly favored Hillary Clinton.
It would be as if not only were unlikely hands being dealt from a deck of cards, one after the other. In addition, they always broke in one player’s favor.
Five royal flushes in a row would raise eyebrows across the saloon. All of them for one player would start a gunfight.
In the research paper, charts called cumulative vote tallies (CVT) were constructed. Simply, along the X-axis, the chart lined up a county’s precincts according to the total number of votes in that precinct, going from small to large, left to right. On the Y-axis was the total percentage of the vote won by each candidate.
Without diving too deeply into statistical jargon, the pattern showed Hillary’s share of the vote going up as the precincts got larger, in an unnaturally smooth curve, which betrayed the presence of an algorithm. The algorithm stole votes in a methodical manner from larger precincts, where it would be harder to detect. The statisticians attempted to explain it demographically, but could not.
Below, the top chart is of a normal CVT vote distribution, in hand-counted Columbia County, New York. Something called the “Law of Large Numbers” says a candidate’s vote percent tends to flatten out.
But in the two charts below that, for Illinois and Louisiana, Hillary Clinton’s numbers, in violation of this law, go up, while Bernie Sanders’ go proportionately down. Not in a jerky, roller coaster manner, but as smooth as an algebraic formula. If there is one thing computers are good at, it is executing formulas.
Directly below: Columbia County, NY, hand-counted ballots
Click to expand image
Two charts below, machine-counted ballots
Click to expand image
Click to expand image
In Illinois and Louisiana, both Dominion and ES&S have a strong presence.
In the paper, (titled “An Electoral System in Crisis,”) it was noted that the same type of statistical forensics had been applied to Ron Paul’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, and found the same patterns. A Wichita State University statistician and Chief Statistician at the National Institute for Aviation Research said of those findings:
“The data I’ve analyzed supports their hypothesis that we have a serious, pervasive, and systematic problem with electronic voting machines.”
She said:
“If fraud were occurring, these are the kind of patterns we would expect to see.”
2012 NH Republican primary
Click to expand image
The researchers looked into the past for examples of the strange statistical pattern. What they saw was that the patterns did not seem to exist before 2004. The researchers wrote:
“For now, we can state that races that we examined from 2004 and earlier did not show the pattern of increased candidates’ percentages in large precincts.”
This was astonishing. The year 2002 is remarkable in elections history for one thing: the passage of the HAVA “Help America Vote Act” in Congress. The act began the disbursement of billions of dollars to the states for upgraded voting equipment, most notably ushering in the modern era of hackable vote-counting machines.
Among the other interesting findings which emerged is that some machines even seemed to have a predilection for a particular party. In the below chart for the 2012 presidential race, although the Republican vote percentage meanders fairly normally for most types of machines, the ES&S DS200 seems to develop a distinct liking for the Republican as the precincts increase by number of voters (red line at bottom.)
Click to expand image
As if all of this were not enough, in the same year a computer programmer made the discovery that vote values in most vote-counting machines could be stored as decimals, rather than only as integers. Probing the discovery further, the programmer and others concluded that all of the reasons for this were bad. There is no such thing as a fractional vote. The only reason for not “declaring” the vote values as integers, as programmers say, would be to be able to decide on a race result beforehand, and be able to work the math backwards. The programmer dubbed his discovery “fraction magic.”
The recommendations of the research team for instilling confidence in voting results are, in essence: verification, transparency, and…more verification.
The authors wrote in 2016:
“The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the available physical evidence — paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.”
Edward Snowden tweet, Nov 6, 2016
The writers recommend what this blog has recommended, making the ballot images public, and every possible measure for transparency taken, simply as a matter of course. This is the opposite of the posture many courts have adopted in Trump’s pursuit of transparency and verification, where the burden has been placed on the Trump campaign to show sufficient evidence.
The authors of the report say:
“It would be best if ballot images from the machines are put online, or the ballots are itemized and photographed, Counts need to be videotaped and the video made available to the public. Observers must be able to watch in close enough proximity to verify the accurate count of every ballot.”
AuditElectionsUSA.org publishes a database of the counties and cities in the US whose voting systems use ballot imaging technology.
The authors of the report wrote in 2016:
“It is hard to conceive of a legitimate transfer of power following an election that has been this flawed. We recommend that many of these elections be examined, and if found to be inaccurate, decertified, or not certified..”
Would Trump supporters in the swing-state legislatures, which are all controlled by Republicans in both houses, find themselves on the right side of history by simply sending electors who will override what they argue are flawed elections, as their state constitutions allow?
This is the danger of bypassing full transparency and verification. When fully one-half of the electorate believes an election was a sham, and the other half can do no better than to repeat “no evidence,” then perhaps the safety valves written into the Constitution, which allow state governments to send anyone they want as electors, should be invoked. Until the system is fixed.
Sometimes the system is fine, and it is prosecution of officials that is needed. In 2016, a Democratic primary challenger to Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz found out, in the middle of challenging the results, that the county election supervisor had illegally destroyed all the paper ballots in the race, which the challenger had requested to see. No state or federal action was ever taken against the supervisor, Brenda Snipes, who was an open ally of Wasserman-Schultz and Hillary Clinton.
Destruction of evidence is the strongest evidence of wrongdoing there is. It should automatically award the election to the wronged party.
Far from media parrotings that doubts about the election system are “baseless,” this Florida episode alone tells voters, of any party, that the fix could be in. This was a major congressional primary involving a powerful former chairwoman of the DNC, in which a Sanders-backed candidate was on track to win.
If election authorities are frustrated that no one trusts their elections, they made their own bed.
As of September 2019, Dominion voting machines are used in 2,000 jurisdictions in 33 U.S. states and Puerto Rico. They are used significantly in all the key swing states of GA, AZ, PA, NV, and MI.
Most advanced democracies have already reverted to systems of 100% hand-counted paper ballots, including Germany, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, Denmark, Finland, and 53 other countries.
In 2004, a computer programmer named Clint Curtis testified under oath before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, that he had hacked an election on behalf of Congressman Tom Feeney, a Florida Republican. Under oath, Curtis testified that he:
“would flip the vote 51–49. Whoever you wanted it to go to and whichever race you wanted to win.”
Curtis said later in a documentary, “Uncounted”:
“Twenty- four lines of code. You never see it.”
MORE READING OF INTEREST
Here is Bill Gates’ Injectable Biochip, for Those Who Think it is Conspiracy Theory
