I am in the middle of writing a much longer post with a bunch of research of why I think hacking might have played a role in the 2016 presidential election, but since time is of the essence, I want to get some of this information out there! It’s vital that as soon as possible there is a full investigation of 2 factors:
1. Potential hacking of election results
Trust me I know how it sounds, but I have reasons. Namely, there are huge discrepancies between exit polls and early voting results and final vote counts.
Here’s the calculated discrepancy between the exit polls and reported counts by state. Note that 22/28 states shown have discrepancy in favor of Trump. The Election Defense Alliance, an independent election integrity group, calls this pro-Republican bias in election results (which happened in the 2004, 2008, and 2012 elections) a “right-shift”. Because of the way exit polls are conducted the odds of these discrepancies, regardless of outcome, are approximately 1/1,000,000 (source: http://freepress.org/images/departments/PopularVotePaper181_1.pdf). Add in that each of these discrepancies are happening in favor of one party repeatedly, the odds of that occurring by random chance are astronomical.
Additionally, most states allow early voting, so people are submitting ballots weeks up until election day, meaning a large proportion of total votes are submitted BEFORE election day. This was true of Florida where ~70% of the total voters voted early. Based on exit polls, before election day, Hillary had 41.3% of the total votes she would need to win Florida. Therefore, even if only 6.7% of Florida voters on election day voted for Hillary she would have 50% of the total vote. Yet Hillary is reported to only have received 47.7%, which would only happen if 6.4% of Florida voters on election day voted for Hillary. Maybe that did happen but the odds of that occurring are incredibly small.
This one doesn’t have as much math because it is so difficult to calculate the number of voters that were suppressed but a few key factors were in play that make voter suppression highly likely.
a) Invalidation of the Voting Rights Act (VRA)
I have read many accounts of people being turned away from voting but don’t have good numbers to back it up so I’ll just leave these 2 images to compare. The 1st is the states that have enacted restrictive voting laws since the VRA invalidation in 2015 and the 2nd is the election result map.
Note that Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida (all swing states that went for Obama 2012) both had new voting restrictions and went for Trump this year.
This was the ominous name given to the media project designed by Steve Bannon and driven by Trump media expert, Brad Parscale. In the words of a senior campaign staffer the goal of Project Alamo was to design their media efforts to “‘We have three major voter suppression operations under way,’ says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.” (source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go). Again the effectiveness of this campaign will be difficult to quantify but it does show that a prominent part of the Trump strategy was voter suppression.
Okay, but what can we do?
-Put pressure on officials to do an audit of the election results including signing this petition (https://www.change.org/p/demand-an-audit-of-the-2016-presidential-election)
-Donating to election integrity groups like the Election Defense Alliance site: http://electiondefensealliance.org
-Educate yourself about types of voting fraud and relay this information to your representatives. Here’s a good read about why electronic voting is making election audits more difficult: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/11/18/election-audit-paper-machines-column/93803752/
Even if it is too late to change the results of this election, it is paramount that we maintain the integrity of our elections.
dededos
kaledo-art
2087
jacobvanloon
yousharknotpass
