Voting Rights Activists Urge Clinton To Challenge PA, MI And WI Vote Counts According to Gabe Sherman, a group of concerned voting-rights advocates and computer scientists are urging the Clinton campaign to challenge the results in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, J. Alex Halderman, were part of a group which held a conference call with John Podesta and other Clinton campaign officials to press them toward forcing a recount in those states. As it pertains to Wisconsin, some rather disturbing anomalies surfaced last night in the spreadsheets published for Outagamie County. In three separate instances, the sum of the votes for Clinton and Trump exceeded the number of ballots cast. This raised the eyebrows of many, who also noted that the one precinct with paper ballots went to Clinton. Further, the discrepanies only occurred in the results for the Presidential race, and when corrected, caused Trump to win by a substantially lower margin than they originally showed. Apparently the White House doesn't want any challenges to the vote. I completely, wholeheartedly disagree with this. If these experts have identified patterns which should be more closely examined, it is within our rights as citizens in this democracy to call for an examination and audit of the vote in those states -- full stop. It could be that such an audit will show that the vote did indeed go for Trump. Or not. We need to know. Update: Election law expert Rick Hasen weighs in: He has more to say in that post about some of the more outlandish theories flying around, too.
Maybe I missed the point of a recount then--isn't part of the process validating the actual votes themselves? Not just if the ballot is legal but matching the voter and the ballot. In any case, whether i have the recount details right or not is irrelevant. We have a president-elect that is still waging twitter battles after winning the vote that he says was rigged and now claiming that meeeeellions of votes were cast by illegal aliens. That HE should have won the popular vote as well. Setting aside the obvious lie that Trump cares, wouldn't that unsupported claim warrant investigation if anyone in power legitimately believed this to be true?
No a recount just goes through the tabulations of ballots. The exact process depends on what method was used to vote in each county. It's mostly useless except you can get different counts each time you go through the process because of inherent errors. Watch Recount. If he wants an investigation he can call for one officially, I don't think a recount is even close to the way you would start.
Fair enough, I would like to know myself if these ballots were cast whether or not a recount does it or an official investigation.
Partisan nonsense aside, are you ok with ineligible people to vote? Should we ignore voting issues and only choose to talk about them a couple months before an election, when nothing can be done?
Not at all, see above--I think we should all require proof, though. I am against restrictive vote regulations, partisan or not. if someone can find systemic and pervasive voter fraud then there is a problem to fix--that hasn't happened yet. GOP state houses persist in new ID laws designed to supress or make voting more difficult when there is no evidence of mass voter fraud to protect us from--a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.
No, felons and non-citizens shouldn't vote. And there needs to be a systematic way of ensuring so without purging others without verifying (because of similar name etc). This should also be done well in advance rather than last minute so mistakes can be caught without use of provisional ballots. Right now is the time to discuss voting issues that can be fixed 1,2 or 4 years from now while it is fresh but it should have zero impact on the election that just took place. Being a white guy with a drivers license I don't have an issue with voter ID laws but then it should be free/easy for folks to get acceptable ID. I also think Election Day should be a holiday every year or two years and all ballots should have a paper copy which is the fed into the reader. All electronic just generally makes me uncomfortable.
I see the 6.4% #. The estimate is from two professors at Old Dominion University using data from Cooperative Congressional Election Study. No one checked their work, but let's just assume it's true for now. They estimated 6.4% of non-citizens (which may be legal or illegal immigrants - but either way, they are not allowed to vote) voted in 2008 and 2.2% in 2010. There were no estimate for 2012 that I can see. And of course there were no estimate for 2016. But even at 8% in 2016, how does that equate to 3M illegals cast? There are around 22M non-citizen in the US. 2M of them are under 18. That leaves 20M. 8% of 20M = 1.6M. If we assume 6%, that's 1.2M. If 2.2%, that's 440k. Even at the high end (1.6M), and let's also assume 100% of them voted for Clinton, that still makes his claim of illegal votes as why he lost nearly 2M in the popular vote false. As a side note, if he is so concern about these illegal votes, shouldn't he be for a national recount to remove all illegal votes so he can claim he won the popular vote. And if you believe there are wide spread voter fraud, why are you so against a recount? I don't care much for the recount, but Trump, who already won doesn't need to get involved in these things. Just ridiculously sensitive.
So what are the chances the electoral college vote swings to Clinton? Can somebody put a percentage on the chances?
This isn't about changing the result as much as just learning about inaccuracies in the counting system. There's been enough doubt cast on the accuracy result by both sides that doing this is not a bad thing. Trump is the president, he should support this effort given his prior comments. I think the real problem is that it isn't easy to vote in some places as it is in others. No one should have to wait 3 hours in line to vote in a poor neighborhood and only 20 minutes in a rich neighborhood.
The funny thing for me was that I saw Jill Stein on TV for the first time ever. She's more relevant now than she was when she was a candidate for President.
Yes, but those were on a potential swing state list. It's only a handful of states that matter any year...or at least that is what the analytic will say.
How is that voter suppression? Suppression implies intent. Those places are going to be primarily Democratic areas...why would Democrats be suppressing the vote of poeple who would vote Democrat?
Because these laws are being passed at the state level, just look at North Carolina and its recent issues. You are aware that poor, Democratic leaning voters also reside in red and swing states too, correct?
