Has anyone here heard about Greg Palast?

[SteelCurtain]

I wasn't aware votes were routinely discarded. Please, enlighten me.

[The Grand Nudger]

Enlighten yourself, I know you have google. It wasn't even controversial before these shenanigans. People must have naively believed that there was nothing to see....there.....

[Mister Agenda]

Since you've offered nothing to make me think you know what you're talking about, I don't see any reason to go to the trouble of trying to back up your claim for you.

[The Grand Nudger]

I certainly didn't need to present anything for you to decide not to look, no point in pretending I had something to do with it, lol. What do you think we do with provisional ballots that don't, for a host of reasons, make the cut? Why, in your understanding, are provisional ballots offered in the first place? What are the metrics for determining who has to cast a provisional ballot.....again, in your understanding?

Again, we're discussing something that was hardly controversial until it began to appear as though -completely normal- ballot purges reliably benefited one party (and one candidate - palast was all over the primaries for this issue as well), and moreso than that when they began to take control of that procedure openly.

[vorlon13]

People are more willing to lie to pollsters, exit and otherwise.

In the run up to the Iowa Caucuses I was telephone polled daily and never told the truth.

Fuck 'em.

Candidates need to run as though they are 20 points behind all the time anyhow, whether they are or not. There's honor in running your hardest and doing your best and still not making it as opposed to being a slacker and assuming you have it cinched no matter what.

And then whining about fucking losing . . . .


See how one of those might be a helpful thing to have in the back of everyone's mind in the lead up to the 2018 congressional races and how the other one ain't ?

[The Grand Nudger]

People lying to pollsters is interesting, but doesn't do anything about the number of ballots, provisional or otherwise, that are purged,...why, and where it happens.

[GUBU]

I don't know...he makes some very interesting claims...


http://www.gregpalast.com/ethnic-votes-s...eg-palast/

Given that the GOP has openly bragged about limiting Democratic votes with voter ID laws, none of this seems like that big of a stretch.

Until he comes with actual proof that votes were discarded, he's just hand waving.

The recount in Michigan. The, Republitraitor, state AG refused point blank to recount over 75,000 votes cast which the machines had stated weren't votes for anybody (because the machines were calibrated to only accept full bubble fill ins in inner city precincts), despite the fact that Dr. Stein forcing the recount so that they would do exactly that.

Why would a party political hack refuse to count ballots cast by over seven times greater than his candidates "winning" margin?
Because those ballots were legitimate spoils? Given the numbers and the geographic spread of those uncounted votes (with the vast majority being in Black areas of Detroit), it is very unlikely that those votes were deliberate spoils. If it were the case that it was either machine error or voter error, those ballots have to be hand counted by rights.
Because those ballots were cast by voters illegally voting? Given the numbers of illegal votes cast over the years to have a sudden rush of 75,000 of them in one state alone in one election defies belief.
Because those ballots were already hand counted and found to have overwhelmingly voted for Clinton? Now we're getting places. I'm not saying that this is definitely the reason, but given the facts behind the uncounted votes, the geographic spread, the likely demographics of the voters, the faults with the voting machines, the reluctance of the Republitraitor AG to count them, this is by far the most plausible answer.

And when you look at the other states where Dr. Stein forced recounts, you find the same problems or worse, for example in Pennsylvania there is no paper trail of how a single voter in the state actually cast their ballot, a giant red flag for anybody interested in ensuring a free and fair election.

[The Grand Nudger]

That;s the thing that make me go "huh" in these discussions.  There's no question as to -what- happened....the controversy is -why- it happened. Do all discarded or uncounted ballots actually qualify as such by the metrics used to determine them to be such..and what number of ballots considered as such are the direct result of manipulation that -again- we know happened in the runnup to the election under the guise of protecting against "voter fraud".

[GUBU]

That;s the thing that make me go "huh" in these discussions.  There's no question as to -what- happened....the controversy is -why- it happened.  Do all discarded or uncounted ballots actually qualify as such by the metrics used to determine them to be such..and what number of ballots considered as such are the direct result of manipulation that -again- we know happened in the runnup to the election under the guise of protecting against "voter fraud".

75,335 votes were for "nobody" officially from an voting population of 7,686,087 in 2014 (from the US Census Bureau). That's a total of 0.9801% of the eligible voters who turned up to vote and, according to the state AG, turned around again on entering the polling booth and decided not to bother (given that most of these spoils happened in Flint and Detroit, where the state government ensured there were less polling stations with fewer machines, meaning longer wait times; this kind of statement should be a red flag of itself). But when you take the total who voted (from Real Clear Politics) that nearly doubles to 1.5724%.

Now it's hard enough to find spoilage figures without access to raw data, but I can get figures for the much more complicated 2016 Irish election and compare some of the constituencies to Michigan (figures from RTÉ the state broadcaster):
Dun-Laoghaire Rathdown (a Dublin constituency) 226 of 41,225 votes cast, 0.546% spoilage
Limerick City (rural and city) 357 of 47,118 0.757% spoilage
Donegal (largely rural) 654 of 73,957 0.884% spoilage
Waterford (rural and city) 400 of 52,103 0.767% spoilage
Cork South-Central (mainly Cork city) 404 of 56086 0.720% spoilage
Meath East (lots of sleeper towns for Dublin, plus large rural areas) 240 of 41,628 0.576%

I'll also add the most recent referendum which had 13,818 spoils from votes cast of 1,949,725 total a 0.71% spoilage (from wikipedia) on a turnout of 60.52%.

As you can see the Michigan presidential election ballot produced two to three times the number of spoilage found in Irish constituencies, when logically it should be lower as Michiganites only got to chose one candidate whereas Irish voters could vote for all candidates in decreasing preference (i.e. one could accidentally give same preference to two candidates, thus accidentally spoiling a vote). That to my mind is another red flag.

But the most damning thing is that the spoils were geograpically tight, they occured mostly in Flint (which per the official results Clinton carried by 18,000 votes) and Detroit (which carried Clinton by c. 270,000 votes) both of which are heavily black and heavily Democrat. That alone is pretty much a guarantee that the 75,000 undercount of votes in Michigan was deliberate, that in all likelihood that a fair, impartial and thorough hand count of all votes in the state would have returned Clinton by a margin of 50,000 to 60,000 votes.

Thus we have proof positive that the recent US election was neither fair, free nor democratic.