Has anyone here heard about Greg Palast?

[Pat Mustard]

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.