Donald Trump warned the world of election fraud throughout his campaign. Here’s what he said during an interview on Fox News on the actual day of the election:
“It’s largely a rigged system. And you see it at the polling booths, too… There are reports that when people vote for Republicans the entire ticket switches over to Democrats. You’ve seen that. It’s happening at various places today. It’s been reported. In other words, the machines, you put down a Republican and it registers as a Democrat. They’ve had a lot of complaints about that today.”
And here’s what tweeted:
In fairness, he had well-founded reasons to say so. US presidential elections have been rigged on at least two recent occasions: Bush’s ‘hanging chads’ victory against Gore in 2000 was demonstrably stolen and his win over Kerry in 2004 was likewise manipulated. The proof of voter suppression and other forms of rigging on these occasions was uncovered by investigative journalist Greg Palast who even ran his reports on BBC Newsnight. One technique Palast failed to mention, however, concerns methods of hacking or otherwise tampering with voting machines, but others better qualified looked into this too and likewise raised the alarm. Gore Vidal was one of the most vocal of mainstream voices calling for investigations in the wake of both election results. All of this is covered in an earlier post.
But Trump is Trump. The insinuations of a loudmouthed pantomime villain who spews vitriolic hatred, spouts arrant nonsense and dabbles in “conspiracy theory” were easily dismissed by a hostile media. Eager to cover up deficiencies, flaws, and criminal fraudulence inherent in contemporary American electoral procedures and processes, rather than investigate his claims, Trump was simply laughed off. But what if, just perhaps, like the proverbial stopped clock, Trump was telling the truth for a change? Or telling half of the truth…? To paraphrase Hamlet, the Donald doth protest too much, methinks…
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Exit polls are the standard by which the US State Department measures the honesty of foreign elections. Exit polling is, historically, deadly accurate. The bane of pre-election polling is that pollsters must adjust for the likelihood of a person voting. Exit polls solve the problem.
But three times in US history, pollsters have had to publicly flagellate themselves for their “errors.” In 2000, exit polls gave Al Gore the win in Florida; in 2004, exit polls gave Kerry the win in Ohio, and now, in swing states, exit polls gave the presidency to Hillary Clinton.
writes Greg Palast in his latest article which is entitled “The Election was Stolen – Here’s How…” He continues:
So how could these multi-million-dollar Ph.d-directed statisticians with decades of experience get exit polls so wrong?
Answer: they didn’t. The polls in Florida in 2000 were accurate. That’s because exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you vote?” What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted.”
In 2000, in Florida, GOP Secretary of State Katherine Harris officially rejected 181,173 ballots, as “spoiled” because their chads were hung and other nonsense excuses. Those ballots overwhelmingly were marked for Al Gore. The exit polls included those 181,173 people who thought they had voted – but their vote didn’t count. In other words, the exit polls accurately reflected whom the voters chose, not what Katherine Harris chose.
In 2004, a similar number of votes were invalidated (including an enormous pile of “provisional” ballots) by Ohio’s GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. Again, the polls reflected that Kerry was the choice of 51% of the voters. But the exit polls were “wrong” because they didn’t reflect the ballots invalidated by Blackwell.
Notably, two weeks after the 2004 US election, the US State Department refused the recognize the Ukraine election results because the official polls contradicted the exit polls.
And here we go again. 2016: Hillary wins among those queried as they exit the polling station—yet Trump is declared winner in GOP-controlled swings states. And, once again, the expert pollsters are forced to apologize—when they should be screaming, “Fraud! Here’s the evidence the vote was fixed!”
Click here to read Palast’s full article.
The nightly anti-Trump vigil beneath Trump Tower is valiant but futile. Likewise, the alienated thousands across America with placards reading “love trumps hate” and “not my president” or else venting spleen in more riotous fashion represent no serious challenge or threat without a cause greater than such a loosely configured fear and loathing of Trump to rally around — as understandable and justifiable as that fear and loathing is. On the other hand, proof of election fraud would serve not only to validate the widespread sense of grievance, but might also be used to focus it.
So once the dust as settled, there has to be a change of political strategy. In the meantime consider the thoughtful analysis of Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media, Culture and Communications at New York, author of “Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform” and “Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy.” His latest article is “An open plea to Michael Moore (and all our other lefty stars): Dude, where are our votes? WAKE UP!”
There is also Greg Palast’s newly released documentary, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” and this companion piece. For the evidence is beginning to stack up and it appears to validate their contention that Trump is not by rights President-Elect of the United States, as indeed, by similar account, Clinton, whose DNC team quite overtly stole the nomination from Sanders, was never by rights the Democrat candidate. Both elections were a travesty. In all likelihood, both were a crime too.
As a taster, I recommend the latest episode of comedian Lee Camp’s Redacted Tonight, which features interviews with Greg Palast and Mark Crispin Miller and is embedded below:
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Update:
On November 30th Democracy Now! spoke with leading cybersecurity and privacy researcher Bruce Schneier on evidence of hacking of the voting machines and of voter suppression. Schneier says voter suppression “has probably caused a lot more discrepancy in the vote versus the will of the people than machines, even though machines can be a disaster”:
[But] something else is brought up in this that’s real important, that we can’t lose sight of, I think, the real issue here, which is not the hacking in those three states [Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan], but the voter suppression everywhere. And whether it is voter ID requirements or closing polling places in poor neighborhoods or reducing early voting or purging voter rolls, there’s a concerted effort in the United States to deny people the right to vote. I think that’s the real issue.
Click here to read the full transcript and to watch the interview on the Democracy Now! website.
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Additional:
Here are Palast’s BBC Newsnight reports on the US election in 2000:
And on the US election in 2004:
wall of controversy 
Yep, very interesting. It is curious that Clinton did win the popular vote too. I actually always thought the Hillary side would rig the election – not the other way around, but who knows what’s going on anymore? For Hillary to rig it, they would’ve had to have it be very, very close and come down to maybe one key state.
I’ve also been told there are petitions popping up for the electoral college votes to be allowed to be changed and for Hillary to be President: one has gotten 3.3 million signatures already, I’ve been told. I have to say I think it would be a terrible idea, even IF there was pro-Trump vote rigging. All this will do is provoke a major civil unrest with the pro-Trump support base.
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Thanks again for the comment. In truth, it’s madness to try to change the rules of an election after the vote – cheating in fact! The electoral system is stupid yes (like our first past the post system) but that’s how it works so the petition can’t and won’t have any effect but even if it did then, as you say, it would simply provoke (more) civil unrest. On the other hand, I think there is perhaps an opportunity to challenge Trump’s apparent win on the basis of hard evidence of elecion rigging. Then it becomes a legal matter. And it sounds like Palast (a respected journalist) has gathered a welter of evidence. So why is the media – once so hostile to Trump – not drawing more attention to Palast’s work?
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That’s what I find curious – why the media is ignoring that, and yet happily drawing attention to stupid petitions to change the electoral vote, etc. I’m going to talk about that in the post I’m putting up tomorrow – in which I’ll reference your post too. But I have a suspicion that the Establishment is planning to undo Trump somewhere down the line and might be holding onto this rigged election thing – along with some other stuff – until later.
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Palast’s is the most remarkable piece of predictive, fact based journalism i can recall. Upset that he published the breaking news of Bush’s first election theft a few days too late, this election, 16 years later, is where it all came together. He made a 3 year documentary project and wrote a book that were both released just before this recent election, and given out for free online days before it took place. He highlights how the billionaire backed Crosscheck software produced a list of racially profiled names in 30 odd states. These names were a list of potential double voters (a fictional storyline created by right wing billionaires and easily purchased small time politicians), totalling 7 million names. Each person was sent a postcard in the mail that looked like junk mail, to which they needed to respond to confirm they were who they said they were, allowing them to be put back on the electoral roll. However, most simply discarded this postcard as a scam or some other such junk mail, meaning that when they got to the booths last Tuesday, they wouldnt be allowed to vote. They were mainly minority voters, the minorities who generally vote Democrat. This was just one of the ways Palast revealed the business billionaires stole this election.
In Ohio, in the days before the election, Palast and Lawyer Dan Fritrakis were appealing to the Ohio court to turn on the new voting machines’ safety protection, a drop down list that appears when each voting machine is turned on. It would take a screen grab of each vote and allow the votes to be checked in the event of voting irregularities, such as exit polls and the actual result not tallying. The court argued this would be too disruptive. On the day of the election Palast was reporting, on the ground reporting, that Ohio was being stolen right now and that the safety feature of the new voting machines to check results was deactivated.
Even more remarkable than stating with evidence, and via 16 years of investigative journalism, that the election was being rigged, who the main players were (Crosscheck architect Kris Koback, billionaire country debt vulture Paul Singer, oil billionaires The Koch’s and 2008 mortgage crises architect (in collusion with Goldman Sachs) billionaire John Paulson to name a few…2 of whom the BBC just named as contenders in Trump’s economics team), which states would be stolen and how they would be stolen using 5 or so tactics before the election even commenced, Palast has been virtually ignored by wide reaching media outlets. His disappointment at not gathering the evidence of Bush’s first victory in time for it to have an effect in the courts before Bush was confirmed victor has been rectified by publishing, with evidence, the lunatic right’s 2016 election theft before it took place. That he is not being referenced by mainstream media outlets across the world (other than a large German tv channel the day after the election), is something difficult for regular folks to understand, even when Palast is known to only report facts he has collected and investigated himself. Even after telling university educated friends, this non-reporting by the mainstream media and why, leads to the conclusion that his journalism must be wrong if they are not reporting his findings, leading them to dismiss Palast’s findings subconsciously. Breaking on through such a disparity could shake ones mental picture of the world to the ground…
This was where Trump’s small part in the overall theft comes in. Trump raised the issue of election fraud a week or so before the election. The so called liberal media then rounded on him, getting the pro Clinton media, as well as President Obama himself, to report that Trump is crazy to say such things. The media basically silenced itself, as how could it now suggest voter fraud when for the previous week or so it had been reporting that Trumps accusations were nuts. In the final days, Trump even said he would only accept the result if he won, to widescale media derision. It is so simple in its execution and knowledge of how things play out in the media narratives of today, that you have to admit it is quite brilliant.
Who ever considered fascists to be dumb pitbulls better reinvestigate what fascism actually means. The main beneficiaries of the 2008 financial crash now have feet inside the Whitehouse, with Goldman Sachs further consolidating its grip on world economic policy. That a journalist exposed the coup before it took place, named names, the key rigged states and managed to make a detailed documentary should give us hope going forward, as long as people actually start listening and identifying those in the know and focusing on what they say! If you hadnt heard of Greg Palast before, you have now. Its a name you shouldnt forget, he has pulled off one of the greatest feats of journalism in my life time. As more and more people hear about it, and they will, one can only consider that there are many more shaky days ahead for the US. Such fact based evidence is hard to dismiss or forget once you know and accept it to be true.
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Update: Palast was interviewed on Truthdig yesterday, the 18th Nov.. Around 23 mins in he outlines the legal challenges that are coming in right now around the US contesting the election results in certain states, and his December 13th appearance at a congressional hearing with 71 senators where he will be showing his documentary and presenting all the other evidence. Evidence that is irrefutable: https://www.facebook.com/Truthdig/videos/10153923991891367/?hc_ref=PAGES_TIMELINE
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