[Plantagenet]

I found this interesting, Bernie Sanders seems to be against the recount:

Bernie Sanders downplays Wisconsin recount: ‘Nobody cares’

“It’s taking place. The Green Party has the legal right to do it … No one expects there to be profound change, but there’s nothing wrong with going through the process,” Mr. Sanders said, going on to throw cold water on any notion that the result in Wisconsin could change.

I'm a bit surprised by that. I wonder WHY Bernie is downplaying it? I wonder what his reasons are.

It's actually the Democratic Party base that is all giving money to the recount.

Bernie is downplaying it because its petty and crazy to do it.

The Ds are spending 6 million dollars on a Green Party recount where Trumps margin of victory is far greater then could be overturned in a recount.

The supposed reason for the recount is that the Russians hacked all the voting machines and rigged the election.

Even Obama's White House says there is no evidence the Russians hacked the election.

This has got to be the dumbest thing the Ds have done since they nominated Hillary.

Cheers!

[Cog]

Jill Stein is proving she can double down on dumb. She missed an important deadline in Pennsylvania for a voter initiated recount. That ship sailed November 21st. Now Jill is suing the state to get a state wide recount. Even the Democrats in charge of their election board are calling it retarded. No recount has ever overturned election results when the margin is in the tens of thousands of votes. But if Demtards want to keep sending Jill money, who am I to object to it? I wonder if Jill will buy her a new house and car like Bernie did.


http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/real ... icult.html

According to the Department of State, there were 9,163 voting precincts in Pennsylvania during the 2016 election. So Stein would need over 27,000 voters to file notarized affidavits, but it's unclear if that avenue is even still available.

According to Wanda Murren, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of State, the deadline under the law for a voter-initiated recount at the county level had been Monday, Nov. 21. Many counties missed it but nearly half have already certified their results, precluding recounts there. That makes a lawsuit the only remaining option for initiating a statewide recount.

[MD]

ridiculous, and inevitable.

[Cog]

Jill Stein is possibly subjecting people to perjury charges should they sign affidavits claiming the election was conducted fraudulently. The article link is below and examines Pennsylvania law and establishes why there will be no recount in Pennsylvania, regardless of Jill Stein's claims to the contrary. I posted a snippet of a much longer article: If you like the arcane rules of election law, you will love this.

http://janderresearch.blogspot.com/2016 ... nt-in.html


Everything you've been reading about a possible recount of the 2016 Presidential Election in Pennsylvania is wrong. There will be no "recount" in Pennsylvania. Book that. It is not speculation. It is legal fact. The broad spectrum of analysis from the blogosphere, Facebook and Twitter is pathetic. Seeing non-lawyer journalists mangle complicated election statutes so brazenly is not only sad but dangerous. It's giving an emotionally triggered part of the electorate false hope. And it simultaneously creates conditions for the destabilization of the nation when hyper-emotional election expectations are thwarted, as they most certainly will be.

[dohboi]

Trump himself is now calling the validity of the entire vote count into question.

(One really has to wonder if this guy really wants to be pres or not!)

[careinke]

Trump managed to get elected without your stellar advice and he will govern just fine by doing the opposite of everything you have suggested.

It sounds like Six wants a Democrat instead of what the electorate will choose. I mean why not just say emulate O? Not going to happen.

I think the electoral system did exactly what it was intended for, protect the smaller states from tyranny of the high population states. We have to remember, we are not a democracy (for very good reasons). Without the electorate, the US would have never been founded.

[Pops]

The main division between the states originally was not population but slavery.

The slave states were larger population wise but slaves couldn't vote so at a disadvantage. Direct election would have favored non-slave states over slaves states and that didn't sit with the slave owners. Since the point was to make a union there was a compromise. The 3/5 compromise and electors basically allowed the slave states to dominate.

Virginia was a slave state with the largest population and it dominated the Presidency — the first 4 or 5 were from there. In fact, up until just before the civil war, most presidents were from slave states and owned slaves.

As well, if you want to talk about originality, the electors were to be - wait - elected. The idea being they would be chosden for just that one task and so less partisan but some time around the civil war that changed when most states adopted a winner take all system. So really the whole electoral college is just an appendix.

Small states are protected by the senate. As for the POTUS, I like the idea that the minority cannot overrun by the majority, but I'm not sure that the ability of a minority to overrun the majority is all that great as the alternative.

[Cog]

Except that doesn't happen Pops and you know it doesn't. The large population states still get more EV's than do the smaller population states. Hillary could have campaigned harder in the states that really mattered. She thought, based on some real bad polling data, that PA, NC, WI, and MI were in the bag for her. They weren't and she lost. Game over.

The Founders understood the dangers of a pure democracy with the Connecticut compromise. They believed that the rule of the mob must be tamped down in some fashion in favor of the smaller states having a voice. Otherwise New York, California, and a handful of other state would decide every election.

[Plantagenet]

The Founders understood the dangers of a pure democracy with the Connecticut compromise. They believed that the rule of the mob must be tamped down in some fashion in favor of the smaller states having a voice. Otherwise New York, California, and a handful of other state would decide every election.

Yup.

+1

Thats exactly the purpose of the electoral college. The Founders didn't want regionalism, i.e. candidates from big states with huge populations to be able to control everything. They set things up so we'd get presidents who represent the entire country.

Another benefit that the Founders didn't foresee is the electoral college protects us from nationwide voter fraud. If the president was elected by popular vote, then every single state would be motivated to run up the vote (by fraud if necessary) in every single county across the country to counteract the "other guys" running up the vote in other states. As it is, places like Chicago and its famous D machine can tilt the election in one state, but other states can run relatively clean honest elections because the "extra" votes from Chicago only screw things up in Illinois---they don't get added in nationally.

Cheers!

[Sixstrings]

The U.S. Vote Recount Matters — Just Not the Way You Think
Apart from allegations of voter fraud and worries over a potential electoral hack, U.S. voting systems are imperfect. An audit could help identify what needs fixing.

Did a Russian hack compromise voting in these states during the election? And if not — no evidence of a hack has yet been found — what will we learn if the final totals for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton need to be adjusted?

Some academic voting security experts say that the focus should be on proving that the election results were correct, rather than determining whether or not they were hacked.

That view is held by David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford University and a board member of the non-partisan group Verified Voting, who supports Stein's efforts.

"I've been pushing for routine manual audits of elections for over a decade. In this case, it should be done all the time," Dill said. "There's been much heightened concern over the security of the election by Russians. There's no evidence of hacking voting machines.

But there isn't any way to know whether machines have been hacked unless you compare them with paper ballots."
http://www.seeker.com/us-vote-recount-matters--just-not-the-way-you-think-2117767875.html

Scientists, academics and experts submit affidavits to the court:

Security experts join Jill Stein's 'election changing' recount campaign
Green party candidate has lodged a lawsuit arguing Wisconsin’s plan to allow automatic recounting ‘risks tainting the recount process’

More election security experts have joined Jill Stein’s campaign to review the presidential vote in battleground states won by Donald Trump, as she sues Wisconsin to secure a full recount by hand of all its 3m ballots.

Half a dozen academics and other specialists on Monday submitted new testimony supporting a lawsuit from Stein against Wisconsin authorities, in which she asked a court to prevent county officials from carrying out their recounts by machine.

Stein argued that Wisconsin’s plan to allow automatic recounting “risks tainting the recount process” because the electronic scanning equipment involved may incorrectly tally the results and could have been attacked by foreign hackers.

“There is a substantial possibility that recounting the ballots by hand will produce a more correct result and change the outcome of the election,” Stein argued in the lawsuit in Dane County circuit court. A copy was obtained by the Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/29/security-experts-join-jill-steins-election-changing-recount-campaign

Here's what Michigan will need for 'monumental' presidential recount

County clerks are preparing to recount, by hand, the 2016 presidential election and do it by Dec. 12. ...

“This is a monumental undertaking,” said Joe Rozell, director of elections in Oakland County, where 678,090 ballots must be reviewed one-by-one. “We’ve never had a countywide recount of this magnitude.”

The window for a possible statewide recount opened on Monday when the Michigan Board of Canvassers certified the state's presidential election results, which showed Republican nominee Donald Trump won the state by 10,704 votes. Green Party candidate Jill Stein has indicated she will request a recount in Michigan by Wednesday's deadline.
http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2016/11/29/michigan-officials-prepare-monumental-presidential-recount/94561684/

[Newfie]

I had posted this in Trump thread but it should have gone here.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/h ... ein-231897

Clinton team shrugs off recount effort

2016

Jill Stein's recounts have energized legions of hopeful Democrats. Not Hillary Clinton's closest allies.

Hillary Clinton’s closest allies are irritated with Jill Stein.

Most of the small circle of operatives and friends surrounding the vanquished Democratic nominee have no illusions that the former Green Party candidate’s recount pushes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and maybe Michigan, will even come close to flipping the result of the presidential election. And they have no interest in handing Donald Trump another political victory when Stein’s efforts fall short.

Indeed, there’s no push to have Clinton say anything public about the recount — or even for anyone on the campaign side to weigh in beyond occasional blog posts and tweets from campaign lawyer Marc Elias.

The election, they know, is over.

“Recounting votes is as American as apple pie. There’s nothing wrong with the effort, but it’s not somewhere where I would put the political energy of my groups, and I’m not,” said David Brock, a Clinton ally whose network of Democratic political firms supported the nominee's White House bid.

Brock said top party donors were asking him whether they should contribute to Stein’s effort, but he said he was already focused on the incoming Republican administration. “We’re focused on watch-dogging the Trump transition."

Stein’s increasingly loud calls for recounts have still struck a particular nerve among top Democrats who are close to Clinton: some feel that the constant Clinton antagonist has put them in an utterly impossible position. They don’t see the results changing — as Elias said when he announced the campaign’s participation in Stein’s effort — and they are desperate not to look bitter or raise the hopes of Clinton’s most diehard supporters. But they do have an obligation to be a part of it, especially — some strategists believe — since Elias himself is a veteran of other recounts.

The result is a pervasive level of Democratic exasperation, especially among party operatives who now note in frustration that Stein’s online fundraising push for the recounts — which has brought in over $6 million in less than a week — has likely handed her one of the single largest small Democratic donor networks outside the party and its nationwide candidates themselves.

Still, it's not like they don't enjoy watching Trump squirm, keeping their popular-vote victory as a trophy while he makes false claims of voter fraud.

"When you see Donald Trump go off the deep end with conspiracy theories, the first reaction is ‘Told you so.’ The second reaction is genuine worry about how thin his skin must be that he needs to invoke conspiracy theories to explain why he wasn’t the most popular candidate in the race,” said one former senior Clinton aide. "That doesn’t mean he didn’t win the Electoral College. He did. But his inability to cope with the majority of the country voting for someone else is, well, a lot of us view it as a window into his heart."

A group of top aides that includes Elias and former campaign chairman John Podesta has listened when credible observers come forth with theories or reason to question the results — such as the call with a cadre of academics that eventually led to Stein’s push. But the Democrats who made up Clinton’s campaign structure are now scattered all over the country, still picking up the pieces from her stunning loss and looking for their own next jobs while helping carve a new path forward for the party amid its latest soul-search.

So despite frustration that their former boss has been dragged back into the news as Trump wrongly suggests illegal voting and Stein pushes on across the Midwest, there’s no Brooklyn war room. There's no regular wide-circulation conference calls, or even any focused email chains to discuss responses to Stein’s recount requests or Trump’s claim on Sunday that, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally” — not to mention his other Twitter suggestion that, “The Green Party scam to fill up their coffers by asking for impossible recounts is now being joined by the badly defeated & demoralized Dems. The Democrats, when they incorrectly thought they were going to win, asked that the election night tabulation be accepted. Not so anymore!"

Over and over, Clinton aides point to the irony of the president-elect criticizing her for participating in a recount while he himself alleges fraud. But they say they’d like to move on, if only Trump — and the small but loud minority of Democratic loyalists and donors who are still furious and dedicated to re-litigating the campaign’s failings – would let them.

So, wary of appearing to interfere in the recount process and giving Trump more political ammunition, Clinton veterans have remained largely silent on Stein’s push, instead turning their public ire to Trump’s latest provocations. Believing that Trump is coming under enough fire without a high-level statement from Clinton or a senior campaign official, the task has fallen to individuals.

Accordingly, former Clinton aides have not hesitated to shoot back online — “okay, no. why even say this?” wrote former foreign policy spokesman Jesse Lehrich, responding to Trump’s claim of fraud. Hours later, former deputy communications director Christina Reynolds chimed in, linking to a New York Times report on Trump’s international business ties: “Here’s why Trump is tweeting about illegal voters. So you don’t notice this."

Authors:

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[Sixstrings]

Here's my understanding of things, just from reading numerous articles.

About hacking -- the biggest issue seems to be the issue computer security professor from Michigan raised (Halderman), namely that while voting machines and paper ballot scanning machines aren't "connected to the internet" -- they DO, in fact, have software that's updated on a flash drive *that an elections worker just plugs into a regular desktop computer*.

So I haven't seen THAT issue addressed. Rather the news just says "the machines aren't connected to the internet."

The computer science professor also says that malware could have been designed so that it was dormant, then alters the voting, and then erases itself after. So what I'm not clear about, is if they could tell if that ever happened after the fact? By examining the voting machines?

Hand recounting -- there's not enough time to recount them ALL by hand, in WI. The court at first ruled that it'll be up to each county to decide. And now what Stein has done is sue for hand recount statewide.

If I'm not mistaken, WI is all paper ballots?

What my suggestion would be, is simply get in some NEW scanning machines and REALLY verify them. Or, just explain the whole situation about the scanning machines -- did they have software updates, and HOW were those updates done and when.

In other words, just really verify the scanning machines are good -- and then okay, do the recount with those.

And also, at least PARTIAL hand counting could be ordered (in the counties that seem questionable), if not full statewide by-hand recount.

And that's all up to the judge, of course.

Other than that -- just for my opinion, I'm a reasonable person. I'd just like to see it explained on tv about how voting machine software is updated, and the scanner software, because the only thing I've read was what the professor said. That the software is updated via a flash drive that was plugged into a desktop pc.

If none of that is true, if it's all 100% secure and experts have thought about all these things and the system is secure, then okay let's hear about it.

[Pops]

The Iranian centrifuges weren't online either.

Which doesn't mean anything either way, just that "not plugged in to the internet" means squat.

[Sixstrings]

The Iranian centrifuges weren't online either.

Which doesn't mean anything either way, just that "not plugged in to the internet" means squat.

Did you see that one article? By the Michigan computer science professor, "Halderman?" I can try to find it later, but in part of it he said the "not connected to the net doesn't matter" because, he said the software is updated via flash drive *from just a regular desktop pc*. Which likely IS connected to the net.

So that's the thing that sticks in my mind, it would be good just to see that addressed.

As it is, all the news says is that the machines are "secure" and they get locked down and that it would be silly to think that Russian agents would physically break into the machines.

But what WOULDN'T be silly is if hackers could have remotely got into the software update somehow.

So really that's what the government should look into, and there should be reports on CNN explaining it, the entire issue about the software updates and how that's done.

There's two things in all of this that make me think "hmmm." The first was those articles by the Michigan computer science prof, and then secondly that the Green Party says there's only 1 in 850 odds chance that the exit polls could have been so wrong. It's not IMPOSSIBLE, but it's a statistical 1 in 850 chance.

So what I think should be done, is just at least partial hand recounting in at least some of the counties that seemed to be off by so much per exit polls.

And then, it would just be good to hear more detail about the issue of how these machines get software updates.

[Newfie]

The Iranian centrifuges weren't online either.

Which doesn't mean anything either way, just that "not plugged in to the internet" means squat.

How do you "hack" something not connected to the Internet?

It's statements like that that I hear as hysterical.

[Sixstrings]

The Iranian centrifuges weren't online either.

Which doesn't mean anything either way, just that "not plugged in to the internet" means squat.

How do you "hack" something not connected to the Internet?

It's statements like that that I hear as hysterical.

The computer security professor from Michigan says that poll workers plug a flash drive into a desktop pc that IS connected to the internet, and then they plug that into the voting machine / ballot scanner, for the software update (so that's how malware could transfer, and could have been done remotely):

Professor Halderman says that before the voting machines are even in the picture, poll workers scan a government template of the ballot on their own administrative computers, that are connected to the Internet. He says they are “almost certainly not secured.”

That image gets downloaded to a drive, like a flash drive or the like, which is then inserted into the voting machine to cast the template for voters come Election Day.
http://www.inquisitr.com/3743343/j-alex-halderman-corrects-the-record-on-hacking-of-electoral-college-results-and-why-recount-2016-is-necessary-opinion/

[Pops]

It's statements like that that I hear as hysterical.

really?
try google

[Sixstrings]

It's statements like that that I hear as hysterical.

really?
try google

THIS is the issue at hand:

Professor Halderman says that before the voting machines are even in the picture, poll workers scan a government template of the ballot on their own administrative computers, that are connected to the Internet. He says they are “almost certainly not secured.”

That image gets downloaded to a drive, like a flash drive or the like, which is then inserted into the voting machine to cast the template for voters come Election Day.

Green Party is doing a good thing, I think, by raising awareness of this so that these states can fix the problem going forward.

Halderman has been trying to raise this issue for YEARS, but nobody listens to him.

That's all the Green Party is doing here, folks, it's just in the public interest. If no improvements need to be made, then great. Or if the rustbelt states should change some procedures for in the future, *then we should all agree that should be done*.

Nobody is saying there's EVIDENCE anything happened.

Green Party is just saying the exit polls are way off from the vote, and then they're also saying there's these issues about software updates and how that's done.

So, why not do a partial handcount audit in the areas where the exit polls were off so much.

And then, talk about / government look into the software update issue.

[Plantagenet]

This is the biggest conspiracy theory ever.

Soooooo.....How did Russia do the hacking?

Take Ohio, for example. Did Russia send submarines up the Cuyahoga River to Cleveland to disgorge spies with flash drives to every precinct to reprogram the voting machines?


No no Boris and Vladimir. Not the bombs. The plan is to take these flash drives and reprogram all the voting machines for Trump!!!

[Sixstrings]

This is the biggest conspiracy theory ever.

Soooooo.....How did Russia do the hacking?

If Halderman is right (this is all like Watergate, there was a DNC breakin *and* there's a Halderman ), and IF the software updates are transferred via flash drive from a regular desktop PC, then that's how malware could transfer. And most likely, the government workers' desktop PC's are hooked up to the net.

In that scenario, hackers could have done it all remotely.

It's just a possible thing that could happen, that's all. It's certainly not beyond the ability of foreign intel agencies -- there's no evidence they DID that, but they COULD.

Plant, the Green Party is doing a public service. It's a non partisan "good government" / "honest govenment" / "reform" kind of thing (which is the Green Party's values). The idea is that by raising awareness, then if there ARE security holes then they can get fixed by the states for going forward, in the future.

So that's all the Green Party wants to do. Improve voting machine / scanner security, and then they just want a hand recount in the areas where the exit polls were off by so much.

Incidentally, Jill Stein is up to almost $7 million in fundraising:

Green Party poised to cash in on Jill Stein’s recount crusade

Jill Stein, the party’s presidential nominee, has raised $6.35 million toward a $7 million goal to pay for recounts in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

But she could raise more — and there’s nothing in the law to stop her from depositing it into the Green Party’s campaign coffers.
http://nypost.com/2016/11/29/green-party-poised-to-cash-in-on-jill-steins-recount-crusade/

(and that's why the D establishment isn't liking this thing at all, because the Greens are raising a LOT of money )

EDIT: look folks, this thing isn't a big deal.. it's just about doing a hand recount in some counties where the exit polls were off. If the vote doesn't change by much, then what's the problem? That's what's most likely. It was probably just a lot of "silent majority" vote for Trump and people told the exit poll workers they voted a different way. Or, maybe the exit polls were just off for some other reason.

Why do people think the recount is a problem? If the vote was okay, then there's no problem. If it wasn't okay (remote possibility) then it's good that we'll find out. So just do some hand-recounts and just see what it says, most likely it'll match the machines.

And then everyone can move on. There's no problem here -- there are HARD DATES for the electoral college, and congress certifying the electors' vote etc.