Can We Count on the Election Results? Exit Poll Discrepancies and Voter Suppression Are Serious Issues

"This is a familiar pattern, indicative of electronic rigging."

By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet November 11, 2016

Another presidential election has run its course and Americans who want to participate in a process that’s democratic, transparent and accountable are left in the dark.

All along the way, there have been dismal failures in our supposed democratic process. That continues today, as election integrity activists point out that the national media’s election day exit polls found that Hillary Clinton was ahead in four key states — North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida — but lost the computerized vote count. That’s not the first time a “red shift” occurred between live exit poll results posted on CNN and the later vote count results.

That suggests the exit polls were either deeply flawed, or the vote count was compromised or stolen.

This latest affront comes after other attacks on the process by political insiders and outsiders throughout the race. Before the campaigning began, insiders in 14 Republican-majority states adopted new voting restrictions and barriers such as new ID requirements. In Wisconsin, where Trump was ahead by 27,000 votes, attorneys trying to challenge that state’s new law said upwards of 300,000 residents lacked the required IDs. That early attack was bookended at the election’s close by Republican election officials, from Ohio’s secretary of state to North Carolina county election boards, who gamed the field for brazen partisan advantage. They curtailed early voting, moved precincts, inaccurately purged voter rolls, and made perplexing decisions—as in Ohio—not to activate voting machine audit software, which means the results cannot be verified.

Those assaults were not the only attacks by insiders. Bernie Sanders’ campaign was targeted by top aides to the ultimately disgraced Democratic National Committee chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who worked to undermine his success. But it wasn’t just the DNC. State parties run their nominating caucuses like private golf clubs—they set the rules, which include how votes are weighted, counted (rural areas get more clout, cities get less) and released. Or not, which is what the Iowa party did. It refused to release the raw caucus vote count, allowing Clinton to get headlines that she won a virtual tie. In Nevada’s nominating caucus, the party allowed caucuses on campuses in Reno but not in bigger Las Vegas. That helped her win.

Then there are gerrymandered districts, and arguably the biggest insider-driven insult of all, the Electoral College. That holdover from the 18th century, in which the American system of elections apportioned votes to balance power between the less-populated slave states and the more urban northeast, is notoriously anti-democratic. Most obviously, Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College, which creates a system where battleground states count more than the rest of the country. It creates other distortions too, because that’s where campaigns focus and target every voter, with encouraging and discouraging messages, voting rules, etc. That overload contributed to 2016’s flat turnout compared to 2012, despite setting voter registration records.

The tears in the mislabeled democratic process don’t stop there. There’s also the actions of outsiders, some overt and some covert. On the overt side, there were scores of confrontations between self-appointed Republican voting vigilantes and perceived Democratic voters in line, according to civil rights groups like the Advancement Project and Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, whose Election Day hotline received 35,000 reports of voting problems. Covertly, there was not just the open question of whether Russia would hack into election computer systems—voter rolls is one system, vote counting machinery another—but some real evidence that it might have happened in North Carolina.

What people heard about were scrambled voter registration database files in Democratic stronghold counties. What they didn’t hear about but what alarmed some computer scientists who track voting machinery, was the vendor that maintains North Carolina’s voter files was in all probability the “unnamed” Florida-based company hacked by the Russians. You can be sure nobody is quarantining those computer systems for immediate examination by computer security experts.

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http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/can-we-count-election-results-exit-poll-discrepancies-and-voter-suppression-are