Sanders called for abolishing the CIA

[Peter Lemkin]

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[TD="width: 84%"]The Suspect Massachusetts 2016 Primary

By Theodore Soares [/TD]
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Inthe Massachusetts March 1, 2016 primary Democratic Party race, thecomputerized vote count declared candidate Clinton the winner but theexit polls indicated candidate Sanders to be the winner by a marginof 6.6%. These same exit polls accurately predicted the results ofeach and all of the Republican candidates. Until the US joins a longlist of many other countries that protect the integrity of theirelections through publicly observed hand counting of paper ballots,our elections are liable to be suspect.
Exitpolling has been performed in the US and other countries for decadesand the science and proper methodology is well established to obtainan accurate prediction of the final vote. For years, manyresearchers have pointed to the discrepancies between exit pollresults and the unverified computer counts in US elections. The mainresponse by the defenders of computerized voting, while expressingblind faith in the unverified computer counting, has been to claimthat the exit polls may go wrong because respondents, moreenthusiastic for a particular candidate, would be more likely toagree to be polled. The recent Massachusetts Super Tuesday primariesdid not support this theory.

(image by Ted Soares)

[1]Exit polls published by CNN immediately after close of polls.
[2]Reported computer vote count from www.nytimes.com/elections/results. 100% vote count. Exit poll projected winner is highlightedin green. Reported winner for the state is highlighted in yellow.
[3]Discrepancies are the reported vote count percentage less exit pollpercentage. Negative result indicates lower vote count thanpredicted by the exit polls. Positive result indicates higher votecount than predicted by the exit polls. In contrast to the lowdiscrepancy in the Republican Party race, the discrepancy for theDemocratic Party race is much greater than the exit poll margin oferror of 5.4% (95% confidence level) for the difference between thetwo candidates.
[4]Margin of error for differences (at 95% CI) calculated according to: Franklin, C .The'Margin of Error' for Differences in Polls .University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. October 2002, revisedFebruary 2007.
TheRepublican Party primary race has been widely acknowledged as morepolarized and contentious than the Democratic Party primary race. Inthe current election cycle, many Republican Party voters demonstrateenthusiasm for candidate Trump as many Democratic Party votersdemonstrate enthusiasm for candidate Sanders. Yet, the exit pollresults for the Republican Party closely matched the final computervote count for every candidate. This accuracy was obtained withabout 500 fewer respondents than for the Democratic Party. Thehigher number of respondents in the Democratic race should lead to asmaller margin of error. The same exit poll for the Democratic race,however, conducted at the same time and the same places, differedwidely from the final computer count and the margin of error for theexit poll. This difference turned a Sanders' victory into a defeat.
InUS elections, very few precincts conduct verified hand counts ofpaper ballots. Almost all ballots are counted by computer softwarehidden from human eyes. A few years ago, MIT Technology Reviewpublished the article Howto Hack an Election in One Minute reporting on Princeton University's research project SecurityAnalysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine finding how easy it was to hack into a computer voting system tochange the results of an election while remaining totallyundetectable. The BrennanCenter for Justice at NYU School of Law in their report TheMachinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World found "more than 120 potential threats to [computerized] votingsystems."
Dueto such concerns, to insure the integrity of public elections,Germany reverted to publicly observed hand counting of paper ballotsfor all their elections. In 2006 the FederalConstitutional Court of Germany determined that while vote fraudwith hand-counted ballots would be easy to detect, "programmingerrors in the software or deliberate electoral fraud committed bymanipulating the software of electronic voting machines can berecognized only with difficulty. The very wide-reaching effect ofpossible errors of the voting machines or of deliberate electoralfraud make special precautions necessary in order to safeguard theprinciple of the public nature of elections."
Noamount of testing and certifying procedures for the machine countingof votes or the availability of paper trails, post election audits,or recounts could satisfy Germany's constitutional requirement thatall important aspects of the electoral process be publicly observableand that "[t]he voters themselves must be able to understandwithout detailed knowledge of computer technology whether their votescast are recorded in an unadulterated manner."
Germanyis not alone among technologically advanced nations that rejectcomputerized counting in their elections. Countries such as Canada,France, Ireland, Italy, Denmark, Finland and 53other countries protect the integrity of their elections withhand-counted paper ballots.
Asthe Massachusetts primaries indicate, the integrity of our electionswill be always questionable and suspect until we join the many othercountries that safeguard their elections with publicly observed handcounting of paper ballots.

Good video report on electronic theft of Ohio vote and assassination of one main player who might have been willing to whistleblow.

https://www.corbettreport.com/mp4/ep226.mp4

The system is now even more embedded and 'accepted' and widespread. Expect to see lots of this in the primaries and in the next elections! Long before computers made it easy, Stalin made a very important observation, "it is not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes."