12-12-2016, 09:14 AM
The Republican Judges are not impressed by the calls for a recount....wonder why....
In One County, 4,000 People Showed Up to Vote But Didn't Or Did They?
Stein's Team Pleads the Case for a Recount in Pennsylvania: Too Little, Too Late?
![[Image: image01-1-700x467.jpg]](http://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/image01-1-700x467.jpg)
Jill Stein in Pennsylvania, pushing for recountPhoto credit: WhoWhatWhy
More than 4,000 voters in a single Pennsylvania county headed to their local polling places on Election Day, stepped into the booth and, at the moment of decision, seemingly cast their vote for no one, records show.
Not for President-elect Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton. Not for Gary Johnson nor Jill Stein.
Nor did they pick a single candidate for US Senate, Congress, state attorney general, state legislature, or town supervisor.
Yet machine records confirm that these Montgomery County voters went to the trouble of showing up. They then either decided to withhold their vote or something prevented their votes from being recorded.
This mountain of so-called No Votes, regarded as "implausible" by Stein's legal team, is now at the heart of her appeal for a recount of Pennsylvania's presidential race that awarded the state's 20 delegates to Trump.
In all, Montgomery County's election records show that 4,087 ballots out of nearly 450,000 cast there were registered as No Votes. Montgomery, a suburban community of 750,000 north of Philadelphia, supported Clinton over Trump by 21 percentage points.
"Thousands of votes almost certainly did not count," said Stein's chief lawyer on the case, Ilann Maazel, at a hearing Friday in Federal District Court in Philadelphia.
Maazel said that a "juvenile password structure" and "antiquated technology," leave these machines used around the state and in much of the country Nov. 8th especially penetrable by hackers and malware. His assertion was dismissed as a pipe dream by an expert witness provided by the state attorney general.
"It's as likely that androids from outer space are living amongst us," Michael Shamos, a onetime voting machine inspector for Pennsylvania, testified. "It's possible, but not likely."
Weeks ago, Pennsylvania loomed as a possible linchpin in the recount effort, but with the recount in Michigan halted and Wisconsin winding down, Trump's hold on the election is secure. And a significant shift in the results are unlikely in Pennsylvania, where Trump leads Clinton by more than 68,000 votes.
Instead, Stein and her lawyers say that the rights of voters are at stake and that a recount and forensic testing of machines might reveal weaknesses in the equipment.
Asked what Stein would do if the probe revealed evidence of hacking, Maazel said after the hearing, "We're not there yet."
The hearing, lasting two-and-a-half hours, starkly framed the issues that have played out as well in Wisconsin and Michigan, with Stein's side pointing to irregularities, and attorneys for the state and Trump saying the recount movement is fueled by paranoia and dismay over the outcome.
"The majority of voters voted for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania," said Trump's lawyer, Lawrence Tabas. "The [Stein people's] disappointment in that result is driving them."
Judge Paul Diamond criticized Stein's lawyers for "creating a legal fire drill" by waiting until Nov. 28, the last day possible, to submit a request for a recount. If the results are not certified by Tuesday, the vote could be thrown to the state legislature, or more dramatically, Pennsylvania's electoral votes could be discarded, as if the election there never happened.
While Stein's lawyers argued that thousands would lose their vote without a recount, the judge, along with Tabas, said that the votes of millions would be imperiled if the Tuesday deadline was missed, just seven days before electors in every state meet to cast their votes for president and vice-president.
Mindful of this, Maazel proposed a scaled back, two-tier approach. He called for a deep forensic dive into DRE machines in six of the state's 67 counties and a hand recount of just one percent of the ballots in 17 precincts roughly 250,000 votes where so-called optical scanners were used to tabulate paper ballots.
The scramble to beat the clock began in the courtroom, with Diamond asking the two sides to huddle to determine how long the assessments would take. They agreed the effort could likely be concluded in a "long" day and a half, just before time runs out.
Still, the judge offered only small hope to Stein's lawyers that he would allow a recount to go forward, saying they had not supplied any proof that a single machine had been hacked or a ballot tampered with.
"You're risking disenfranchising six million voters versus speculation," he said.
Breakdowns that somehow transformed more than 4,000 ballots into No Votes went mostly undetected by voters who left the booth thinking their selections had been registered. But hundreds of voters discovered the mistake within moments, when the machines recorded they had shown up but kept returning their ballots with no votes cast. In the following days, many of these voters embarked on a tortuous bureaucratic trail, said Maazel, the Stein lawyer.
They were shunted from one office to the other as they tried to submit a petition to have their ballot counted, and those who persisted were confronted with filing fees of as much as $500 or ultimately told they had missed a deadline. Most, Maazel said, just gave up.
Because petition deadlines varied wildly from town to town and because towns did not formally post them, voters in this predicament were deprived their constitutional right to protection against disenfranchisement, Maazel said.
Shamos, the attorney general's expert witness and a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said that Pennsylvania's tabulation methods, lacking a centralized computer, were impervious to a bad actor trying to hack into it by altering the software.
"Tell me how one would introduce malware into a significant number of machines to change the result," he said. "No one has."
Attackers, he said, would have to lie in wait for four months as machines were readied and tested before being brought to polling places a few days before the campaign.
"They would have to break seals and apply counterfeit seals," he said. "No one would have unfettered access."
He acknowledged that typical voting precincts such as schools, churches and libraries often went unguarded, even in the days leading up to the election.
Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer-science professor, testified for the Stein side that there were two basic ways Pennsylvania's machines were vulnerable to hacking, either by physically tampering with a computer chip or by transferring infected files from one machine to another on ordinary flash drives.
He said that while it was "significantly likely" pre-election forecasts were wrong, "it was not much less likely that there was a cyber attack."
"Putting myself into the role of attacker, with all its vulnerabilities, I would hack Pennsylvania," he added.
And on a more gallows humor, yet at the same time serious note:
June 25, 2013 The Day Republicans Won the Election
![[Image: image00-700x467.jpg]](http://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/image00-700x467.jpg)
Photo credit: HoyaLawandSociety / YouTube
November 8 will go down in history as the day on which Donald Trump won the presidency and Republicans held the Senate by fighting off Democratic challengers in several close races. A key foundation for that victory, however, was laid more than three years earlier on June 25, 2013. On that day, the Supreme Court handed the GOP a tool that allowed it to turn back the clock to a time when racism was OK.
With its Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act and opened the door to state laws whose sole aim was to ensure that voting would be as difficult as possible for minorities, who typically vote for Democrats.
The nation's highest court decided that "preclearance," the provision requiring the Department of Justice to sign off on changes to election laws in states with a history of discrimination, was no longer needed. They were quickly proven wrong.
Republicans, unable to change the country's demographics, did the next best thing to remain in power: They changed who could vote by enacting a slew of state laws targeting minorities.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw the storm clouds forming on that day in June. In her dissent, she predicted that this decision would leave many voters out in the cold.
"Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet" she wrote.
To get a quick primer on voting rights, the Shelby County decision and voter suppression, please watch the short video below.
In One County, 4,000 People Showed Up to Vote But Didn't Or Did They?
Stein's Team Pleads the Case for a Recount in Pennsylvania: Too Little, Too Late?
Jill Stein in Pennsylvania, pushing for recountPhoto credit: WhoWhatWhy More than 4,000 voters in a single Pennsylvania county headed to their local polling places on Election Day, stepped into the booth and, at the moment of decision, seemingly cast their vote for no one, records show.
Not for President-elect Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton. Not for Gary Johnson nor Jill Stein.
Nor did they pick a single candidate for US Senate, Congress, state attorney general, state legislature, or town supervisor.
Yet machine records confirm that these Montgomery County voters went to the trouble of showing up. They then either decided to withhold their vote or something prevented their votes from being recorded.
This mountain of so-called No Votes, regarded as "implausible" by Stein's legal team, is now at the heart of her appeal for a recount of Pennsylvania's presidential race that awarded the state's 20 delegates to Trump.
Maazel said that a "juvenile password structure" and "antiquated technology," make these machines used around the state and in much of the country on Nov. 8th especially penetrable by hackers and malware.
With a federal judge promising a ruling Monday morning and a Tuesday deadline bearing down on Pennsylvania to certify the results Stein's lawyers say that the No Votes suggest that machines tabulating the vote simply wiped them from their memory.In all, Montgomery County's election records show that 4,087 ballots out of nearly 450,000 cast there were registered as No Votes. Montgomery, a suburban community of 750,000 north of Philadelphia, supported Clinton over Trump by 21 percentage points.
"Thousands of votes almost certainly did not count," said Stein's chief lawyer on the case, Ilann Maazel, at a hearing Friday in Federal District Court in Philadelphia.
Maazel said that a "juvenile password structure" and "antiquated technology," leave these machines used around the state and in much of the country Nov. 8th especially penetrable by hackers and malware. His assertion was dismissed as a pipe dream by an expert witness provided by the state attorney general.
"It's as likely that androids from outer space are living amongst us," Michael Shamos, a onetime voting machine inspector for Pennsylvania, testified. "It's possible, but not likely."
Weeks ago, Pennsylvania loomed as a possible linchpin in the recount effort, but with the recount in Michigan halted and Wisconsin winding down, Trump's hold on the election is secure. And a significant shift in the results are unlikely in Pennsylvania, where Trump leads Clinton by more than 68,000 votes.
Instead, Stein and her lawyers say that the rights of voters are at stake and that a recount and forensic testing of machines might reveal weaknesses in the equipment.
Asked what Stein would do if the probe revealed evidence of hacking, Maazel said after the hearing, "We're not there yet."
The hearing, lasting two-and-a-half hours, starkly framed the issues that have played out as well in Wisconsin and Michigan, with Stein's side pointing to irregularities, and attorneys for the state and Trump saying the recount movement is fueled by paranoia and dismay over the outcome.
"The majority of voters voted for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania," said Trump's lawyer, Lawrence Tabas. "The [Stein people's] disappointment in that result is driving them."
Judge Paul Diamond criticized Stein's lawyers for "creating a legal fire drill" by waiting until Nov. 28, the last day possible, to submit a request for a recount. If the results are not certified by Tuesday, the vote could be thrown to the state legislature, or more dramatically, Pennsylvania's electoral votes could be discarded, as if the election there never happened.
While Stein's lawyers argued that thousands would lose their vote without a recount, the judge, along with Tabas, said that the votes of millions would be imperiled if the Tuesday deadline was missed, just seven days before electors in every state meet to cast their votes for president and vice-president.
Mindful of this, Maazel proposed a scaled back, two-tier approach. He called for a deep forensic dive into DRE machines in six of the state's 67 counties and a hand recount of just one percent of the ballots in 17 precincts roughly 250,000 votes where so-called optical scanners were used to tabulate paper ballots.
The scramble to beat the clock began in the courtroom, with Diamond asking the two sides to huddle to determine how long the assessments would take. They agreed the effort could likely be concluded in a "long" day and a half, just before time runs out.
Still, the judge offered only small hope to Stein's lawyers that he would allow a recount to go forward, saying they had not supplied any proof that a single machine had been hacked or a ballot tampered with.
"You're risking disenfranchising six million voters versus speculation," he said.
Breakdowns that somehow transformed more than 4,000 ballots into No Votes went mostly undetected by voters who left the booth thinking their selections had been registered. But hundreds of voters discovered the mistake within moments, when the machines recorded they had shown up but kept returning their ballots with no votes cast. In the following days, many of these voters embarked on a tortuous bureaucratic trail, said Maazel, the Stein lawyer.
They were shunted from one office to the other as they tried to submit a petition to have their ballot counted, and those who persisted were confronted with filing fees of as much as $500 or ultimately told they had missed a deadline. Most, Maazel said, just gave up.
Because petition deadlines varied wildly from town to town and because towns did not formally post them, voters in this predicament were deprived their constitutional right to protection against disenfranchisement, Maazel said.
Shamos, the attorney general's expert witness and a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said that Pennsylvania's tabulation methods, lacking a centralized computer, were impervious to a bad actor trying to hack into it by altering the software.
"Tell me how one would introduce malware into a significant number of machines to change the result," he said. "No one has."
Attackers, he said, would have to lie in wait for four months as machines were readied and tested before being brought to polling places a few days before the campaign.
"They would have to break seals and apply counterfeit seals," he said. "No one would have unfettered access."
He acknowledged that typical voting precincts such as schools, churches and libraries often went unguarded, even in the days leading up to the election.
Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer-science professor, testified for the Stein side that there were two basic ways Pennsylvania's machines were vulnerable to hacking, either by physically tampering with a computer chip or by transferring infected files from one machine to another on ordinary flash drives.
He said that while it was "significantly likely" pre-election forecasts were wrong, "it was not much less likely that there was a cyber attack."
"Putting myself into the role of attacker, with all its vulnerabilities, I would hack Pennsylvania," he added.
And on a more gallows humor, yet at the same time serious note:
Quote:Making Sure That Only the Right People Vote
Hint: It Helps to Be White
Voting in the Age of Trump.Photo credit: DonkeyHotey / WhoWhatWhy (CC BY-SA 2.0) See complete attribution below.
When the demographics of the US electorate began to turn against Republicans, it appeared as though they only had two options: Adapt their policies to appeal to minorities and young people, or stay the course and risk slowly fading into irrelevance.
Unwilling to change their policies and unable to change the country's demographics, the GOP instead chose a third option: Alter who can vote.
That's why, once they gained full control of a state, Republicans quickly moved to consolidate their power. They gerrymandered congressional districts and passed laws that would make it more difficult for likely Democrats to vote.
When the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013 with its decision in Shelby County v. Holder, it removed one of the last remaining obstacles that stood between the GOP and the ability to pick an electorate more to its liking.
State Republicans immediately went to work and passed laws across the country to make that happen.
Soon, we will see what it looks like when that plan goes national. With Donald Trump in the White House, Republicans in control of Congress, Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general, and Kris Kobach (the architect of various voter suppression efforts) in the transition team, chances are the GOP will soon come up with another scheme to keep minorities on the sidelines on Election Day.
To help them out, we came up with a few innovative ways to ensure that only the "right" people vote:
English only: Ensuring that all election materials are available in English only seems like an easy way to keep undesirable immigrants away from the polls. But why stop there? Prior to being allowed to vote, immigrants should recite the Constitution from memory.
Voter ID: Under the pretense of fighting the extraordinarily rare crime of in-person voter fraud, Republicans have instituted a number of Voter ID laws across the country. The actual goal of these is to make sure that poor people, the elderly and minorities, who often lack the required ID, can't vote. However, current measures are not restrictive enough. Look for federal legislation that requires the following additional identification to be required to cast a ballot: Country club membership card, receipt for NRA donation, bowling league registration card, Trump University enrollment form and/or KKK secret handshake.
With the Interstate Crosscheck program, Kobach and his voter suppression minions managed to strike a lot of voters from the rolls, but the system is not foolproof. That's why a law is needed that prevents people from voting whose last name ends in the letter "z", any name that includes an "ñ" (note that the following letters are also foreign but they are acceptable because they come from European alphabets: ä, ü and ø), whose name matches any part of the name of a Middle Eastern terrorist or anybody whose name is Mo'nique.
While hundreds of polling places were eliminated prior to the 2016 election, additional steps have to be taken. In the future, polling places in areas with large minority populations must be located next to landfills.
To prevent long lines, voting hours will be staggered. White people can vote anywhere from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm while minorities and millennials must vote between midnight and 8:00 am or 8:00 pm to midnight. That way, each group has 12 hours to vote and it is therefore a "fair" system.
People with "Make America Great Again" bumper stickers, or anybody who can produce a copy of "The Art of the Deal," will be eligible for a Priority Voting line. People with "Coexist" bumper stickers, on the other hand, will not be allowed to vote.
Early voting, which many minorities prefer, will be eliminated. However, African Americans and Hispanics will have the exclusive opportunity to cast symbolic "late votes" on the Sunday following the election.
Democracy isn't easy, but these simple fixes should ensure that the next election won't be rigged.
June 25, 2013 The Day Republicans Won the Election
Photo credit: HoyaLawandSociety / YouTubeNovember 8 will go down in history as the day on which Donald Trump won the presidency and Republicans held the Senate by fighting off Democratic challengers in several close races. A key foundation for that victory, however, was laid more than three years earlier on June 25, 2013. On that day, the Supreme Court handed the GOP a tool that allowed it to turn back the clock to a time when racism was OK.
With its Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act and opened the door to state laws whose sole aim was to ensure that voting would be as difficult as possible for minorities, who typically vote for Democrats.
The nation's highest court decided that "preclearance," the provision requiring the Department of Justice to sign off on changes to election laws in states with a history of discrimination, was no longer needed. They were quickly proven wrong.
Republicans, unable to change the country's demographics, did the next best thing to remain in power: They changed who could vote by enacting a slew of state laws targeting minorities.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw the storm clouds forming on that day in June. In her dissent, she predicted that this decision would leave many voters out in the cold.
"Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet" she wrote.
To get a quick primer on voting rights, the Shelby County decision and voter suppression, please watch the short video below.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass