Looking at the ideological survey demographics between 2016 and 2012, the support for the republican candidate is nearly the same in both cycles, while the expected votes for Hillary seemed to go elsewhere outside the two major parties. So it appears that for the most part, conservatives along with their subcontinent of deplorables were going to vote the party line regardless of the candidate, while just enough of the remaining voters irrationally chose alternatives over Clinton to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
No no the alt-right took over, yep that what happened, we totally did not run an unelectable candidate that turned off enough of the electorate to lose. Now I know people that voted Stein and even wrote in Bernie, I tried to convince them otherwise, to no avail, I'm just one random smuck, Hillary Clinton on the other hand made the choice to lose and to put a pig boar moron in charge of the country.
Just to remind you ... ... stop wasting your life. I don't want to waste your life, anymore, so please do us the courtesy of not asking us to take part in wasting your life.
That one of the highest rated and best known politicians in the US, one preferred by a majority of voters both in prospect and in retrospect, would be described as "unelectable", is bizarre. When you present adult human beings who allowed themselves to be manipulated by such transparent bigotry and misogyny fig leaves as the email, Benghazi, and "lots of scandals" bs, as being somehow justified in voting for flagrant Republican misogyny and racial bigotry by Clinton's failure to properly focus on the economic plight the last Republican administration put them in, you are justifying bigots. That's exactly what you are doing. How about, as a first step down the road, we attempt to get rid of the media punditry and campaign strategists (and - yes - little campaign minions out among the real people) who can't say "shit" when they have a mouthful of it? Who have to find somebody, anybody, on some other "side" of whatever happened, to assign "both sides" shares of blame for what a fairly small and clearly identifiable cadre of bad people openly set out to do and are doing? And in between then and now, we take seriously the voting machine and vote suppression issues that are front and center in the aftermath of yet another screwed up election - that's an immediate, this week, and undeniably significant matter that has been festering and undermining our elections for almost twenty years now.
Good so Tiassa out, reality has set in, as for wasting my life, don't ask me to be sane, Donald Trump is president. Did she win the presidency? No she lost buddy boy, she lost! She lost to the lowest publicly approved candidate ever (she being second), to a pig boar that has never held office, is a moron, an unabashed huckster. Had it been Cruz or Rubio against her she would have been utterly clobbered, but this lose is even more embarrassing despite how close she got to winning. I can't change the fact that she lost, that enough people voted against her, you sir need to accept reality! Your telling me trump won on bigotry, yet I'm the one justifying bigotry? Your justifying bigotry, as you claim it gave trump the presidency! I'm the one saying bigotry was not the major factor in his victory, that the swing voters that elected trump simply did not see any improvement in their lives and wanted an anti-establishment candidate to punish the elite. so called mainstream media is already dying off, hence why it has gotten so bad and biased. Campaign strategist on the other hand can stay if they can win elections. All I read there was: blah, blah blah blah, blah blah... blah. All for that, and there is a recount going on right now, and if it finds something that can free us from the nightmare of Trump, I will be ecstatic, but I have no hope of that happening. Slim chance it will find anything. I am thankful for Stein pushing for it though, I should have voted for her. None of these though are solutions to my question though.
So the question is why - certainly not because Clinton was "unelectable", in the first place. That's ridiculous. Mull this: If she'd been running as a Republican, would she have lost? You greatly underestimate Trump - something we on the Left have been warning you about all along. He didn't clobber Cruz and Rubio by accident. They voted for a card-carrying member of the elite that is most directly responsible for the lack of improvement in their lives, running as the nominated candidate of the political Party most directly responsible for the degradation of their lives. They believed complete bullshit, unworthy of any adult, on no grounds. Why did they do that? You said you wanted to focus on improving "our" chances of winning the next election. You claim to be an opponent of Trump's Party and political faction, despite your reposting of a lot of their media memes. That's an obvious step to take, right now and urgently, by anyone who wants to improve the chances of an opponent of Trump's Party and faction winning future elections. Yeah, we know. But it was worth a try.
Okay, so, you know how if I want to take the libertarian-paranoiac―a.k.a., "Republican"―position I might bawl about liberal totalitarianism and how much you hate the First Amendment and blah blah blah? Right, so ... we can all dispense with that, I think. I hope. Oh, right. Republicans. Oh, right: What do we do about market demand? For instance, it's nearly microcosmic, but as viewers were disappointed to learn that Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule would not get a fifth season, I wondered about the first four. I accept that I'm out of touch with much of television comedy, but I never could figure out why certain bits were popular. Then again, neither do I understand much of network prime time television except perhaps, that people watch it because it's what the networks put on. But it's true, there are some exceptionally strange market niches. How are we going to "get rid of the media punditry and campaign strategists (and - yes - little campaign minions out among the real people) who can't say 'shit' when they have a mouthful of it"? The reason I ask has nothing to do with fantasies of liberal totalitarianism, but, rather, simple market expectation. That is to say, the audience will follow what it likes. Or, more directly: I am uncertain how we get rid of them from the marketplace. Our neighbor and I, for instance, dispute certain points about how to deal with ... oh, right, you're already in on that part. The thing about our neighbor's insistence on sympathy and appeasement for bullies and bigots is that the bullies and bigots had enough votes in the right places to win this election. You know, even if I said fuck it, which essentially I had ... look, I just never expected it ran this deep. As such, I can't tell right now whether it's spreading or in remission. But our neighbor is right about one thing, though we kind of knew it already: These people, the bullies and bigots, only harden. The best way I can think of to get rid of the problems as you describe them is with market force. And, yes, that means more years of enduring Republicans bawling about how they feel so violated because their supremacism and bigotry is called by its name. What becomes unpredictable really is whether supremacism is spreading or in remission. Consider, for example, the weird flaw in our neighbor's argument by which he (ahem!) forgets that black women exist. No, not really. But the part about Obama's election and Hillary Clinton's loss, while often draped in that astounding pretense of pretending the last eight years of racist backlash never happened, also conflates racism and misogyny. The fact of a man being black doesn't preclude misogyny. That is to say, despite general similarities, they are, in particular, distinct phenomena. Indeed, this is how deeply it runs: If it is a woman, we all distrust her inherently. If it is a man who "talks like a woman", we are compelled to trust him more. That a racist doesn't like a black man has nothing to do with how that racist or any other person of any color might feel about women. And in a circumstance by which such ideas and outcomes assert any other merit than existing―e.g., finding significant sympathy―we really must consider, or so says me, how we can get rid of them without the audience following. So even if we do manage to shame or logically argue them off the networks and out of the major newspapers, they're still going to find an audience. The punditry show on RT would get great ratings, especially for throwing hard right. I think it's a fascinating question, because the discourse is clearly dysfunctional. But even without leaping into an abyss of traditional American hyperbole the functional challenges assert themselves loudly. Even the metrics for describing the dimensions of the problem present what can easily seem a daunting mystery. I can probably offer a more functional starting point regarding this than the prior section, but it's still vague: If I suggest I have noticed over the years―and it nags at me―a coincidence between Republicans stirring up society asserting corruption, and society responding by securing that asserted corruption, is that an entirely foreign concept to you? I ask because some would go so far as to suggest it hyperbolic. But I'm still uncertain what to say about a marketplace that swallowed Zell Miller's 2004 Republican convention speech blaming John Kerry for Dick Cheney. To the other, voting is a prime example as we witness breathtaking gerrymandering―some of it extraordinarily vicious and ... I mean ... the "three-fifths day" in Virginia↗, y'know?―and any number of Republicans over the course of a presidential cycle acknowledging and even boasting that voter ID laws are intended to tilt the election, amid any number of regular foul schemes in conservative politics, and yet the GOP somehow still has initiative. Oh, right. Or, yeah, Donald Trump, a Goldman-Sachs Hollywood elitist, and a vulture capitalist are going to straighten out the corporate corruption hurting workers. So the first thing I think we need to do toward that end is start winning the argument to shape the narrative. Focusing on the real threats to our vote is, presently, a hearts and minds contest. Still, it's vague, I know. But sometimes I think if we stop the insistent superficial messaging and essentially throw down a coherent, detailed, accurate historical narrative we ought to be able to start seizing the initiative on the merits. For institutional liberals, this will mean it's time to stop playing the talking point and sound bite and press release mcnugget game. How about, "No more #tablescrapping"? And as with other things, sure, I get why politicians play that game; the market responds to it. On some level, it works. But that's the challenge, isn't it? All we need to do is give frightened, superstitious people a rational narrative that helps them feel better about themselves while explaining how they've been doing it wrong the whole time and how to tune into the appropriate, real threat vectors, and sure, something goes here about elitism, because that's an aspect of their shield against certain verifiable realities. And I know that sounds sarcastic, but it really does seem to a certain degree what American society is now up against in dealing with itself. Something about having fun storming the castle. Trumpunzel, Trumpunzel, let down your hair .... (groan)
She was not elected, therefor unelectable. You need to accept reality, yes reality is ridiculous, our existence is a joke, Donald fucking Trump is president, we live in something akin to the matrix only far stupider and lame. She would have lost in the primaries like all the other boring establishment cooky-cutter politicians. In the primaries, but polling showed he was the least liked in the general population of the republican candidate with Cruz and Rubio polling higher then Clinton consistently. Yes most voters vote on party loyalty, nothing can be done about the loyalist republicans other then trying to convince them not to show up and vote, better yet in convincing our side to come out to vote, and convincing independent voters to vote for us. All three we failed at this time. First we ran a candidate that was hated by all, emboldening Republican loyalist, certainly not getting independent voters and causing many democrats not to show up to vote at all. Second we encourage republican loyalist via regressive leftist shaming tactics, more so we lost independent voters via those tactics and discourages many leftist democrats. "vote for Hillary or else your sexist" not only failed it embolden many simply to not vote or even vote for trump just to say "fuck you". Because their "media memes" WON, fact, reality, accept it. Here is a reality test for you: when trump said "drain the swamp" what does that mean to you?
The "market" - defined as what viewers want to see - does not seem to be the - or even a - controlling factor. The role of the "market" is not clear in all this. We know for a fact that on occasion more popular shows, pundits, and news presenters have been changed, marginalized, even removed in favor of less popular ones on some stations (MSNBC, say - three more hours of Joe Scarborough every morning was not a market-driven decision), in every single case shifting the political spectrum to the "right", or Republican-favoring. What that means is speculation, but it seems to point to non-market forces in play. The mass media audience is not that competent, or diligent, or loyal; those guys are not entertaining, or insightful, or attractive. Nobody who watches that swill has the interest, or the motivation, to scroll around on the downmarket satellite TV channels and find out where - say - David Brooks ended up after the NYT, PBS, and major talk shows finally boycotted his worthless self, or Hugh Hewitt found his niche after more competent and interesting purveyors of "thought" were found on the local playground, or Chuck Todd landed after being parasailed off the top of Mount Bothsides with a broken ethical compass jammed up his ass and a note pinned to his harness: "Down is not Up". Ohhhh-kay. We might need something we can use to explain the past and plan for the future, though. But in the national? With the smear campaigning and the vote suppression and the voting machine tilt in her favor (as it was in the Dem primaries)? A trivial factor, of course. Very few Trump voters were listening to such people directly. But why do you ascribe those tactics to "the Left"? They sound more like something from hardcore and longtime Clinton supporters. Certainly you don't mean me, or anybody like me? We said and did nothing of the kind. That doesn't explain why you accept them as framing your actual perceptions. Can't you tell the difference between wingnut rants on Fox-addled media and stuff that actually exists, things that actually happened?
Oh so close to self-awareness there! This whole time I've been trying to explain what happened (the past) and what need need to do (the future). How did Obama do against the smear campaign, vote suppression and voting machine tilt. We will see how much tilting there was after the vote recount. I will put a bet very little or none, but I would be delightfully surprised if they find otherwise. Very few of such people were talking to trump voters, except for yelling and screaming at them occasionally, on video that is then shown to millions, and make us all on the left look bad. Sure explain to me again how racism is everything. Can't you tell the difference between facts, regardless of who is saying them? If fox says Hillary has a huge number of scandals behind her, guess what that is actually true! Regardless if the scandals are fabricated or have resulting in no convictions, the scandals were real enough to depress voter turn out for her such that now Donald Trump is president. Sure it is, conservatives go to conservative news outlets that feed them what they want to hear, liberals go to liberal news outlets that feed them what they want to hear, everyone has their own echochamer or hugbox to go to, a generalized unbiased source of news has an ever shrinking market as more and more people master google enough to get what they want to hear.
No, you haven't. You've been trying to deny what happened, and use wingnut memes to guide a future you can only screw up thereby. So you at least acknowledge that very few people - and I can tell you not me or anyone like me - ever yelled and screamed names like "racist" or "fascist" at undecided voters, who then reacted by voting for Trump for some reason. That's a start. Now take a look at how "us all on the left" somehow were made to "look bad" - to grown adults, undecided voters - by a few people somewhere who weren't acting like us at all. A while ago you blamed me and people like me for that - have you come to your senses? The tilt - between the machine tally and the exit polls, especially in certain circumstances - is already established. The vote recount may help explain it, if done rigorously and not slipshod, but cannot banish it. It's already documented. Sure. But we aren't talking about facts. No, it isn't. What Hillary has is a large number of Fox allegations of scandal behind her. That's not the same thing as an actual scandal, because Fox makes lots of false allegations. The fabricated scandals do not become more real because people believe them, or allow them to depress turnout. They are still fabrications. The only scandal connected with them is Fox's public and unpunished dishonesty. You can't fix that by changing anything about the Democratic Party. That doesn't explain why popular and money-making talking heads have been systematically replaced with less popular and less profitable talking heads - always increasing the rightwing and Republican lean. It doesn't explain why liberal and leftwing news sources (even profitable ones) disappear and unprofitable small-audience conservative and rightwing news outlets replace them. It doesn't explain why the bias that people supposedly want to hear is toward deception and lies for conservatives and accurate responsible journalism for liberals.
It seems worth pointing to a weird ... well, it's neither revelation nor epiphany, but .... • Waah! Any time you criticize Obama they say you're racist! Waaaaaaah! ― Remember that one? Toss a coin: Does anybody else, other than fellow white-supremacist conservatives, exist in the perspective that bawled like that? I mean, I get that a Republican isn't going to directly criticize a Democrat for not being liberal enough, but they sure as hell tried to find some way of hitting Obama that way. Okay, that's an overstatement. Republicans tried. They weren't smart enough to make it a useful or decent try. Seriously, though, the left-side critique against Obama generally had nothing to do with his skin color. So, is it that Republicans didn't like the left-side critique, or did that critique simply not, in their perspective, exist? Actually, though― ―yeah, this is something I really do wonder about. Like the bit you were just asking him about: "we lost independent voters via those tactics and discourages many leftist democrats. 'vote for Hillary or else your sexist' ...". I know I dug after you a couple times, not so long ago, for playing weird talking points, but by comparison this is absolutely naked. This is the right-wing bawl. There is this bit in Cowboy Feng (this isn't it↱, but I can't find my copy right now to transcribe), an intermezzo chapter readers refer to as, "Let's Talk About Love". And that's what it is, a bitter reflection on men and women, boys and girls, and all sorts of whatever, a great bit about breathtaking vistas on mountainsides not being good places to live and reminding that heat is good but too much can burn, and somewhere in all of that is a line about human creativity and inventing new ways to hurt ourselves. Sometimes I'm amazed at how creative people aren't. I mean, somewhere in there I hit you for talking points that relied too much on inherent cultural misogyny, but even still, I just can't imagine anyone having paid attention to this barnstorming shitshow, claiming to be any remote degree of Democrat, liberal, sympathizer, supporter, or voter, who isn't aware of a raft of policy complaints about Hillary Clinton. I mean, seriously, I comforted my father against the expectation of a Clinton presidency by reminding that he had been a Reagan Republican, so he knew approximatetly what he was getting. In another room that's a fucking policy indictment against any Democrat. Let's see, didn't we just hear a shit-ton about war? I mean, sure, we could get into eggs and stones throwdowns, I suppose, in order to make it sexist, but she certainly learned the political value of halfassed interventionism, and one of the most vexing conundra on the left is that we never win out on this point, but the alternative is generally worse. I can't imagine the Republican who ... er ... right. Never mind. Because I'm looking at our neighbor's bit about how "we lost independent voters via those tactics and discourages many leftist democrats. 'vote for Hillary or else your sexist'" and, in truth, I'm fascinated for a really weird reason. There's a market sector (marketplace of ideas, as such) we encounter in various discussions about equality, justice, and various asssertions of morality that purports to be on one side of a generally dualistic dispute, but also insists on adopting the framework of the "other" side in order to continue the discussion. And the thing is they can never tell us why, or what we're expecting to find. Nor is that a good description, but you're aware of these people who posture themselves as some manner of heroic ideological wanderer trying to convince you that they're on your side and what you need to do is surrender the argument a priori. I've seen this bit before, and it's really weird because at some level I am nearly obliged to believe it's genuine, that they really can't tell the difference. It's kind of like while others might laugh and say the back and forth is like sniffing butts before a pissing contest, nobody can explain why the one is over there trying to hump a cactus. Because, you know, ritualized whatever might be what mere humans do, but piercing yourself humping a cactus is what smart people do. No, really, it blows my mind.
After the election I heard from friends that voted third party and wrote in Bernie, but that’s out here on the left coast, where thanks to the Electoral College you can safely play those games. For those who chose to play electoral chicken in the swing states, if they don’t regret their brinkmanship now, the majority of the rest of the voters surely do. We had a similar taste of this back in 2000. In three key states that President-elect Donald Trump won, his margin of victory was smaller than the total number of votes for Green Party nominee Jill Stein. According to Cook Political Report's Dave Wasserman, the votes Stein got in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin outnumber Trump's edge over Democrat Hillary Clinton in each state: Jill Stein is now officially the Ralph Nader of 2016. Stein votes/Trump margin: MI: 51,463/10,704 PA: 49,678/46,765 WI: 31,006/22,177 http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-brief...-smaller-margin-than-stein-votes-in-all-three
Hey I didn't vote for Stein and I don't even live in a swing state. Yes if Stein and the green party somehow did not exist Hillary's chance of having been president would be much greater and I tried to convince them not to waste their vote but they hated Hillary too much. Sure I blame Nader in 2000, we had come so much closer to victory then, but this time as a party member, being at caucus and meetings, having foreseen how lackluster Hillary would be (like Gore, the bore, only worse), I argued for another candidate, one we would have a better chance of winning with.
Yeah, those numbers sting. On mnsbc, Steve Kornacki↱ visualized the numbers with Arrowhead Stadium. Psychologically, this is actually a number we can conceive. This isn't like trying to wrap our heads around the numbers in a sports contract or defense appropriation. Two trillion dollars evaporating from the abstract concept of all the money in the world nearly overnight after Brexit? That number is inconceivable to most; people imagine they should be distressed because it's a tall number. And, you know, they may be right, but sometimes it helps to comprehend why one is correct. (Brief not-quite digression: Imagine someone angrily declaring he is not a Republican. And everyone at the table sits in shocked silence. For as long as he has expressed a political conscience, he has backed Republicans and conservative ballot initiatives. Over fifteen years, and all around the table there is shocked silence. And finally someone says it: "But you always back Republicans. You always vote that way." And he just had, too, in a manner that boggled their minds. And what the guy will never admit is that the reason he had behaved that way is that he backed Reagan in 1980, but only because his little brother had listened to their Republican father's explanation of Democrats and Republicans and decided he was a Democrat. But it was 1980, and the older brother won. So he ran with it. Some eighteen years later? It was conditioned behavior. It took the Bush Jr. administration to finally break his habit.) To the other, seventy-nine thousand is a number many of us can conceive. Some people make more than that a year; some people drive cars that cost more than that. Own a house? It probably costs more than seventy-nine thousand dollars. Unlike a two hundred fifty million dollar sports contract, or a two-trillion dollar abstraction, we can relate to―count, envision, experience, &c.―this number. To wit: Arrowhead Stadium, sold out, distributed through three states. Regardless of who we might blame, those numbers sting badly. I mean, sure, I can look at Stein voters and say, "Really?" But I can also look at some Trump crossovers and say the same. And nobody can convince me there aren't seventy-nine thousand potential Democratic voters who just stayed out of it this year―actually, we know there are―so they get the question, too. ____________________ Notes: Kornacki, Steve. "Most important number of the day for Dec. 1". MSNBC Live. 1 December 2016. msnbc.com. 2 December 2016. http://on.msnbc.com/2gQaX5j
At least that many Dem votes were tossed by illegitimate crosscheck denial, absentee ballot "spoilage" and discard, miscalibrated voting machine spoilage, new voter ID law enforcement, and the like. And that's not even counting the outright vote tally software fraud possibility - especially in Pennsylvania. He got it close enough to steal. Stein's recount effort needs money, btw, if anyone's interested.
Don't you mean Hillary's recount effort? Honestly, is there any doubt that Stein was cheated? What a scam. Why doesn't Hillary just come out arm-in-arm with Stein and announce their mutual effort. http://www.ibtimes.com/final-electi...in-michigan-pennsylvania-recount-flip-2454095 In New Hampshire, Hillary won by less than 3,000 votes. In main , she won by a little more than 20,000. If Stein is so concerned about an honest election, why not include those two states in her recount? It won't get them any closer, but it will solidify people's opinion about both the Green Party and the Democratic Party. It shows the level of BS they are willing to dig up. If you really want to get involved, iceaura, I hear that Hillary is recruiting people to participate in the recount. Don't throw good money away when time is so much more valuable.
That's a popular right wing conspiracy, i.e. the lock her up crowd, but it's Stein's recount. Why are right wingers so concerned? They lost the popular vote but won the election for the second time in recent years. Republicans have won 2 of the last 4 elections while losing the popular vote. It's highly unlikely the recount will change anything. Stein's paying for it. So where's the harm? Stein is well within her rights and well within the law. If you are so concerned, why don't you or your man Trump demand a recount in New Hampshire if it bothers you? Stein can spend her campaign money any way she wishes. It's how the freedom train rolls. Yeah, it probably won't change things. So why are you and your fellow right wingers so concerned? "Level of BS". . . seriously? After all the bullshit and all the lies Republicans have made over the course of decades, e.g. Hillary lied, Hillary is a serial murder, is a criminal, et al. and in particular the lies The Donald has made, you are going to accuse Democrats of bullshit? Please, Democrats would need several decades and armies of manure spreaders as Republicans have had in order to achieve comparable lows. Democrats have a long way to go in order to catch up with Republicans on the BS front. If Stein and her supporters want to spend their money on a recount, it's their right to do so. It's their time and their money. They can spend it any way they wish. At this point, the fascists don't run our government and our Constitution still means something. Hell, if you believe your man Trump, he says millions of illegals voted. So why are you defaming the Greens and Democrats because the Greens asked for a recount?
I posted some Pennsylvania election totals yesterday not realizing that votes are still being counted, and that the numbers continue to fluctuate by the hour. Decision Desk currently has Trump up by 47,603 votes Current tally in PA after reviewing a few more counties' sites today: Donald J. Trump (REP) 2,965,046 Hillary Clinton (DEM) 2,917,443 https://twitter.com/DecisionDeskHQ NBC Philadelphia puts the margin at 49,000 votes With a fight being waged over whether a statewide recount will take place in Pennsylvania, President-elect Donald Trump's lead in the commonwealth narrowed by some 22,000 votes as counties continued to count votes from last month's presidential election. State election officials said Friday evening that Trump now led Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton by 49,000 votes, down from 71,000 as provisional and absentee ballots from overseas are recorded. http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Philadelphia-Recount-Presidential-Election-Trump-Clinton-Stein-404060246.html So even current results still keep Trump's margin less than Stein's total of 49,678. If you consider half of Gary Johnson's vote to lean progressive, then add another 72,000 to the count of those in Pennsylvania disenchanted with Hillary, and by default willing to give Trump the presidency. Remember it was Trump that bitched and moaned about the flawed election system. Now he has a chance to back up his rhetoric with action. Time for all candidates and skeptical citizens to get on board the recount train.
Dr. Stein's conscience might compel her to make some demonstration intended in lieu of apology, or some such. She is aware that, as the statistically relevant liberal alternative, she receives a definitive measure of blame. Despite the dramatic title, Steven Rosenfeld's↱ overview at AlterNet is worth the time: The Greens issued an update on Friday listing the vote count anomalies they are hoping a recount will clarify. In Wisconsin, they noted that two-thirds of the counties are doing hand-counts of paper ballots, which is this only way to check against machine-induced errors. One of those counties, Ottagamie, where observers noticed that an early tabulation counted 1,500 more votes than actual ballots cast, will not be doing a hand count, which is very frustrating to election integrity activists. Their update said “there are a number of statistical irregularities in voting data, which merit heightened scrutiny given the historic level of concern over hacking during this election: “Wisconsin: Three counties saw large discrepancies in votes between 2012 and 2016, with the margin of victory for Donald Trump in some cases being ten-fold higher than the GOP’s average in the last four presidential elections. “Wisconsin: Another statistical analysis, done by Stanford PhD candidate Rodolfo Barragan and Axel Geijsel of Tilburg University, finds that even when taking into account factors like ethnicity and education, there is significant evidence that counties with electronic voting showed higher support for Trump than counties using only paper ballots. “Michigan: More than 75,000 Michiganders cast no vote for president in the 2016 election—almost twice as many 'under-votes' than were cast in the 2012 election (49,840). The high number is a red flag, especially when considering that these 'under-votes' were concentrated in the heavily Democratic precincts of Detroit.” The Greens also said the touchscreen voting systems in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were especially vulnerable to hacking, and even cited a tweet by Edward Snowden affirming that point. “Hacking voting machines: not that difficult. Hiding a secret deviation in votes from after-the-fact statistical analysis: nearly impossible.” “In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, approximately two-thirds and one-tenth of voting, respectively, is done through touchscreen machines (DREs) that are susceptible to manipulation and hacking (and which many states have banned or are phasing out),” their summary said. “In Pennsylvania, whose voting system has been called a 'nightmare scenario' by one leading expert, the machines do not even dispense a paper ballot or receipt. As a result, the only way to conduct a full, foolproof audit is through a 'forensic analysis' —opening each machine to look for evidence of tampering or voter manipulation.” “Optical scan voting—the method for all voting in Michigan, 85 percent in Wisconsin and one-third in Pennsylvania—is considered an improvement over DREs, but can still be breached without detection,” they continued. “The machines suffer from glitches and are prone to mistakes, including misreading voters’ markings. For example, in a recount of Ohio votes initiated by then Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb in 2004, almost 90,000 votes were left uncounted due to a machine calibration error. As such, manual hand recounts—as opposed to simply running ballots back through the machine—are essential, and considered the gold standard of recounts by election integrity experts.” In truth, it's hard for me to oppose the recount because, (A) it's happening, (B) it ought to be enlightening, anyway, since this is taking place in the realm of one of the more realistic concerns about vote integrity, and (C) I come from a state where recounts overturned the election night call and kept the Democrats in the governor's mansion. True, that last was over a decade ago↗, and started with a difference of only forty-two votes, but it was an insanely fraught time. And it includes a bonus appearance by Chris Vance, formerly Chairman of our state "GOP Party", who just had his ass handed to him by Sen. Patty Murray to the tune of eighteen points. Poor guy. There's some irony in all that. (He might actually become the next Dino Rossi, the cyclical Republican loser.) Still, though, the thing is that between the traditional conventional wisdom that it's not about to change the outcome of the election, and the fact of these margins and the amount of controversy this can and might cause, the only way I really see this overturning the election is because Americans really, really, really want to see this happen. We're talking about a conspiratorial sounding result that we Americans could tacitly engineer simply by will of our need to live in a movie. Honestly, I keep trying to find ways to say I don't expect it to change the outcome; but Michigan is definitely within reach, and Wisconsin is not definitively out of reach. It's one thing to say recounts wouldn't overturn the election, but I'm trying to conceive the damage of rolling even one state, such as Michigan. And if that happens, and people lose their shit, just what is the possibility that we end up with a federalized uniform standard? It was my duty twelve years ago to accept the idea of Governor Rossi, but the recount made a difference. It is my duty to accept this election unless and until I am given specific reason not to. And if one of these recount efforts gives me a reason, I will worry about it then and accordingly. As Capracus↑ suggests: ____________________ Notes: Rosenfeld, Steven. "Trump Campaign and GOP Allies in Full Legal Panic as Recounts Could Create Electoral College Crisis". AlterNet. 2 December 2016. AlterNet.org. 3 December 2016. http://bit.ly/2fVHViz
