2016: Another Stolen Election

Documented: Articles concerning how the 2016 election was stolen via voter suppression (primiarly via Kris Kobach's Interstate Crosscheck). The result being the installation of another illegitimate president. The publication of this article directory is in response to a querry by Dave Miller who said "I've seen no one credible saying there was any fraud in this election".

See also: How Republicans Win Elections: They Cheat! DSD #23.

Health of State Democracies. Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Question: What is The Interstate Crosscheck System?

[Excerpt from undated article] The Interstate Crosscheck system is a database used by officials in 27 states to identify voters potentially registered to vote in more than one state. States need a mechanism to maintain accurate voter rolls, but the states participating in the Interstate Crosscheck system risk purging legally registered voters - with a significant oversampling from communities of color - from the voting lists.

The system flagged roughly 7 million names of "potential double voters" prior to the 2014 election; however, since 2014, not a single person has been convicted of double voting pursuant to Crosscheck data. This large number of false positives is due to Crosscheck not taking into account information that may disqualify a match: SSNs should be disregarded if they do not match, Jr. and Sr. distinctions are often ignored, and many names on the list have mismatched middle names. Because nonwhite communities share surnames more commonly than white communities - in fact, 50% of Communities of Color share a common surname, while only 30% of white people do - this leads to a greater number of flagged potential double voters...

5/24/2016. The Kansas City Star.

Kris Kobach is a big fraud on Kansas voter fraud by The Editorial Board.

[Excerpt] Secretary of State Kris Kobach warned Kansas lawmakers last year that he knew of at least 18 suspected cases of double voting in recent elections. Wait, make that 100 cases! Kobach threw out these wild claims as he successfully pressed the Legislature to make him the only secretary of state in the nation with the power to prosecute in these matters.

It was all part of Kobach's continued loathsome attacks on U.S. immigration policy. He knew he could score political points with many Kansans by promising to stop "illegal" voters from canceling out the votes of red-blooded Americans. But now Kobach has been exposed as a big fraud on the issue of voter fraud, which studies have found to be almost nonexistent in America.

8/24/2016. Rolling Stone.

The GOP's Stealth War Against Voters by Greg Palast.

[Article excerpt] Will an anti-voter-fraud program designed by one of Trump's advisers deny tens of thousands their right to vote in November? When Donald Trump claimed, "the election's going to be rigged", he wasn't entirely wrong. But the threat was not, as Trump warned, from Americans committing the crime of "voting many, many times". What's far more likely to undermine democracy in November is the culmination of a decade-long Republican effort to disenfranchise voters under the guise of battling voter fraud. The latest tool: Election officials in more than two dozen states have compiled lists of citizens whom they allege could be registered in more than one state – thus potentially able to cast multiple ballots – and eligible to be purged from the voter rolls. The data is processed through a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program...

9/2/2016. Facing South. Facing South is the online magazine of the Institute for Southern Studies.

Controversial anti-voter fraud program risks disenfranchising voters through racial bias, report finds by Sue Sturgis.

[Excerpt] Back in 2005, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach — who as chair of his state's Republican Party championed an illegal voter suppression technique called "caging" — launched a program called Interstate Crosscheck to compare voter registration data across states and ferret out evidence of double voting.

The program has since expanded to 30 states... but it's been controversial from the start. ...it's resulted in very few actual cases of fraud being referred for prosecution, as alleged cases of double voting in multiple states turned out to be clerical and other errors. One tally found that while the program has flagged 7.2 million possible double registrants, no more than four have actually been charged with deliberate double registration or double voting.

(Image: Trump and his immigration advisor Kris Kobach).

10/18/2016. The Huffington Post.

The Republican Myth Of Voter Fraud by Jerry Bowles.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris W. Kobach... is considered by fellow Republican AGs as the master of the GOP voter suppression game. Kobach argued before state lawmakers that his office needed special power to prosecute voter fraud, because he knew of 100 such cases in his state. After being granted these powers, he has brought 6 such cases, of which only 4 have been successful. The secretary has also testified about his review of 84 million votes cast in 22 states to look for duplicate registrations. That effort yielded 14 instances of fraud referred for prosecution, which amounts to a 0.00000017 percent fraud rate.

Undaunted, Kobach doubled-down to the Washington Post: "The reason we have to do this is there is a significant problem in Kansas and in the rest of the country of aliens getting on our voting rolls. With so many close elections in Kansas, having a handful of votes that are cast by aliens can swing an election".

The simple truth is that every serious examination of voter fraud to date has been a bust producing only a statistically insignificant number of possible cases and virtually no prosecutions. Voter fraud by impersonation is GOP talking point with no basis in reality.

11/10/2016. markcrispinmiller.com.

Exit polls suggest that Trump's big "victory" was stolen (just like Hillary's nomination) by Mark Crispin Miller (a professor of media studies at New York University, and the author of the book: Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections. He is known for his writing on American media and for his activism on behalf of democratic media reform).

[My Summary & Editorial] "Unadjusted exit polls for the 2016 election" show exit polls do not match "actual" vote totals (Red Shift). In NC, PA, WI, FL, MI and MN the difference between the exit polls and "actual" vote totals flip a win for HRC (per the exit poll) to a win for Trump. Note that (except for FL, MN and WI) all states participate in the Interstate Crosscheck system.

Rick Scott, the governor of FL and a Trump supporter refused "to extend his state's deadline for voter registration in response to Hurricane Matthew". According to "Dan Smith, a University of Florida political science professor and FL election data expert... his research has found that individuals who register immediately prior to an election turn out to vote "at rates very comparable, if not higher, than the average registrant" (excerpted from Florida Gov. Rick Scott Under Fire for Voter Registration Decision, 10/7/2016).

According to One Wisconsin Now "With Scott Walker leading the charge, Wisconsin Republicans have systematically sought to make voting more difficult and manipulate state law to give themselves a partisan political advantage". MN is the ONE anomaly, in that the exit polls show Trump narrowly winning (0.1% Trump as per the exit polls versus 1.5% Clinton as per the actual vote). Note that this "shift" is the smallest among the states where the exit polls and actual vote don't match (the swing is greater where the exit polls show Clinton winning but the actual vote says Trump won).

11/11/2016. gregpalast.com.

The Election was Stolen. Here's How by Greg Palast.

[Article excerpt] Before a single vote was cast, the election was fixed by GOP and Trump operatives. ... Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP–controlled states.

On Tuesday [11/8/2016], we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump. The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including "Caging", "purging", blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to provisional ballots that will never be counted.

12/5/2016. The Intercept.

Trump Adviser Kris Kobach Harassed Kansas Voters In His Failed Quest For Mass Election Fraud by Spencer Woodman.

[Excerpt] ...Donald Trump falsely claimed that millions of people had voted illegally in this year’s general election. Without a credible source to cite, Trump's assertion set off fears that the incoming administration was laying a foundation of disinformation ahead of a potentially unprecedented push to restrict voting access across the country. After being asked to back up his claim, Trump berated journalists for being unable to prove the negative that millions of illegal votes hadn't been cast this year — a rhetorical tactic often deployed by conspiracy theorists.

The source of Trump's claim was apparently his immigration adviser... As Kansas's two-term secretary of state, Kobach himself has been a pioneer of raising the specter of voter fraud to curtail access to the ballot box. ... Today, a year and a half after the Kansas legislature gave Kobach free rein to pursue his legions of illegal voters, he has announced a mere half-dozen prosecutions related to voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, largely against elderly voters - and none involving voting by non-citizens.

12/5/2016. The Root.

Was the 2016 Election Stolen by Massive Voter Suppression? by Lauren Victoria Burke.

[Excerpt] Jill Stein can have all the recounts she wants, but you can't count votes that never got a chance to be cast ... According to many experts who watch elections, the real controversy of 2016 is not the recount but the hundreds of thousands of votes that were never cast in the first place because of widespread voter suppression. ... The 2016 election was the first in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The election turned out exactly the way one would imagine it would: with numerous examples of local officials either misrepresenting the law or making it more difficult to cast a ballot.

"I think what happened in this election [was] voter suppression and manipulation of the voter rolls. I think we saw, basically, a stolen election", said Ben Ptashnik, executive director of the National Election Defense Coalition, before a large audience packed into a committee room on Capitol Hill on 11/16/2016.

12/13/2016. Democracy Now!.

By Rejecting Recount, Is Michigan Covering Up 75,000 Ballots Never Counted? by Amy Goodman.

[Excerpt] Trump won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes out of nearly 4.8 million votes cast. Green Party presidential contender Dr. Jill Stein attempted to force Michigan to hold a recount, but a federal judge ordered Michigan's Board of Elections to stop the state's electoral recount. One big question remains: Why did 75,335 ballots go uncounted?

9/25/2017. Mother Jones.

A New Study Shows Just How Many Americans Were Blocked From Voting in Wisconsin Last Year (Trump won the state by 22,748 votes) by Ari Berman.

[Excerpt] Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison surveyed registered voters who didn't cast a 2016 ballot in the state's two biggest counties - Milwaukee and Dane, which is home to Madison. More than 1 out of 10 nonvoters (11.2%) said they lacked acceptable voter ID and cited the law as a reason why they didn't vote; 6.4% of respondents said the voter ID law was the "main reason" they didn't vote.

The study's lead author, University of Wisconsin political scientist Kenneth Mayer, says between roughly 9k and 23k registered voters in the reliably Democratic counties were deterred from voting by the ID law. Extrapolating statewide, he says the data suggests as many as 45k voters sat out the election... "We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law"...

Nov/Dec 2017. Mother Jones.

Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump (And possibly handed him the whole election). by Ari Berman.

[Excerpt] ...a year later, interviews with voters, organizers, and election officials reveal that, in Wisconsin and beyond, voter suppression played a much larger role than is commonly understood. Republicans said the ID law was necessary to stop voter fraud... But when the measure was challenged in court, the state couldn't present a single case of voter impersonation that the law would have stopped. "It is absolutely clear that [the law] will prevent more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent votes", Judge Lynn Adelman wrote in a 2014 decision striking down the law. Adelman's ruling was overturned by a conservative appeals court panel... the law was allowed to stand for the 2016 election.

Incoming Links [SWTD #369] Trump Not Legitimate Prez Says Civil Rights Icon John Lewis (Speaking The Truth). 1/16/2017. [DSB #64] Presidency Stolen From Rightful Winner HRC (Alex Mohajer Writing For HuffPo). 1/16/2017.

DSD #54