Prior to the presidential election, pollsters were giving Hillary Clinton 70 to 85 percent odds for winning the presidency. How could the polls have been so wrong?
The polls weren’t wrong, said local attorney Forrest Jacobi, who has closely been following discrepancies between the voter exit polls and the results reported by the voting machines.
“Donald Trump said the election was rigged and he was right,” said Jacobi, a long-time advocate of election integrity. “It was rigged in favor of Donald Trump. There is a thing called the red shift. It is where every recent election shows more votes for the Republicans than for the Democrats surprising the pollsters because it doesn’t align with exit polls. The red shift is so consistent that there has to be something wrong. When exit polls don’t align electronic vote results, and that is outside the margin of error for the polls, it screams election fraud.”
Jacobi said exit polls are so accurate that other countries use them to report the results of elections so long as they are within the margin of error. He said four battleground states this year were all outside the margin of error: Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“If those states went according to the exit polls, Clinton would be our next president,” Jacobi said. “The odds of the red shift happening this year at random would have been one in 1,310 – the same odds of flipping a penny 1,300 times and it coming up tails only once.”
Jacobi said from a statistical standpoint, this is not an accident. It has happened for years. There are always more Republican votes outside the margin of error than there are for Democratic votes. He said in addition to affecting the presidency, it also affects the number of senators and congressmen from each party, not to mention governorships or other state elected position.
“Right now we have what is known as black box voting,” Jacobi said. “It is called that because it is not transparent. Electronic voting machines are manufactured by private companies using proprietary software that leaves no way to check to make sure that the results reported are correct. If you are going to use electronic voting machines, they have to be open source software. They can’t be private proprietary software where some private entity somewhere tells you the answer. That is ridiculous.”
Jacobi said there was also evidence of election fraud in the Democratic primaries.
Who is responsible for the rigged election results?
“If the system is not secure, anyone can hack it including foreign people who want to disrupt our ‘fair elections’,” Jacobi said.
While mainstream media has provided little coverage of the issue so far, Alternet.org published a story Nov. 11, “Exit Poll Discrepancies and Voter Suppression Are Serious Issues, This is a familiar pattern, indicative of electronic rigging.”
“According to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research, Clinton won four key battleground states (NC, PA, WI, and FL) in the 2016 presidential election that she went on to lose in the computerized vote counts,” said Theodore de Macedo Soares, who blogs on election integrity issues. “With these states Clinton wins the Electoral College with a count of 302 versus 205 for Trump. Clinton also won the national exit poll by 3.2 percent and holds a narrow lead in the national vote count still in progress. Exit polls were conducted in 28 states. In 23 states the discrepancies between the exit polls and the vote count favored Trump. In 13 of these states the discrepancies favoring Trump exceeded the margin of error of the state.”
The author of the article, Steven Rosenfelt, summarizes this way: “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.”
Alternet.org reports that the vendor who maintains the North Carolina voter files was in all probability the “unnamed” Florida-based company hacked by the Russians to obtain emails from the Democratic National Committee.
“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,” the article said.
Rosenfelt said Americans are told to take it on faith that the election results are accurate, from the highest-stakes presidential elections to lower-turnout state races that keep legislatures in one party’s grip.
“That’s infuriating, patronizing and unnecessary,” Rosenfelt said. “The alternative is simple: voting needs to be transparent, verifiable and accountable from the start of the process to the end. Instead, it’s just like the dysfunctional campaign finance system. Incumbents have mastered it, despite their gripes about its ugliness, and they are not about to give up their path to power.”
In a Google group blogsite on election integrity, Soares makes the following recommendation: “All states have open records act, in many ballots are public records accessible to the citizen. We can target specific states to examine the ballots and or get electronic copies of the ballot images generated by many of the scanners and other voting machines. We can review the Democratic primaries as well as the 2016 Presidential election. In my opinion this should be our main priority.”