
Hillary Clinton and Electoral Fraud - ericras
https://medium.com/@spencergundert/hillary-clinton-and-electoral-fraud-992ad9e080f6
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daughart
Republicans shut down the polling sites in Arizona to save money, and also
this was decided well before anyone knew Bernie would be a contender. Same
with all the voter registry purges. Bernie is right that he attracted a lot of
people who don't regularly vote... which explains why they weren't registered
to vote. Another of his main supporter groups are college students, who have
been being purged from voter rolls for years due to frequent mailing address
changes (this happened to me in Pennsylvania in 2008). There are more logical
explanations for this than can be mentioned here, Occam's Razor.

Same for exit polls. The author notes that Clinton voters were more likely to
vote early, which would logically cause them to be under-represented in exit
polls. Also the "enthusiasm gap". Also lots of people have written about how
poor exit polls are at predicting outcomes
([http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ten-reasons-why-you-
shou...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ten-reasons-why-you-should-
ignore-exit/)). Exit polls are notoriously bad, which is why they're basically
only fodder for the cable news industry.

~~~
DamienSF
The "saving money" argument is always used to explain the reduction of the
number of polling sites but it is not a credible one when considering that
only very specific locations are being impacted. Also, the volume of purged
voters is inexplicably high (
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORoXanoqXwQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORoXanoqXwQ)
) and many troubling irregularities have been reported such as cases of forged
signatures: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k6YAEU-
eDE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k6YAEU-eDE)

~~~
daughart
YouTube isn't a very reputable source. That being said, universal voter
registration is the real answer, which sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

~~~
DamienSF
I don't see why YouTube (the medium) is the problem here. Both reputable or
non-reputable sources can post content on YouTube.

The first video is an interview of two poll workers expressing their concerns
regarding the unusually high number of voters that were removed from the voter
roll. There aren't any apparent reason why their testimony should not be
considered as credible.

The second video shows a voter being shown a document she allegedly signed and
that had for effect to switch her party affiliation from Democrate to
Republican. However, it seems the signature on this document has been forged.
There have been multiple reports of allegedly forged signatures during this
election, most of them reported by voters on social media. Here is another
example:
[https://www.facebook.com/groups/518955314959236/permalink/51...](https://www.facebook.com/groups/518955314959236/permalink/519676198220481/)

Sure the validity of these reports need to be verified but I don't see why
they should be dismissed beforehand.

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GabrielF00
Lots of very strong claims made without any evidence.

The fact that voting machines are insecure does not mean that fraud occurred.

> When an exit poll or two is outside the margin of error, it denotes failure
> in the polling; when eight defy it — egregiously so — that indicates
> systemic electoral fraud.

Or it indicates systemic problems in the methodology used to conduct exit
polls, such as incorrect assumptions in sampling. The author suggests that the
fact that exit polls of the Republican primaries were accurate means that exit
polls of the Democratic primaries must also have been accurate. Given that
Republican and Democratic voters tend to have very different demographics, I
would question that assumption.

The author is holding up exit polling as a gold standard, but it took me about
about five seconds of googling to find a long history of bad exit polls.
[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/06/outrage...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/06/outraged-
wisconsin-exit-polls-so-wrong)

~~~
DamienSF
Voting machines are black boxes which by nature are incompatible with one
fundamental principle of democracy: transparency.

This is a major issue because even if the fraud is unproven, voters can
legitimately be concerned about the accuracy of how votes are being counted.

That said, some statistical analysis research have shown a strong probability
of votes being flipped by electronic machines in past elections. Here is the
original research paper:
[http://madisonvoices.com/pdffiles/2008_2012_ElectionsResults...](http://madisonvoices.com/pdffiles/2008_2012_ElectionsResultsAnomaliesAndAnalysis_V1.5.pdf)

------
MilnerRoute
The author of this article acknowledges the possibility that the polls could
just be wrong, but gets tripped up when the Republican polls seem to be more
accurate than the Democratic polls -- and then concludes that the only
explanation must be fraud.

I think what's really going on is that older voters and younger voters behave
differently, affecting the accuracy of the polls for one set of voters more
than the other.

------
slg
Fivethirtyeight has explained away the exit poll issue very easily. Due to the
way they are collected, they have an inherent bias toward young voters. Young
voters are overwhelmingly pro Sanders. This results in the exit polls being
biased towards Sanders. If this is the case, the margin of errors are
worthless because they assume a representative sample.

The voter suppression thing is certainly a problem, but it is a big leap to
say it is only a problem for Sanders or proves anything nefarious.

~~~
DamienSF
There are many distinctions to be made when it comes to voter suppression. The
first category we are seeing during most elections is the legal voter
suppression where voters cannot vote because of stringent requirements.
However, we've seen numerous cases of unexplained voter suppression during
these elections where voters purely disappeared from the voter roll without
any explanations.

I am not saying this is favoring Clinton over Sanders but it certainly
undermines the trust anyone can have regarding the final results.

------
richard_mcp
Why would Hillary need to rig anything? It's been pretty obvious that she's
going to win the election since the start.

Regarding the author's points, he doesn't mention anything I find particularly
compelling. Most of it seems to be built on shaky logic or draws weak
connections between points. If the exit polls were really that big of an
issue, we'd see political analysis (aka the experts) reporting on this.

~~~
tracker1
It's really not that obvious... Sanders' support has been stronger than
Hillary's in most areas. Of course Hillary's Super Delegate support is
significant. That said, it doesn't seem so obvious to me.

I'm not a D or R, so have to horse in this part of either race.

~~~
daughart
The idea that "Sanders' support has been stronger than Hillary's in most
areas." must not be true, though, right? Otherwise he would have more votes. I
think "more vocal" is accurate, but not actually larger in number.

