Stolen Votes: America’s Elections Are Rigged And The Worst In The Western World
I feel I need to state this at the outset so that some may understand that I am doing this without intended bias. I am a Bernie Sanders supporter, but whether he wins or loses does not matter to me in the end. The movement will move forward. Someone else will pick up the fallen banner and drive onward through the years. It is not about a man, but about our people and our nation.
In that regard, this is not written against Hillary Clinton. I have no proof that anything presented herein was of her doing or with her knowledge, and I do not suggest it. Like Sanders, I will vote for her in November. It isn’t because I like her, or think she is the best candidate, but because this country cannot afford to have someone like Donald Trump at the helm. So, keep that in mind when you plan to flame me in the comments section for what you do not like.
For some time now many Americans have believed that our elections have been rigged or even stolen from us. If you ask Democrats, they are absolutely certain that 2000 and 2004 were stolen, and if you ask Republicans they believe that 2012 was locked up. According to Greg Palast, the Democrats are right, and the world knows it. The Republicans would have been right too, except that Obama’s support overcame the repression.
That’s old news, though. We’ve all heard that stuff before. There’s plenty of evidence that we choose to ignore that it still happens, but we just stick our heads in the sand humming a tune trying to block out the voices that scream in our heads that this isn’t right. Then comes along something like a Harvard study that proves that our elections are rigged and the worst in the Western world.
Still, how many of us in the know have even heard about this study? It isn’t in the mainstream media, but it should be, don’t you think? Maybe the reason the media doesn’t cover it is because they don’t want you to hear it? After all, they are trying their hardest to choose the candidates for us.
Think about this for a moment. Anytime Donald Trump lost a race, the media went into frenzy about how much danger he might be in and the talk of a contested convention ramped up exponentially. Sure, some of that was just media circus to garner ratings, but when you consider how far behind Ted Cruz actually was and how close Trump just had to get before the Republican Party just conceded anyway to avoid a schism, it was a fate accompli.
On the other side of the spectrum, it was a slightly different story. No matter how many wins in a row Sanders railed off the same old story came out. It didn’t matter because he could never catch up to her insurmountable delegate lead, which always included the super delegates who hadn’t yet voted and could always vote differently. Even if they didn’t include them, they would say that a 250 delegate lead was too much in a race with more than 1500 left when Trumps lead of more than 400 wasn’t enough in a system with far less? That logically doesn’t make sense.
However, that isn’t even close to the most egregious offense committed by far. You see there is one way that most of the world tests if an election has been fair. The Democratic primaries have been failing that test in a number of states. In one case, Oklahoma, the system failed in favor of Bernie Sanders, but overwhelmingly the primaries seemed to be rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton.
As I said above, this is NOT an accusation against the Democratic candidate, but against our voting process, which obviously can be subverted by someone with nefarious purpose. The way countries tell that an election has a problem is through exit polls. Lee Camp on Redacted Tonight does a great job explaining the importance of this, but in short exit polls are a very accurate way to see how the populace voted on any given night in any given election.
Like anything else, there is some margin of error, usually plus or minus 3%. After our primaries have been tabulated though, the results of a number of them, like New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Ohio are off by a good bit. Some aren’t enough to change the outcomes, but some are. Either way, the delegate count would be different, and the narrative might certainly have changed had Sanders been closer in some states and won states like Ohio and Massachusetts.
Now, there has been an article by Phillip Bump from the Washington Post that tries to debunk the whole exit poll theory and say that the whole uproar is garbage. He even has Joe Lenski from Edison Media Research the company that conducts the exit polls for American media to help explain the process for people. Unfortunately, there are two very huge problems with his article that he tries to pass off as justification for the disparity in numbers.
The first one comes near the end when Lenski states that “So we’re seeing precinct-by-precinct that the actual results were that Hillary Clinton was doing four points better than she did in the exit poll in that precinct, we will adjust the results [of the exit poll] accordingly.” The point that everyone else is making is that the unfiltered and unadjusted data is what matters. It is the actual opinions and preference of the people, not the adjusted exit polls that Edison puts out a few days later after the election results pour in from the electronic voting machines.
We have ample proof from other sources that voting machines have been and can be tampered with. The original exit poll results are a safeguard used to help indicate when voting machines have been tampered with. If you adjust exit polling data to meet the vote, then you affirm the stolen vote instead of crying out against it like you are supposed to.
The second fallacy that is foisted upon us is that a number of younger people are filling out the survey and that skews the results. For crying out loud, that is a piss poor excuse if I’ve ever heard one. First off if young people are the ones who filled out the survey, they were there in numbers to vote. Secondly, if you have a lot of young people on your survey, you have algorithms to even it all out. This isn’t a new process, and it has all been accounted for before. To blame the young for this problem is just looking for an excuse for perpetrated fraud.
We still have a few more states to go before this whole primary thing is called off, and it looks like Republicans have got their candidate in Donald Trump. Democrats seem to have been forced to have Hillary Clinton whether they wanted her or not. The media has been forcing her down our throat since before she proclaimed her candidacy, while ignoring Sanders. The thing that truly bothers me about this whole thing though, other than our voice was virtually silenced here, is which Americans will be unheard in November?
Image via ZUMA News
