On today’s BradCast: As we first broke last week, Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein has now filed for ‘recounts’ (attempts at first time hand-counts and forensic audits, in any event) in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and soon in Michigan. Independent candidate Rocky De La Fuente has also filed in WI. [Audio link to show is at end of article.]
Today we catch up on all that the calls for “recounts” have led to over the weekend and since the holiday break last week, including: News on the more than $6M raised by Stein to pay for the counts so far (the number that both she and the attorneys seeking the counts had told me about last Monday before any of this had become public); the Clinton Team (somewhat) joining the effort; Donald Trump demeaning it as a “scam” and offering wildly false claims of “voter fraud”; Stein’s emergency effort to draft needed voter volunteers for filings in PA; the legal question (and now lawsuit) over whether WI will “recount” paper ballots by hand or by the same computers that tallied them in the first place; whether there will be sufficient time for any kind of proper public counting before the federally mandated December 13 deadline; and whether there is anything to count in PA at all, where they still shamefully force voters to use 100 percent unverifiable touch-screens across most of the state.
We are joined by long-time election fraud investigator and author Richard Hayes Phillips, to discuss all of that and his detailed report about the unusually large apparent voter turnout numbers in many rural WI municipalities and the difficulty citizens have in verifying and overseeing those numbers. As Phillips explains, there are horrible public reporting requirements for both results and for same-day voter registration provisions in the state.
“At a minimum, the problem is a lack of transparency,” Phillips tells me today. “We have no way of knowing how many registered voters there are [in WI]. If you don’t know how many registered voters there are, you don’t know if too many ballots were cast.” His report finds that, based on the latest state-reported voter registration numbers, there were “193 towns with turnout of 90% or better, 25 towns with turnout of 95% or better, and 7 towns with turnout of 100% or better.” Those exceedingly high turnout numbers are likely lower in reality, due to same-day registration in WI, but the lack of reporting requirements for those numbers is “unacceptable”.
“This is the period of time during which we must analyze those numbers to decide whether or not to challenge the election, and we don’t have reliable numbers to use!” Philips, who personally examined tens of thousands of ballots and poll books and much more in Ohio after the disputed 2004 election there, resulting in his book Witness to a Crime: A Citizens’ Audit of an American Election, says WI’s turnout numbers remind him of a number of counties where he found fraud in Ohio, where there was some 80% turnout reported.
He also warns — as I have, very loudly, for many years — that there are almost no ballots to actually count in PA. “The five biggest cities in Pennsylvania that have no paper record of anybody’s vote, except for absentee ballots, which only amount to 1 or 2% of the ballots,” he says. “My God, if Wisconsin and Michigan which are very close were to actually flip and fall to Hillary Clinton’s column, we will face a constitutional crisis, because this whole election will come down to Pennsylvania and the vote cannot be verified. I want America to know this.”
Also hearkening back to Ohio in 2004, Phillips notes that there are tens of thousands of ballots with no vote at all for President in MI — even near Detroit — according to the state’s unverified optical-scan tabulators. It’s impossible to know how people voted, unless paper ballots are actually counted by human beings, he confirms. “Who knows who these ballots are actually marked for?”
“I’m not a shill for Hillary Clinton. I didn’t even vote for her. But I want everyone’s vote to count,” he argues. “I want the winner to win and the loser to lose.” Crazy idea, I know. Please take some time to listen to today’s program…
CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!…
[audio:http://bradblog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman_RichardHayesPhillips_WIVoterReg_SteinRecount_112816.mp3]
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
|
Thanks for the forensic audit updates.
All machines in Wisconsin take digital ballot images. A goldmine!
http://electionnightmares.com/use-newer-machines-with-numerically-pegged-ballot-imaging-to-help-verify-elections/statesprecincts-that-use-ballot-images-from-physical-ballots/
Those images are needed by Jill to comfirm audits.
http://electionnightmares.com/use-newer-machines-
with-numerically-pegged-ballot-imaging-to-help-verify-elections/
Election activist John Brakey and attorney William Risner assert that destroying ballot images is against Federal law: Federal law 52 U.S.C � 20701 requiring retention of federal election materials, provides a penalty of up to $1,000 fine and one year in jail for premature destruction of that material (was formerly 42 U.S.C � 1974).
For the November elections, Brakey and Risner recommend the following strategy:
� File a public record request (ASAP) asking for ballot images for the last and the next election. The request should include other critical documents like the Cast Vote Record (CVR). We can provide a draft of what to request.
� If ballot images are or have been destroyed then file a special action Temporary Restraining Order (TRO), which is usually easy to request.
� If they refuse your public records request for �ballot images,� then file another special action in the form of a Mandamus Act. When you win they have to pay all expenses and legal fees.
Additional efforts that may be necessary and are suggested by AUDIT-AZ member Mickey Duniho, a retired former NSA Cryptologist for 37 years. His recommendations are being added to our TRO.
� Do not transfer results from the DS850 to the central count computer until election day;
� Print the cast vote record serial number on each ballot so that an audit can link back to the original ballot as per how the system was federal certified by EAC;
� Mark every storage box containing ballots with the range of serial numbers contained in the box, so that an audit can easily find the box containing a ballot of interest.
The dangerous thing about this is, I don’t believe the term “election fraud”, which is the voting integrity activist’s term used to describe upper level election theft by election insiders, including lieutenant governors and secretaries of state like Katherine Harris in Florida’s 2000 theft and Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio’s 2004 theft, has ever once been used on any national news program or even on NPR.
In contrast, the term “voter fraud— which puts any doubts in an election outcome squarely on the heads of individual democratic voters has been endlessly bandied about in the media and by Republican congressmen for years. The largest example of that would obviously be the hysteria behind the phony video promoted by the racist Breitbart “news” website, which lead to the congressional defunding of ACORN.
This gives Trump a massive advantage in his lie about “voter fraud”. It’s actually embedded in the minds of Americans to the point where even election activists find themselves, accidentally using the term that describes a practically non-existent problem. We’re talking about dozens of cases, out of all the millions of votes cast in a given election.
Go Donald! 🙁
Actually, now that we know Breitbart is a white supremacist outlet, it shines a new light on the ACORN episode, doesn’t it?
Larry Bergen is right when he notes that the GOP’s decades-long repetition of the “Big Lie” has been accepted as truth by a wide swath of the American electorate. It explains why 63.1% of deceived Missouri voters approved a constitutional amendment that mandates the presentation of photo ID at the polls.
On Nov. 8 I served as a volunteer poll worker at my precinct in Thousand Oaks, CA. A number of voters seemed baffled as to why we did not require them to produce a photo ID. They seemed genuinely surprised when I informed them that a law professor acquaintance (now member of the Justice Department) had performed a comprehensive 2014 study which revealed that during the preceding 14 years there were only 31 cases of in-person voter fraud out of more than one billion votes cast in U.S. elections.
Oh, and Larry, I sincerely believe that “Alt Right” and “White Supremacist” are simply alternative descriptors for 21st century American Nazis.
“I want the winner to win and the loser to lose.”
In a republic, trust is essential to national security. But we have gone from the Commander in Chief of the Continental Forces to the gentleman from New York. The former refused a salary; the latter refuses to release his tax returns and divest his holdings.
In Washington’s day, votes were counted by hand. But now pseudo-tough guys whine about doing so while calling themselves “conservative.” Well, labels alone do not mean much, but, in this case, why not use the old ways? Then it would be clear who is the winner and who is the loser.