US Election Fraud --Part III: The Validity of Exit Polls for Monitoring Elections Dale Tavris

[Tace]


Image: Free Press Journal

Dale Tavris -- World News Trust
July 1, 2018

Election Fraud in the United States: 2004 to Present 
Part III. The Validity of Exit Polls for Monitoring Elections

Before I begin to discuss the validity of exit polls for monitoring elections, I need to clarify a couple of issues: First, I recognize that there are certain problems with exit polls. The question that we need to deal with is not whether they are perfect. The question we need to address is whether they are useful enough to serve as a warning sign of election fraud that requires further investigation.

The known vulnerability of our election system to electronic vote manipulation/fraud is well accepted.There may be disagreement on exactly how vulnerable it is, but nobody can argue that it isn’t highly vulnerable. So the relevant question becomes: Is it possible that the presence of widespread electronic vote tampering could make exit polls a more reliable estimate of voter intent than official election results; and if so, would it be worth thoroughly investigating elections whenever exit polls diverge substantially from official vote counts?

Secondly, we are dealing here with a situation where the concern is much greater than whether elections for federal office are occasionally stolen. As noted in Part II, we are dealing with a situation where we have systematic divergence of exit polls from official vote counts, every election cycle, pointing in the same direction -- favoring the more right-wing candidate in the official count, compared to exit polls.Notwithstanding the fact that exit polls have some problems, we need to ask why exit poll discrepancies from official vote counts almost always point in the same direction. Does it make more sense to postulate that exit polls are routinely and systematically biased towards the more left-wing candidate? Or does it make more sense that some rich and powerful people, who tend to be right wing on economic issues, choose to use their money and power in illegal and immoral ways to safeguard their economic interests?

That being said, let’s quickly consider the three reasons why exit polls might diverge from official vote counts:

1. Random chance: The potential for random chance to cause exit polls to be inaccurate is routinely assessed with statistical tests, which calculate a margin of error at various probability levels. As noted in Part II of this series, myriad exit polls in national elections have been found to deviate beyond statistical margins of error, which makes random chance a very unlikely explanation in each one of those elections. These discrepancies have been so frequent in U.S. elections since 2004 that the probability that random chance explains all or most of the discrepancies is virtually non-existent. Nobody can argue that. The fact that almost all of them point in the same direction makes the probability of random chance as an explanation essentially zero. That leaves only two remaining possibilities worthy of consideration:
2. Exit poll bias
3. Corrupted election

With that in mind, let’s consider the accuracy of exit polls:

(more)

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-iii-the-validity-of-exit-polls-for-monitoring-elections-dale-tavris

This is Part III of a series on election fraud by DU’s Time for change (Dale Tavris, M.D.)

Time for change takes issue with the conclusions of a 2008 story on exit polls by Nate Silver, often cited by critics of Time for change’s analysis of the utility of exit polls.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ten-reasons-why-you-should-ignore-exit/

“Nate Silver’s article, ‘Ten Reasons Why you Should Ignore Exit Polls’ (written in 2008) has had and continues to have a great impact on this debate because he is perhaps the best known and most highly respected political pollster in the United Sates.  
 
“Yet his article is worthless and dangerous nonsense.  The facts that he presents in the article are all true, as best I can tell. But the reasoning that he displays in arguing that we should ignore exit polls as a tool for monitoring our elections is what I would expect of a ten-year-old child.”

—Time for change


Dale Tavris, M.D

Bio: Dale Tavris has worked as a public health physician/epidemiologist for 40 years, with state departments of public health, the U.S. Air Force, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and the Food and Drug Administration. In that capacity, he has authored 39 publications in peer-reviewed medical or public health journals.

Since 2004 he has been actively involved in the national election reform movement, serving in a volunteer capacity with the Election Defense Alliance for a few years as their data coordinator.

He has written dozens of online articles about election fraud. In 2007 he co-authored a journal article on election fraud: “Fingerprints of Election Theft: Were Competitive Contests Targeted.”

Tavris has written and published three books, including two of a political nature: “The Unfulfilled Promise of the American Dream: The Widening Gap between the Reality of the United States and its Highest Ideals,” 2011; and “Democracy Undone: Unequal Representation, the Threat to our Election System, and the Impending Demise of American Democracy,” 2012.


PART I: Vulnerability of Electronic Vote Counting in U.S. Elections

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-i-vulnerability-of-electronic-vote-counting-in-u-s-elections-dale-tavris


PART II: Evidence for Election Fraud in Exit Poll Discrepancies from Official Results

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-ii-evidence-for-election-fraud-in-exit-poll-discrepancies-from-official-results-dale-tavris


PART III: The Validity of Exit Polls for Monitoring Elections

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-iii-the-validity-of-exit-polls-for-monitoring-elections-dale-tavris


PART IV: Untimely Deaths Associated with the 2004 Presidential Election

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-iv-untimely-deaths-associated-with-the-2004-presidential-election-dale-tavris


Part V: Disallowed and Corrupted Vote Recounts in Presidential Elections

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-us-2004-to-present-part-v-disallowed-and-corrupted-vote-recounts-in-presidential-elections-dale-tavris

[RandomAccess]

1. Would you also post links to the previous parts?

Thanks in advance.

[Time for change]

3. Here you go

Part II
https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-ii-evidence-for-election-fraud-in-exit-poll-discrepancies-from-official-results-dale-tavris

Part I
https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-i-vulnerability-of-electronic-vote-counting-in-u-s-elections-dale-tavris

[Tace]

4. Links For First Five Parts Added To OP

Thanks, RandomAccess. --Tace

[Hoyt]

2. Not this again. We lost. Get out the vote, we win.

[McCamy Taylor]

15. Yes, this again. Dude, only the math challenged can not see that election was stolen.

And I will be glad to give remedial math lessons to anyone who needs help to understand this. I blame the American education system.

[Hoyt]

17. My "math" and more is fine, and I'm rational about our loss.

[LanternWaste]

46. Then why irrationally ignore a point wholly relevant to the Democratic loss?

"and I'm rational about our loss..."

As it does seem irrational to ignore the one hole in the ship's hull to better concentrate on three larger holes, as each one allows water in.

[Hoyt]

48. Because I do not believe votes were flipped/hacked. It's that simple. I didn't say we don't need

to be on guard, I think the "votes were hacked" is just an excuse for Democrats who did not vote -- many in protest because they were sore losers in primary or whatever -- stupid racists who went for trump, people who believed bots and fake news, etc. Hacked votes is not why we lost.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

5. In states that only allow voting on election day itself,

exit polls are going to be quite accurate.

But a lot of states allow early voting, and overall somewhere between 30-40% of all votes were cast early in 2016. Since early voters aren't exit polled, you can only know the the party affiliations of the early voters, and since not all states require voters to register by political party (and even those that do allow for "independent" or "non-affiliated" registration) you only get a general notion of who the early voters have voted for.

I love early voting. If I ever relocate, that's one of the things I'll make a priority in a new state.

[Time for change]

8. Though early voters aren't exit polled

they are polled, and those results are factored into the exit poll analysis in states that have significant early voting populations:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-blumenthal/how_do_polls_and_exit_polls_ha_b_725345.html

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

9. That's good to learn.

Thank you.

[triron]

10. I thought I had read that before as well.

[Gothmog]

39. LOL that is so weak that it is funny

You want to mix regular polling with exit polls to prove your silly conspiracy theory.

Again, Nate Silver knows far more abut statistics and poling and I trust him

[Time for change]

43. It's not me who does this. The exit pollsters do it.

Nate Silver doesn't even mention that in his article.

[Gothmog]

45. I trust Nate over someone pushing a false conspiracy theory

[triron]

6. Thank you for posting this. I really tire of all the naysayers denying

the value of exit polls. Dr. Ron Baiman did an excellent analysis of the deviations of vote count from exit polls
done in 2016. The deviations were astounding and in one direction. Guess which direction.

[Time for change]

7. Yes, the deviations of the official vote counts from exit polls is always in the same direction

The more conservative candidate always outperforms the exit polls, and vice versa.

And we're told that, no matter who the individual candidates are, the reason for this is that voters for the more conservative candidates are always less likely to participate in exit polls.

Yet whenever studies have been undertaken to see if they lend support to that theory, they provide no confirmation for it whatsoever.

[triron]

11. Take a look at (for starters) the first figure in this affadavit from Baiman. It is startling.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319205877_Updated_Expanded_and_Corrected_Affidavit_Version_US_2016_Unadjusted_Exit_Poll_Discrepancies_Fit_Chronic_Republican_Vote_-_Count_Rigging_not_Random_Statistical_Patterns

Notice where Trump's vote count for Wisconsin falls on the normal distribution centered on exit poll prediction.
Similar thing happened for Pennsylvania.

[Time for change]

20. Yes, Baiman's extremely detailed, sworn affidavit is very illuminating

Everyone ought to read it.

[mythology]

12. Let's see, who should I believe

The guy who knows statistics, or the doctor who doesn't? He obviously doesn't understand that the exit polls used to determine fraud are much more expansive than the ones we use.

Any dumbass who talks about the "adjusted" exit poll data has no idea what they are talking about. It is nice that they make it so I don't even have to bother looking at their math though.

https://www.thenation.com/article/reminder-exit-poll-conspiracy-theories-are-totally-baseless/

The writers hyping this stuff claim that those preliminary data are “unadjusted,” and therefore offer a true barometer of voters’ responses as they leave their polling places. They say that the preliminary data are then adjusted to conform to the official results. In the hour or so between when the polls close and the final exit polls are released, they say, votes have consistently shifted away from Sanders, and this indicates that pollsters are covering up election fraud. (That last bit is often left implied, lest people consider how wide-ranging this plot must be.) And, central to the whole story, they say that looking at the way these data shift is a vital means of identifying potential fraud.

Every single part of that is 100 percent wrong.

Edison Media Research has conducted all of the exit polls for the major US media organizations since 2003. Joe Lenski, Edison’s executive vice president, talked to me about how exit polls are conducted. Two phone interviews revealed just how specious these claims really are.

Here’s how exit polling works: In most states, Edison conducts phone interviews before Election Day to capture absentee and early voting. Then, on Election Day, they send staff to between 15 and 50 polling places per state, and they ask between 500 and 3,000 voters to fill out questionnaires indicating which candidate they voted for and what issues are important to them. In order to account for those voters who refuse to fill out a questionnaire, exit pollsters have to adjust their survey data. Lenski says that about 50–60 percent refuse to participate. When someone says no, the pollster notes the person’s rough age, race, and gender. They then weight their data to match the population that voted at that location.

Some media outlets post preliminary data when the polls close—that’s the supposedly raw data that, according to the conspiracy-minded, reveal the fraud. But those data have already been merged with the results of those telephone interviews, and they have already been adjusted throughout the day (the interviewers send in their survey results in three waves). Unadjusted data are never released. (If you Google “exit polls adjusted New York,” you’ll get back dozens of posts claiming that the “unadjusted exit polls” varied significantly from the final results. All of those posts are dead wrong, as none of their authors have any idea what the unadjusted data looked like.)

This isn't complicated. These conspiracy theories are just really dumb. I don't get why people want to believe them.

[Time for change]

16. I've worked with statistics for 40 years on a daily basis in my epidemiology work

To decide whether or not to believe Silver's article, you should ask yourself whether circular reasoning is a valid way to support an argument. If you believe that, then by all means believe Silver's claim that we should ignore exit polls, because he uses circular reasoning repeatedly.

As for Joshua Holland's article that you cite, he clearly doesn't understand the information he's citing from Joe Lenski. Here is a quote from Lenski on the subject: "we may re-weight the exit poll results later in the evening to match the vote estimates by geographic region".
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/02/just-how-does-the-general-election-exit-poll-work-anyway/

That clearly contradicts what Holland says on the subject. But it is an understatement. They ALWAYS adjust the exit polls to match the vote estimates. To know that all you have to do is look at any exit poll published by CNN. It always exactly matches the vote estimate. You don't have to be a "conspiracy theorist" to figure that out. All you have to do is check out any exit poll published by CNN and see if you can find a single one that doesn't match the official vote count.

[malaise]

13. This should have 500 recs

Rec

[McCamy Taylor]

14. Gotta love the "reluctant responder theory" which went something like

"Republicans lied to exit pollsters about their votes in Ohio in 2004 except in precincts with hand counted paper ballots, since hand counted paper ballots make Republican voters more honest."

[malaise]

35. Ant time exit polls are off

There is election fraud.

[bucolic_frolic]

18. I see this differenly

The GOP expected to lose, but placed bets on every legitimate and illegitimate method they could countenance and contrive to build their vote totals. Anything you've read or thought of, they perhaps did. All their dominoes fell into place, all chips cashed, a Royal Flush.

You can say all day long they cheated on the margins, or Russian meddling warped weak blue collar minds in marginal counties, or cash motivated rural blue collar ethnics and poll workers.

Fact is, their methods delivered the extra fraction of a percent they needed. Even if part of it was crooked, cheating, flipped, fabricated, or suppressed, they still had to get the 60 million to put themselves in the position to have these methods deliver.

Why did we struggle to close the deal? Everytime HRC surged, within 2-3 days the margins were narrowing again. Why didn't we control the news cycle? THAT was one of Obama's strengths.

Whatever we did or didn't do, we gave opportunity where there should have been little or none.

Don't let it happen again.

And not to diminish their expertise or efforts, all along, from July forward, we were told publicly by Mook and/or Plough that Hillary would win this going away. Every demographic was tied down, every district scrutinized for turnout, error, contacts, and all the rest. How did these two very learned, experienced, ethical - our very best, and the very best their profession has to offer - get this wrong?

I wonder sometimes if an anti-pollster whisper campaign was executed by Trumpers. Don't forget they trust no establishment figure, pollsters especially, who told them Trump was a loser. So they all decided - whispered to each other - to LIE to pollsters. They would take great pleasure at that. Prank the elites.

[Time for change]

19. Trump and his campaign abhor any challenge to the legitimacy of his election

Lying to pollsters would serve only to make his election seem less legitimate in the eyes of many. I can't believe that he would have any reason to encourage that.

[bucolic_frolic]

21. I don't think he encouraged it at all

I'm simply saying it may have been a disinformation campaign based upon the way these people think

[Time for change]

23. I doubt it.

I think that Trump voters would be as eager as anyone to proclaim to pollsters or anyone else who they're voting for.

[bucolic_frolic]

25. But they're so perverse. They always disagree with everything and everyone

and reserve their fiercest disagreements for anyone in establishment circle elites that think 'deplorables' was an accurate term.

As for proclaiming to pollsters - I sometimes lie to pollsters. I tell them I'm a Republican and agree with Democratic issues. One asked my income, I picked a low figure and they hung up. Then the fund-raising calls started.

The world is far more fluid than rigid these days. Anything is possible rather than impossible.

[Time for change]

26. The lies you told to pollsters

regarded your characteristics. You told them the truth about your opinion, which is the main thing they're measuring. And I'll bet that you told them the truth about your opinion because you wanted to show support for it.

[bucolic_frolic]

27. Not always, depends on who the pollster is

If I can discern it's a Republican poll I will probably lie to them.

I've had polls too where the purpose seems to be to spread rumor about the opposition. Ask questions about the Repub, then a series of questions about the Dem ... did you know he did this or supported that, all of which was circumstantial.

There's every game in the book.

[triron]

28. No this is not what happened.

[bucolic_frolic]

29. How do you know?

It's just an opinion, a possibility.

You think Trumpsters don't lie to pollsters? They've learned from their leader, his spokeswoman, they will lie to get a leg up on anything:

[questionseverything]

54. i want a system that is not based on trust or belief

http://bradblog.com/?p=12386

Recently, they were allowed to review those ballots and, as they feared, many perfectly valid votes had gone uncounted by the optical-scan systems both during the original Election Night tally and the so-called "recount" in counties that used the same faulty computer scanners for the second count, after they had similarly mistallied ballots on Election Night.

I'm joined on today's show by longtime election integrity advocate and WIE's statewide coordinator KAREN McKIM to discuss the group's findings, revealing that the ballot scanning computers used in some 57 municipalities across the state had failed to tally anywhere from 2% to 6% of the ballots with valid Presidential votes in each of the Racine precincts they were allowed to examine a week or so ago. In other WI cities which chose to count by hand during Stein's "recount", McKim tells me, those same scanners had originally missed anywhere from 9% to 30% of valid Presidential votes! All of that in a state which Donald Trump is said to have won last year by less than 1%.

"They were ignored by the voting system entirely," says McKim, "and that's what made the miscount - or should have made the miscount obvious to the election officials even before they certified. You could look at those election results that the voting machines spit out on their face and you could see that hundreds of votes were just missing. If you compared the total number of ballots cast to the total number of presidential votes counted, you should have known --- they should have known --- that two percent of the voters didn't go to the polls so that they could cast a blank ballot. The miscounts were obvious at the time of the canvas, and the county officials did nothing about it."

[Time for change]

55. That sounds like a terrible break down of the system

Do you know if those votes were eventually counted and added to the total count? And if not, how could they possibly justify that?

[questionseverything]

60. i do not know if the votes discovered during the stein recount were added or not

but the second group of votes discovered to be uncounted by the machines were after certification...so no those would not be added

in Wisconsin election integrity activists have been trying to show the vote counting is INACCURATE since the walker recalls....

there is video of the racine county clerk screaming at those activists that NO HAND COUNTS WILL BE DONE NO MATTER HOW SMALL THE PRECINT

we need transparency and citizen oversite, that is the answer

[Gothmog]

32. In Texas, 50% to 70% of the vote is by early vote or vote by mail

Exit polls do not work in states with significant early vote or voter by mail. From Nate's article

6. Exit polls may have problems calibrating results from early voting. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, exit polls will attempt account for people who voted before election day in most (although not all) states by means of a random telephone sample of such voters. However, this requires the polling firms to guess at the ratio of early voters to regular ones, and sometimes they do not guess correctly. In Florida in 2000, for instance, there was a significant underestimation of the absentee vote, which that year was a substantially Republican vote, leading to an overestimation of Al Gore’s share of the vote, and contributing to the infamous miscall of the state.

7. Exit polls may also miss late voters. By “late” voters I mean persons who come to their polling place in the last couple of hours of the day, after the exit polls are out of the field. Although there is no clear consensus about which types of voters tend to vote later rather than earlier, this adds another way in which the sample may be nonrandom, particularly in precincts with long lines or extended voting hours.

The Texas Democratic Party has been pushing vote by mail for a while. Originally, this was done do combat voter id laws but now it is being done to lock in a reliable segment of the vote. I helped fund a program to send vote by mail applications to persons in small counties and I contributed to the vote by mail program in my county.

[Time for change]

34. Please see my response #8

[Gothmog]

38. Your analysis is wrong as normal

Why are you pushing conspiracy theories that will depress the vote and help the GOP?

[Gothmog]

31. Ten Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Polls by Nate Silver

Exit polls are not reliable in the real world. Here are some facts from Nate Silver https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ten-reasons-why-you-should-ignore-exit/

Oh, let me count the ways. Almost all of this, by the way, is lifted from Mark Bluemthnal’s outstanding Exit Poll FAQ. For the long version, see over there.

1. Exit polls have a much larger intrinsic margin for error than regular polls. This is because of what are known as cluster sampling techniques. Exit polls are not conducted at all precincts, but only at some fraction thereof. Although these precincts are selected at random and are supposed to be reflective of their states as a whole, this introduces another opportunity for error to occur (say, for instance, that a particular precinct has been canvassed especially heavily by one of the campaigns). This makes the margins for error somewhere between 50-90% higher than they would be for comparable telephone surveys......

5. Democrats may be more likely to participate in exit polls. Related to items #1 and #4 above, Scott Rasmussen has found that Democrats supporters are more likely to agree to participate in exit polls, probably because they are more enthusiastic about this election.

6. Exit polls may have problems calibrating results from early voting. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, exit polls will attempt account for people who voted before election day in most (although not all) states by means of a random telephone sample of such voters. However, this requires the polling firms to guess at the ratio of early voters to regular ones, and sometimes they do not guess correctly. In Florida in 2000, for instance, there was a significant underestimation of the absentee vote, which that year was a substantially Republican vote, leading to an overestimation of Al Gore’s share of the vote, and contributing to the infamous miscall of the state.

7. Exit polls may also miss late voters. By “late” voters I mean persons who come to their polling place in the last couple of hours of the day, after the exit polls are out of the field. Although there is no clear consensus about which types of voters tend to vote later rather than earlier, this adds another way in which the sample may be nonrandom, particularly in precincts with long lines or extended voting hours.

The concept voter fraud is proven by exit polls is simply wrong

Seriously, I volunteer a great deal time on voter protection efforts. One thing that all election experts agree is that false stories about unreliable voting machines and false claims of voter fraud depress turnout. GOP types will vote no matter what but it is easy to depress voter turnout.

There are real examples of GOP voter suppression and the DNC and Democratic attorneys are fighting these voter suppression efforts. If you want to help, go volunteer to be an election worker. I serve as an election judge once a cycle to make sure that I am current. It is a very long day and can be boring. However, this is the best way to protect the vote in the real worldl

[Time for change]

33. Did you read what I said about Sanders' article in the OP?

If you understand what I said at all, why don't you respond to that rather than parrot what Silver said in his article?

Nate Silver is part of our corporate news media. They have tried vigorously to stifle talk about election fraud and exit polls since it became a major issue in 2004.

[Gothmog]

40. This conspiracy theory has no merit in the real world

These silly and false conspiracy theories only serve one purpose which is to help the GOP by suppressing Democratic voters

[Time for change]

42. Do you understand any of the issues well enough to discuss them

other than to simply repeat your assertions and parrot what you've read?

[LeftInTX]

44. I tend to agree with Gothmag

The area I differ is:

If this is true, what do you propose to do about it?

I don't know Gothmag in real life, but he is involved with the Texas Democratic Party and so am I.

Even if these theories are true, I can't do much about them.
I can only do what I am doing.

We are committed to getting Democratic candidates elected.

If we tell voters that the system is rigged and that their vote does "not count", will they vote?
This why I don't dwell on these theories because they are voter suppression tactics.

GOTV don't suppress it.

[Gothmog]

49. I was hopeful that the Travis County election office plan would work

Travis County has been pushing for a plan for new machines for a while but their latest plan fell apart for the 2018 cycle. I know some of the people in the Travis County election office from working on a commission to adopt county wide voting in my county. My county is still printing "zero tapes" before each election which is time consuming and uses a great deal of paper. The Travis county election office are currently using the same machines but are not printing "zero tapes" because that involves using too much paper and killing trees.

I am hopeful that the next generation of machines will have a true paper trail. OCR systems do not work in large Texas counties. We have races where there are 200 different ballot styles and there is no way for a county wide voting center to have sufficient different paper ballots. I am a precinct chair and my precinct has two independent school districts and four Municipal Utility Districts. Texas has too many different governmental entities running elections for OCR systems to work.

The Travis County plan may have been too ambitious which is why they could not find a manufacturer. Elements of the Travis County RFP are evidently being incorporated into the recommendations of EAC. https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2017-10-13/county-ditches-star-votes-innovative-voting-system/

However, STAR-Vote is already having an impact on the national discourse. In Sep­tem­ber, the U.S. Election Assistance Com­mis­sion issued a new set of voluntary voting system guidelines that included many of the precepts upon which the Travis County system was to be built – particularly, the requirements for a verifiable, independently auditable paper trail. DeBeauvoir said, "I'm not sure that being ahead of our time has been helpful, but it has allowed other elections officials to articulate that this is what they want, and this is what the voters want."

I am going to continue to volunteer on voter protection efforts. The current machines are old and are having problems. I was working the run off in 2014 as an election judge and my JBC died 6 times. We got it working and my vote tally matched the JPR ending tape. We need a new generation of machines.

[Time for change]

52. Saying that "even if these theries are true, I can't do much about them"

is similar to saying during the Civil Rights movement, for example, that "even if it's true that peoples' civil rights are routinely violated, we shouldn't complain about it because there's nothing we can do about it". When things are bad in our country the only way that they are going to be changed is to publicize the problem and put pressure on our government to change it.

[questionseverything]

53. thank you for trying to open eyes

the solution is simple, hand marked paper ballots,counted openly and transparently , with a tight chain of custody for the precinct results and their statewide totals

totals we could all believe and trust because WE THE PEOPLE oversaw every step in the process

as far as keeping this info from depressing the vote, i tell people that overwhelming numbers seem to be able to over come the rig

[LeftInTX]

56. Gothmag has offered solutions

Do you have a plan?
Do you have solutions?

That is all that I am asking.

If you feel that elections are hacked, please get involved.

I just got back from two campaign headquarters and am heading off to blockwalk for a special election.

[Time for change]

59. Part VIII of my election fraud series deals with solutions.

It has not been published yet, but will be in the next month. You can wait for it, or you can write to my DU inbox with your e-mail address, and I'll send you an unpublished copy of it that we can discuss if you like.

Gothmog has offered some solutions to voter suppression, but he has not offered any solutions to election fraud because he doesn't believe that it exists.

I believe that voter suppression is a very serious problem, but I believe that electronic manipulation of our vote is an even more deadly threat to our election system. Both problems must be addressed. One or the other probably will not be enough.

[Gothmog]

47. I live and work in the real world

I volunteer a great deal of time on voter protection. I have served as an election judge numerous times and I have been present for the testing of voting machines in my county. I have a far better understanding of the issues compared to someone pushing a false conspiracy theory.

If you really believe your silly conspiracy theory, go volunteer. Most counties have teams of persons who watch and participate in the testing of voting machines each cycle. The persons who do this for Harris County are all IT experts who are all very impressive. If you claim to be an expert, then volunteer in the real world.

In the real world, there is a great deal of concern about false conspiracy theories being used to depress the vote. I first heard this from the head of the Florida Kerry Edwards voter protection team when I was one of 3000 out of state attorneys who went to Florida in 2004. I have heard this same warning from other election law experts.

Pushing bogus conspiracy theories can depress the vote. Pushing these silly theories only help the GOP by depressing Democratic vote.

Again, the real world is a nice place. I actually live and work in it. Come visit.

[Blue Owl]

24. Validity -- or Vlad-did-it-y?

n/t

[Gothmog]

30. Exit Polls, and Why the Primary Was Not Stolen From Bernie Sanders

Here are some facts to counter the fantasy in the OP https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/upshot/exit-polls-and-why-the-primary-was-not-stolen-from-bernie-sanders.html

Now, how can this happen? There are a lot of sources for exit poll error — even more than in an ordinary poll. Here are a few:

■ Differential nonresponse, in which the supporters of one candidate are likelier to participate than those of another candidate. Exit polls have limited means to correct for nonresponse, since they can weight only by visually identifiable characteristics. Hispanic origin, income and education, for instance, are left out.

■ Cluster effects, which happen when the precincts selected aren’t representative of the overall population. This is a very big danger in state exit polls, which include only a small number of precincts. As a result, exit polls have a larger margin of error than an ordinary poll of similar size. These precincts are selected to have the right balance of Democratic and Republican precincts, which isn’t so helpful in a primary.

■ Absentee voters aren’t included at all in states where they represent less than 20 percent or so of the vote.

For all these reasons, exit polls can be very inaccurate and systematically biased. With this kind of history, you can see why no one who studies the exit polls believes that they can be used as an indicator of fraud in the way the conspiracy theorists do.

But why were exit polls so tilted toward Mr. Sanders? It’s impossible to be 100 percent sure, but the best-known bias in the exit poll offers a very good explanation: young voters.

Young voters are far likelier to complete the exit polls than older voters, according to data from Edison Research, the organization that conducts the exit polls. The gap is particularly pronounced when the interviewers are also younger, but the gap persists even when older interviewers are conducting the exit interviews.

Exit polls are not reliable in the real world

[Time for change]

36. These are just some of the same things that Silver said in his very misleading article

Rather than continuing to parrot our corporate national news media on this topic, why don't you respond to the responses I've provided that explain why none of these things provide any reason to ignore exit polls?

[Gothmog]

37. I trust Silver over someone pushing a Conspiracy Theory that has no merit in the real world

Why do you want to depress the vote and help the GOP? These conspiracy theories only help the GOP by depressing the vote

[Time for change]

41. That's what I thought

You don't understand his arguments or mine, and you don't care. You just trust what you read from Nate Silver on blind faith.

Apparently you don't think that people steal elections in the "real world".

Are you aware that the United States has been ranked last among the world's Western democracies in the integrity of their election system?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/03/21/the-u-s-has-worst-elections-of-any-long-established-democracy-report-finds/?utm_term=.987de4b0f642
Yes, that's the "real world".

I don't want to depress the vote. I want verifiable elections, so that we don't get stuck with Trump again for another 4 years, or anybody like him.

[Gothmog]

50. Then volunteer and work in the real world

Your conspiracy theories are so bad that they are funny. It is clear that you have never worked on this issue in the real world. Come and visit the real world. Every county could use more election workers

In the meantime, I have real GOP voter suppression to worry about. We have managed to gut the Texas voter id law but we still have election judges trying to enforce the old law. One of my poll watchers was told to leave by a tea party election judge and we had to sick the county attorney on that election judge and the tea party idiot who runs elections in this county.

[Time for change]

51. I've worked as an election worker

In 2006, as an election worker, I noticed that one of the machines in our precinct had a broken seal. In accordance with the training I'd received I reported it to the applicable authorities, who were supposed to remove it from service. But they decided to allow it to continue, rather than remove it from service per SOP. At the end of the day that machine had a higher preponderance of Republican votes than any other machines in the precinct.

It's very naive to think that having more election workers is going to solve this problem.

You obviously know nothing about the massive amount of evidence for election fraud in this country, and you have no interest in learning about it. All you do is parrot corporate media propaganda about its unimportance.

Even if you were right that there hasn't been substantial election fraud in our country in recent years, it would still be important to improve the verifiability of our election system.

[LeftInTX]

57. Did you go up the chain of command? Did you report it to the press?

[Time for change]

58. It was a long time ago, so I don't remember all the details

I reported it through the chain of command. I don't believe that I reported it to the press, but I probably posted the story on-line.

I would like to add that I believe that my little experience that I relate is important not because I believe that those few votes had any effect on the outcome of the elections in question, but because I believe that it represents just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Much of what I have read indicates that to a large extent the voting machine companies are more in charge of running our elections more than are the election officials who are charged with running them. In part this is because there are many complicated details having to do with technical issues of the machines, which our election officials are not aware of, so they are happy to defer to the manufacturers on such issues.