Election Issues

Parallel narratives of deepening intrigue and outright denial unfolded Friday, as new revelations surfaced about Russian hacking to steer the presidential election while states showed they were afraid to look under hood to see what happened.

The Wisconsin recount is headed for disaster, but there’s still a chance to save it. We need a federal lawsuit requiring a hand recount of all paper ballots.

We’re one week into the historic Wisconsin recount, prompted in no small part by widespread concerns about the reliability of electronic voting machines and their susceptibility to tampering, fraud, and computer hacking. The difference in Wisconsin is currently about 22,000 votes, or 0.75%. Patriotic, democracy-loving Americans share a common value of wanting to see that every vote is counted fairly, accurately, and honestly, especially in such a close and crucial election as this one.

The article is contained in the attached PDF document. 

The impatience across much of the media is palpable. 

Recount?

Oh groan. That’s not going to change the election results. The consensus “truth” writhing just below the surface of the mainstream, eyeball-rolling disapproval of Jill Stein’s call for and financing of a presidential vote recount in Wisconsin (and perhaps in Pennsylvania and Michigan) is that the political and media consensus has already established who the next president is. Like it or not.

Joan Brunwasser: Welcome to OpEdNews, Bob. The 2016 election has come and gone. What, if anything, is there to talk about now?

Bob Fitrakis: The big news is that Jill Stein’s Green Party presidential campaign is asking for a recount of the votes in three states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. All of these states are significantly outside the margin of error from the unadjusted exit poll numbers contrasted to the reported vote count. I am acting as an of-counsel attorney, pro bono, for the Stein campaign. I believe this is a historically important effort due to the lack of transparency in our elections, that allow private, for-profit, partisan companies to program our computerized voting machines and central tabulators.

JB: Agreed. How did Stein decide to do this action? It’s unusual, to say the least. Can you give us some background, please?

“All great changes,” said Deepak Chopra, “are preceded by chaos.”

That starts to get at it — how to understand, and start healing, the national wound inflicted on this country, and the world, by the 2016 presidential election. But I need to throw in a little John Oliver as well.

“We are faced,” he said on his TV show, “Last Week Tonight,” “with the same questions as the guy who wakes up after a Vegas bachelor party deep in the desert, naked, tied to a cactus and a dead clown. Namely, how the fuck did we get here and what do we do now?”

We’ll be struggling to answer the second question for the next four years, but the question of how we got here can be addressed with a certain troubling clarity. It took more than Donald Trump’s spur-of-the-moment racist populism. The groundwork for the results of the 2016 election began with the nation’s founding — and the racist elitism that was deeply a part of it.

We got 1,001 things wrong in the latest U.S. election. Here are the top 10:

1. Expecting an election to solve deep injustices that require a massive movement, as have all the deep injustices of the past. This can be fixed through education and activism.

2. Rigging the DNC primary to deny Bernie Sanders a nomination. This could have been fixed by Sanders running as an independent. It can now be fixed by all DNC donors abandoning it and putting their funds into activism. Of course the DNC should dump Brazile and all Clintonites, but installing Howard Dean or Keith Ellison hardly solves anything. Disempowering parties through some of the proposals below would work.

3. Rigging the RNC primary by giving Donald Trump endless free media coverage. This can be fixed by busting up the media cartel, requiring free and equal air time for candidates, limiting the election season, banning legalized bribery, and publicly funding elections. (These things also disempower parties.)

For the sixth time in our history, a candidate for President of the United States may have won the popular vote and lost the White House.

This must end.

While the nation—and much of the world—shudders at the thought of a Donald Trump presidency, our electoral system has once again failed to deliver a formal victory to the person who got the most votes.

Hillary Clinton appears to have won the nationwide popular vote. As of about 1 PM eastern time, the tally was roughly 58,909,774 votes (47.6%) for Clinton, versus 58,864,233 votes (47.5%) for Trump. (The exact numbers will change as the vote count continues.) 

But Donald Trump's Electoral College tally has exceeded the 270 Electoral College votes needed to take the White House.

There is much more to tell about this. This year’s vote has once again been stripped and flipped by GOP Jim Crow segregationist tactics that disenfranchised millions of primarily African-American and Hispanic citizens.

According to Green Party election observer Tekla Lewin, at Columbus precinct 13-A,B,C, the Godman Guild, six out of 17 voting machines have been taken offline because they are running out of the paper tape that is the only paper trail for any electronic voting. The Presiding Judge called the Franklin County Board of Elections and said he was told “It’s happening everywhere” and that they “don’t have enough technicians.” It started around 4:30pm and the machines are still offline as of 5:15pm.

At the Indianola Presbyterian Church polling site, the Green Party observer reports that there are 24 machines there and they all ran out of paper tape and were taken offline and the paper is being replaced one by one. Two other iVotronic machines have broken down and the two technicians there don't seem to be able to fix them. Voters reported that the screens froze on the touchscreen. About a hundred people are waiting to vote. 

Report any further voting problems to these number: 614-374-2380 and 614-253-2571.