Is The Election Going To Be Electronically Stolen?

"Why is Mitt Romney so confident?
In states where the winner will be decided by less than 10%, of the vote he already knows he will win. This is no tinfoil hat conspiracy. It’s a maths problem. And mathematics showed changes in actual raw voting data that had no statistical correlation other than programmable computer fraud. This computer fraud resulted in votes being flipped from Democrat to Republican in every federal, senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial election since 2008 (thus far) and in the 2012 primary contests from other Republicans to Mitt Romney."

 This comes from a UK Progressive magazine article alleging massive voter machine manipulation across the US in the 2012 Republican primaries and the 2008 and 2010 elections. It goes on:

This goes well beyond Romney’s investment control in voting machine maker Hart Intercivic and Diebold’s close ties to George W. Bush. Indeed all five voting machine companies have very strong GOP fundraising ties, yet executives (including the candidate’s son Tagg Romney) insist there is no conflict between massively supporting one party financially whilst controlling the machines that record and count the votes.

The whole article is here. 

So far, the only coverage I can find on this story is on blogs and political websites, but my experience with the Anchorage Municipal election in Anchorage last April have made me much more aware of the potential for election fraud.  In that election about half the polling places ran out of ballots;  a Fundamentalist Christian political operative sent out emails telling their members they could register to vote the day of the election [which he knew to be false] which resulted in significantly higher numbers of unregistered voters showing up and disrupting the election, and a election officials were told if voting machine seals were broken to not worry about it.  I learned a lot about voting machines and how susceptible they are to tampering.  People were upset when there were no ballots, but most people were resistant to the idea of election manipulation.  I also began to read the Brad Blog, which covers election fraud.  There's nasty folks out there who believe in winning by any means possible. 

But I also learned how - yawn - resistant most people are to these issues. 

The UK Progressive article goes on to cite retired NSA analyst Michael Duniho who investigated voting in his home state of Arizona:

When Duniho applied a mathematical model to actual voting results in the largest voting precincts, he saw that only the large precincts suddenly trended towards Mitt Romney in the Arizona primary – and indeed all Republicans in every election since 2008 – by a factor of 8%-10%. The Republican candidate in every race saw an 8-10%. gain in his totals whilst the Democrat lost 8-10%. This is a swing of up to  20 point, enough to win an election unless a candidate was losing very badly.

Here's a new (posted Friday night) video from The Intercept of Duniho and another plaintiff in the their suit against Pima County discussing why they are suing.




Basically, they are asking for accountability of the voting tallies, to randomly compare numbers of the voting machines against a hand count.  Something, as I understand it, the Anchorage Assembly seems to have agreed to for the next Municipal election.

My concerns, based on what I saw in April Municipal elections, are these:

• Cognitive dissonance - people's belief in American democracy is so strong, that reports of election fraud are met with disbelief.
• People whose party wins, are even more reluctant to want to pursue allegations of election fraud.
• Because the fraud happens on computer chips, totally unseen, people have trouble understanding it.  ("Said Duniho, 'It is really easy to cheat using computers to count votes, because you can’t see what is going on in the machine.'”]
• Because most Americans are statistically illiterate, statistical evidence of voter fraud means nothing to them. 

 When the Romney votes start coming in a week from Tuesday, how many people are going to just accept the election and how many will be listening to the evidence that I'm guessing will also come in about vote tampering? At the very least, we need to take the charges seriously and have them investigated.  For that to happen, enough people have to get angry enough to write letters and/or take to the streets.  Seriously.  Remember the quote above about how all the voting machine companies are owned by people with a big stake in Republican candidates. 

Thanks to Gryphen who has a video up with an interview with Duniho's NSA colleague Dennis Campbell (and editor of UK Progressive magazine.)

Remember too, this could be wrong.  We don't have collaborating alternative sources.  But it feels worth paying attention to. 

[UPDATE Nov 5:  I've done another, related post - Arguing Over the Biggest Threat to Fair Elections. ]