Contact Your Financial Adviser Money Making MC
30
November 2016
 |
Electionland (The Total Investment & Insurance
Solutions)
President-elect Donald Trump took to
Twitter on Sunday to claim that he would have won the popular vote "if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."
There is no evidence that millions of
people voted illegally. If there were, we'd have seen some sign of it. The Total Investment & Insurance
Solutions
ProPublica was an organizing partner
in Electionland, a project
run by a coalition of organizations including Google News Lab, Univision, WNYC,
the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and the USA Today Network. We monitored
the vote with a team of more than 1,000 people, including about 600 journalism
school students poring over social media reports and more than 400 local
journalists who signed up to receive tips on what we found. We had access to a
database of thousands of calls made to a nonpartisan legal hotline. We had four
of the nation's leading voting experts in the room with us and election sources
across the country. Thousands of people texted us to tell us about their voting
experience.
We had an unprecedented real-time
understanding of voting in the United States, and while we saw many types of
problems, we did not see mass voter fraud of any kind — especially of the sort
Donald Trump alleges. The Total
Investment & Insurance Solutions
Trump's claim tracks closely with an
Infowars piece published
less than a week after the election, claiming that 3 million votes were cast by
illegal aliens. The website, run by conservative radio host and noted
conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, attributed the number to an unsubstantiated
tweet by Gregg Phillips, the founder of VoteStand, a voter fraud app. While
Infowars attributed the number to VoteFraud.org, there has been no report on
the number by VoteFraud.org and Phillips told
Politifact he
was not affiliated with the organization. He would not provide Politifact with
any information about how he arrived at the number, saying he was still
verifying its accuracy. As Politifact points out, there is no evidence to
support the number.
On a call Monday morning with
reporters, Trump transition spokesman Jason Miller cited two studies to back up
the president-elect's claim of illegal voting. The research, he said, spoke to
"issues of both voter fraud and illegal immigrants voting."
Experts say the studies did not speak
to these issues. The first study Miller
cited was published in 2014 and has been widely debunked by a number of
researchers. While the study claimed that 14 percent of non-citizens were
registered to vote, that turned out to be an error in self-reporting. The question pertaining to
citizenship was confusing, leading citizens to regularly mark themselves as
non-citizens. The Total Investment
& Insurance Solutions
Miller also cited a 2012 Pew Study
which found that there were thousands of people on the rolls who had moved or
died. David Becker, now the executive director of the Center for Election
Innovation & Research, was the primary author of the study, and told us
there was "no link" between this study and voter fraud. The Total Investment & Insurance
Solutions
"The rolls are out of date
because people are moving or dying in the normal course of things, not because
people go and intentionally register in two states," he said, adding that
his two decades of experience has shown him that out-of-date rolls are not used
for fraud. He added that now that 20 states are participating in the Electronic
Registration Information Center Inc. — or ERIC — which allows states to share
registration information, the voting rolls in 2016 were "far more up to
date" than the rolls in 2012. The
Total Investment & Insurance Solutions
Beyond the study, Becker said the
warning signs of millions of ineligible voters casting ballots are simply not
present, nor were they on Election Day, which Becker spent in the Electionland
newsroom. In fact, he said, it's likely Electionland 2014 and many other
election observers 2014 would have known about this long before the election
actually took place.
"There would have been an
unprecedented number of new registrants that would not have had matched social
security or driver's license numbers," Becker said. "There was no
exceptional registration, there were no crazy long lines, there were no
language difficulties, and there wasn't an exceptionally high number of mail-in
ballots."
Tammy Patrick, another Electionland
expert and a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said that no elections
officials have raised flags related to tampering. Jurisdictions do regular
audits to ensure that the number of sign-ins equals the number of votes being
cast, and none of those audits have found problems. In fact, with the fervor
raised in advance by the president-elect himself, Patrick said this election
was the best monitored in her memory.
"People were watching," she
said. "We had more international observers than ever before. Thousands of
political party observers at the polls. Campaign observers in the polling
places."
Third-party candidate Jill Stein has
raised less sweeping doubts about the validity of the vote. These came on the
heels of a Nov. 22 piece in
New York Magazine, claiming that researchers had found "persuasive
evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been
manipulated or hacked." The story went on to say that "in Wisconsin, Clinton
received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting
machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper
ballots." The Total Investment
& Insurance Solutions
Stein has now used this study in her
recount petitions in both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
However, the story did not seem to
hold up under scrutiny. One of those researchers, J. Alex Halderman, writing in
a Medium post, disagreed with
New York Magazine's characterization of his research, saying only that systems
were vulnerable, pointing to the hacks on the Democratic National Committee
and the voter registration systems in Illinois and Arizona. He did,
however, call for manually checking paper ballots. The Total Investment & Insurance Solutions
Nate Silver at 538 and others rebutted
the New York Magazine claims via Twitter and
later in a longer
story. Silver pointed out,
among other things, that in Wisconsin, the disparity between counties that use
paper ballots and ones that use electronic voting systems disappears when
controlling for race and education. The
Total Investment & Insurance Solutions
Charles Stewart, elections expert and
professor at MIT, noted in his blog, "virtually all" ballots in
Wisconsin and Michigan were cast on paper, so the "core empirical
claim" of the New York Magazine story "cannot be true." The Total Investment & Insurance
Solutions
But Stein, citing "very troubling news about
the possibility of security breaches in voting results," created a crowdsourcing campaign to fund a recount effort in Wisconsin,
Michigan and Pennsylvania. She first set a fundraising goal of $2 million,
which was very quickly met, and raised it ultimately to $7 million, where it
currently stands as we write this.
The Clinton campaign is participating
in the Wisconsin recount process. Marc Elias, general counsel to the Clinton
campaign, expressed
skepticism, saying that the campaign had "not uncovered any
actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting
technology," but that they would participate in the recount "in order
to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides."
Both Becker and Patrick say the idea
that a hack could meaningfully impact an election is far-fetched. In Wisconsin
alone, there are 1,800 jurisdictions, none of which have machines connected to
the internet, said Becker. "It would have taken thousands of people
working in concert without being discovered to hack the result, just in
Wisconsin," he said.
And while some have asserted that
malware could have been built into the software used to run electronic voting
machines and optical scanners for paper ballots, Patrick said this would either
require a lot of foresight or time travel. The Total Investment & Insurance Solutions
"This software is years old. The
voting machines are not new. Someone would have had to — years ago — decide
they were going to hack this election, without knowing who the candidates
are," she said. The Total
Investment & Insurance Solutions
While it's important to investigate
voting irregularities, claims made without evidence about fraudulent voting and
hacking may have costs that go beyond the expense of a recount. Studies suggest that voters — especially low-information
voters — who fear that their vote may be tampered with might not vote at all. The Total Investment & Insurance
Solutions
Members of the losing party often
blame defeats on flaws in the voting system, Becker said. He said it's
"particularly difficult" this year, when all of the polls seemed to
be lined up against the ultimate winner, "but it doesn't change the facts
about the process."The Total
Investment & Insurance Solutions
No comments:
Post a Comment