As the all-important Election Day of 2016 draws closer, one issue is spiking in the minds of many voters: the possibility of election fraud.
It’s been raised as an issue before, particularly in the elections of 2000 and 2004, when George W. Bush squeaked out controversial victories in the Electoral College, the first one having to be ratified by the Supreme Court.
Election fraud has been a problem ever since elections were held, but in the modern world of electronic voting machines, computers and hackers, it’s easier than ever to rig an election, according to many experts.
In 2000, it was the famous “hanging chads” that weren’t counted that got Bush in trouble when many voting machines were mechanical and had paper trails.
But now, with the advent of electronic voting machines that have no paper trails, fraud can often be as simple as changing a line of software code or having a central computer alter the results it’s tabulated. If those computers are connected to the Internet (as nearly all of them are), the process can happen by remote control — with the potential to be activated from anywhere in the world.
In the Democratic primary elections in New York, California and Kentucky, there were widespread accusations of fraud being involved in the outcomes that enabled Hillary Clinton to topple her archival Bernie Sanders and come up with the delegates she needed for her victory in those states.
In California, a researcher at Stanford University published a paper showing that states with paper trails for their primary elections favored Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries by more than 50 percent. In states without paper trails, Clinton was favored to Sanders by nearly two-thirds (65 percent to 35 percent).
Some 30 states are now allowing people to vote via the Internet, especially members of the military and American citizens abroad. Even liberal media outlets such as The Washington Post have warned that this process is not secure.
In fact, it’s Americans living abroad that the George Soros funded-AVAAZ charity has targeted with a campaign, claiming that if the eight million American citizens who live overseas all vote for Clinton, she’ll win the election.
AVAAZ co-founder Ricken Patel has done work for globalist groups such as the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation in the past. The campaign rented double-decker buses in London to tour colleges where Americans are studying and blasted Bruce Springsteen’s song “Born in the USA” while campaigners aboard yelled, “Don’t vote Trump!”
In Illinois and Arizona, the FBI found that voter registration databases have been hacked recently in the past. The state of Illinois shut down its voter registration system for 10 days in July after its hacking.
The FBI didn’t identify the hackers or necessarily agree that the intention was to affect the election versus simply gain access to 200,000-plus citizens’ private information. However, David Kennedy, CEO of IT consulting company TrustedSec, said that “it could be a precursor to a larger attack.”
GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump spoke to Fox News earlier in the month about the issue. “I’m telling you, November 8, we’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged,” he said. “I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.”
With all this talk about potential fraud, an average voter might be right to ask what can be done to combat it. One measure that can be taken is for states to switch back to all-mechanical voting machines that leave an auditable paper trail in every case.
Being auditable means that analysts can go back, see if a person voted a certain way and then contact that person to double-check and see if they really did.
Another solution is for votes to be counted locally, by trusted representatives, rather than by any one central authority. Decentralization in all cases is key to combatting epic cheating; the more people that are involved in the process, the harder it is to be controlled from the outside.
Veteran political observer Patrick Caddell believes that fraud is not beyond the desires of the Democratic Party. On SiriusXM satellite radio, Caddell said, “One of the things we’ll see, and I’ll predict this now and why if Trump’s going to win he has to go to this higher ground, is, you’re going to see … just how much the establishment order will fight to hold onto its power and privilege at all costs.”
President Obama, who formerly denied that election fraud could be a real problem in this election, has now reversed himself and said that indeed, there are chances for hackers playing with election results. This is similar to Hillary Clinton connecting Russian hackers who she suspected were behind the DNC email hack with Donald Trump.
What’s Obama’s solution? He wants to have physical election machinery declared part of America’s “critical national infrastructure” so that it can fall under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This isn’t just talk — DHS has now established the Election Infrastructure Cyber-Security Working Group to “study” and work on this very effort.
Obama’s plans would effectively allow the federal government to control elections, which have always been under the authority of state and local officials. State governments that have gotten wind of this DHS group have banded together and written letters to Congress to try and fight it.
This is something that should absolutely be feared as one central authority to control all election machinery would be one step away from having a third-party IT consulting company or other computer specialist being able to rig all of the machines the same way.
So much has Donald Trump worried that the 2016 elections could be rigged that he’s forming his own private group of election observers to monitor voting across the country on Election Day; you can join this group if you go to his website.
When the Obama administration got word of this, it said it would go one better — it will have 500 members of a group affiliated with the United Nations and the European Union — the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) — monitor the elections.
This group has been controversial because many of its members hail from Communist or dictatorial regimes. The Communist Party of the USA has openly endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. At the same time, President Obama also wants to reduce oversight from domestic election-monitoring groups.
The federalizing of the election process is overwhelmingly Orwellian and should instinctively strike fear into the hearts of all voters as it’s the opposite of what the Founding Fathers wanted when they wrote the Constitution. Hopefully, if Trump wins the election, he’ll reverse this process and keep control over elections as local and as decentralized as possible.
