Featuring Bob Fitrakis, Cliff Arnebeck and Lori Grace
7:30-10:00 pm, Wednesday May 25, and Friday May 27, 2016, (video above is of Friday’s presentation)
Sunrise Center, 645 Tamalpais, Corte Madera, CA
This evening covered the issues we are all facing as voters in the 2016 election. Lori Grace, on behalf of the Institute for American Democracy and Election Integrity (www.trustvote.org), presented Bob Fitrakis, PhD, JD, and Cliff Arnebeck, JD, two election lawyers she has worked with since 2004. They talked about past challenges to election integrity in our presidential elections, the challenges we face in the current presidential election, and the opportunities we have as voters to create a more honest election.
They showed videos from past presidential elections that point to the problems from those years and discussed what was done about those problems at that time. Then they discussed what problems exist for the upcoming election and what can be done to address them. Overall, our best protection to have a trustworthy election is to be an informed public that will demand more public oversight of elections and exit polling and to have the patience and persistence to deal with a system that currently does not give us the reliability and transparency we need.
2016 is, of course, a presidential election year and problems with voting in the primary elections have already been showing up. Not a good sign for the general election! Would you like to learn how to protect the voting process as well as protect your own right to vote? If so, this is the workshop for you!
Learn why the integrity of this November’s election may be of serious concern. Here in the United States, all of our votes are counted by private corporations. After an election, it is very difficult to look at the votes that may have been lost or changed electronically because these private corporations hold their software as proprietary. An examination of Scytl/SOE and ES&S, two vote-counting companies, shows many negative reviews regarding their management of elections. (You can read numerous such reviews by doing a web search for the company name and “reviews.”) In addition, some people may have concerns that companies like Scytl/SOE and ES&S which managed the votes in Kentucky, New York and Arizona, have directors who are also on the boards of other companies involved in wire-tapping, the defense industry and military interrogations. Additional concerns are that some American votes may actually be counted in Toronto, Canada and in Barcelona, Spain.
With more states’ primary elections coming up on June 7th, including one in California, which is a potentially decisive state for the Democrats, The Institute for American Democracy and Election Integrity is concerned that The Media Consortium has cancelled all remaining exit polls for the remaining primaries. Thus, the Institute, a division of Sunrise Center, is calling for an exit poll to be held in California. If an exit poll is funded by a nonprofit, contributions to the exit poll are tax-deductible. Results will give people true knowledge about whether questionable results have occurred in the election. Then audits would be much easier to organize. Happily, California is mostly a paper ballot state.
Concern has been expressed that the exit polls of the Democratic Primaries for this year, when compared to electronic voting machine totals, seem to show a pattern that might suggest that the electronic vote totals in about ten states may have been changed to favor Hillary Clinton. In contrast to other nations, exit polls used currently by the Federal Government to assess election fraud in other countries are adjusted continuously on election day to match electronic voting machine totals, rather than to determine whether the electronic vote is accurate.
A 2006 video of Stephen Spoonamore, a Republican who was partly responsible for Obama winning the 2008 election. Learn how in this meeting!
Chicago Board of Elections. This shows the kind of defensive behavior that Boards of elections frequently demonstrate even when politely challenged.
If you want to see the full hearing, start at minute 27. The article will also summarize the whole story. Click to learn more.
Richard Charnin speaks about exit polls. This mathematician has been studying exit polls since 2004.
When much suspicion arose this year about Edison, a U.S. primary exit poll company’s habit of adjusting exit polls to match the electronic data, Edison and the Media Consortium (media companies that report the election news to us) decided to cancel any further exit polling following primaries. Although Edison usually receives money from The Media Consortium for conducting primaries exit polling, it will receive much more during the November election, so canceling it is not that great a hardship. Maintaining the trust of the American people and The Media Consortium is more important to their company’s financial picture, even if the picture provided by Edison to the American people is inaccurate because election results are continuously changed to fit unverifiable electronic vote totals.
So you might ask, “How can I support our elections being honest here in California on June 7th?” Contributing financially to exit polling will definitely be valuable. Letting The Media Consortium know that there will still be an exit poll could be a deterrent to vote manipulation. On a more personal note, be sure to take a printed copy of your registration to the polling location if you are not a permanent absentee voter. If you are, and your ballot came in the mail, check your ballot to be sure it accurately represents the party in which you are registered, which allows you to vote for the candidate of your choice. We recommend physically taking your ballot to the polling location, rather than mailing it, so there is no chance that it gets lost in the mail.
Other things you can do include becoming a poll observer with a modest amount of training. Manipulation of the vote can frequently be minimized when there are people watching the process. Becoming a poll worker is an even bigger step. If you happen to be voting on an electronic voting machine without a paper trail, take a video or snapshot of the screen if you see it was flipped to the opposing candidate or if your candidate of choice fades away on the screen.
If there are major discrepancies in the California exit poll and the vote totals, assuming that we can raise the money for the exit poll, participating in an audit could be a great contribution. The exit poll we are proposing will be run through the Columbus Institute of Contemporary Journalism. More information about contributing financially to the exit poll will be available during both evenings and through the Sunrise Center office, which is also the office for the Institute for American Democracy and Election Integrity.
