Democracy Lost:
A Report on the
Fatally Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries
The title is a 96-page report, sources included, from EJUSA. No, I had not heard of EJUSA, either, until I read a
comment by CM-TX on the Treehouse blog here. (If you are planning to work the
polls, this report will be of particular interest to you.) The parts of the
report that I read through struck me as responsibly researched and digested. In
brief,
Election
Justice USA (EJUSA) is a national, non-partisan team of seasoned election
integrity experts, attorneys, statisticians, journalists, and activists. The
circumstances surrounding Arizona’s presidential primary on March 22nd,
2016—widely acknowledged as one of the most disastrous election days in recent
memory—were the lightning rod that catalyzed the formation of EJUSA. Throughout
the course of the 2016 presidential primary season, EJUSA has emerged as a
leader in the fight for honest elections, pursuing legal action in several
states in an attempt to counteract specific forms of targeted voter suppression
and election fraud.
Unfortunately, Ohio turns up in the document word search 15 times. Here are two relevant sections:
OHIO Attorney Bob Fitrakis has filed a
lawsuit against Edison Media Research asserting that Democratic presidential
candidate Bernie Sanders actually earned more pledged delegates in the
primaries than were shown by the results. The suit seeks the release of raw
exit polling data which documents dramatic differences between exit polls and
electronic vote totals in eleven states in the 2016 presidential primaries.
Exit polls have been adjusted to fit electronic vote totals since 2004, when
they appeared to show Kerry winning against Bush. At that time, Karl Rove (then
an assistant to George Bush) developed a theory to explain the alleged
unreliability of exit polls. After citizens on the internet began to notice
wide discrepancies in this election, the exit poll sponsors, The Media
Consortium and Edison Media Research, canceled exit polls for all remaining
states in the primary season. The lawsuit demands that media organizations
release the raw data for the 2016 exit polls for the first time.
. . .
Of ten places
where exit polling has missed by more than 7% (South Carolina, Alabama,
Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, Ohio, New York,
California), seven are states where all or the majority of election
jurisdictions are using machines ten years old or greater. For six of these
seven states (excluding California which only included an early voting poll
with a very large discrepancy of 14- 22%) the average initial exit polling miss
is a whopping 9.98%.
Bear in mind, this report analyzes the
Democrat Party primary voting. I vote in Cuyahoga County, I mark my choices on
a paper ballot that is fed into a scanner for tabulation. At least in that
case, there is a paper trail that can be used to reconcile votes cast with
final results. That will not be the case in many other counties. Scary.
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