Quoting Paul Dwerryhouse (paul@dwerryhouse.com.au):
On 2018-03-15 06:36, Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:
Hillary Rodham Clinton, but then vote manipulation in several key states illegally changed the result.
Ooh, interesting. I hadn't heard this before; I was under the impression it was just a broken electoral system that caused the result.
Was this by disenfranchising the poor via voter id requirements, or good old-fashioned ballot-box stuffing?
There were quite a number of elements to how this was done, and not merely through the highly indirect and less totally illegal deployment of Russian software bots and stolen real online identities as a force-multiplier on social media (though they certainly did that). Part of it was direct break-in to election authority computing facilities, which permitted both some jiggering of vote totals in key places such as Wisconsin and data-mining about both the voting protocols and about the electorate. The latter was used to selectively purge inconveniently-inclined voters -- qualified, legal voters -- off of voting rolls a month or two before the November general election. The data-mined information was also used for not-exactly-vote-manipulation-as-such-but-probably-illegal targeted private lobbying of particular likely voters, profiled courtesy in part of information stolen by Russian hackers from the voting authorities, to induce them to stay home and not vote for Secretary Clinton. E.g., particular black Democratic Party voters were privately IM'ed URLs with propaganda descriptions purporting to prove that Secretary Clinton was bigoted against blacks, cherry-picking some ill-advised things either then-First Lady Clinton or President Bill Clinton said about African-American 'supercriminals' back during the crime wave of the early 1990s. The exact methods for doing many of these thinga was at least partially deniable if you didn't have the overall picture about _why_ it was being done and in that fashion. For example, the targeted purge of (Democratic Party only) voters was usually done under the cover of alleged concern about accuracy of voting polls. A postcard was mailed out to the last recorded street address of that voter, saying this was a check and asking the voter to write back or telephone a number to indicate receipt. The (Republican) officials who did this claimed (usually lying) that all responses were logged, and then a second card was sent marked to never be forwarded by the Post Office, saying this was the last chance to remain enrolled. The officials then claimed to have acted on all responses to these, too (and usually lied). Even if they had not lied, one fundamental problem is that the Voting Rights Act makes such a purge illegal of a qualified voter with a correctly declared residence address _without_ any obligation to respond to anything at all. Therefore, such voters who showed up on Election Day and were denied the right to vote based on 'You're no longer on the voting rolls' were illegally disenfranchised. Outright vote-count _rigging_ also occurred, and suspiciously in exactly the states and counties closest to tipping the 'purple' state in question so that the state's entire Electoral College tally went to the Republican ticket (Trump/Pence) rather than to the Democratic ticket (Clinton/Kaine). This was suspicious because of how finely calculated the effect was, _and_ more and more evidence has been emerging that it was not an accident. I should stress that this was not a Russian-directed effort only, in that there was massive help from domestic traitors, starting with a covert data analytics firm named Cambridge Analytica founded by far-right lunatic billionaire Robert Mercer and staffed by firebrand Steve Bannon. That firm had at first backed the universally loathed Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who was at one point a leading Republican primary election candidate. When Cruz dropped out of the race, they switched to backing The Toddler, Mr. Trump. Domestic traitors including but not limited to Cambridge Analytica were instrumental in telling the Putin-funded saboteurs where to manipulate, where to surveil, where to apply influence, etc. Leading up to the November 2016 electionse, _all 17_ USA intelligence agencies were in agreement that Putin was using many illegal measures to attempt to interfere in the election on Trump/Pence's behalf. Of course, it not being appropriate for secret agencies to directly enter domestic politics, they brought these findings urgently to President Obama, nearing the end of his term of office. Obama in turn warned Putin directly, very sternly, to cease interfering or there would be great repercussions to his disadvantage, and then Obama met privately with Congressional leaders about the threat to the republic's election integrity, presenting the intelligence agencies' damning evidence behind closed doors and seeking a bilateral consensus to act and speak publicly to repel this critical attack. This effort to seek a unified response was prevented, because Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky (a Bible Belt state) stated that he refused to believe the unanimous advice of all 17 US intelligence agencies plus the President, and would deny Obama the support of his party in the Senate. In other words, he traitorously backstabbed his (and my) country for raw power reasons. This was not the first act of outright treason McConnell had carried out. Starting a year earlier, McConnell had openly declared after ultra-right-wing US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died that the Republican-controlled Senate would refuse to hold hearings to consider Obama's nominee to replace Scalia, universally admired moderate Judge Merrick Garland. McConnell cheekily claimed -- with one year remaining in Obama's second 4-year term, that it would be inappropriate to approve a nominee 'so close' to an election, but rather that 'the people should decide', e.g., that the next President's choice would take the seat, instead. (The Toddler, once in office, appointed a far-right person who has turned out to be worse than Scalia.) McConnell was able to get away with his treason, in part because there are no longer Republicans of conscience willing to act with Democrats to stop this inappropriate denial of a Presidential function, and also because _technically_ the Constitution doesn't require the Senate to hold confirmation hearings, only to vote yea or nay _if_ they hold such hearings. My point is: It wasn't just the Russians, but also it required key help, both covert and overt, from Republicans so devoted to power that they were willing to commit treason with a foreigh power to perpetuate it. They are still the main real problem, to this day. Without them, the Russians would have remained, as Senator McCain mockingly called them in 2014, 'a gas [petrol] station masquerading as a country'. There is a _great_ deal more to this, including the direct evidence of vote manipulation you speak of, but it is only slowly coming out. Part of the reason for the slowness is that The Toddler absolutely refuses to permit any Federal resources to be devoted to _either_ investigating past foreign interference _or_ protecting the nation's election systems against future interference. (The Toddler, too, par excellence, is a traitor, not to mention so extremely self-absorbed that he refuses to defend his own country if doing so might in any way suggest illegitimacy in how he entered office.)