Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was certainly right when she said, “We do not have a voting system we can trust.” And her aborted recount in Michigan helped prove it, revealing that more than one-third of Detroit voting machines recorded more votes than voters.
As the Detroit News writes, “Detailed reports from the office of Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett show optical scanners at 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books. Voting irregularities in Detroit have spurred plans for an audit by Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson’s office, Elections Director Chris Thomas said Monday.”
This presented problems with the Michigan recount, which has since been halted by a judge who found that Jill Stein didn’t have standing as an aggrieved party. As the News also informs, “Overall, state records show 10.6 percent of the precincts in the 22 counties that began the retabulation process couldn’t be recounted because of state law that bars recounts for unbalanced precincts or ones with broken seals. The problems were the worst in Detroit, where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes.”
Effect on Election
Hillary Clinton won over Donald Trump with a whopping 95 percent of the vote in Detroit, a city run by Democrats. Given this, it’s logical to assume that any over-votes — whether due to error or fraud — would have broken for Clinton by a similar margin. This could mean that if only legitimate votes were counted, Trump would have won Michigan by more than the 10,704 votes the “official” count indicates.
Moreover, what of that 95 percent figure? Detroit is 81.6 percent black, 10.5 percent white, and 5 percent Hispanic (an ethnic, not racial, designation). Since 90-plus percent of blacks vote Democrat virtually every election, and since the percentage would be highest in urban areas, it would surprise no one that 95-plus percent of Motor City blacks might have chosen Clinton. Yet given that whites turn out to vote in greater numbers, they would have comprised more than 10 percent of the Detroit electorate. And while urban whites tend to be rather liberal, they don’t vote Democrat by a 90 percent margin; the same can be said of Hispanics. Thus, Clinton’s 95 percent Detroit figure warrants examination.
Human Error?
Some observers say the discrepancies could be due to repeated attempts to stuff ballots into malfunctioning machines; more than 80 jammed in Detroit on election day. “This is not the first time,” either, adds Daniel Baxter, elections director for the city. As Time reports, quoting him, “‘We’ve had this problem in nearly every election that we administer in the city of Detroit.’ Baxter says that the machines were tested for accuracy before election day [sic] in accordance with state and federal guidelines, but that sometimes the machines ‘hit up against each other and malfunction’ as they’re being transported to the precincts.”
Striking. If this is an ongoing problem, it should have been addressed long ago. As for machines hitting up against each other during transportation, this is what foam padding is made for. Note, however, that claims of malfunction can be a great cover for vote fraud: “Of course the numbers don’t match up with the dang machines we have to work with!”
And this is precisely what we hear from city officials — in so many words. As Time also tells us, “‘You don’t expect a laptop to last 10 years, and you shouldn’t expect a voting machines [sic] to last 10 years,’ says Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey.” This is a flawed analogy. A laptop is generally used almost every day. Yet even if there were one election a year, it would amount to only 10 uses per decade. Would you expect your new computer to malfunction after a week and a half?
While we can’t be sure about the nature of the Detroit irregularities in question here, that vote fraud is a problem — especially in large cities — is well established. Most notably, undercover videos taken by Project Veritas investigative reporters earlier this year showed Democrat operatives plotting to commit the vote fraud. For example, Scott Foval, then field director for left-wing group Americans United for Change, admitted on camera, “We’ve been bussing people in to deal with you f*****g a******s [the Republicans] for 50 years and we’re not going to stop now” . Foval was fired from his position after the videos came to light.
Also captured on video was NYC election commissioner Alan Schulkin. While a Democrat, Schulkin lamented the fraud while echoing Foval, saying, “They get busses and they move people around [to vote illegally].” He also admitted that “there’s thousands of absentee ballots. I don’t know where they came from” (video below).
Schulkin also “suggested that [Democrat] Mayor Bill de Blasio was to blame for a lot of the voter fraud taking place in New York City,” writes Project Veritas. The commissioner explained:
He gave out ID cards, de Blasio. That’s in lieu of a driver’s license, but you can use it for anything. But, they didn’t vet people to see who they really are. Anybody can go in there and say I am Joe Smith, I want an ID card. It’s absurd. There’s a lot of fraud. Not just voter fraud, all kinds of fraud.
This is why I’m getting more conservative as I get older.
Note that this allows even illegal aliens to vote, a phenomenon that “was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections,” wrote the authors of a study published in October.
Then there’s the technique I wrote of that month, citing information that had been given to me, exclusively, by a Washington, D.C. community leader in 2005. Outlining rampant vote fraud in minority neighborhoods, he mentioned that transiency is a problem, with people moving in and out of such areas frequently. This leaves many former residents on voter rolls — and their absence is well known to local, area-savvy political operatives called “block captains” or “apartment captains.” All these operatives need do then is vote, or have others vote, in these departed residents’ stead.
Whatever the method, even Hillary Clinton agrees (privately, anyway) vote fraud is a problem. For instance, an e-mail released by WikiLeaks in October showed that her campaign believed that Obama operatives “flooded the caucuses with ineligible voters” in 2008.
But then there’s the type of person not as welcome in polling places. It’s alleged that approximately “40 court-appointed Republican election inspectors were turned away from Philadelphia polling stations on Election Day,” reports Heat Street. This is no surprise since Philly Democrats apparently got away with the same behavior in 2012. Reports then were that more than 60 court-appointed inspectors were forced out of polling places, with one woman actually being attacked. And that’s America 2016: Girls’ bathrooms open to everyone but polling stations for Democrats only.
Unless there’s a complete examination of our electoral system, banana-republic-type elections will be our fate.
