Voter fraud in the United States in 2016 seems like it shouldn't even be possible, but a series of troubling incidents in the Democratic primaries have some pointing fingers at Hillary Clinton.
Starting in the Iowa caucuses and straight through the contests in West Virginia and Nebraska earlier this month, critics have noted multiple election abnormalities that almost always favor the Democratic front-runner.
And the criticism is not only coming from disgruntled supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (although they're plenty angry). Numerous voices on the left suspect election fraud on the part of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
"The Democratic presidential primaries have been a Wagnerian Ring Cycle of electoral 'shenanigans,' cynical rule-bending and outright voter suppression," Riley Waggaman wrote in a March 28 Huffington Post article.
Take Iowa, for example, which Clinton won by a razor-thin margin of 0.3%.
"Too many questions have been raised. Too many accounts have arisen of inconsistent counts, untrained and overwhelmed volunteers, confused voters, cramped precinct locations, a lack of voter registration forms and other problems," noted the Des Moines Register in an editorial.
In several cases, the number of votes at a caucus exceeded the number of people registered. And the "extra" votes favored Clinton.
And yet the chairwoman of the Iowa Democratic party, Dr. Andy McGuire, refused to re-check the results. McGuire's vanity license plate reads: "HRC2016."
But this is much bigger than Iowa...
Exit Polls Point to Possibility of Widespread Voter Fraud
Left-wing political newsletter CounterPunch has published an entire series of articles examining voter fraud problems in the Democratic primaries.
One persistent problem CounterPunch found was discrepancies between exit polls and final results.
Unlike the many polls taken in the months leading up to election, exit polls are conducted on the day of the election at carefully chosen polling stations. Great care is taken by the pollster (Edison Research, which supplies the data to most major news organizations) to weight the results for accuracy.
So exit polls tend to be much more accurate than pre-election polls.
In the Republican primaries, CounterPunch found that the exit polls were very good at predicting the actual results, falling within the margin of error 24 out of 25 times. And the slight deviations favored no GOP candidate in particular.
Not so on the Democratic side. Here the results were outside of the margin of error (3.5%) in 17 out of the 25 contests. And in 16 of those, the miss was in Hillary Clinton's favor. By in her favor I mean that her actual results were higher than what the exit poll indicated.
It gets crazier. In nine contests, the exit polls underestimated Clinton's numbers by 7% or more - which should be almost impossible.
The most likely explanation is some sort of Hillary Clinton voter fraud. It's not that far-fetched.
You see, many of the voting machines used throughout the United States, particularly older ones, are easily hacked. And in most cases, such tinkering leaves no traces.
"Hundreds of jurisdictions throughout the United States are using voting machines or vote tabulators that have flunked security tests," notes CounterPunch.
Of the states where the exit polls underestimated Clinton's results by 7% or more, two-thirds used voting machines 10 years old or more - the most vulnerable to hacking.
There's no hard proof, but if the causes behind these issues were random -- be they with the exit polls or faulty voting machines -- why do they invariably favor Clinton?
And there's still more evidence of possible Hillary Clinton election fraud. These allegations are the most disturbing of all...
Did Clinton Supporters Suppress the Vote in New York and Arizona?
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In at least two primaries, New York and Arizona, thousands of registered Democrats in districts that favored Bernie Sanders were prevented from voting.
In New York, 125,000 Democrats were purged from the voter rolls, supposedly as part of routine maintenance to remove those who had moved away or failed to vote in previous elections.
But many who tried to vote were turned away at their polling place. In some cases, their party registration had been changed from Democrat to Independent or Republican, preventing them from voting in New York's closed primary.
In a closed primary, you can only vote if you're registered as a member of that political party.
Such party affiliation switches occurred in several other closed primaries as well, including California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. And once again, the victims were disproportionately Bernie Sanders supporters.
Arizona's issues were even more suspicious. Maricopa County, which includes the city of Phoenix and most of the state's Democratic voters, had just 60 polling places to serve 800,000 registered voters.
Long lines resulted in many voters never getting to the polls. Turnout was a third of that for the 2008 primary. Plus, Arizona also suffered from changed voter registrations.
The resulting low turnout was a boon for Hillary Clinton, thanks to early voting.
A large number of registered Democrats - almost a third -- voted early. About 41% of these voters were over 65, a group that favors Clinton. Just 7% were under 30, a group that favors Sanders.
Clinton won Arizona handily, 57.6% to 39.9%.
Afterward, a Hillary Clinton representative in Arizona blamed the voting issues on "a Republican effort to make it harder for people to vote."
There have been other incidents, including a controversial Nevada Democratic Convention that resulted in Clinton gaining seven out of 12 contested delegates, even though Sanders had won a majority of the state's county conventions.
We may never know for sure if the Hillary Clinton campaign orchestrated large-scale election fraud, or whether she just happened to luck out every time there was an aberration in the system.
But for a candidate deemed untrustworthy by 57% of American voters, so many incidents looks awfully suspicious.
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Related Articles:
- Huffington Post: It's Not Just Arizona: Election 'Shenanigans' Have Defined the Democratic Primaries - and Benefit Hillary Clinton
- CounterPunch: Hillary Clinton vs Bernie Sanders: In-depth Report on Exit Polling and Election Fraud Allegations
- CounterPunch: Purged, Hacked, Switched: On Election Fraud Allegations in Hillary Clinton vs Bernie Sanders
- Des Moines Register: Editorial: Something Smells in the Democratic Party
About the Author
David Zeiler, Associate Editor for Money Morning at Money Map Press, has been a journalist for more than 35 years, including 18 spent at The Baltimore Sun. He has worked as a writer, editor, and page designer at different times in his career. He's interviewed a number of well-known personalities - ranging from punk rock icon Joey Ramone to Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Over the course of his journalistic career, Dave has covered many diverse subjects. Since arriving at Money Morning in 2011, he has focused primarily on technology. He's an expert on both Apple and cryptocurrencies. He started writing about Apple for The Sun in the mid-1990s, and had an Apple blog on The Sun's web site from 2007-2009. Dave's been writing about Bitcoin since 2011 - long before most people had even heard of it. He even mined it for a short time.
Dave has a BA in English and Mass Communications from Loyola University Maryland.