What does Bernie believe about the ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES?
Does he have any advisors who know anything about this? I doubt it.
One quite recent book on the subject, CODE RED by Jonathan Simon, gives a good summary of how we got to where we are (where 98% of the vote is counted electronically on computers and are thus virtually unverifiable), where Republicans have become the most powerful party even though every demographic would indicate otherwise, and where the corporations that count the votes keep making sure that any shift away from the pre-election polls or the exit polls is always a RED SHIFT.
I'm with Bernie but I'm afraid I don't believe Hillary is his most serious obstacle to election. And even if by the grace of God he is elected, the people on the lower ends of the ballot, the Reps and the Sens, are the ones that are the most often the ones who are narrowly beaten despite showing stronger in the pre-election polls and in the exit polls. And he will have to have a Senate and a House to work with if he's to do any of the things he wants to do.
About all we mortals can do is pray I guess. The immortals are on the board at Dominion or ES&S. Here's a LTE I wrote recently (200 wds limit) related to this subject:
HAVE WE GIVEN UP ON ELECTION INTEGRITY?
Electronic voting machines are essentially unverifiable. It’s as if we give our vote to a guy who takes our vote into a room, then comes out later and says that he has carefully counted all the votes before shredding them, and here’s the result. Like it or lump it. And yet thousands of elections since computers began counting votes in 1988 have not squared with the exit polls or with other significant measures of validity. In the last election in Kansas, for example, Beth Clarkson, a statistician at WSU, found some marked irregularities in terms of urban/rural deviance and asked to be allowed to study the paper tapes from the voting machines to square them with the precinct results. Kris Kobach would not allow her to do so. We are now at a point where corporations count about 98% of the vote and it’s almost impossible to verify anything. Isn’t it time we joined Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands and trashed the machines in favor of easily verified paper ballots, preferably hand-counted?
= new reply since forum marked as read
What does Bernie believe about the ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES? (your title, my emphasis)
I don't want to know what Bernie "believes" about electronic voting machines. I want to know what he DOES about verifying vote counts (or exposing the inherent inability of current e-voting systems to provide verification). Can he even prove that he himself was elected to the Senate? No other elected official can do this, and none of them even try to. Why? How is it that they are "trusting" to private corporations, all of them using 'TRADE SECRET' code--code that the public is forbidden to review--to tabulate election results, with half the states doing NO AUDIT AT ALL of the results, and the other half doing only a miserably inadequate 1% audit. And don't even get me started on WHO owns and runs the PRIVATE corporations that are 'counting' all our votes--it would make your hair stand on end. It is no wonder that Congress has something like a 10% approval rating. Most of the members of Congress represent NO ONE. Or rather, they represent the 0.01%. Many of them were NOT elected by the people. And NONE of them can prove that they were elected.
It is not a matter of "belief." It is a matter VERIFICATION. If verification is NOT POSSIBLE, the system is criminally fraudulent and inherently anti-democratic. And those things are true whether you like the result or not. They would be true if every elected official were a socialist and a peace activist. (As Josef Stalin, in communist Russia, is alleged to have said: "It's not the votes that count; it's who counts the votes!"
To my knowledge, there is not a single elected Democratic leader in this country--nor even any of those who were NOT s/elected, nor any party leaders at all--who have challenged this criminally fraudulent and inherently anti-democratic vote counting system. And, believe me, Bernie Sanders will not do so if he is serious about wanting to be s/elected--and if he does challenge the vote counting system, in defiance of our Corporate/MIC rulers, he will see a swift end to his political career. He probably knows this. I think they all do. And if he is not just a decoy--someone to bleed off the leftist energies of the majority (especially with regard to the zillion dollar military/security state/ police state thievery)--he will keep his lip zipped and hope for the best. We will never know what he "believes" about 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting.
Although Bernie Sanders is an independent, he has to play by the same rules as everybody else who seeks power within our Corporate/MIC system. So do not expect him to violate Rule no. 1: Silence about our criminally fraudulent and inherently anti-democratic 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting system. He won't likely do it; he CAN'T do it and remain viable as a candidate for president (or any office). And, in the unlikely event that he does do it, we should know that he is sacrificing his career for the rest of us. That would be an exceedingly noble and patriotic act.
