Jonathan Simon, Election CyberTheft Expert, Discusses 2016 Presidential Race

JB: Which means exactly what?

JS: What that means is that only in Oklahoma would insiders working through corporate vendor connections not enjoy the ready access to the programming process that makes computerized rigging so easy to pull off. Can we just write it off then as a mere coincidence that Oklahoma is also the only state (other than hyper-scrutinized Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker was already on the hot seat for alleged election fraud) not to exhibit an exit poll-votecount shift to Sanders's detriment?

Pollsters, and especially exit pollsters, study their own error patterns fanatically. That is, they see where they've "gone wrong" and try to fix it by tweaking their sampling and weighting protocols going forward. They do this under the unshakable assumption that the votecounts are legitimate and accurate. That is why when they keep getting it wrong in the same direction race after race--as in, e.g., the 2016 Democratic primaries--it is a glaring red flag. In all likelihood, they are making corrections (in favor of Clinton) and still getting it wrong (in favor of Sanders).

Now you have to ask, if Oklahoma wasn't rigged, why were the exit polls there not accurate? Why were they shifted by over 6% to Sanders? It sure looks as if in Oklahoma, where the vendors did not have control of the programming so it was not easily riggable, the pollsters' corrections "backfired" so they got it wrong in the opposite direction. That then suggests that in the other races, if the pollsters had not tweaked their samples to try to keep up with the shifted votecount patterns, the exit poll/votecount disparities would have been even larger than we detected, If so, then the Sanders-Clinton shift throughout the primaries was actually greater than the large disparities we recorded and these egregious numbers throughout the Democratic primaries would be screaming even louder that electronic manipulation was endemic and that it altered the outcome of the nomination battle.

JB: Weren't there also a lot of complaints of voter suppression? The problems in Arizona and New York got lots of coverage.

JS: Of course, the media focus has been on every scheme but the direct manipulation of the votecounts. And of course there have been a lot of other things wrong with elections in 2016. I think this points up something I predicted back in 2006: as the government, installed and maintained in power through rigged elections, progressively loses the genuine consent of the governed, the level of discontent among the governed (which we're now seeing on both the left and the right) keeps mounting, until it takes a combination of skulduggeries to keep a grip on power. We saw that in E2014 where, with a Congressional Approval rating in the single digits, exactly TWO of the 222 incumbent members of the Republican House majority seeking re-election lost their seats. We'd never seen anything like that.

Harvey Wasserman has coined the term "strip and flip" for the strategy of using voter suppression schemes to bring the election within smell-test rigging distance and then direct computerized votecount manipulation to finish the job. It looks very much like this is what was done to Bernie Sanders--who was on an historic roll and of course was the only candidate of either party who posed any real danger to the corporate oligarchy--to make sure he was stopped short.

JB: So, Jonathan, we're arrived at the quadrennial $64,000 question: where do we go from here? What can be done with what we've got?

JS: I think we've gathered enough, and way more than enough, data. And done more than enough analysis, both exit poll-based and using even stronger intrinsic methods such as Cumulative Voteshare Analysis, which look only at the votecount patterns themselves. 2016 just adds to the mountainous pile. It is true that, for a single election, an exit poll/votecount disparity is a shaky basis for proclaiming fraud. But when you see a recurrent and pervasive pattern, as we have, it should, in any rational world, be time to investigate. Seriously and thoroughly investigate.

The world of American elections, we know all too well, is not a rational world.

The reality is that the system deliberately is set up to protect its process from public scrutiny. It is straight out of Alice-In-Wonderland that anyone who questions the hidden process of vote counting is scoffingly told to produce a smoking gun, when all that evidence--memory cards, computer code, voter-marked ballots--is (legally, at least) unobtainable. And the reality is that an incredibly serious problem is not being taken seriously: we lose in court (e.g., New Hampshire, where ballots are made exempt from public records laws); serious remedial legislation hasn't had a prayer; the media mocks.

Political anger is on the constant rise; hyperpolarization is the order of the day. Vast swaths of the public feel frustrated, outraged, unrepresented, very much as if a fundamental breakdown in the process of translating the public will into leadership, policy, and national direction has occurred. As if public sovereignty itself is in serious jeopardy. That leads eventually either to quiet desperation and resignation (e.g., the Soviet Union for decades) or to some sort of violent revolution (e.g., France in 1789).

If we stage a revolution in the counting of votes, perhaps that will stave off a more general and violent revolution that happens when the governed finally realize they are powerless and being governed without their consent. So it is time for public action, focal, visible, and, above all, simple and immediately recognizable as fair and just. I keep thinking of the words of Big Papi, David Ortiz, after the Boston Marathon bombing: "This is our f*cking city!" It galvanized a whole city, and much of our nation. There is all the difference in the world between x% red shift, y% oversampling, z% adjustment, response bias, margin of error, etc. and "Those are our f*cking ballots! We're here to count them observably in public so open this opscan."

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