World Affairs Brief, November 11, 2016 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.
Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).
This Week’s Analysis:
Trump Victory Shocks the World
Manipulating the Election
World Reactions to Trump’s Win
Clinton Backers Sore Losers
Can Trump Live Up to His Promises?
Preparedness Tip: Prep Your Bicycle
[…]
MANIPULATING THE ELECTION”
I’ve received not a few emails from subscribers asking, “How could Trump possibly have won given the amount of vote fraud going on?” Another version was, “The margin between Trump and Clinton in several states was small enough that it seems that the voting machines could have flipped enough votes to her for her to win with no one being the wiser. So how could the PTB allow this to happen?”
I think the answer to that is that Trump’s final margin of victory exceeded the percentage of vote fraud that the manipulators dared to use. The reason for that limitation is that vote fraud has to be limited to a few percentage points lest the fraud becomes obvious by statistical analysis of exit polls. Fraud probably accounted for no more than 3%, and that wasn’t enough to counter the surge in vote for Trump.
Computer Voting Machine Fraud: There were reports coming in from many parts of the country documenting the flipping of votes from Trump to Clinton. Here’s a link to a typical example. I’ve summarized below a pattern of manipulation we can see from this type of computer vote flipping:
1) All examples were changing Republican votes to Democratic, never the other way around.
2) The most common machine vote flip was to specific change from a vote for Trump to Hillary.
3) All these results happened in conservative areas of voting–not in areas where Hillary was expected to win handily.
4) Vote flipping was only happening in 1 or 2 out of every 10 machines.
5) Most people were catching the errors and calling vote officials to correct the machines.
The first 4 points above prove that this can only be programming manipulation—not random errors. What is also noteworthy, which you can see in the Pennsylvania news report above, is that election and media officials never drew the conclusion that machines had been tampered with as proof of vote fraud.
Not a single official would even hint that vote fraud was a possibility. That shows some pre-conditioning and bias to defend the superficial “integrity” of the election process. All they could talk about is how the machines were either taken off line or recalibrated to fix the problem. Recalibrating would, of course, take the machine back to its original state and erase the manipulating code.
There is also the potential of vote tally manipulation after voting is complete. Since vote flipping shows up on the screen, where most people catch the error, I think this type of fraud is on the way out. Changing the tally at the end of the process is less visible and can only be detected by a detailed audit of all the vote receipts, which is never done.
That may be the reason why we’ve seen no call by the Clinton campaign for any recounts, even in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania where the margin of victory for Trump was so slim. I suspect that an audit would show significant vote fraud in favor of Clinton, and the PTB don’t want any evidence manipulation of voting computers discovered. The coverup would be messy.
I also suspect that the delay in reporting highly democratic areas in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan was to let vote tally officials time to decide if they could get away with fudging the tally in these areas where it wouldn’t arouse suspicion if Clinton had an even bigger lead. And, since the polls gave Clinton a projected lead before the election, this kind of fraud wouldn’t seem out of line with polling data. Ultimately, they may have decided against it for a couple of other reasons:
1) Trump was winning too many other swing states and they’d have to manipulate the end tally of more than one state, which increases the risk of discovery and collusion.
2) Trump was increasing his lead slightly all those swing states even as the votes counted got close to 100%. So, a sudden surge by Clinton to top Trump would force Trump to call for a recount, which might expose the final tally manipulation.
Keep in mind that no major recount has ever been allowed since electronic voting machines have been in place. Computer audits have taken place, and are mandated by law in some locations. And, all have shown computer manipulation of the count, but election officials wave it off as an error, change the final tally to match the computer’s addition, and go on as if everything is OK.
Overall, I would say the Democratic ground game is at least as effective as computer vote flipping in permanently increasing Democratic voters. Helping minorities fill out voter registration papers, and picking them up and transporting them to the polls accounts for many hundreds of thousands of additional votes in swing states where minorities are a high percentage of the population. They don’t bother to do this in areas where conservatives are a majority.
It is also apparent that millions of Hispanic illegals vote each year. In fact, this year Obama committed an impeachable offense by encouraging illegals to vote—telling them that their fears of being deported or being rejected at the polls are unfounded, as Breitbart.com reported.
Obama took time to be interviewed on Friday by a Latino Youtube host. “Many of the millennials, dreamers, undocumented, um, citizens — and I call them citizens because they contribute to this country — are fearful of voting. So if I vote, will immigration know where I live? Will they come for my family and deport us?” asked host Gina Rodriguez on MiTu, a program on Youtube.com and Facebook. “Not true,” Obama replied.
President Barack Obama’s Nov. 4 suggestion that voting by illegal aliens in the 2016 presidential election will not be investigated is “absolutely shocking,” says the former Republican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer.
Neil Cavuto [in a separate interview] turned to Brewer for her take on Obama’s bizarre statement. “I can’t believe how blithely the President of the United States, the keeper of our Constitution, and all the rights that come with it, including the right to vote, legal citizens having the right to vote, blithely dismissing that,” Cavuto said. [And that’s the impeachable offense.]
“Shocking. Absolutely shocking,” Brewer said. “He should have absolutely set her straight that if you’re not a citizen, you don’t get to vote. And just because you’re in our country ‘undocumented,’ you’re not a citizen. They want to blur the lines.”
Media Bias: Traditionally, the media is quick to inform people who the “top candidates” are for the presidency as the first step in manipulating public opinion. In the process they exclude those they don’t want to run. Both Romney and Trump defied that system by having enough money and notoriety to inject themselves into the race in spite of the media filtering process.
But once in this race the media had to deal with Trump’s rash comments which were a magnet for media coverage. Personally, I don’t think Trump did this on purpose, as a calculated move. I’m convinced it’s just part of his personality. He’s brash and impulsive and doesn’t have the mental control skills to restrain himself when speaking off the cuff.
At first the media loved it because it gave them an opportunity to bash Trump and embarrass any conservative who took similar positions to Trump’s imprecise way of representing the issues. But after it became apparent that Trump’s popularity increased the more the media attacked him, they were stuck. Trump was now a major force to be reckoned with. Inevitably, their only weapon was to keep up the attacks on Trump as he continued to hand them ammunition every time he opened his mouth.
But here’s the key question: How can conservatives complain about media bias when they themselves are embarrassed by much of what Trump says, and especially his explicit comments about groping women, as the Access Hollywood tapes exposed? Wasn’t the media justified in being critical of Trump?
Yes they were, but that’s not the issue when it comes to bias. There was an easily discernable difference between how they treated Trump’s negative issues versus those of Hillary Clinton.
1) They turned Trump’s verbal gaffs into a drumbeat, repeating them over and over again. There was no drumbeat over Hillary Clinton’s Foundation corruption or the email scandal, despite the big opportunity for analysis that it presented. In fact, whenever they would mention these problems, they would interview someone who downplayed them or excused them.
2) The media went to great lengths to search out and broadcast the minutest details of Trump’s indiscretions. They had paid staffers calling every contestant involved in Trump’s Miss Universe pageant to find any who had a negative experience with Trump. However, when talking about Hillary’s Foundation corruption, they would avoid even a detailed recitation of the charges. They also failed to interview former intelligence officials who were outraged by Hillary’s use of a private email server for classified messages. They would never try to track down, let alone mention, the credible evidence of Bill’s predation on women, nor give air time to one of Bill Clinton’s former mistresses who testified that Bill told her directly about Hillary’s use of cocaine and her preference for women sexual partners.
3) The media selectively interviewed Republican women who were uniformly outraged by Trump’s behavior and broadcast their comments. But moral outrage is easy to showcase in a one sided manner if you don’t also present those women with equivalent opportunities to express moral outrage over Clinton’s misconduct. They never search out Democratic women who might be outraged by Hillary’s use of cocaine, being a lesbian, or using “pay to play” tactics to enrich her Foundation while Sec. of State. Sadly, most Democratic women probably would be tolerant of the lesbian charges, being politically correct.
All of these are indications of heavy media bias toward Hillary Clinton. The day after the election Judy Woodruff of NPR’s News Hour brought on air a cross section of commentators to discuss how Trump won the election.
J D Vance, a writer who specializes in white, working class Americans and how they feel disrespected, started off with a blockbuster—that this sector of America feels vindicated by Trump, in that they knew the “media is corrupt and they were lying about the outcome of the election, and Donald Trump really proved them right… So I think there should be some soul searching among the press who predicted that Trump would lose handily; and of course that didn’t happen… that corrodes some of the trust that people back home have in the media.”
Woodruff excused the media by saying they were just following the polls, which they don’t produce. There was a brief discussion about whether the media was looking for data to affirm their liberal bias.
In the next segment she decided to try and get 3 commentators to help out by addressing whether or not the media was “lying” as JD Vance had suggested. Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post was quick to deny there was any lying or intent to deceive, as would be expected from that very biased mainstream paper –“nothing so venal,” she said. My response would be that manipulation and deception can be more subtle than outright lying, but it’s still manipulation.
One of those invited to participate was Steve Deace, a prominent conservative talk show host from Iowa. He’s been on before because he’s anti-Trump, but this time he turned the tables on the News Hour. Co-host Hari Sreenivasan asked him “how much of this is a disconnect between those who are writing the stories and those out there living them in middle America?”
“I think there is a massive disconnect” “How many people in the news room right here now, at PBS, how many are Pro-Life? How many go to church or to mass at least once a week? How many voted for Trump? There’s a lot of talk of diversity nowadays, but there’s a huge lack of ideological diversity in our newsrooms. And I think that’s creating a massive disconnect, nationwide.”
You could tell his questions hit home, as Judy and Hari had no comeback. Woodruff was noticeable shaken by the clarity of the logic and did not try to deny that they were all anti-Trump. She stammered on about how we try to be neutral and present both sides, but his point was clear. When you are biased to this degree, you can’t present both sides in a balanced way.
Polling Bias: Pollsters are scrambling to explain away how all the mainstream pollsters got it wrong. The Hill.com details just how bad the polling was:
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, had long said the polls were biased against him. His claims — dismissed and mocked by the experts — turned out to be true.
Going into Election Day, a strong majority of pollsters and election modelers forecast that Democrat Hillary Clinton would coast to victory, with many predicting she would sweep the battlegrounds and win north of 300 electoral votes.
The final University of Virginia Center for Politics model had Clinton winning 322 electoral votes to 216 for Trump, with Clinton winning Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all states that she lost.
Liberals lashed out at data guru Nate Silver for giving Trump a 35 percent chance of victory heading into Election Day, claiming he was putting his thumb on the scale for Trump by making the race appear closer than it was.
Of the 11 national polls to be released in the final week of the race, only two — a Los Angeles Times/USC survey and one from IBD/TIPP — showed Trump with the lead. The L.A. Times survey was criticized as “experimental” by industry experts for polling the same pool of people and for the way it weighted black voters.
But for the second consecutive presidential cycle, the L.A. Times and IBD/TIPP surveys were among the most accurate, making them the gold standard going forward.
The rest of the polls showed Clinton with leads of between 2 and 6 points, boosting the Democrat to a 3.3-point national lead in the RealClearPolitics average.
And the battleground data was just as biased against Trump. There were no surveys released this year from Wisconsin that showed Trump with a lead.
In Michigan and Pennsylvania, deep blue states the GOP candidate has not won in decades, polls showed the race tightening in the home stretch, but only one poll, from Trafalgar Group, showed Trump with the lead.
Election modelers declined to flip either state into Trump’s column, even as the Clinton campaign rushed furiously to defend those states in the final days of the election [showing she knew there were problems]. And Trump won North Carolina by nearly 4 points, despite polls showing a toss-up there.
But state after state told the same story for Trump and Clinton. White working-class voters — the silent majority that Trump said was being underestimated by pollsters — swarmed for him on Election Day, particularly in the Rust Belt states, and helped him beat the polls.
Clinton could not turn out women, or the Obama coalition of minorities and young voters, in the same numbers to keep pace.
Pollster John Zogby believes that many in the industry weighted their polls too heavily in favor of Democrats, pointing to polls that had an 8- to 9-point advantage for the party, when it should have been in the 4- to 5-point range, he said.
There’s a reason for all this emphasis on weighting. The polling industry has become very crowded and competitive leading to cost cutting measures—meaning using less people and more computer driven “robocalling.” Also, the number of people accessible to pollsters has dwindled dramatically with the increasing number of people with cellphones (where robocalls are prohibited) as opposed to landlines where that is allowed. It’s just too expensive to have phone banks do a lot of telephone polling, so pollsters take the dwindling number of existing respondents and multiple their responses to approximate what they think exists among society. That’s called weighting. This may explain why even the Trump pollsters got it wrong.
However, as pollsters’ databases age, they become more inaccurate and less representative of what’s real. Coupled with the fact that pollsters already play tricks with weighting to fudge the numbers toward the Left, they can easily get it wrong.
Many pollsters excused their performance by saying that millions of Trump voters were “silent” meaning not in their database. That may be true, but that is the pollster’s own fault since they long ago stopped spending serious money on broadening those limited databases.
One of the most serious examples of manipulated polling happened in Utah. The week prior to the election, Utah polls were saying that Evan McMullin, (the Romney and establishment choice to run an independent spoiler campaign against Trump) was nearly even with Trump (22% to 23%). It was all the rage to anticipate how McMullin was going to deny Trump the electoral college majority and throw the race to the House of Representatives, who would pick McMullin.
Nonsense. Trump ended up with almost half the vote, and McMullin got his predicted 23%. How could the polls be right on about McMullin’s numbers and be off by 25 points with Trump? -Pure manipulation.
Third Party effects: With so much dissatisfaction with both Trump and Clinton, third party candidates on both the Left and Right could have had a large effect. It turns out they didn’t. While support for the quasi Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and his globalist VP William Weld was as high as 10% when Trump grabbed the nomination, their final support level came in at only 3.4%.
In like manner Jill Stein of the Leftist Green party claimed 5% support to start but ended up with slightly less than 1%. But that’s not the entire story. I think that’s because the initial outrage against Trump’s tone gave way to heightened fears about living under a Hillary regime. People wanted to see her defeated more than stand on principle. However, combined totals for both third party candidates did cost Trump and Clinton votes in 4 battleground states as MSNBC noted,
In Florida, Hillary Clinton lost by about 1.4% of the vote – but if Jill Stein’s supporters and half of Gary Johnson’s backers had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state.
Similarly, in Pennsylvania, Clinton lost by about 1.1% of the vote – but if Jill Stein’s supporters and half of Gary Johnson’s backers had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state.
In Wisconsin, Clinton lost by about 1% of the vote – but if Stein’s supporters had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state. In Michigan, Clinton appears to be on track to lose by about 0.3% of the vote – but if half of Stein’s supporters had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state.
Those are big assumptions. I’m not at all inclined to think that 50% of libertarians would have countenanced Hillary Clinton.
