Republicans shut down the polling sites in Arizona to save money, and also this was decided well before anyone knew Bernie would be a contender. Same with all the voter registry purges. Bernie is right that he attracted a lot of people who don't regularly vote... which explains why they weren't registered to vote. Another of his main supporter groups are college students, who have been being purged from voter rolls for years due to frequent mailing address changes (this happened to me in Pennsylvania in 2008). There are more logical explanations for this than can be mentioned here, Occam's Razor.
Same for exit polls. The author notes that Clinton voters were more likely to vote early, which would logically cause them to be under-represented in exit polls. Also the "enthusiasm gap". Also lots of people have written about how poor exit polls are at predicting outcomes (http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ten-reasons-why-you-shou...). Exit polls are notoriously bad, which is why they're basically only fodder for the cable news industry.
The "saving money" argument is always used to explain the reduction of the number of polling sites but it is not a credible one when considering that only very specific locations are being impacted.
Also, the volume of purged voters is inexplicably high ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORoXanoqXwQ ) and many troubling irregularities have been reported such as cases of forged signatures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k6YAEU-eDE
Lots of very strong claims made without any evidence.
The fact that voting machines are insecure does not mean that fraud occurred.
> When an exit poll or two is outside the margin of error, it denotes failure in the polling; when eight defy it — egregiously so — that indicates systemic electoral fraud.
Or it indicates systemic problems in the methodology used to conduct exit polls, such as incorrect assumptions in sampling. The author suggests that the fact that exit polls of the Republican primaries were accurate means that exit polls of the Democratic primaries must also have been accurate. Given that Republican and Democratic voters tend to have very different demographics, I would question that assumption.
The author of this article acknowledges the possibility that the polls could just be wrong, but gets tripped up when the Republican polls seem to be more accurate than the Democratic polls -- and then concludes that the only explanation must be fraud.
I think what's really going on is that older voters and younger voters behave differently, affecting the accuracy of the polls for one set of voters more than the other.
Fivethirtyeight has explained away the exit poll issue very easily. Due to the way they are collected, they have an inherent bias toward young voters. Young voters are overwhelmingly pro Sanders. This results in the exit polls being biased towards Sanders. If this is the case, the margin of errors are worthless because they assume a representative sample.
The voter suppression thing is certainly a problem, but it is a big leap to say it is only a problem for Sanders or proves anything nefarious.
There are many distinctions to be made when it comes to voter suppression. The first category we are seeing during most elections is the legal voter suppression where voters cannot vote because of stringent requirements. However, we've seen numerous cases of unexplained voter suppression during these elections where voters purely disappeared from the voter roll without any explanations.
I am not saying this is favoring Clinton over Sanders but it certainly undermines the trust anyone can have regarding the final results.
Why would Hillary need to rig anything? It's been pretty obvious that she's going to win the election since the start.
Regarding the author's points, he doesn't mention anything I find particularly compelling. Most of it seems to be built on shaky logic or draws weak connections between points. If the exit polls were really that big of an issue, we'd see political analysis (aka the experts) reporting on this.
It's really not that obvious... Sanders' support has been stronger than Hillary's in most areas. Of course Hillary's Super Delegate support is significant. That said, it doesn't seem so obvious to me.
I'm not a D or R, so have to horse in this part of either race.
I agree that the author's points could have been developed in a more compelling manner but I think the purpose of this article is to draw attention on the topic and open the debate.
[+] [-] daughart|10 years ago|reply
Same for exit polls. The author notes that Clinton voters were more likely to vote early, which would logically cause them to be under-represented in exit polls. Also the "enthusiasm gap". Also lots of people have written about how poor exit polls are at predicting outcomes (http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ten-reasons-why-you-shou...). Exit polls are notoriously bad, which is why they're basically only fodder for the cable news industry.
[+] [-] DamienSF|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GabrielF00|10 years ago|reply
The fact that voting machines are insecure does not mean that fraud occurred.
> When an exit poll or two is outside the margin of error, it denotes failure in the polling; when eight defy it — egregiously so — that indicates systemic electoral fraud.
Or it indicates systemic problems in the methodology used to conduct exit polls, such as incorrect assumptions in sampling. The author suggests that the fact that exit polls of the Republican primaries were accurate means that exit polls of the Democratic primaries must also have been accurate. Given that Republican and Democratic voters tend to have very different demographics, I would question that assumption.
The author is holding up exit polling as a gold standard, but it took me about about five seconds of googling to find a long history of bad exit polls. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/06/outrage...
[+] [-] DamienSF|10 years ago|reply
This is a major issue because even if the fraud is unproven, voters can legitimately be concerned about the accuracy of how votes are being counted.
That said, some statistical analysis research have shown a strong probability of votes being flipped by electronic machines in past elections. Here is the original research paper: http://madisonvoices.com/pdffiles/2008_2012_ElectionsResults...
[+] [-] MilnerRoute|10 years ago|reply
I think what's really going on is that older voters and younger voters behave differently, affecting the accuracy of the polls for one set of voters more than the other.
[+] [-] slg|10 years ago|reply
The voter suppression thing is certainly a problem, but it is a big leap to say it is only a problem for Sanders or proves anything nefarious.
[+] [-] DamienSF|10 years ago|reply
I am not saying this is favoring Clinton over Sanders but it certainly undermines the trust anyone can have regarding the final results.
[+] [-] richard_mcp|10 years ago|reply
Regarding the author's points, he doesn't mention anything I find particularly compelling. Most of it seems to be built on shaky logic or draws weak connections between points. If the exit polls were really that big of an issue, we'd see political analysis (aka the experts) reporting on this.
[+] [-] tracker1|10 years ago|reply
I'm not a D or R, so have to horse in this part of either race.
[+] [-] DamienSF|10 years ago|reply
Several members of Congress are currently discussing the topic ( http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35846-members-of-congress... ). However, it is expected that mainstream media won't echo these talks as it would result in opening a can of worms.