Investigation by Anonymous Provides Evidence that Bernie was Targeted in AZ Voter Suppression
Last edited Wed Mar 30, 2016, 07:26 PM - Edit history (1)
For those of you who are not familiar with the group known as “Anonymous”, perhaps their most amazing accomplishment was their foiling of Karl Rove’s attempt to electronically steal Ohio for Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential Election. As it turned out, Obama didn’t need Ohio to win the Presidency in 2012, but that wasn’t known at the time that Ohio was called for Obama on Election Day, and Karl Rove had a conniption fit on FOX News over the call. The reason that Anonymous was ready to foil Rove’s plan in Ohio was largely due to the fact that he had successfully stolen Ohio electronically for George W. Bush in the 2004 Presidential Election, when Ohio was the state that decided the winner of the election. In other words, I would call “Anonymous” a secret voter protection organization with extra-ordinary skills, especially computer skills.
As such, they were as concerned about the voter suppression that took place in the Democratic Primary in Arizona last Tuesday as much as anyone, and they were determined to investigate the reasons for it. There were two aspects of the voter suppression. One was a severe reduction in polling places, which resulted in voting lines as long as half a mile, and thousands of people waiting to vote for several hours. I discussed that aspect of it in this post. The other was that many people were not allowed to vote when they finally got to the front of the line because it was claimed that they were not registered Democrats. Between those two voter suppression methods, the end result was that Election Day voters in Maricopa County, by far the largest county in Arizona, accounted for less than 15% of the vote in the Democratic Primary that day (early voters accounting for more than 85% of the votes). This hurt Bernie Sanders tremendously, because while more than 60% of early voters voted for Clinton, more than 60% of Election Day voters voted for Sanders.
Anonymous’ investigation, reported in an article titled: “Anonymous Report: Was Arizona’s Voter Registration Hacked and Changed?” centered on the other aspect of voter suppression in Arizona – the claiming that voters who knew themselves to be registered with their Party were actually not registered. In this investigation, Anonymous searched the Internet to find all the claims that they could of voters who were disenfranchised in this way, and they attempted to ascertain their preferred candidate, by phone if they could, and otherwise from the Internet claim. The results are startling:
Unknown Party or preference: 25
GOP: 12
Clinton: 2
Sanders: 113
Keep in mind that this is not the extent of those who were disenfranchised in this way. These are only the claims that Anonymous could find on the Internet. Anonymous gives an example of the extent of the disenfranchisement by pointing to Phoenix (a big part of Maricopa County), which has a Democratic mayor, where 80,000 Republicans voted on Election Day, compared to only 33,000 Democrats.
Clearly there could be some bias in this survey. Maybe Sanders voters were more likely to voice their complaints of disenfranchisement than Clinton voters. Maybe a proportion of the Bernie claims are lies (I don’t believe that at all, but I can’t prove it). But this was as close to a random sample as Anonymous could get. And the extent of the difference between the Clinton and Sanders disenfranchisement in this survey is so huge that it is very hard to believe that most of it was due to bias.
Conclusion
Here is Anonymous’ conclusions in full (I don’t understand some of the technical computer jargon):
At this point, Anonymous quite obviously does not have the required proof to point a finger at any particular person or campaign for the findings in our database and of our vulnerability scan. Non-conspiratorial alternative explanations may emerge for why perhaps tens of thousands of voters showed up to the polls expecting to be able to vote with the party they had registered with previously and were either denied or forced to vote provisionally. What is unmistakable, at this point, is that something went very badly wrong well beyond the lack of polling stations. The evidence does point to the possibility that something more malicious is happening.
In that vein, we should note that there are now likewise dozens and dozens of reports of Sanders supporters in places like Pennsylvania and New York, with upcoming closed primaries, finding that their own registrations have been switched. One such report arrived in our inbox on Friday morning, the final day for new voter registrations in New York. The e-mailer told us that the website for New York was going up and down intermittently. We asked what link they were using. When we checked it, our Tor Browser informed us that the website was insecure, presenting an invalid encryption certificate.
Suspicious, for damn sure. We’ll allow readers to draw their own further conclusions at this point.
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