"Chicago Election Official Admits “Numbers Didn’t Match”" [View all]

[kaleckim]

Last edited Mon May 16, 2016, 12:58 PM - Edit history (2)

"Hillary Clinton vs. Bernie Sanders Election Fraud Allegations"

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/13/chicago-election-official-admits-numbers-didnt-match-hillary-clinton-vs-bernie-sanders-election-fraud-allegations/

Jim Allen, Communications Director for the Chicago Board of Elections (BoE), acknowledges that “the numbers didn’t match” initially in the legally mandated 5% audit of voting and tabulating machines after the recent Illinois Democratic primary between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Allen, however, insists that this is simply a “perception issue” and that absolutely no election fraud took place.

Allen was responding by phone to my questions regarding allegations from citizen vote monitoring groups Who’s Counting? – Chicago and the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project (IBIP). Dr. Lora Chamberlain is a leader of Who’s Counting, which works with IBIP to credential election day monitors and joined them this year to audit the audit. IBIP was started in Illinois in the aftermath of the 2000 Al Gore versus George Bush Debacle. A total of six members of the two groups gave affidavit-based testimony at the April 5, 2016 Chicago Board of Elections meeting.

...Four of the people who gave testimony described unbelievable irregularities in detail without a single word of rebuttal about the specifics of how the audit tabulation occurred from the Board. In sharp contrast to a more orderly audit in Rensselaer County, New York, Chamberlain, Michelle Suzanne Gayle, Rebecca Curliss, and William Schickley stated that problems included erasure of tally sheet votes when they didn’t match (then adding some to get to the correct, pre-determined number), attempts to hide the work that was being done or to block the view of monitoring citizens, rapid adding of tallies to tally sheets near the end of the day to make things work, inconsistencies in the way names were read leading employees tallying the results to say “wait, I’m confused” without real redress, most stations having a single person to tally results for particular machines rather than two tally-ers, tally-ers falling asleep or absenting themselves to the bathroom while the results continued to be read-out, double reading of votes that had already been tallied, and multiple methods for cheating or fudging the results when they didn’t match, which was apparently quite often.

Since Chamberlain in particular reported that the mismatches would have meant substantially more votes for Bernie Sanders in a very specific case, I followed up with her to ask if all or most of the mismatches were similarly suggestive of a miscount favoring Clinton. Chamberlain responded, “It appears to us that the inaccuracies were mostly in favor of Hillary,” but she added, “we are not going to say that in a court of law because we didn’t have every table covered every day” and “there was a lot of blocking behavior” by BoE employees throughout the process.