Wednesday, November 23, 2016

MIT and UC Berkeley election experts call for presidential election audit: There's cause for concern

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/11/22/1603289/-MIT-professor-cryptographer-UC-Berkeley-statistician-call-for-a-presidential-election-audit
"Concerns continue to rise regarding the legitimacy of the 2016 United States elections, which gave us Donald Trump, the new president-elect. In the past, fraud concerns like this might have been been considered sour grapes, silliness, and conspiracy theories. But this was not an ordinary election and Donald Trump is not an ordinary candidate.  On election night, when most of the world expected to see the the first woman became a U.S. president, the ballot results came rolling with win after win going to a man — who blatantly lies, incites violence, commits fraud, bullies the disabled, sexually molests women, files bankruptcies, has thousands of lawsuits against him, boasts about not paying taxes, appoints misogynistic white supremacists and witch-hunters to top positions, and choses an anti-choice/anti-LGBT vice president who believes in LGBT conversion therapy and swears he’ll take Roe v. Wade to the “ash heap, where it belongs.” No, this is no normal president-elect and many around the country remain in disbelief, with some terrified. A Washington Post–ABC News poll found that “18% of voters — 33% of Clinton supporters and 1% of Trump supporters — think Trump was not the legitimate winner of the election.” Months before the election, stories began emerging with concerns about the possibility of election hacking. The number of articles continues to grow as the nation’s popular vote rises in favor of the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who now has over 2 million more votes than Donald Trump. Last week UC Berkeley statistician Phillip Stark and MIT professor and cryptographer Ron Rivest called for an audit to double-check and ensure hackers didn’t manipulate our American election results. UC Berkley News reports Stark and Rivest, who are both advisors on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, argue that there are good reasons to conduct a “risk-limiting” audit of the presidential election."