But Ari Berman of Mother Jones recently reported that in Wisconsin, where Trump was supposed to have won by less than 23,000 of the nearly three million votes cast, as many as 45,000 voters, particularly black voters, were prevented from casting a ballot by voter identification laws designed to disenfranchise them.
Berman cites another study suggesting that in total 200,000 more voters would have participated in the 2016 election had nothing changed since 2012 in how elections were run in Wisconsin, and of course these voters “skewed more African American and more Democrat”.
Even those who were able to vote may not have their votes counted. A few weeks after the election, journalist Gabriel Sherman reported “that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7% fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes,” significantly more than Trump’s margin of victory.
Further, in many swing states, including Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, there were extraordinary discrepancies between the exit polls and the vote tallies. Though it’s common to regard the latter as more reliable than the former, in other parts of the world, exit polls are treated as important verifications of the outcome.
As Alan Gilbert wrote in the Daily Beast: “In Germany, Canada, and many other countries, an initial exit poll is released. And then paper ballots are counted. Where this procedure is used, there is no controversy. If the election is very close, the ballots can easily be recounted. Further, since 2000, the US State Department has used initial exit polling to test the fairness of elections in 14 ‘transitional’ democracies.”
Clinton would have won the election overwhelmingly had she won those states. Perhaps she did. Shortly after the election, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman reported: “In 24 of 28 states, unadjusted exit polls also showed Clinton with vote counts significantly higher than the final official outcome. The likelihood of this happening in an election that is not rigged are in the realm of virtual statistical impossibility.”
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Pennsylvania blocked a recount by mounting outrageous obstacles to the process. Wisconsin prevented a hand recount that might have found machine errors; and the Michigan recount was stopped after enormous errors were detected. The Republican party appeared to be frantic to prevent us from finding out what really happened.
Republicans, with some notable exceptions, have also been eager to prevent any investigation of Russian intervention in the election and collusion between Trump’s associates and the Putin regime.
The evidence for it was substantial and diverse before the election, some of it circumstantial – the Trump team members with strong ties to and clandestine meetings with Russian officials, the odd things Trump himself, Roger Stone, and others said about Vladimir Putin, the Russian government, about WikiLeaks, and about the hacks of the DNC.
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In June 2017, Bloomberg News issued a little-noticed report that voter databases in 39 states, far more than previously believed, had been hacked by Russian operatives before the 2016 election: “In Illinois, investigators found evidence that cyber intruders tried to delete or alter voter data. The hackers accessed software designed to be used by poll workers on Election Day, and in at least one state accessed a campaign finance database.” Did these incursions alter the outcome? We don’t really know.
You don’t have to factor in the Russian intervention or the Trump team’s collusion to regard the election as fatally corrupted. But while the corruption of the voting system seems to have been an achievement of Republican strategists working for decades, the unprecedented role of a foreign government does give an entirely different basis to regard it as illegitimate. As we learn more about the latter, it behooves us not to forget the former, which is as grave a blow to the credibility of the election.
