Help Find Out If We Can Observe the California Ballot Count
As you may know, exit polls have been cancelled for the remainder of the primaries. California's Secretary of State, Alex Padilla, when in the California state legislator, took payoffs to stop our state single payer plan. He is also an open Clinton supporter, who has been going around opening Clinton campaign offices.
More than 70% of the primary votes are likely to be mail-in ballots. While those can still be tampered with, swapped out or thrown away, that is much harder to do than rigging voting machines. Every county in California files its own separate election observer plan. Some counties may allow observers at the actual ballot counting. If so, that could make a big difference in what happens with California and the overall final delegate count going into the convention. Clinton is worried enough about California that she has apparently cancelled a bunch of events to go to California. I'm assuming that's less to do campaigning, and more to make sure all the pols in her pocket stay in her pocket. But either way, she's worried.
I am working with others to establish a networking organization to drive progressive change in California, focused on getting more and better progressives elected and more and better progressive legislation passed. We have established a Twitter account: @ca_progressives and a subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CA_Progressives/ The subreddit's first project is to find out which counties, if any, will allow ballot counting observers and then get volunteers in to observe.
MAIL-IN BALLOTS START BEING OPENED AND COUNTED TOMORROW (TUESDAY) MORNING. If anyone is interested in helping with this, please go to the subreddit for more information, or tweet with questions, either to @ca_progressives, or you can tweet me directly: @JL00t. I'll be online at somewhat different times than the person handling the organization's account, so one way or another, someone should be able to answer your questions. At this point, the best thing to do might be to call the registrars of the most populated counties and simply ask if observers may watch the Vote By Mail and election day ballots being opened and counted. Even if the answer is no, having the question asked might discourage malfeasance. Whatever information you find out, please post it at the subreddit, or tweet it to one of us.
Thanks.
Comments
Clinton in CA
Starting to see ads on TV and heard she is supposed to campaign here for a week. Maybe the state is not as safe as she thought...oh darn lol
exit polling is critical
And taking random samples of the paper mail-in/absentee votes would be an excellent way of checking for discrepancies of final counts.
Also Stuart Davies is working with MoveOn for funding an exit poll for California.
Exit Polling
I'll be happy if someone does third party exit polling, if Bernie and his supporters aren't be asked to fund it.
I don't think it should be a primary focus, because almost every single primary's exit poll has shown fraud on the part of the Democratic party establishment on Clinton's behalf. IIRC, US and UN guidelines are if exit polls are off by a point or two, the results are suspect. In New York, the exit polls were off by more than 10 points. Yet all the major media outlets were completely silent about this, as they have been about the consistent discrepancy between the Republican primary exit polls (dead on) and the Democratic primary exit polls (way, way off).
If Padilla, et al., steal California, it will be allowed to stand, even if a robust exit poll shows an extreme discrepancy. The main advantage I can see to an exit poll is similar to what I am advocating: maybe it will tamp down on the trickery, if they know they are being watched. But calling the registrars to ask about volunteer ballot counting observers would take even a handful of people mere hours to do. Getting volunteers in there if it's allowed likewise would cost very little in time and effort, yet could make a real difference.
If anyone is reading this who lives in California, please make a couple of calls tomorrow.
Someone should get The Guardian
and some other non-US media outlets to do the exit polls.
Agree with one change
Let's get international observers to monitor our elections, this has become a necessity, so sad
We can't
The US basically controls the UN and most other international organizations. Carter has come out and said our voting process is too corrupt to even attempt to monitor.
We are on our own.
I heard reports today that volunteers are going around Los Angeles taking people's Bernie ballots. Please spread the word: DO NOT FALL FOR THIS. The Los Angeles registrar and his staff seem to be very honorable. But Padilla would be able to tell who the recent registrants are, and which long term registrants did not vote Clinton last time, and send people out to get those ballots and discard them. That apparently happened in Oregon.
If you can call any CA county registrar today to ask about volunteer observers of the ballot counting, please do: http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting-resources/county-elections-offices/