Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have claimed “the popular vote,” but the truth is that the system is so exposed to fraud and closed to oversight that nobody knows who’s right.

Opponents of the Electoral College are attacking it again, claiming it doesn’t represent the will of the people as evidenced by the popular vote in the latest presidential election. With votes still being counted as of Thanksgiving weekend, Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine lead Donald Trump and Mike Pence in the popular vote count by about one percent of the 130 million votes counted so far (48 percent to 47 percent), with Libertarian candidates Gary Johnson and Bill Weld playing the role of spoilers in the popular vote, garnering about three percent.

Hillary’s lead in the popular vote is expected to increase to about two percentage points, as most of the still-uncounted votes are in Democrat stronghold states such as New York and California.

Some point to the Libertarian ticket, which got considerably better media coverage in this campaign amidst the anti-Trump bias in the mainstream news media, as the fly in the electoral ointment. But the Libertarian ticket was comprised of two former Republican governors who could have been expected to siphon more votes from Trump than Hillary. On the other hand, it could be argued that the ticket’s position on certain issues such as abortion may have attracted more votes that otherwise would have gone to Clinton. Regardless, it is clear that no one got a majority of the popular vote according to the official totals.

But there are reasons to question the popular vote totals, and Hillary’s victory therein. First, burning questions exist regarding how accurate and honest the vote counts are. And these questions come from a wide range of the political spectrum. It’s no longer just Alex Jones, True the Vote, Bev Harris, and The New American publishing articles pointing out dangers in our elections. Undercover reporters from Project Veritas have filmed political insiders admitting what appears to be widespread voter fraud, with voters being bussed to different polling sites and backup plans to transport them via carpools in case stealth becomes necessary. Even leftists are questioning the outcome, though from a pro-Hillary point of view. CNN, in an online article updated November 22, reported that computer scientists have examined the vote totals and found “a questionable trend of Clinton performing worse in counties that relied on paperless electronic voting machines compared to paper ballots and optical scanners.” It is not known if the differences are caused by the voting technologies or from demographic differences.

Project Veritas Films a Democratic Operative

As to the claims that the vote was skewed in Hillary’s direction, as previously reported by The New American online on October 21, 2016, an undercover reporter from Project Veritas used a hidden camera while interviewing a major Democratic Party operative, Scott Foval, who boasted, “We’ve been rigging elections for 50 years”:

It’s a very easy thing for Republicans to say, “Well they’re bussing people in.” Well, you know what? We’ve been bussing people in to deal with you f***ing a**holes for 50 years and we’re not going to stop now.

The Project Veritas cameras also captured some of the strategies used to avoid getting caught and getting prosecuted when employing repeater voters to commit vote fraud:

Are they going to charge each individual of voter fraud? Or are they going to go after the facilitator for conspiracy which they can prove? It’s one thing if all these people drive up in their personal cars. If there’s a bus involved? That changes the dynamic. It’s the legality, because you can prove conspiracy if there’s a bus. If there are cars it’s much harder to prove.

Another tactic used to keep from getting caught is by having vital tasks accomplished by several organizations that secretly work together while supposedly not coordinating with each other. As Foval put it, “We talk about lots of things we don’t talk about.”

Foval’s claims are consistent with recent findings of volunteer organizations such as True the Vote (TTV). Its nationwide network of volunteers has uncovered large numbers of phantom voter registrations across the country. The New American has attended True the Vote’s national summits and interviewed TTV volunteers, who have explained in detail how obstacles are put in their way when they attempt to become election observers or attempt to learn how many votes have been cast using phantom voter registrations.

While political campaigns build images of mobilizing support via positive encouragement of voters, Foval’s further remarks gave insight into a more negative aspect of mobilizing people in political campaigns:

We have to do a better job of making our people do what they’re supposed to do. Not asking them. Making them. Not expecting them and taking them for granted but beating the s**t out of them and then making them do it.

Project Veritas Films a New York City Elections Commissioner

Foval’s boasts about Democratic fraud were seconded by a completely unrelated Democrat with insider information. In New York, one of Hillary’s stronghold states, one of Project Veritas’ undercover reporters interviewed Alan Schulkin, a New York City commissioner on its Board of Elections. Schulkin told the reporter:

I think there is a lot of voter fraud. Right. Like I say, people don’t realize certain neighborhoods in particular, they bus people around to vote.

Schulkin also pointed to the lax standards for New York City ID requirements.

But they didn’t vet the people to see who they really are. Anybody can go in there and say, I’m Joe Smith, I want an ID card. It’s absurd. There is a lot of fraud, not just voter fraud, all kinds of fraud.

When even people inside the system admit to the lack of credibility in New York’s vote totals, that’s hardly a strong endorsement for using popular vote totals as justification for ending the Electoral College.

How Much Fraud Was There in the Absentee Vote?

A second reason to question the popular vote totals is the absentee vote. Absentee ballots have long been an opportunity for fraud, and the elections of 2016 were no exception. In an October 28 press release from Katherine Hernandez Rundle, a state attorney in Miami-Dade County, Rundle announced the arrest of Gladys Coego, who had been hired as a temporary worker opening absentee ballots. The press release stated:

It appeared that Ms. Coego concealed a black pen in her purse and brought it into the ballot sorting room. The Miami-Dade Elections Department immediately contacted members of the State Attorney’s Multi-Agency Public Corruption. Ms. Coego provided a voluntary statement to investigators and admitted that she had marked a number of absentee ballots involving the Miami-Dade County mayoral race that had been left blank, marking each ballot for candidate Raquel Regalado.

While the press release didn’t cite any alterations of presidential votes, it does show the vulnerability of absentee ballots for all contests on the ballot.

Some of Hillary’s popular vote plurality comes from states such as Oregon and Washington, where virtually all the ballots are cast via absentee balloting, and opportunities for absentee ballot fraud are much greater. The loose chain of custody for ballots in Oregon was documented in John Fund’s book Stealing Elections — How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, where he cited an example by Melody Rose, a professor at Oregon State University:

Rose herself once stopped by a library after hours to deposit her ballot, only to find an overflowing bin of ballots in the lobby. She could have taken all of them to her car and done some creative pruning based on where people lived or their gender.


John Fund should have also added that Professor Rose had the opportunity to stuff the ballot box with fraudulent ballots. And she wasn’t the only person with behind-closed-doors access to those bins of ballots that were left unattended in government buildings. All manner of employees, such as librarians, janitors, security guards, students with after-hours access to the building, and numerous others have access to the government buildings where ballots are dropped off in states that offer unrestricted absentee balloting. It should also be noted that government employees, especially those with government patronage jobs, have a history of being involved in electoral fraud schemes, and access like this is an open invitation for electoral fraud.

Another weakness in absentee ballots is that many states allow absentee ballots to arrive after election day, provided they have postmarks on or before election day. This can be an opportunity to do a little extra stuffing of the ballot box if a contest becomes surprisingly close. Consider the arrests in the aftermath of a contest to guess the score in the 1987 Super Bowl. The suspects were accused of postmarking empty envelopes before the deadline date, writing down the final score after the game ended, and bypassing the stamp cancelation process by putting the letters directly into outgoing mail sacks the next day. The New York Times of April 20, 1988 said:

Fourteen postal employees and three associates in New York City were accused yesterday of using their post-office know-how to win a 1987 Super Bowl “Pick the Score” contest.

They were charged in a Federal complaint of pre-dating their entries, and waiting until after the game to “predict” the winning score. They won most of the $100,000 awarded in the contest.

Don’t forget, government employees are frequently involved in many different roles in vote-fraud schemes. Many of them owe their jobs to people in the political establishment, and they are often called on to use their governmental positions to benefit the political bosses.

And why aren’t the absentee ballots counted immediately? All that is needed to count extra absentee ballots is to add extra ballot counters. It could be a deliberate slow count, a stall for time while the needed number of extra ballots with appropriate postmarks is being calculated. Slow counts have been known in the past to be opportunities for mischief.

Moreover, add to this that most absentee ballots are counted behind closed doors. There was a time when the American public had unrestricted access to observe all aspects of elections, except for the marking of the secret ballots. That openness is a safeguard that needs to be restored to our elections. Absentee balloting should return to being used only when justified. It must be mandated that the ballots must arrive by election day, and the process must be open to public monitoring. Until then, vote totals including widespread usage of absentee ballots should not diminish the credibility of the Electoral College.

Were the Vote Totals Subject to Tampering?

A third reason to question the veracity of popular vote totals is vote tampering, a process made easy by electronic voting.

Elections expert Bev Harris recently appeared on Alex Jones’ Infowars news show and unveiled a computer program that was written by white-hat hacker Bennie Smith. (White-hat hackers are good guys who apply hacking skills to identify and fix security flaws in computer systems.) Smith’s program, called Fraction Magic, is capable of altering vote totals from the top down. That means he can specify a desired final total, and the computer then replaces the actual vote totals and subtotals all the way down to the precinct level with plausible but dishonest totals. The fact that such a program exists doesn’t mean it was used, but it does mean there’s a security flaw that needs to be fixed.

The New American and many others have advocated for years that electronic voting equipment should have a voter-verified paper trail that can be used by the voter to ensure the computer has done as instructed by the voter and can also be used for manual recounts. That is an important first step. But that is not the only paper trail needed. The vote totals at the precinct level need to be printed and posted publicly at the precinct voting site as well as posted online immediately for the public to know. Additionally, the public needs to be allowed to witness and photograph the vote count as a public event.

But there is a disturbing trend in American elections to make precinct vote totals secret and use secure means of transmission to keep these totals secret until after they have been collected by a centralized authority. Secrecy tactics such as this have been used by dictators in their dishonest elections:

Another dirty deed, very closely related to behind-closed-door vote counts, is keeping precinct vote totals secret from the public while forwarding them to the central election administration. This gives the powers at the top the final opportunity to review the vote totals and adjust them as necessary to achieve the desired outcomes.

At the Iowa Republican Caucuses early this year, the votes were counted in front of the caucus attendees, but the county chairman recorded those totals on a piece of paper, which he put in a manila envelope, and would not let the news media see what he recorded. The vote totals were securely transmitted to a central location using modern encryption technology. The liberal news media that reported on this generally put a positive spin on it by focusing on the impressiveness of the technology, failing to ask what good was being accomplished by concealing public information from the public.

Were the vote totals and subtotals in the 2016 general elections altered by such a program as Fraction Magic? Probably not — at least not extensively. Many local voting officials printed their precinct’s totals, and those paper copies, where saved, could be used for an audit. Another reason is because Donald Trump raised the issue of whether or not the vote was being rigged, something Republican candidates generally do not do. This, coupled with news reporting in the alternative news media, raised the public awareness. That may have served as a deterrent in case there were such plans. Let’s reopen the doors and allow the public to monitor this electoral process.

Repeater Voting Has a History in Election Frauds

A fourth reason not to trust the popular vote total is repeater voting.

Repeater voting, in which people make multiple appearances at numerous election locations, and sometimes multiple visits to the same location during an election, is commonplace. It’s no wonder why certain segments of the political landscape are in love with early voting, are opposed to allowing cameras to be used even outside of voting locations, and are opposed to voter ID laws.

How many fraudulent votes can a repeater cast in an election, especially now that early voting has extended the number of days to vote? There have been investigations of fraudulent elections in the past. In 1869, the U.S. Congress investigated frauds in New York in the previous year’s presidential election. The Report of the Select Committee on Alleged New York Election Frauds stated:

These frauds were the result of a systematic plan of gigantic proportions, stealthily prearranged and boldly executed, not merely by bands of degraded desperadoes, but with the direct sanction, approval, or aid of many prominent officials and citizens of New York.... They were aided by an immense, corrupt, and corrupting official patronage and power, which not only encouraged, but shielded and protected, the guilty principals and their aiders and abetters.

The report went on to say:

Many hundreds of persons voted in New York city from two to forty times or more, each under assumed or fictitious names, fraudulently registered for the purpose.

If a repeater could use fraudulent voter registrations to vote as often as 40 times in an election in 1868, he could fraudulently vote at least that many times today. The techniques of stealth in repeater voting in the 1800s were documented in James B. Glentworth’s book A Statement of the Frauds on the Elective Franchise in the City of New York in the Fall of the Year 1838 and Spring of 1839:

To most of the men a slip of paper was given, with the name and residence they were to assume written upon it.... Frequently alterations were made among the men during the election, by exchanging hats and coats among themselves.... These men boasted of having voted in several of the different wards, and in some instances multiple times in the same ward.

Forbidding public access and photography makes the repeater’s job less risky. For example, if someone gets multiple photographs of a repeater in the act of voting in a state such as Texas where it’s illegal to use a camera at the polls or within 100 feet of the outside door, the photographic evidence, having been obtained illegally, can’t be used in court to prosecute the repeater.

We need to reinstate elections as public events, in public places, with the public allowed access to witness to assure the elections are being run accurately and honestly.

How Effective Are Voter ID Laws?

A fifth reason to question popular vote totals is the lack of ubiquitous and strict voter ID laws. Some people say state laws requiring voter ID are useless. After all, with today’s technology it’s easy to put a repeater’s photo on multiple fake IDs. But as in the difference between transporting repeaters to the polls in buses versus cars, it’s more discreet to camouflage repeater voting by suppressing voter ID laws than by equipping repeaters with fake IDs. Sooner or later a large stash of fake IDs with the same person’s photo on multiple IDs would be discovered. Can you imagine what would happen if a car with multiple occupants got into a fatal crash and the accident investigators found each person in the car in possession of perhaps 20 or 50 fake photo IDs, and it was subsequently learned they were traveling from one polling location to another? The consequences could be as severe as when a courier for the Illuminati was found dead, and the authorities discovered messages on his body. That led to an investigation of the Illuminati.

Voter ID laws at the state level are constitutional, and they serve as a deterrent to repeater voting. They should be strengthened to include an indication of citizenship. Until that happens, how can the popular vote totals from states with lax voter ID requirements be considered more credible than the Electoral College?

Currently, Donald Trump and many in the alternative news media are claiming that millions of votes were illegally cast by non-citizens and that repeat voting took place. Many establishment news sources, such as the front page of the New York Times for November 28, have described this as a baseless claim. This controversy could be resolved by having Trump pick a few precincts where he thinks this has happened and use the list of persons who voted to see if they really exist, if they are are eligible to vote, and whether or not they voted.

This type of verification was done in the infamous Ballot Box 13 scandal in the senate primary runoff of 1948 in Texas where 200 votes were added after Lyndon Johnson gave orders to “Find the votes.” J. Evetts Haley, in his book A Texan Looks at Lyndon, described how the list of voters was used to gather evidence of illegal votes being cast in Precinct 13: “202 new names had been added alphabetically in blue ink, whereas the original list was in black.”  Haley went on to describe what happened when attempting to vet these voters:

They found grave difficulty in locating the addresses they had jotted down except three, “whose last known address was the cemetery,” one of whom, according to the church records, had been there for four years. At least two of those they did locate swore they had not voted, while others shrugged off their questions with the frank admission that people in Parr’s province who did not talk prospered better and lived longer than those who did.

This type of follow-up should be done after all major elections, especially this one.

The Founding Fathers of the American Republic never intended to calculate a popular vote for president. Part of the reasoning for the Electoral College was the fact that each state has the right to determine the qualifications for voting, and each state should have the final say over their electoral votes. South Carolina’s presidential electors were elected by the state legislature.

Today, many are calling for the abolition of the Electoral College and/or for extra-constitutional federal oversight and election standards. Yet, federal intervention under the guise of securing the ballot could have the opposite result. About the only major difference in voter qualifications in different states is whether or not to allow former felons to vote. But there are huge differences in how accurately and honestly the elections are conducted in different states.

The Founding Fathers never wanted to see the quality of elections degrade to the point seen in America today. The Electoral College now serves an additional purpose: It protects the electoral votes in each state from being adversely affected by fraud or sloppiness in another state. No matter how much electoral fraud or sloppiness is committed in Chicago, that affects only Illinois’ electoral votes, not those of any other state. That can’t be said for the national popular vote.

So who really won the popular vote?  Unless we clean up the potential for sloppiness and fraud and implement a verification procedure that ensures the votes are cast by real voters, we’ll never really be sure.

Photo of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton: AP Images