Greg Palast

For more background, read Greg Palast. He's been on the vote theft beat forever: https://www.gregpalast.com/

Not being a US citizen, I'm always quite stunned by what I perceive as an obsession with polling results. Especially when fundamental flaws in the US voting system (see, for example, http://www.gregpalast.com/latinos-too-lazy-to-vote/) seem to get widely ignored. Sites like http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/ may be great in bringing insightful reflections on statistics to a larger audience, but by focusing exclusively on the maths of elections, they might actually reinforce this ignorance towards actual political issues.

Greg Palast has been someone worth looking into when it comes to these issues http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/3956129.stm http://www.gregpalast.com/2004/ http://www.gregpalast.com/store/?id=13

"Chávez himself read my findings on potential elections theft – to his nation on his TV show – and then he moved swiftly, establishing an election system that Jimmy Carter, who has headed vote observer teams in 92 nations, called, 'an election process that is the best in the world'. Here's how it works: every Venezuelan voter gets TWO ballots. One is electronic, the second is a paper print-out of the touch-screen ballot, which the voter reviews, authorises, then places in a locked ballot-box. An astounding 54 percent of the boxes are chosen at random to open and check against the computer tally. It's as close to a bulletproof count as you can get." [1] In the face of significant US interference Venezuala could have gone extremely dictatorial, but it seems they went the other way and implemented a more secure voting process than in many other countries where electronic voting is used. [1] http://www.gregpalast.com/did-chavez-pick-steal-the-election-in-venezu…

Please look for 'Stupid in America' show on YouTube and watch it. It will seriously change your opinion about public schools. I'm aware of the documentary, and as usual, it completely misses the point. I'm intimately familiar with the inner workings of America's public and private schools (both the best and the worst on both sides). For the past several years I've had daily exposure to pretty much all angles of this issue. I suspect you've simply watched a 45 minute Youtube video and liked how microfoundations sounded when it was taught to you in school. I could write for hours on the horrors of private school vouchers alone (did you know when they tried it in Arizona, 3/4ths of the money ended up going to students who were already in private schools? [1]). And lets not even get into the fact that private schools actually don't perform that much better than public schools [2] when you account for the diversity in public schools. Considering that private schools mostly teach to a homogeneous student body, they should be blowing the public schools out of the water. They're actually not that much cheaper either, when you consider that private schools don't need to spend nearly as much money on special education programs and psychological therapy [3]. If I was a school admin I could post the most impressive numbers in the country if I'm allowed to skim from the cream of the crop, but public schools by law are not allowed to do so. However, I suspect at this point…

If you discount the blatant voter suppression and other forms of voter disenfranchisement. Greg Palast has an interesting article [1] on the level of disenfranchisement happening. According to the numbers calculated by him and other organizations the are _millions_ of US citizens that get their voter thrown out. [1] https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/

I mean, he kind of stole the election. https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/

Voter suppression: https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/

Not sure how true this is and I guess it is moot at this point (except as far as thinking how to ensure all legal votes are counted in the future): https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/ "Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes. And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million."

That is not what they did: https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/ Passing laws to make it harder to vote, and easier to challenge a persons voter registration and ballot, and then running an operative campaign to specifically target voters on the other side of the political spectrum is a bit different than "just politics". Legal, sure. Ethical, moral, fair, absolutely not.

This was posted recently on HN, but I'll repost it here. My main take away is that these two regions are really more Russian and want to be a part of Russia. They were given to Ukraine as part of an old agreement internal to the USSR https://www.gregpalast.com/7-facts-about-ukraine/

Funny, I googled "programmer testifies..." and the first autocomplete was "...about rigging elections": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjvtSquZkhs Journalist Greg Palast also has evidence of electronic voter in Ohio in 2004. (Disclaimer: I have not delved deep on his claims, but the mere fact of their plausibility is deeply concerning.) http://www.gregpalast.com/how-they-stole-ohio/

At present the memo is available via one of the links. http://www.gregpalast.com//vulturespicnic/pages/filecabinet/chapter12/…

Who said I was crying wolf? I believe Trump would have lost if this was a fair election. So does Greg Palast: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Palast See: https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/ I believe Trump is a fascist who is extremely dangerous and everything he did so far ticks all the boxes. And by the way: In the wolf story you refer to the wolf was real. The real moral of that story is that the villagers should have trusted the boy (to prevent his death) and help him, as he in fact saw a wolf (who ate him in the end). The story says that the boy lied, but as he died that story would have been told be the villagers who let him die. The wolf was real (he ate the boy), the villagers made up a story after the fact of how the boy had it coming as a lier to justify their position. It is a story about people who are more afraid of the scary story and the messenger who tells it, than of the actual danger itself. About people who despite warnings let the boy get eaten, because they checked the first two times and the evil wasn't directly evident to them. In German we say about fascism: "Wehret den Anfängen" (defend against the beginnings). Once you are in a fascist society, once the wolf is eating you, it is to late. And the wolf is real.

I am positive that you have the facts about George W. Bush's military record wrong. The real story there is that all of the pertinent facts, with evidence, appeared in the BBC. Greg Palast was responsible for a lot of it. When CBS wanted to report on the story, they were given all of that, then went and did their own digging. In the process of digging they were given a perfect memo that they ran with without authenticating properly. The memo turned out to be too good to be true, and was a forgery. The result is that everyone was left believing that the whole thing was based on a forgery. But it wasn't. All of the key facts were uncovered earlier by the BBC and the planted forgery was merely a clever way to discredit the story. After Dan Rather painfully took a public fall over it, the issue became radioactive for all US media organizations. See http://www.gregpalast.com/dan-crashes-bush-flies-high/ for Greg Palast's view on what happened to Dan Rather.