Today we catch up on all that the calls for "recounts" have led to over the weekend and since the holiday break last week, including: News on the more than $6M raised by Stein to pay for the counts so far (the number that both she and the attorneys seeking the counts had told me about last Monday before any of this had become public); the Clinton Team (somewhat) joining the effort; Donald Trump demeaning it as a "scam" and offering wildly false claims of "voter fraud"; Stein's emergency effort to draft needed voter volunteers for filings in Pennsylvania; the legal question (and now lawsuit) over whether WI will "recount" paper ballots by hand or by the same computers that tallied them in the first place; whether there will be sufficient time for any kind of proper public counting before the federally mandated December 13 deadline; and whether there is anything to count in Pennsylvania at all, where they still shamefully force voters to use 100 percent unverifiable touch-screens across most of the state.
We are joined by long-time election fraud investigator and author Richard Hayes Phillips, to discuss all of that and his detailed report about the unusually large apparent voter turnout numbers in many rural WI municipalities and the difficulty citizens have in verifying and overseeing those numbers. As Phillips explains, there are horrible public reporting requirements for both results and for same-day voter registration provisions in the state.
"At a minimum, the problem is a lack of transparency," Phillips tells me today. "We have no way of knowing how many registered voters there are in Wisconsin. If you don't know how many registered voters there are, you don't know if too many ballots were cast." His report finds that, based on the latest state-reported voter registration numbers, there were "193 towns with turnout of 90% or better, 25 towns with turnout of 95% or better, and 7 towns with turnout of 100% or better." Those exceedingly high turnout numbers are likely lower in reality, due to same-day registration in WI, but the lack of reporting requirements for those numbers is "unacceptable".
"This is the period of time during which we must analyze those numbers to decide whether or not to challenge the election, and we don't have reliable numbers to use!" Philips, who personally examined tens of thousands of ballots and poll books and much more in Ohio after the disputed 2004 election there, resulting in his book Witness to a Crime: A Citizens' Audit of an American Election, says WIsconsin's turnout numbers remind him of a number of counties where he found fraud in Ohio, where there was some 80% turnout reported.
He also warns — as I have, very loudly, for many years — that there are almost no ballots to actually count in Pennsylvania. "The five biggest cities in Pennsylvania that have no paper record of anybody's vote, except for absentee ballots, which only amount to 1 or 2% of the ballots," he says. "My God, if Wisconsin and Michigan which are very close were to actually flip and fall to Hillary Clinton's column, we will face a constitutional crisis, because this whole election will come down to Pennsylvania and the vote cannot be verified. I want America to know this."
Also hearkening back to Ohio in 2004, Phillips notes that there are tens of thousands of ballots with no vote at all for President in Michigan — even near Detroit — according to the state's unverified optical-scan tabulators. It's impossible to know how people voted, unless paper ballots are actually counted by human beings, he confirms. "Who knows who these ballots are actually marked for?"
"I'm not a shill for Hillary Clinton. I didn't even vote for her. But I want everyone's vote to count," he argues. "I want the winner to win and the loser to lose." Crazy idea, I know. Please take some time to listen to today's program.
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