Study supports Trump: 5.7 million noncitizens may have cast illegal votes

[yota691]

Study supports Trump: 5.7 million noncitizens may have cast illegal votes

 

• JAMES D. AGRESTI

President Trump has promised to find those responsible for disclosing sensitive information. But getting to the bottom of who is behind the leaks may be easier said than done. Leak investigations generally start by process of elimination, and the more ... more >

 

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By Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Monday, June 19, 2017

A research group in New Jersey has taken a fresh look at postelection polling data and concluded that the number of noncitizens voting illegally in U.S. elections is likely far greater than previous estimates.

As many as 5.7 million noncitizens may have voted in the 2008 election, which put Barack Obama in the White House.

The research organization Just Facts, a widely cited, independent think tank led by self-described conservatives and libertarians, revealed its number-crunching in a report on national immigration.

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Just Facts President James D. Agresti and his team looked at data from an extensive Harvard/YouGov study that every two years questions a sample size of tens of thousands of voters. Some acknowledge they are noncitizens and are thus ineligible to vote.

Just Facts’ conclusions confront both sides in the illegal voting debate: those who say it happens a lot and those who say the problem nonexistent.

In one camp, there are groundbreaking studies by professors at Old Dominion University in Virginia who attempted to compile scientifically derived illegal voting numbers using the Harvard data, called the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

 

On the other side are the professors who conducted the study and contended that “zero” noncitizens of about 18 million adults in the U.S. voted. The liberal mainstream media adopted this position and proclaimed the Old Dominion work was “debunked.”

The ODU professors, who stand by their work in the face of attacks from the left, concluded that in 2008 as few as 38,000 and as many as 2.8 million noncitizens voted.

Mr. Agresti’s analysis of the same polling data settled on much higher numbers. He estimated that as many as 7.9 million noncitizens were illegally registered that year and 594,000 to 5.7 million voted.

These numbers are more in line with the unverified estimates given by President Trump, who said the number of ballots cast by noncitizens was the reason he lost the popular vote to Hillarious Clinton.

Last month, the president signed an executive order setting up a commission to try to find on-the-ground truth in illegal voting. Headed by Vice President Mike Pence, the panel also will look at outdated voter lists across the nation with names of dead people and multiple registrants.

For 2012, Just Facts said, 3.2 million to 5.6 million noncitizens were registered to vote and 1.2 million to 3.6 million of them voted.

Mr. Agresti lays out his reasoning in a series of complicated calculations, which he compares to U.S. Census Bureau figures for noncitizen residents. Polls show noncitizens vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

“The details are technical, but the figure I calculated is based on a more conservative margin of sampling error and a methodology that I consider to be more accurate,” Mr. Agresti told The Washington Times.

He believes the Harvard/YouGov researchers based their “zero” claim on two flawed assumptions. First, they assumed that people who said they voted and identified a candidate did not vote unless their names showed up in a database.

“This is illogical, because such databases are unlikely to verify voters who use fraudulent identities, and millions of noncitizens use them,” Mr. Agresti said.

He cites government audits that show large numbers of noncitizens use false IDs and Social Security numbers in order to function in the U.S., which could include voting.

Second, Harvard assumed that respondent citizens sometimes misidentified themselves as noncitizens but also concluded that noncitizens never misidentified themselves as citizens, Mr. Agresti said.

“This is irrational, because illegal immigrants often claim they are citizens in order to conceal the fact that they are in the U.S. illegally,” he said.

Some of the polled noncitizens denied they were registered to vote when publicly available databases show that they were, he said.

This conclusion, he said, is backed by the Harvard/YouGov study’s findings of consumer and vote data matches for 90 percent of participants but only 41 percent of noncitizen respondents.

As to why his numbers are higher than the besieged ODU professors’ study, Mr. Agresti said: “I calculated the margin of sampling error in a more cautious way to ensure greater confidence in the results, and I used a slightly different methodology that I think is more accurate.”

There is hard evidence outside of polling that noncitizens do vote. Conservative activists have conducted limited investigations in Maryland and Virginia that found thousands of aliens were registered.

These inquiries, such as comparing noncitizen jury pool rejections to voter rolls, captured just a snapshot. But conservatives say they show there is a much broader problem that a comprehensive probe by the Pence commission could uncover.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, which fights voter fraud, released one of its most comprehensive reports last month.

Its investigation found that Virginia removed more than 5,500 noncitizens from voter lists, including 1,852 people who had cast more than 7,000 ballots. The people volunteered their status, most likely when acquiring driver’s licenses. The Public Interest Legal Foundation said there are likely many more illegal voters on Virginia’s rolls who have never admitted to being noncitizens.

[Synopsis]

Illegally cast votes whether multiple, people passed on, or non citizen is a cancer that really must be cut out and purged for the health and integrity of We the People in this Democratic Republic to be of the People, by the People, AND for the People. People as bone fide Citizens of The United States Of America that is!!!

 

Go President Trump!!!

 

Go Vice President Pence!!!

[coorslite21]

There are methods available to assure clean elections....guess the question is does the establishment really want them?......

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Hedera Hashgraph Team

The Hedera hashgraph platform will offer a public, distributed ledger that enables globally decentralized applications.

Nov 22, 2017

I Want Your Vote! (Oh Wait I Already Know It)

By Paul Madsen

 

At the heart of Distributed ledger Technologies (DLTs) is the mechanism by which the different instances of the ledger are kept consistent, i.e. how do the nodes holding those copies come to a shared agreement or consensus on the ordering of the various transactions within the ledger.

 

How to gain the security benefits of voting without the overhead.

A consensus mechanism will generally have the following steps

1. Nodes create transactions they want recorded
2. Nodes share transactions amongst other nodes
3. Consensus is established on the order of valid transactions
4. Nodes update their local state to the consensus result

The goal is to get to step #4 as quickly as possible, but do so while minimizing the chance of the process being disrupted, corrupted or manipulated. Generally, consensus models rely on a mix of democratic mechanisms, economic principles to encourage good behavior or discourage bad behavior & random aspects which together make it impractical or unpredictable for an attacker to achieve such manipulation.

Proof of Work (PoW) models like Bitcoin effectively run a contest to determine which node is given the power to make the consensus decision. The miner that first completes the hashing puzzle wins the right to add its block. Other nodes effectively endorse that block by subsequently adding their blocks to that chain. Proof of Stake (PoS) models like Ethereum’s Casper proposal layer on economic incentives — requiring that those nodes that would participate in consensus make a deposit of coins as a surety on their good behavior. Leader based models like Paxos & Raft rely on a specialized node (that may change over time) to unilaterally decide the consensus result.

Voting models for consensus have desirable security properties (namely that they can be asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant and achieve consensus even when some nodes are malicious and some messages are significantly delayed) relative to the consensus models listed above. On the other hand these voting models generally require that a large number of messages be sent amongst nodes in order to get to consensus. Consequently, voting models have been seen as impractical for any real deployments.

The inefficiency of voting models derives from the necessity of multiple messages being sent between nodes to tally up the votes and so determine consensus. But consider what would happen if this weren’t necessary, that each node would know what other nodes had voted, without actually having that other node share its ballot?

What if voting were ‘virtual’, i.e., that nodes were not only able to determine what their vote on a given question will be, but also what other nodes would vote on the same question? No longer would Alice need to tell Bob her vote, Bob would be able to put himself in Alice’s shoes and work out what her vote would have been if she actually cast the ballot and told Bob.

The situation is similar to a political election. The candidates could save themselves some time and effort on the day by simply indicating to some volunteer at the polling station ‘You know how I’m going to vote, do it for me’. (though it is admittedly hard to imagine any politician being willing to forgo the photo opportunity of casting their ballot.) In fact, we could imagine all citizens voting virtually in this manner — every citizen would calculate how every other citizen would vote, and after adding up, they would all come to the same answer.

A virtual vote to establish consensus on the order of transactions obviously requires that Bob is able to have the same view as Alice of the transactions. Without that view Bob would be unable to put himself in Alice’s shoes and see the world from her PoV — and so be able to determine what Alice’s vote would be.

The hashgraph is a data structure that provides exactly that shared view of a set of transactions. But critically, not only does it provide Alice & Bob an identical view of the transactions, it gives them an identical view of how each of them (and all other nodes) learned of those transactions. The hashgraph provides each node a consistent history of exactly how each node has talked to others, and in what order they have talked, and exactly what they talked about. A hashgraph is a record of the complete history of how all nodes communicated, including what transactions were communicated at each step. With Alice and Bob both creating their own local copy of the hashgraph (built up over time via the nodes gossiping amongst themselves), both are able to see all the data & metadata they need to be able to cast their votes, but also cast a virtual vote on behalf of the other. No longer does Alice need to tell Bob how she voted, Bob just looks at his own copy of the hashgraph (which he knows Alice also has) and determines how Alice would vote (if he asked her).

With virtual voting based on the hashgraph, we benefit from the great security characteristics of voting models, but without the associated messaging overhead. Constructing the hashgraph requires not only that nodes gossip about transactions, but also gossip about how and with whom they previously gossiped. I’ll go into greater detail on this ‘gossip about gossip’ in a subsequent blog post.

 

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[bostonangler]

Senate Republicans reject $250 million effort to fund election cybersecurity measures

 

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked a Democratic effort to increase spending on election security measures, saying they wanted to see what states do with grants they have already been provided.

The amendment, which would have appropriated $250 million for grants to states through the federal Election Assistance Commission, garnered 50 in favor to 47 opposed, largely on party lines and shy of the 60 needed to pass. Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker was the only Republican to vote in support of the amendment.

“A lot of the states want this kind of help to make sure their systems are not going to be hacked,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii. “The Republicans are not standing in line to help them, which I think is a real testament to what they think about protecting our democracy.”

Opponents of the amendment said they want to see how the states spend the 2018 grant money before they appropriate more. Sending money to states “would just be another step maybe towards convincing the states that somebody besides them is going to be responsible for elections in their state,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R., Mo.), chairman of the Senate Rules Committee. “That shouldn’t be the case, it won’t be the case.”

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/senate-republicans-reject-250-million-effort-to-fund-election-cybersecurity-measures-2018-08-01

 

 

Isn't that odd?

B/A