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Did Prop 37 Really Lose or Was it Vote Fraud? Maybe We Do Want To Know After All?

Editor’s Note: Last week I posted We Don’t Want to Know, sharing the rather glum news that Californians had, somewhat inexplicably, voted against their own interests — deciding they didn’t actually care to have the right to know what they were eating. By all appearances, Proposition 37 was won by the corporates. However, since then we’ve learned that there may be more to this than meets the eye. Jon Rappoport, a 74-year old Californian who has been an investigative journalist for the last 30 years, also felt the results were rather inexplicable, and decided to take a closer look. Read on to find out why I think Californians might not be as daft as we were, last week, led to believe…. I also hope Californians will jump up and down about this issue — as they should be hopping mad…. At time of writing this, the Yes to 37 campaign is only half a million votes behind, and it appears there are at least 3.3 million votes still uncounted…. In short, we have hope yet — but we need to watch this very closely, and do what we can to ensure all votes are properly counted!

Did Prop 37 Really Lose or Was it Vote Fraud? (November 8, 2012)

On election night, not long after the polls closed in California, the announcement came out: Prop 37 was losing. A little while later, it was all over. 37 had gone down to defeat.

But is that the whole story? No.

As of 2:30PM today, Thursday, November 8th, two days after the election, many votes in California remain uncounted.

I tried to find out how many.

It turns out that the Secretary of State of CA, responsible for elections in the state, doesn’t know.

I was told all counties in California have been asked, not ordered, to report in with those figures. It’s voluntary.

So I picked out a few of the biggest counties and called their voter registrar offices. Here are the boggling results:

  • Santa Clara County: 180,000 votes remain uncounted.
  • Orange County: 241,336 votes remain uncounted.
  • San Diego County: 475,000 votes remain uncounted.
  • LA County: 782,658 votes remain uncounted.

In just those four counties, 1.6 million votes remain uncounted.

The California Secretary of State’s website indicates that Prop 37 is behind by 559,776 votes.

So in the four counties I looked into, there are roughly three times as many uncounted votes as the margin of Prop 37’s defeat.

And as I say, I checked the numbers in only four counties. There are 54 other counties in the state. Who knows how many votes they still need to process?

So why is anyone saying Prop 37 lost?

People will say, "Well, it’s all about projections. There are experts. They know what they’re doing. They made a prediction…"

Really? Who are those experts? I have yet to find them.

For big elections, the television networks rely on a private consortium called the National Election Pool (NEP). NEP does projections and predictions. Did NEP make the premature call on Prop 37? So far I see no evidence one way or the other.

NEP makes some calls for the television networks, but NEP is composed of CBS, CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC, and AP. It could hardly be called an independent source of information for those networks.

NEP has AP (Associated Press) do the actual vote tabulating, and NEP also contracts work out to Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International to do exit polls and projections based on those polls.

Edison Media Research did the exit polls in the state of Washington for this election. How? They surveyed 1493 people by phone. Based on that, I assume they made all the projections for elections in that state, even though there is no in-person voting in Washington, and voters can submit their ballots by mail, postmarked no later than election Tuesday. So how could Edison know anything worth knowing or projecting on election night?

Both Edison Research and Mitofsky were involved in the 2004 election scandal (Kerry-Bush), in which their exit polls confounded network news anchors, because the poll results were so far off from the incoming vote-counts.

Edison and Mitofsky issued a later report explaining how the disparity could have occurred; they tried to validate their own exit-poll data and the vote-count, which was like explaining a sudden shift in ocean tides by saying clouds covered the moon. It made no sense.

So if NEP did the premature Prop 37 projections that handed 37 a resounding loss, there is little reason to accept their word.

We’re faced with a scandal here. An early unwarranted projection against Prop 37 was made, when so many votes were still uncounted.

Those votes are still uncounted.

Why should we believe anything that comes next?

Prop 37 Vote-Fraud Update: 3.3 million Votes Still Uncounted (November 12, 2012)

When the networks and other media outlets made the early call on election night, claiming Prop 37 had gone down to defeat, there were millions of votes still uncounted.

I just checked the California Secretary of State’s website, which is the official center for vote results, and there are 3,334,495 votes that remain unprocessed.

Reading the county-by-county reports, the last date any of them reported in with numbers was November 8, three days ago.

Why is it taking so long for California to count all its votes? Why do so many remain uncounted at this late date?

Yes, some of them are what’s called provisional votes. That basically means they were turned in with errors, and those errors need to be tracked down and corrected. That takes time.

But large numbers of uncounted votes must be electronic. What’s the hold-up?

Looking at the most recent report on the Prop 37 results, Prop 37 is trailing by 585,464 votes.

Of the 3.3 million votes that remain uncounted, how many people voted on Prop 37, one way or the other? I don’t know.

We can fiddle with estimates and projections and try to figure out how many people would have to vote YES on 37 for a victory, but—and this is very important—a larger specter looms over all this.

I really hope you get this.

When the absurdly early call against Prop 37 was made on election night, that was a clue. It was a red flag. It was a loud siren:

"Something is very wrong here." That was the message.

From the moment that clue sprang forth, from the moment that siren went off, we had two choices. We could say, "Well, the TV networks are insane. They’re crooked. So we need to get all the votes counted, to see what the real result is."

Or we could say: "This early call against 37 suggests more criminality. Other crimes. How can we rely on the vote count at all? How can we assume, even when the other votes are counted, we’re going to get a true result?"

The second conclusion is the correct one. This is what I’ve been saying for the past several days.

Many people naively believe that the early call against Prop 37 was the only problem. They assume the entire vote count, when it’s finished, will be true and honest.

Let’s say you’re investigating a jewel theft. And you see a guy walking down the street and he has part of a big necklace hanging out of his pocket. Do you assume the necklace is the only stolen item he’s carrying? Or do you infer the guy is loaded with other items from the theft?

Here are two sources you can consult. The first is an extensive article by Victoria Collier about general vote-count fraud. The second is the California Secretary of State’s own 2007 "Top-to-Bottom-Review" of voting machines used in elections. This report is a mind-blower. It reveals massive opportunities for vote fraud. Should we blithely assume California has fixed all those problems?

Recently, a team at the Argonne National Lab showed how a voting machine could be hacked and controlled, using a small device that costs between $10-$26.

There was the famous 2010 experiment, in which a team from Ann Arbor, Michigan, offered to hack the District of Columbia’s voting system. They broke in and reversed the count in the mayoral election. They also fabricated absentee votes from overseas and canceled out the real votes.

In my second article on the Prop 37 scandal, I tracked the early media call against Prop 37, on election night, to its most probable source, the Associated Press (AP).

AP, the giant wire service, is officially a non-profit owned by 1400 member newspapers, who use its services and also contribute articles. However, as everyone knows, the newspaper business in America is dying. Its bottom line is sitting in a lake of red ink, and the lake is sitting in an ocean of red ink.

That means these newspapers, and the corporations who own them, have been re-financing their very existence with loans, and loans to pay off earlier loans. That means banks.

Now you’re getting into the oligarchy that owns this country.

Does this sound too far-fetched? Too remote? Can we really say that "the powers-that-be" defeated Prop 37?

Well, remember that YES ON 37 was a wedge against the assault of GMO food. It was the first of a number of dominoes that could fall against Monsanto and other GMO companies. Why? Because once consumers could see, labeled on the food they bought, whether it was GMO, they could make a choice.

And surveys indicate that huge numbers of people don’t want to eat GMO food or are at least suspicious of it.

Imagine what would happen if millions and millions of Americans, starting in California, rejected GMO food at the market.

Is that a threat to the mega-GMO-corporations who want to own the patents on all food crops on the planet? Is the Pope Catholic?

We also have more down-to-earth fiddling with Prop 37. An instant classic press conference was held a few days before the election, by the YES ON 37 forces.

I was on that phone call. One by one, I heard reporters from major media outlets confuse and divert the whole issue of crimes committed by NO ON 37 forces. These reporters channeled the discussion into an irrelevant nit-picking question: Has the FBI really opened a full-blown investigation into NO ON 37, or is it really just an inquiry or a mild expression of interest?

This theater-of-the-absurd crashed the intent of the press conference, and in the ensuing days, just as election day loomed, sure enough, stories appeared in the press. The gist of these stories was: "no real FBI investigation"; "YES ON 37 had it wrong"; "who’s really deceiving who."

What started out as an effort to expose very obvious lies and crimes committed by the NO ON 37 forces boomeranged completely.

So, all in all, there is substantial evidence that, in the run-up to election day, and in the criminally insane early call against Prop 37, on election night, very heavy hitters didn’t want Prop 37 to pass.

Therefore, do we foolishly assume the ongoing vote-count in California is going to be honest?

Do we assume the votes that have already been counted and reported in California are true and honest?

Do we accept that Prop 37 is now trailing by 585,464 votes?

No, no, and no.

Many people would like to think we can assume honesty in these matters. It would be nice to believe in the system. But it would a fatal error.

~~~~~

Jon Rappoport:
The author of an explosive collection, The Matrix Revealed, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

8 Comments

  1. Nice writeup. I’d like to know how to get involved as a resident of another state. We are our governments and we make the rules. We just have to come together.

  2. How do we demand that these votes be counted?! It’s not just 37, but local issues and legislative races, too!

  3. Surely ALL votes in any election legally HAVE to be counted and included in the final results? Is there a maximum time frame for this to occur? surely, counting doesn’t stop when someone says part way through – ‘we have a winner’.. especially if the number outstanding is higher than the difference between the leader and the second place??

  4. Jon Rappaport’s first article leaves out a very important piece of information; the unprocessed ballots are unlikely to suddenly swing wildly in favor of Prop 37. As far as we know, Prop 37 lost 47% to 53% against. In order for us to win, the unprocessed ballots (at least 3 million, according to Jon’s first article) would suddenly have to be about 60-70% YES votes. That’s not very likely, at all. Plently of those unprocessed votes will still be NO votes, and that’s what Rappaport did not take into consideration.

  5. Ken, likely or not, there’s some chance those would change the outcome. Weirder things have happened (like a presidential election coming down to a few hundred votes in a state governed by one of the candidate’s brothers).

    I don’t believe statistics and sample sizes are used to stop counting votes.

  6. When will the votes be in and counted? Will the American people who are waiting for the results and concernead with the outcome ever know for sure? This is an important move toward knowing what we are eating and what it will do to our health. We are just asking Label it!!!

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