Did Trump steal it?

Apologies for the light posting.

I am pursuing the theory -- backed by a growing amount of evidence -- that the results of the recent election are not trustworthy. Right now, I can't say that I believe with 100 percent certainty that Hillary Clinton won the electoral college, but we certainly have grounds for suspicion.

Alas, as I attempt to look into this issue, I keep running into the same problem: Many researchers into election fraud are BernieBots who believe that the Savior From Vermont was the rightful winner of the Democratic primaries. The promulgators of this ludicrous notion are wedded to the same myths that Kurt Eichenwald so ably demolishes here.

(I really wish that every Bernie die-hard could be strapped into a chair like Little Alex in A Clockwork Orange and forced to listen as the Eichenwald article is read out to him -- perhaps with suitable graphs and illustrations flashing on screen.)

As we have seen, the evidence actually suggests that Bernie benefited from election fraud. The Michigan results are otherwise almost inexplicable. The NY primary was obviously rigged against Hillary through a purge of Hispanic voters.

This earlier Cannonfire post rebuts the insane delusion that Sanders was the "real" winner in California.

Sadly, some former stalwarts of truth -- such as Bob Fitrakis and Richard Charnin -- remain mired in the Cult of Bernie. We must solve the riddle of election 2016 without their help. I suppose that I should mount a long, formal rebuttal to all of their claims that "Sanders wuz robbed" -- but I'm not really inclined to do so, since the task would involve a daunting amount of work, and few would read the results. Besides, Bernie supporters have behaved like fanatics -- and everyone knows that you can't change the views of a fanatic, no matter how solid your argument.

That said, there is some good work being done by researchers who know when to keep their knee-jerk Hillary-hate in check. In particular, I can recommend (with some reservations) the investigative videos produced by David Pakman. If you scoff at the very idea of election hugger-mugger, try to keep an open mind as you watch the video embedded at the top of this post. I guarantee that you'll come away at least wondering.

In the video below, Pakman directs our attention to NSA chief Michael Rogers, who claims that Russia intervened on Trump's behalf. Please note that Rogers is not talking about Russian hacking of vote tabulating devices. Please further note that those wacky conspiracy theorists at CBS News did discuss that very possibility, in an article published before the election.

After the election, all such talk suddenly became impermissible. I'm not sure why.

Perhaps the best work is being done by Brad Friedman, the acknowledged expert in the problems besetting America's elections. In particular, you simply must hear his interview with Jonathan Simon, who focuses on the exit polls results in the battleground states.

Here is the key fact which rarely gets mentioned in the media: Those exit polls numbers pegged Hillary as the winner in the very same states that "officially" went for Trump.

Unfortunately, we now face a problem familiar to anyone who recalls the 2004 controversy: Throughout election night, the exit poll results were "conformed" to match the official tallies, on the presumption that the "actual" tallies are sacrosanct. That presumption is a classic example of the logical fallacy of petitio principii, or begging the question. In my view, only the non-conformed exit poll should be of interest. Simon, bless him, tries to take screen caps of the exit poll results the moment they appear online, before people start playing with the numbers.

Oddly enough, when it comes to elections in other countries, a significant discrepancy between the "actual" results and the exit polls is considered grounds for calling an entire election into question. For some reason, nobody takes that attitude when it comes to elections in the United States.

In the absence of countable paper ballots, all we have are the exit polls. There is no other way to check the results.

Nowadays, you often hear pundits say: "Everyone knows that exit polls are unreliable." Funny thing: That line became standard only since 2000, when Republicans started winning "funky" elections.

When I was growing up, there was an election night ritual in which mainstream newscasters like Chet Huntley and Walter Cronkite would patiently explain to the audience why exit polls should always be considered very reliable. News networks would call elections early in the evening based on the exits -- a controversial practice, due to fears that an early announcement would depress voting in the western states. Yet the big news networks never had to backtrack. We never saw Cronkite's cheeks turn red as he confessed that CBS News had relied on faulty exit polls.

Today, exit poll discrepancies (defined as exit poll results which vary significantly from official results) are far more common than they used to be in American presidential elections. Tellingly, they seem to occur primarily in the most closely contested states. And they always favor the Republicans -- in other words, the Republican candidate is the one who seems to get more "actual" votes than the exit polls would indicate.

Doesn't that fact strike you as just a little odd? If exit polling was inherently unreliable, one would expect the errors to swing left as often as they swing right.

One must also ask why such polls were reliable in the 1960-2000 era and became "unreliable" only in the post-2000 era.