from Bill Still
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Good morning, I’m still reporting on politics.
Welcome to the Utah Primary-slash-Caucus – the land of Mitt Romney and Glenn Beck.
I’ve always followed elections closely. So my wife went to bed and I stuck it out waiting for the Utah returns. But since midnight, I had noticed that Utah numbers had been stuck on only 2% of the precincts reported.
Though I wasn’t contemplating doing a report on this, I decided to do some reading while I waited up.
In Tuesday’s election in Utah, registered Republicans had two voting options: stand in lines to participate in the state caucus, or for the first time, vote online. The Utah Caucus/Primary was billed as the nation’s largest online election ever.
The day before the election, the online version of Wired magazine had even done one of their typical stories on it. They reported that as of Monday morning, 59,000 had chosen online voting.
The title of Wired’s story was disturbing: “Utah’s Online Caucus Gives Security Experts Heart Attacks”.
The story opens up this way:
“Security researchers pretty much uniformly agree that letting people vote online is a very bad idea, one that is fraught with risks and vulnerabilities that could have unknowable consequences for the future of democracy.”
“This week, the Utah GOP is going to give it a whirl anyway.”
But right out of the box I noticed a slight problem.
Who paid for the experiment? The Utah GOP paid more than 80,000 to purchase the equipment – not state election officials.
It seems that the internet voting system came from Smartmatic Group, which is based in England. The Chairman of Smartmatic is Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, who is also on the board of George Soros’ Open Society and is a personal friend of Soros. Brown has served as a former #2 in the United Nations, currently sits in the House of Lords, and has served as vice-chairman of Soros’ Investment Funds.
This would be the same Soros group, who, along with the Hillary Clinton campaign is suspected of funding something else – hundreds of paid thugs – known in polite circles as demonstrators – paid to follow the Trump Train across the nation to disrupt and destroy – if possible – the gigantic Trump rallies.
So that’s strike one against the Utah GOP’s online voting effort.
Strike two is that President Obama is a big fan of online voting. In 2014, he created a commission to generate a report about how best to ensure online voter integrity.
Ok, so right off the bat, that’s two strikes against Utah GOP’s electronic vote initiative.
And here’s strike three.
This popped up on the Free Republic site at 01:43, right in the middle of my reading-up on the topic of Utah voter fraud.
A voter identified as M. Thatcher wrote that he had chosen to go stand in line and participate in the Caucus.
He was able to enter the caucus room with:
“No checking credentials, IDs, NOTHING.”
The Presidential ballots were then passed out on the take-one-and-pass-it-down system.
Thatcher was sitting on the end of his row and so ended up with extras.
“I literally had over 50 ballots in my hand.”
He photographed some of them.
[insert]
“We were told to mark our vote and place our ballot in a tin can. They then asked for a volunteer to hold the can. At this point, most people filed out the door.”
“I cast ONE vote, then stuck around to see what would happen with the votes.”
Thatcher then asked if he could watch the vote count. He was told “No”.
So he left the room and wandered over to check his friend’s precinct caucus to see if it was as disorganized. As he walked into the room, he was handed another ballot.
“Again, no credential check, no ID check, NOTHING.”
Thatcher declined to vote again, and went back to his precinct caucus to see what the results were:
“74% Cruz, 14% Trump, 11% Kasich.”
As he left the building, Thatcher overheard results coming back from other precincts.
“Overwhelmingly numbers for Cruz… Like 70-90% or more.”
“Bottom line… They basically are going to post whatever the hell numbers they want.”
“There were no apparent controls, no credential checks, no ID checks, and ballots being handed around like napkins.”
“UTAH RESULTS ARE A COMPLETE SHAM.”
So, I had started my research about 1 am EST. At that time only 2% of the vote had been posted. Now, it is 04:18 am, and the latest Utah vote tally as displayed on the Fox ticker is: Cruz 68.9, Kasich 16.8, Trump 14.2 with 75% of the vote tallied.
I’m Still reporting from Washington. Good day.