Handicapping

Well, it looks like Clinton took the Pennsylvania primary by a 10 point spread.

Right?

From BradBlog, just this last Monday:

This Tuesday's crucial contest will be primarily run on 100% faith-based, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen or push-button) e-voting machines across the state. There will be no way to determine after the election whether the computers have accurately recorded, or not, the intent of those voters who voted on them. As VerifiedVoting.org summarizes the crucial contest, it "will be essentially unrecountable, unverifiable, and unauditable."

Most of the votes, more than 85%, will be cast on such DRE systems which do not provide so-called "Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails" (VVPATs), as their use has been found unconstitutional in the state, since its been determined, accurately, that ballot secrecy cannot be guaranteed when using such paper trail systems. Not that it matters.

And from BradBlog, late yesterday evening:

9:24pm ET: Fox "News" confirms e-voting problems.

While MSNBC was said to have reported earlier that PA's SoS claimed there were no reports of problems today (see the 6:34pm ET update below), it was Fox "News" of all outlets who bothered to confirm and briefly report the problems.

Just after the polls closed tonight, as the Exit Polls were "too close to call", and too important to share with us mere mortals, the cable news nets were beside themselves with the prospect of having to actually wait for votes to be "counted". In truth, very few of them can actually be counted because, as we explained yesterday, most of PA uses e-voting machines on which it's strictly impossible to determine if even a single vote was recorded as any voter actually intended.

It was Fox then, who confirmed some of the problems we've been reporting all day here.

"Some of those electronic voting machines did not work," says the Fox reporter in the clip below, describing the process of "cartridges" being brought in for counting. She mentions that there were some paper ballots brought in as well from where machine broke down (though as we noted in earlier reports below, provisional ballots were only handed out if both machines in voting precincts broke down).

"Those machines weren't ready, weren't going, and they did have to resort to the paper," before adding with a big roll of the eyes, "the old way."

I'd love to quote different sources than BradBlog, but apparently nobody else anywhere thinks any of this is worth reporting. The mainstream media has advised us who the winner is in Pennsylvania, and although there is literally no way to independently confirm those pronouncements, nobody is inclined to question it. (Premier lefty poli-blogger Josh Marshall helpfully reminds us "All that said, remember, the exits out of Ohio had it a much closer race than it ended up being." In other words, when the evidence indicates that the official results may be bullshit, well, just remember, the official results are never bullshit.)

I don't know what it is. People have been screaming about election fraud, especially untraceable, unverifiable election fraud by electronic voting machines, for years now. Apparently we've screamed so long, so loud, and so hard that the 'serious' people, ALL of them, have simply decided to tune out.

The press wants a horse race. The Powers That Be would find it simpler to do their work with a Republican President in the White House, or, barring that, with a Clinton. And each time it seems like this section of the mess might get resolved and we might be able to move on to the next section, we get exactly the results that Big Corporate Media and the other Powers That Be would like to see most. And it troubles no one that there are countless problems with how votes are being cast and counted in this process, and that odd little things like exit polls lately (well, since 2000, in Florida, anyway) always seem to be somewhat at odds with the actual reported results.

Ah, fuck it. On to the next untraceable, unverifiable, unaccountable primary. It's good practice for the untraceable, unverifiable, unaccountable Presidential election this November...