“How will the electronic vote count in the 2016 election be verified?” The answer is simple: “It can’t be.” ~ Fitrakis & Wasserman, March 31, 2016

Back in 2004, then Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb put it bluntly: “The greatest threat to American democracy is the belief that we have one.” That is so true today.

When candidate Donald Trump charged that the 2016 election was somehow being rigged, both establishment and progressive pundits erupted in unanimous outrage that the vaunted integrity of America’s “exceptional” electoral system was being impugned.

An Epidemic of Cognitive Dissonance and Denial

On the morning of the 2016 election, the New York Times, vaunted ‘paper of record,’ gave Trump a 15 percent chance of winning. So much for the NYT. The vaunted Washington Post is now claiming – with no evidence – that ‘Russian hackers’ gave the election to Trump. So much for the WaPo.

Christian Parenti speaks for many head scratching progressive commentators when he writes, “My point is not that we should like Trump but rather that the Left must understand why almost 60 million Americans voted for him.”

Our point is, they didn’t.

Throughout the campaign, GOP candidate Trump cleverly complained of a “rigged election.” He continually warned of innumerable non-whites and Muslims voting multiple times for Hillary Clinton.

Of course the opposite happened. Hundreds of thousands of non-white citizens were systematically denied their right to vote. Since even that wasn’t enough to elect Donald Trump, the Electoral College will once again deny democracy. And thanks to the dark magic of electronic voting machines, we will never really know 2016’s true vote count.

Today’s most tangible tragedy is what may soon unfold in this country. But the underlying nightmare is that this has been done before, that we’ve known about stripped and flipped elections for at least sixteen years, and that nothing has been done.

The Unreality Show Goes On – The Apotheosis of the Ugly American

It started almost as soon as the “results” were announced. Reports of groping, harassment, hate speech, racial insults and physical assaults against women, Muslims, and people of color exploded on Twitter and across the internet.

The prospect of a polarized police state America in a high state of unrest is hard to avoid.

So we are now faced with the tragic and pathetic spectacle of a totally unqualified narcissistic lout – himself surprised by his unexpected victory, and reportedly demonstrating in his meeting with Obama a complete lack of comprehension of the complexities of the presidential job – taking over the helm of the floundering American Ship of State.

We are reminded of the closing line of the 1972 Robert Redford feature The Candidate, in which a couple of bozos on a lark improbably win an election and end up asking themselves, “Now what do we do?”

At this writing, massive anti-Trump protests involving thousands are still on-going on campuses and in city streets across the country. Accumulating counting date shows that Hillary Clinton is chalking up the largest popular vote since Obama, while still falling short in the Electoral College vote. Maryland has put out the message that, if other states will follow suit, its Electoral College delegation will go with the popular vote over the super delegate vote. It remains possible that, as Senator Barbara Boxer and Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs-Jones demonstrated in 2005, Trump’s selection by the Electoral College can and will be challenged and potentially reversed.

Recounts and Reformability

Now, thanks to the indomitable principled leadership Jill Stein and the Green Party and the outpouring of over $6 million in crowd funding from outraged citizens, there will be recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – states with statistically improbable “red shifts” between unadjusted exit polls and official vote tallies and other alleged glaring irregularities.

Like the election itself, the push for a recount has generated a cloud of dis- and mis-information, heated controversy and mixed signals both within the Green Party itself as well as outside.

No, Stein is not doing it as a surrogate on behalf of Clinton, or to steal the money. No, she was not risking missing the federal deadline by suing for a hand count, instead of just running the ballots through the same electronic Black Boxes that may have miscounted them in the first place. Dane County Circuit Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn ruled against her, despite seeing the logic of her case, because a Wisconsin state law gives county officials discretion over how the recount is conducted. That was the second impediment. Wisconsin has come up with the first – raising the cost of the recount from $1.5 to $3.5 million dollars.

Outside or Inside Job?

The media has given prominence to unproven allegations by security expert J. Alex Halderman and various intelligence agencies and companies that suggest that Russia somehow hacked the election. The impressive resume of Halderman, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, takes up much of the petition’s exhibits, along with news stories about alleged Russian cyberhacking.

It should be clear that we don’t need a ‘The Russians Are Coming!” justification for looking at the many tamper- and hacker-friendly vulnerabilities of the system right here at home. Not to mention cyber-mandering and massive disenfranchisement. If hanky-panky turns out to be provable – a big IF – it seems most likely to prove an inside rather than an outside job. But hey, whatever it takes to draw public attention and forensic scrutiny to this fundamental issue.

While the vulnerabilities of American voting machines have been known for some time, states' responses to these vulnerabilities have been patchy and inconsistent at best. Many states, including Wisconsin, continue to use out-of-date machines that are known to be insecure.

Examining the Paper Record Is the Only Way to Ensure the Integrity of the Result

Paper ballots are the best and most secure technology available for casting votes. Optical scan voting allows the voter to fill out a paper ballot that is scanned and counted by a computer. Electronic voting machines with voter-verified paper audit trails allow the voter to review a printed record of the vote he has just cast on a computer. Only a paper record documents the vote in a manner that cannot later be modified by malware or other forms of cyberattacks.

Dr. Bob Fitrakis, who is acting as an of-counsel attorney for the Stein campaign, explains it this way, “I believe this is a historically important effort due to the lack of transparency in our elections, that allow private, for-profit, partisan companies to program our computerized voting machines and central tabulators…. The three states chosen for the recount all have statistical red flags and were very close in the votes between the two major presidential candidates. Stein believes the voters of the United States have the right to a fair and accurate count.”

The point is not to trade one unpopular candidate for another, but hopefully to demonstrate – whatever the outcome – the need for paper ballots, hand-counted in public. Of course, distortions, manipulations and lawyerly maneuvering may still occur in such a corrupt system, and the whole concept of recounts may end up being discredited in the public mind.

Mrs. Clinton has so far remained silent, but “Hillary for America” general counsel Marc Erik Elias has announced that his organization will now also participate. “…[W]e feel it is important, on principle,” he said in a written statement, “to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself.” This, after the Democrats denounced candidate’s Trump’s potential questioning of the outcome as “undermining democracy.”

At this writing, Clinton’s popular vote now reportedly exceeds two million votes and counting. According to Common Dreams, in Pennsylvania – red shift 5.6 percent – she lost by about 71,000 votes; in Wisconsin – red shift 4.9 percent - by about 22,000 votes; and in Michigan – red shift 0.3 percent by about 10,000 votes. (In Ohio, where the red shift from unadjusted exit polls to official count was an impossible 8.5 percent, a recount would probably show them tied.)

National Election, Planetary Stakes

The fate of the earth may well depend on the outcome of a US election in what is possibly the most corrupt and least democratic electoral system in the world.

As Asia-based journalist Andre Vltchek points out in alarm, “Only citizens can vote in the US Presidential elections, yet the impact is global.”

In post-constitutional, make-believe America – where corporations are people, climate change is a hoax, a 77 percent majority believe in angels, and losers win elections – consensual reality has become collective delusion which endangers the world. And not only because, if inaugurated, Trump will become the only head-of-state in the world to deny climate change. He will also assume the authority to launch on a whim America’s air, land and sea-based nuclear arsenal. Every day of the year, 24/7, there are 450 Minute man ICBMs buried in silos three stories deep across the Great Plains, ready for launch.

On perpetual` hair-trigger alert, fourteen US Ohio-class submarines ceaselessly prowl the world’s oceans from pole to pole, each carrying the equivalent of 4000 Hiroshima bombs. Just eight of them alone, which have been built since the end of the Cold War, carry sixty-four times the total explosive power used by all sides in WWII.

That’s why, despite all the obstacles and seeming impossibilities, Americans have a responsibility not only to our sister and brother citizens, but the populations, lifeforms and ecosystems of the entire planet to wrest back control of our country.

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Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle Co-Direct EON – the Ecological Options Network (EON3.net). They blog @PlanetarianPerspectives.net. Their video channel is YouTube.com/EON3. Their Election Protection & Deep Democracy playlist featuring 60 video reports is on YouTube.