Tag: 2016 Election

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President Obama’s team sought NSA intel on thousands of Americans during the 2016 election

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by John Solomon

WATCH | The Obama administration distributed thousands of intelligence reports with the  unredacted names of U.S. residents during the 2016 election.

During his final year in office, President Obama’s team significantly expanded efforts to search National Security Agency intercepts for information about Americans, distributing thousands of intelligence reports across government with the unredacted names of U.S. residents during the midst of a divisive 2016 presidential election.

The data, made available this week by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, provides the clearest evidence to date of how information accidentally collected by the NSA overseas about Americans was subsequently searched and disseminated after President Obama loosened privacy protections to make such sharing easier in 2011 in the name of national security. A court affirmed his order.

https://circa.com/politics/president-obamas-team-sought-nsa-intel-on-thousands-of-americans-during-the-2016-election

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Democrats say they now know exactly why Clinton lost

wicked-witch

WASHINGTON — A group of top Democratic Party strategists have used new data about last year’s presidential election to reach a startling conclusion about why Hillary Clinton lost. Now they just need to persuade the rest of the party they’re right.

Many Democrats have a shorthand explanation for Clinton’s defeat: Her base didn’t turn out, Donald Trump’s did and the difference was too much to overcome.

But new information shows that Clinton had a much bigger problem with voters who had supported President Barack Obama in 2012 but backed Trump four years later.

Those Obama-Trump voters effectively accounted for more than two-thirds of the reason Clinton lost, according to Matt Canter, a senior vice president of the Democratic political firm Global Strategy Group. In his group’s analysis, about 70 percent of Clinton’s failure to reach Obama’s vote total in 2012 was because she lost these voters.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/politics/democrats-say-they-now-know-exactly-why-clinton-lost/ar-BBAz1Gn

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There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble

wicked-witch

Groupthink produced a failure of the “wisdom of crowds” and an underestimate of Trump’s chances.

By Nate Silver

Filed under The Real Story Of 2016

Published Mar. 10, 2017

This is the ninth article in a series that reviews news coverage of the 2016 general election, explores how Donald Trump won and why his chances were underrated by most of the American media.

Last summer, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in what bettors, financial markets and the London-based media regarded as a colossal upset. Reporters and pundits were quick to blame the polls for the unexpected result. But the polls had been fine, more or less: In the closing days of the Brexit campaign, they’d shown an almost-even race, and Leave’s narrow victory (by a margin just under 4 percentage points) was about as consistent with them as it was with anything else. The failure was not so much with the polls but with the people who were analyzing them.

The U.S. presidential election, as I’ve argued, was something of a similar case. No, the polls didn’t show a toss-up, as they had in Brexit. But the reporting was much more certain of Clinton’s chances than it should have been based on the polls. Much of The New York Times’s coverage, for instance, implied that Clinton’s odds were close to 100 percent. In an article on Oct. 17 — more than three weeks before Election Day — they portrayed the race as being effectively over, the only question being whether Clinton should seek a landslide or instead assist down-ballot Democrats:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-really-was-a-liberal-media-bubble/

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‘THIS IS WATERGATE’

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Barack Obama denies ‘ever ordering surveillance on any US citizen’ following bombshell accusations he tapped Donald Trump’s phone during US presidential election

Trump claims ‘sick’ ex-president involved in surveillance during heated election campaign

By Brittany Vonow, Mark Hodge and Patrick Knox
4th March 2017, 8:06 pm

Updated: 4th March 2017, 10:44 pm

DONALD Trump’s allegation that his predecessor ordered his phone to be tapped is “simply false”, Barack Obama’s spokesman says.

In an astonishing salvo of early morning tweets, the firebrand President claimed his predecessor had bugged his phones during the “very sacred election process”, slamming the allegations as a “Nixon/Watergate” scandal.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3009405/donald-trump-barack-obama-wires-tapped-trump-tower-election/

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Poll: Dems more likely to unfriend people due to political posts

House Minority Leader Boehner wipes tears as colleague Johnson speaks about his prisoner-of-war status in Washington

BY JOE CONCHA – 12/19/16 01:46 PM EST

Democratic voters are almost three times as likely to have “blocked, unfriended, or stopped following someone on social media” after Donald Trump’s victory, according to a study released Monday.

The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI ) found 24 percent of Democrats distanced themselves from people on social media because of a political postings. Nine percent of both Republicans and independents reported doing the same to those in social media circles.

Additionally, 28 percent of liberals surveyed said they removed someone from their social media circle because of the content that person posted, compared with 8 percent of conservatives.

For moderates, 11 percent said they blocked, unfriended or unfollowed someone due to what that person posted online.

https://thehill.com/homenews/311047-poll-dems-more-likely-to-unfriend-people-due-to-political-posts

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President-Elect Donald J. Trump Calls Green Party Recount Request , “Ridiculous”

Jill Stein Green Party

 

November 26, 2016

the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, Statement From President-Elect Donald J. Trump on the Ridiculous Green Party Recount Request, “The people have spoken and the election is over, and as Hillary Clinton herself said on election night, in addition to her conceding by congratulating me, ‘We must accept this result and then look to the future.’

“It is important to point out that with the help of millions of voters across the country, we won 306 electoral votes on Election Day – the most of any Republican since 1988 – and we carried nine of 13 battleground states, 30 of 50 states, and more than 2,600 counties nationwide – the most since President Ronald Reagan in 1984.

“This recount is just a way for Jill Stein, who received less than one percent of the vote overall and wasn’t even on the ballot in many states, to fill her coffers with money, most of which she will never even spend on this ridiculous recount. All three states were won by large numbers of voters, especially Pennsylvania, which was won by more than 70,000 votes.

“This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded, and the results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing.”

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Recent Breaches Raise Fears of Voting System Hacks

Vote Ridgewood NJ

file photo Dana Glazer

Best Practices’ considered for state and local election officials

In an already topsy-turvy presidential campaign, the recent breaches of Democratic Party computer networks have fueled fears about potential foreign meddling and raised questions about how secure the electronic systems that record and tally votes across the country are from sophisticated hackers.

For years, computer security experts have warned that electronic voting is vulnerable to hacking that could alter vote tallies and theoretically swing an election. The intrusions that compromised the Democratic National Committee and the House Democrats’ fundraising campaigns’ systems — both of which cybersecurity experts have blamed on groups linked to Russian intelligence agencies — have only heightened those concerns.

Even a minor breach could wreak havoc by undermining the public’s faith in the integrity of the balloting, particularly in a campaign as contentious as this year’s presidential race.

“We cannot function without the leadership that is elected via the democratic process, and attacks on our election system could undermine all of the confidence that voters have in the legitimacy of our leadership,” said J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who has studied security in electronic and internet voting.

With the stakes running high, the Obama administration has said it is attuned to the threat and is looking at ways to mitigate it.

– See more at: https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/recent-breaches-raise-fears-voting-system-hacks#sthash.3VxahQHi.dpuf