To: President Donald Trump
Help Ensure The Integrity of the United States Vote
We call upon President Obama to utilize all the powers of the presidency to help ensure a thorough investigation of this election, including methods of examining source codes for possible electronic tampering, as well as investigating more conventional irregularities, suppression and fraud, before electors cast their votes.
Why is this important?
According to a recent ABC News poll, some 42% of Democrats feel that the 2016 election results are illegitimate, even while votes are still being counted [1]. A petition has now been started by Verified Voting demanding of U.S. Secretaries of State, voting officials and Governors that there be an immediate audit of the vote [2]. Meanwhile, the Director of the NSA has suggested that Russia has hacked our election, and calls have been made for a Congressional investigation [3]. The extraordinary circumstances of this election have led to a potential constitutional crisis at the close of the Obama Presidency, and we call upon the President to immediately take an active leadership role, using all means at his disposal to protect the integrity of our electoral process and hence our democracy.
When elections are extremely close, the popular vote and electoral count can diverge, and statistician Nate Silver projected that this could arise with the current election [4][5], estimating that it had a 10% chance of occurring. Since the birth of the modern two-party system, this has happened twice before (1888, 2000). However, having a discernable popular vote lead and yet still losing the electoral college is rarer still, and has only taken place once, in 1876, an election often described as the most controversial, and most widely disputed, in U.S. history [6]. Still, in that case, the electoral loss was merely by a single elector, leaving the current election unique in United States history – it is the only election in which a Presidential candidate has ever won a discernible victory in the popular vote (>1% already, possibly approaching 2% by the time counting is finished, according to some estimates), all while losing the electoral college by a considerable margin (74 electors).
Edison Research exit poll data shows that in precisely the elector-rich swing states that made these highly unusual results possible, Hillary Clinton won, but there was a consistent shift towards Trump, beyond the margin of error, in the tabulated results [7]. Whether the product of happenstance or not, such anomalous results will unquestionably create a vast reservoir of distrust, and in this way tear at the fabric of this nation like no other event in recent history. Linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky called November 8th 2016 “a date that might turn out to be one of the most important in human history, depending on how we react.” [8] It is to that question of how to react that we are now petitioning President Obama.
President Obama is the leader of this country but for two more months, and clearly aware of the high stakes of this election and its importance to his own legacy. It might in issues of direct succession seem most appropriate for a sitting President to avoid any appearance of impropriety and stay aloof, but we are living in extraordinary times, and the need for the Executive Branch to exercise all means at its disposal to ensure the integrity of the United States electoral process could not possibly be more urgent than it is right now. It should be clear that, to a considerable faction of Americans, the United States might never have been in a greater state of emergency than it is right now.
Thus, we call upon President Obama, in these final days of his presidency, to utilize all the powers of the presidency to ensure a thorough investigation of this election, including methods of examining source codes for possible electronic tampering, as well as investigating more conventional irregularities, suppression and fraud, such that there can be far greater clarity and understanding about the extremely unusual results of the current election. This absolutely must be completed before electors cast their votes. The future of the United States depends upon it.
[1] http://dailycaller.com/2016/11/13/42-percent-of-democrats-feel-the-election-was-rigged/
[2] https://www.change.org/p/demand-an-audit-of-the-2016-presidential-election
[3] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/will-congress-investigate-russian-interference-2016-campaign
[4] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-trump-could-win-the-white-house-while-losing-the-popular-vote/
[5] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-odds-of-an-electoral-college-popular-vote-split-are-increasing/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1876
[7] http://markcrispinmiller.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/2016PresidentialExitPoll-VoteCountComparativeSimple.pdf
[8] http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/38360-trump-in-the-white-house-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky
When elections are extremely close, the popular vote and electoral count can diverge, and statistician Nate Silver projected that this could arise with the current election [4][5], estimating that it had a 10% chance of occurring. Since the birth of the modern two-party system, this has happened twice before (1888, 2000). However, having a discernable popular vote lead and yet still losing the electoral college is rarer still, and has only taken place once, in 1876, an election often described as the most controversial, and most widely disputed, in U.S. history [6]. Still, in that case, the electoral loss was merely by a single elector, leaving the current election unique in United States history – it is the only election in which a Presidential candidate has ever won a discernible victory in the popular vote (>1% already, possibly approaching 2% by the time counting is finished, according to some estimates), all while losing the electoral college by a considerable margin (74 electors).
Edison Research exit poll data shows that in precisely the elector-rich swing states that made these highly unusual results possible, Hillary Clinton won, but there was a consistent shift towards Trump, beyond the margin of error, in the tabulated results [7]. Whether the product of happenstance or not, such anomalous results will unquestionably create a vast reservoir of distrust, and in this way tear at the fabric of this nation like no other event in recent history. Linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky called November 8th 2016 “a date that might turn out to be one of the most important in human history, depending on how we react.” [8] It is to that question of how to react that we are now petitioning President Obama.
President Obama is the leader of this country but for two more months, and clearly aware of the high stakes of this election and its importance to his own legacy. It might in issues of direct succession seem most appropriate for a sitting President to avoid any appearance of impropriety and stay aloof, but we are living in extraordinary times, and the need for the Executive Branch to exercise all means at its disposal to ensure the integrity of the United States electoral process could not possibly be more urgent than it is right now. It should be clear that, to a considerable faction of Americans, the United States might never have been in a greater state of emergency than it is right now.
Thus, we call upon President Obama, in these final days of his presidency, to utilize all the powers of the presidency to ensure a thorough investigation of this election, including methods of examining source codes for possible electronic tampering, as well as investigating more conventional irregularities, suppression and fraud, such that there can be far greater clarity and understanding about the extremely unusual results of the current election. This absolutely must be completed before electors cast their votes. The future of the United States depends upon it.
[1] http://dailycaller.com/2016/11/13/42-percent-of-democrats-feel-the-election-was-rigged/
[2] https://www.change.org/p/demand-an-audit-of-the-2016-presidential-election
[3] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/will-congress-investigate-russian-interference-2016-campaign
[4] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-trump-could-win-the-white-house-while-losing-the-popular-vote/
[5] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-odds-of-an-electoral-college-popular-vote-split-are-increasing/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1876
[7] http://markcrispinmiller.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/2016PresidentialExitPoll-VoteCountComparativeSimple.pdf
[8] http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/38360-trump-in-the-white-house-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky