Evidence of election fraud always starts with exit polls.

EXIT POLLS ARE the most important polls the media commissions. Throughout this fifty-state 2016 Democratic primary between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, the exit polls have shown again and again that the way people have voted, on the one hand, and the way the computerized counting machines have recorded votes, on the other hand, have differed significantly.

If you’re unfamiliar with exit polls, they are rigorous scientific instruments used throughout the world as a primary deterrent and safeguard against election fraud. While a few media pundits have written that exit polls only provide informal data for election-day media stories, that is far from their only purpose.

In Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia, for instance, exit polls have been used to overturn elections. In Ukraine, when the recorded vote differed from the exit polls by more than 2%, people immediately knew something was amiss, there were protests in the streets, and the entire election was thrown out. The US State Department itself dubbed that Ukraine election fraudulent based largely on the variance from the exit polls. The State Department considers 2% to be the standard margin of error allowed for an election to be considered fair and authentic.

But for elections here in this country — even one involving a former head of the State Department itself — exit polls have been ignored by elections officials and the corporate media if they differ from the reported results. In state after state, Hillary Clinton has received more votes than the exit polls indicate she should have received, and yet the corporate media has just shrugged this off. This is a scandal that has been reported on widely in alternative media as #ExitPollGate.

TO BE SPECIFIC, in the 26 states for which exit polls were released by media outlets during the Democratic Primaries, Clinton received more recorded votes than the amount expected by exit polling in 24 out of 26 states. In eleven of those states the discrepancy in Clinton’s favor was larger than the margin of error. Meanwhile, in only two states did Bernie Sanders receive more votes than the exit polls predicted. It is very rare for exit polls to miss in favor of one candidate 24 out of 26 times. It is even more rare for exit polls to be off in favor of one candidate by more than the margin of error 11 out of 26 times. The odds of this happening, to this extent, as calculated by mathematician and election analyst Richard Charnin, is 1-in-77 billion. In other words, we’re either witnessing the impossible over and over again, or we’re witnessing fraud.

Ms. Quin Hearn, another mathematician and a math professor at a Florida college, explains this in clear language in a short video. She demonstrates the high likelihood that these exit polls indicate election fraud:

Ms. Hearn explains exit polls

Let’s narrow our focus to statistics from early March exit polling:

In the first half of March, Clinton received more recorded votes than the amount expected by exit polling in 13 out of 14 states. In eleven of those states the discrepancy in Clinton’s favor was larger than the margin of error. Meanwhile, in only one state — Oklahoma — did Bernie Sanders receive more votes than the exit polls predicted. It’s also worth noting that of these 14 states, the discrepancy actually determined the winner in three states — Massachusetts, Missouri, and Illinois. These wins, all swinging from Sanders to Clinton, certainly created momentum for Clinton. But since the Democratic Primary is a race to accumulate proportionally-awarded delegates, it was in the states in which the discrepancy in gross numbers was greatest — Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Ohio — that fraud likely benefited Clinton most.

States later in the primary — Arizona and New York, for instance — were also outside the margin of error. And as I reported last week, California may have been the worst of all.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, the exit polls have been boring, dull, and accurate. In fact, as is generally expected in every country around the world, in every primary on the Republican side, the recorded vote matched the relevant exit poll within the margin of error.

Only on the Democratic side have there been these wild variations. While one can go into logical contortions to imagine exit pollsters defying their professional training and polling certain groups so disproportionately that even established adjustment mechanisms failed to render the exit polls accurate. But in 24 out of 26 states?

We Must Not be Hamlet in the Face of Modern Electoral Crime

IF YOU LET GO of any emotional attachment to what you would like to believe, and imagine we’re discussing an election in, say, China or El Salvador, what would you suspect?

Professor and international elections observer Bob Fitrakis penned a great article on exit polls in this primary. Here is an excerpt from his piece:

I was an international election observer for El Salvador’s 1994 presidential election. Had the ARENA Party said that the votes would be counted on machines built by their friends in private industry and tabulated on computers belonging to major donors of their Party, my report would have been simple to write: “The election is assumed to be fraudulent due to non-transparency and lack of auditing accountability.”

Mr Fitrakis alludes to the fact that the ballots in most states in the US today are counted by computerized voting machines built by one of only two private companies, both of which have suspicious and longstanding ties to the political parties. These voting machines use secret, private computer code devised by these private companies to count the votes, and we have no way to inspect this secret code. This is ridiculously unacceptable in today’s era of dubious online security, cryptography, and hacking.

Mr Fitrakis goes on to explain the importance of exit polls in the processes of modern computerized democracy:

Exit polls are the accepted international standard for indications of election fraud and vote tampering… When election results do not match exit poll results, we should not simply accept these results.

GIVEN THE 1-IN-77 BILLION mathematical calculation that indicates fraud, all Americans should be experiencing a reasonable doubt about the secret, private computer code that has been used in this Democratic Primary. We’re either witnessing the mathematically impossible, or we’re witnessing fraud.

Election fraud at this level would be a high crime against our democracy, and the science suggests it’s happening. Exit polls are one of very few checks against fraud in our elections. To paraphrase Hamlet, exit polls “are the thing wherein to catch the conscience of an election.” We must pay attention to the exit polls since we can’t verify the computer code used to count the votes.

Hamlet repeatedly confirmed his suspicions of a heinous crime, but he struggled to find the courage to take action to right the wrong.

We must find the courage today to understand that exit polls indicate our elections are likely being stolen. And then we must go beyond Hamlet’s indecision. We must act boldly to ensure and restore our democracy.

Tony Brasunas is a Bay Area-based author and journalist.

This article was updated on July 7, 2016 to include data from more exit polls.