Hackers tried to access South Carolina's voter registration system almost 150,000 times on election day.

Courtesy of Yahoo News:  

Hackers tried to access South Carolina's voter registration system almost 150,000 times on Election Day alone, a new report from the state's Election Commission has revealed. 

The report plays into a larger pattern of attempted hacking in the 2016 election, in which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says more than 20 US states were targeted. Intelligence officials believe much of the election meddling was carried out by Russian hackers.

They keep using the phrase "tried to access" but I am starting to think that they almost had to have been successful at least a couple of times.

One does not attempt 150,000 times unless you managed to penetrate a security system somewhere using the same or a similar approach.

And if they were successful just how many votes might they have altered for Donald Trump?

Not that they needed to do much since the Republicans had already managed to purge as many as 22 million eligible Democratic voters from the system before the election:

In the name of voter fraud, 1.1 million voters were removed from the registration lists through voter purging in the months before the 2016 election, and 21 million eligible voters were removed from the polls through voter ID restrictions. 

22 million eligible voters from Democratic voting blocs were removed from the registration lists and polling booths in the name of voter fraud. 

22 million.

Go ahead, tell me again that the Russians and Republicans were not working together. 

Jeb Bush and the purge of minority voters during the 2000 presidential election.

Courtesy of HuffPo:  

As the 2016 campaign heats up, an episode from his tenure as Florida governor reveals why Bush's image as a “uniter, not a divider,” as his older brother used to put it, may not stand up. The state's deeply flawed purge of felons from its voting rolls in advance of the 2000 presidential election remains a scar that still has not healed for many in the state. 

“I’ll never the forget people that came up to me and said, ‘You let them steal our votes,’” Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.), who became state's first African-American elected to Congress since Reconstruction when she won her seat in 1992, told The Huffington Post. “So many people were just wiped off the rolls -- people who’d been voting for years and years. You had the obligation to prove that you weren’t a felon.” 

The felon purge wrongfully denied thousands of legitimate voters the ability to participate in a presidential election pitting Republican George W. Bush against Democrat Al Gore. Ultimately, a few hundred Florida ballots would determine the presidency, and with it, the nation’s path for the next eight years and, really, well beyond. 

Though it received little notice outside of Florida in the election’s immediate aftermath, as hanging chads and butterfly ballots took center stage during the recount, the purge remains for many the most egregious example of voter disenfranchisement that took place during the 2000 presidential election, which was ultimately decided by a Supreme Court ruling. 

“The purge was right out of one of these playbooks in how you diminish minority turnout -- there was absolutely no justification for it,” said Dan Gelber, a former Democratic state legislator and a longtime Bush nemesis. 

Just a reminder that Jeb Bush can speak Spanish until his lips fall off, but that deep down we all know that he will gladly stomp on the rights of minorities in exchange for political expediency. 

Oh, and this story also reminds us just how responsible Jebbie is for this brother's presidency.

That all by itself should be the ultimate dis-qualifier.

Mass voter purges, not good candidates, may help to explain how the Republicans did so well in this midterm election.

Courtesy of Aljazeera:  

Interstate Crosscheck is a computerized system meant to identify fraudulent voters. While Crosscheck’s list of nearly 7 million names of “potential” double voters has yet to unearth, as of this writing, a single illegal vote this year, it did help Republican elections officials scrub voters from registries, enough, it appears, to have swung several important Senate and governor’s races in favor of the GOP. 

There is good reason to believe that Crosscheck-related voter purges helped propel Republican candidates to slim victories in Senate races in Colorado and North Carolina, as well a tight gubernatorial race in Kansas.

Crosscheck compares the lists of voters from states that participate in their program. If it finds two similar names it red flags them and they can then be prevented from voting.

Guess which groups of Americans are more likely to share similar, or even the same, name.

It is no surprise that Republicans control most of the top election positions in Crosscheck’s 27 participating states. In all, Crosscheck tagged a breathtaking 6,951,484 voters for the possible removal from the voter rolls as “potential” duplicate voters. 

Duplicate or double voting is a crime punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison. Yet, despite this supposed vote-fraud crime wave, not one suspect on Crosscheck lists was charged, although prosecutors would have access to any alleged fraudsters’ names and addresses. 

The Crosscheck list purges could easily account for Republican victories in at least two Senate races. In North Carolina, the GOP’s Thom Tillis won over incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan by just 48,511 votes. Crosscheck tagged a breathtaking 589,393 North Carolinians as possible illegal double voters (though state elections officials cut that down to roughly 190,000). 

In Colorado, Republican Cory Gardner was able to force out incumbent Senator Mark Udall in a race that had poll-watchers guessing all summer. The outcome might have been more predictable if Colorado had made public that 300,842 of the state’s voters were now subject to being purged from the voter rolls. 

Other states’ voting officials are less forthcoming about their purges. For example, North Carolina and Ohio refused to release their Crosscheck lists on the grounds that all these voters, more than a million in those two states, are subjects of criminal investigation, which allows them to keep the information confidential. 

If other states followed Virginia and scrubbed just 13.5 percent of their Crosscheck lists, that would more than cover the spread in the North Carolina Senate race and significantly contributed to the margins of victory in several other states. Moreover, this could account for the comeback victory of incumbent governor Sam Brownback in Kansas. Kansas originated Crosscheck and its Secretaries of State have been using it to promote the cleansing of voter rolls since 2005.

And that my friends is how you steal elections, and subjugate the will of the people.

This is why the conservatives are always demanding increased voter ID laws, it is not to keep voters from voting more than once, it is so that they can more easily disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters who might dare vote in way not to their liking.