Sunday, December 4, 2016

You’re not just imagining it: the Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump vote totals do look rigged - Bill Palmer Report

You’re not just imagining it: the Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump vote totals do look rigged
By Bill Palmer | November 17, 2016 |

As a political journalist, I hate empty conspiracy theories. I like to go where the bulk of the evidence is pointing. So even though I’m as shocked at Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton as anyone else, I have been unwilling to preemptively accuse the vote totals of having been rigged or altered. It’s taken me nine days of looking at the numbers and trends and patterns, but I’ve come to the conclusion that for once, the conspiracy theorists appear to have been right: this election looks rigged.

There is no single smoking gun in the voting results which led me to this conclusion of its own accord. Rather it’s the totality of all of what I’m about to lay out which has led me to the conclusion that there was indeed something fishy with the numbers, the sheer number of highly unlikely red flags. So bear with me as I lay out a mountain of evidence.

What first made me suspicious was the notably low general election voter turnout. Pundits have explained that away by pointing out that Clinton’s favorability rating was fairly low and Trump’s was even lower. But throughout the primary season, the American voters made clear that they very much wanted to turn out for or against these two candidates. And despite all the talk about favorability, these two candidates each got millions more primary votes than any of their challengers. So the notion that the 2016 election would receive two and a half million fewer votes than the 2012 election, which most Americans considered to be a far less consequential election, is odd. But the demographic breakdowns are what truly raise eyebrows.

Some have pointed to voter suppression in certain swing states as the supposed reason for lower voter turnout. But the 2012 election was subject to the same kinds of suppression. And for that matter, so were the 2016 primary contests. Despite the voter purging and long lines, we saw African-Americans in southern states come out of the woodwork to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 democratic primary, even though they didn’t necessarily dislike Bernie Sanders. But according to the official tallies, those same African-Americans in North Carolina suddenly decided they no longer cared if Hillary Clinton won the 2016 general election, even though she was now facing an opponent in Donald Trump whom they viewed as an abhorrent racist.

Other states and other demographics raise other red flags. For instance, somewhere around seventy percent of all the votes cast in the 2016 general election in Florida were cast early. Various exit polls pointed to Hillary Clinton receiving as somewhere between 54% and 59% of the Florida early vote, much of it from Hispanic-Americans. That meant Trump would have had to have received somewhere between 59% and 71% of the election day voting in Florida in order to have caught up and tied the state. He would have needed between 62% and 74% of the election day vote to have won it by the one percent overall margin he supposedly won it by.

Although democrats tend to do somewhat better in early voting and republicans tend to do somewhat better on election day, it’s virtually impossible for Trump to have come back and won Florida after it was already basically in the bag for Clinton before election day even arrived. See my full mathematical breakdown for Florida voting in the middle of this article for why he simply couldn’t have come back to even tie up Florida, let alone win it.

There has also been much made of how the polls ended up being so wrong. Having spent the past year and a half observing the polls in this election, I fully agree that it’s easy for one or two polls to end up being very wrong. We saw it all the time in the primary season. But historically speaking, going back through the eighty years in which presidential polling has been conducted, it’s virtually impossible for the polling averages to have been this thoroughly wrong. In fact the last time they got a Presidential general election wrong outside the margin of error was in 1948 – and polling was unsophisticated crap back then.

But nevermind the overwhelmingly unlikely odds of the 2016 polling averages having been wrong. The more immediate trend is one which we saw during the primary season. In any given hotly contested primary state, Donald Trump tended to perform the same as, or worse than, his polling averages. We saw it in his very first contest in Iowa, where he shockingly lost despite being favored. We saw it again in Wisconsin and other states. In contrast, Hillary Clinton tended to perform about the same as, or better than, her polling averages in most states. For instance she was favored to win South Carolina by around twenty points and she won it by more than forty points.

In a general election matchup between one candidate who had spent the past year underperforming his poll numbers, and one candidate who had spent the year outperforming her polls numbers, the logically expected outcome is that Hillary Clinton would have won by the same amount she was ahead in the polling averages or more. Now she did win the popular vote in the general election by around one percent. But logically, based on the final polling averages and the existing pattern observed in the primaries, she should have won it by four points or more.

Finally, there were four swing states in which Hillary Clinton was definitively favored to win, but she ended up losing: Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvnia, and Michigan. In the final tallies she lost each of them by right around one percent of the vote. That’s not how numbers work. If Trump had won those four states legitimately due to pockets of voters that pollsters didn’t know about, we would have seen a more random dispersion of the results. Trump might have won one of those states by four percent, won another of them by two percent, lost another one percent, and so on.

It is statistically suspicious that in every state where Donald Trump pulled off an upset, he won it by right around one percent, just what he needed to win it, no more and no less. Results don’t naturally play out that way. The final tallies in Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvnia, and Michigan read like someone went through and nudged each of them just over the mark so Trump would win them, but didn’t want to arouse too much suspicion by giving him any larger of a victory in those states than he needed.

So where does all of the above get us? It’s a mountain of statistical and mathematical and logical and demographic discrepancy and suspicion and nothing more. I can’t definitively prove that the vote tallies were rigged. And as a practical matter it would be so tricky for a hacker to rig the results in various states, without any of the local precinct overseers catching on, that no one has even been able to posit a plausible method for pulling it off. But still, these things can’t all have legitimately happened.

In order to believe that the official vote tallies are legitimate, you have to accept that all of the above legitimately happened: African-Americans in the south went from turning out in droves for Hillary Clinton in the primary to not caring if she won the general election. Donald Trump got sixty-something percent of the same-day voting in Florida. The polling averages were wrong for the first time in modern history. Trump beat his poll numbers despite having spent the primary season tending to fall below them. Clinton fell below her poll numbers despite having spent the primary season tending to beat them. In every state where Trump pulled off a shocking upset victory, he just happened to do it with one percent of the vote. And in an election that everyone cared particularly deeply about, no one really turned out to vote at all. I can accept any one of the above things happening as an isolated fluke. I cannot accept all the above happening. And so for once in my evidence-driven career, I’m left to believe that the conspiracy theorists are right: the vote tallies are rigged.

3 Key Lessons to Starting a Successful NGO, According to an Effective Poverty Fighter - Fortune

Posted: 02 Dec 2016 09:47 AM PST

A cyclone in 1970 that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Bangladesh changed the course of Sir Fazle Hasan Abed’s life and the lives of the 150 million his organization has since pulled out of poverty.
At the time of the disaster, he saw bodies of men, women, and children floating in the shallow waters of a bay.
“That shocked me,” he said at the Fortune – Time Global Forum in Rome on Friday. “Suddenly, I thought the life I was leading had no meaning at all. I was so disconnected from the poor like this.”
The revelation prompted Abed to leave his job at Shell Oil and eventually start BRAC, now the largest non-governmental organization on the planet with over 110,000 employees and an institution that’s considered the world’s most effective at eradicating poverty.
BRAC started as a relief operation called the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee in 1972 to help the nation recover from the cyclone and its war of independence from Pakistan. It soon morphed into a larger effort to eliminate poverty and empower women through social and economic channels. Today, it has commercial enterprises like a printing press, retail outlets, and the private BRAC University that help fund its development programs. Last year, Abed won the 2015 World Food prize for his “unparalleled” work on reducing poverty in Bangladesh and 10 other nations.
On the Global Forum stage, Abed reflected on his life’s work and shared what he says are the keys to a successful anti-poverty program. They boil down to:
  1. Be ruthless in your targeting 
  2. Perfect the process 
  3. Scale 
Most anti-poverty programs are “not designed well,” Abed said. “They don’t reach the poorest of the poor; they are not targeted properly. I think what is needed are small pilot projects to make it effective.” Then, he said, a leader must make the project efficient by converging essential tasks and cutting non-essential ones. The final step is to scale.
Abed also emphasized the importance of a program’s sustainability. (Eighty percent of BRAC’s $1 billion budget in Bangladesh is self-funded through its commercial enterprises; the rest comes from donors.) He cited research by a historian who examined 500 16th century institutions in Europe—only 33 of them survive today. Of those, 29 are universities.
“Why universities?” Abed asked, “All societies obviously needed leaders, and those leaders were trained by universities. Plus, [universities] have always changed with the evolving needs of society.”
This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

What Starbucks’ New CEO Means For Your Daily Coffee Fix - TIME Business


Posted: 02 Dec 2016 07:41 AM PST

It’s the end of an era for the global corner coffeeshop: Howard Schultz is stepping down as Starbucks’ CEO. And investors are uneasy about it.
Shultz announced the move Thursday in a statement released right after the stock market’s official trading session ended. He will take on the title of executive chairman, while Starbucks President and COO Kevin Johnson will assume the CEO role. Both men held a conference call to reassure investors that, far from disrupting Starbucks’ long history of success, the moves will pave the way for future growth.
Shultz will remain at Starbucks, but will focus on building out new categories of stores, such as the high-end, 15,000 square-foot Roastery it opened in Seattle. Johnson will focus on running the 25,000 stores Starbucks has in 75 countries, drawing on his experience at Microsoft and Juniper Networks to employ technology aimed at keeping customers coming to its coffeeshops.
So iconic is Shultz as a retail CEO, however, that Starbucks shares dropped 4% on the announcement. Nor did the stock recover much after repeated assurances from both executives that this was “an evolutionary process” that has been in the works for several months as Starbucks charted out a five-year strategic plan. Evolutionary or not, it came as a surprise to investors.
“I’m here every single day,” Shultz said. “And I’m going contribute to what I think is a significant growth opportunity of a new franchise within Starbucks.” For his part, Johnson underscored he won’t be running Starbucks alone. “Over the last two years, we’ve worked much more closely together,” he said. “Our offices are connected. We talk several times a day. We brainstorm.”
Shultz joined Starbucks in 1982 after working for a Swedish housewares company and noticing the a small Seattle store was buying more cone filters than anyone. He bought Starbucks in 1987, expanded into other cities and took the company public in 1992. In 2000, having brought the company to $2.2 billion in annual revenue, Schultz stepped down.
Eight years later, Schultz returned as CEO after the stock entered a prolonged slump that saw its value decline 80% over a two-and-a-half year period. Once Schultz returned, Starbucks’ stock went on a tear that pushed it to new heights, rising more than 500%.
Over the past year, however, that rally has stalled, with the stock down 9% from its record high of $64 a share. Schultz says retailers in general are undergoing a “seismic shift away from bricks and mortar toward online retailing.” Starbucks isn’t immune to the loss of foot traffic, which is why he’s embarking on a new kind of coffeeshop designed to become what he calls “relevant consumer destinations.”
Starbucks plans to open as many as 30 Roastery stores in coming years, including one in New York and another in Shanghai, which feature on-site roasting and $12 cups of coffee. Schultz said the Roastery stores will feature baked goods from the Italian restaurant Princi as well as “a broader category” that Starbucks will unveil at its investor day on Dec. 7.
The company will also build as many as 1,000 smaller stores under the Starbucks Reserve brand, which will offer high-end coffee without the on-site roasting, while remodeling many older stores to include Reserve espresso bars. Johnson, meanwhile, will work to improve customer engagement with initiatives like loyalty programs, app-driven orders and digital payments.
Given Schultz’ lifelong entrepreneurial bent, the plan the company has outlined for growth into high-end stores makes sense. The chief concerns are that the new stores could cannibalize business from its traditional stores and that pulling Schultz away from a $21 billion enterprise could lead the stock lower.
One analyst on today’s call called Schultz a “master merchant” and asked whether “that merchant gene and level of entrepreneurial spirit” would remain in the managerial team. Another asked why this changing of the guard would be different from the last time Schultz stepped down 16 years ago.
“The differences between then and now couldn’t be greater,” Schultz said. “I don’t think there’s ever been a time in the company’s history with a pipeline of product innovation.” For now, investors don’t seem so sure. The new roles for Johnson and Schultz may prove to be just what Starbucks needs for its next chapter. But don’t change the fact that there is a difference between a capable CEO and an iconic one.