How Wrong Were The Polls?These New Hampshire stats seem rather disconcerting.
By Percentage
Method Hillary Clinton Barack Obama
Diebold Machines 53.23% 46.77%
Hand Count 47.47% 52.53%
By Votes
Method Hillary Clinton Barack Obama
Diebold Machines 82860 72807
Hand Count 18898 20912
By Number of Municipalities Won
Method Hillary Clinton Barack Obama
Diebold Machines 54 33
Hand Count 43 77
While I have no evidence at this time --- let me repeat, no evidence at this time --- of chicanery, what we do know is that chicanery, with this particular voting system, is not particularly difficult. Particularly when one private company --- and a less-than-respectable one at that, as I detailed in the previous post --- runs the entire process.
I should also note that some 40% of New Hampshire's precincts are hand-counted, which equals about 25% of the votes. All the rest are counted on hackable Diebold op-scan systems, with completely hackable memory cards, all programmed and managed by LHS Associates. As Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org who seems to share my concern, says, LHS is the "chain of custody" in New Hampshire elections.
Other folks that I've spoken to, who follow this sort of thing, share my concern at this hour. Harris noted that it will be interesting to compare numbers of the hand-counted precincts with those counted on the hackable Diebold op-scan systems.
If I was Barack Obama, I'd certainly not have conceded this election this quickly. I'm not quite sure what he was thinking. And as far as offering an indication of whether he understands how these systems work, and the necessity of making sure that votes are counted, and counted accurately, it does not offer a great deal of confidence at this hour.
I'm trying to get in touch with his campaign, to let them know of these concerns. I hope you'll feel free to let them know as well, if any of you happen to be in touch with them, or a part of the campaign. I will, of course, be happy to discuss these concerns with them if they wish to call.
Do NH Primary Statistics Show Election Fraud?
NH Machine vs. Paper
Exit Poll
(c)2004-06 Rand Careaga/salamander.eps
More groovy Diebold posters here.
10 comments:
This is disturbing, but I'm sorry to say that I'm not surprised by it.
At least here I can be confident that my Murst! will be counted.
When I heard the results I immediately suspected fraud. Voting really doesn't matter anyway, so oh well..
P.S. I suspect Hillary's victories will be all overwhelmingly diebold districts.
UPDATE 1/9/08 1:40am PT: Last update for the night. I hope. A quick note on all of this.
Over at Daily Kos, diarist "AHiddenSaint" has written a post quoting, and linking over to this one, by way of sharing his/her concerns about the NH results.
The result: an embarrassing thread of comments, smashing up AHiddenSaint for posting something that the dKos commenters feel is little more than "conspiracy theory". Foolishly (for them), they have taken a sentence from the original post, in which I noted that I "have no evidence at this time --- of chicanery," to wonder why I would therefore write such a post at all. Their claim: that I am some how charging that Clinton stole the election.
I have made no such claim. In fact, if there was skullduggery here, there are plenty of reasons to believe it could have been committed by any number of interested parties, who have nothing to do with the Clinton campaign.
Daily Kos, of course, is a Clinton-centric website, which, more disturbingly, purged diaries and diarists after the 2004 Ohio election, if they were judged to be questioning what went on there. I spoke to Markos (the site's founder) about that, when we were at a conference together in Vegas last Summer. He stills stands by his decision to purge those folks. That, despite so much that has come out since '04 to show that what happened was a travesty of democracy. As I told him then, he owes his readers an apology. He did add, however, that he has someone ("Georgia10") who now cover issues of Election Integrity on their front page.
The result of his purge, is the mindset of the commenters now seen over there. It seems to me they are are begging for a world of hurt, someday, when their candidate doesn't win, under questionable circumstances. They will, of course, have cornered themselves such that they won't be able to ask questions themselvses. In the bargain, they are now fostering a culture of fear. Fear of asking questions. Fear of insisting that our democracy be transparent, of the people, by the people and for the people. If it were only themselves they were hurting by fostering that culture, I wouldn't give a damn. But rest assured, their comments, actions and attitudes will be leveraged, as we move forward, to hurt all of us.
For the record, I am neither a Clinton supporter nor an Obama supporter (nor a supporter of anyone else in the race at this time, in any party.) I am a supporter of the VOTERS. Period.
This comment thread reminds me why I never read the Daily Kos. They act as though it's a conspiracy theory along the lines of - well, to quote one: "Maybe UFOs kidnapped all of Obama's voters." While a commenter claim sthe exit polls confirm the results, they don't provide a link. If they do confirm the results, I would sure like to see them.
Can You Count on Voting Machines?
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Just to be straight up about it, I have never been so certain and so wrong in many years of watching elections, anticipating as I did a solid Obama victory here. Apparently the Clinton camp was surprised, too, as some in their ranks candidly acknowledged.
Billary is the only dem the thug lickens can beat. Therefore, ergo, she will be the dem.
Billary is the only dem the thug lickens can beat.
Yes, I agree that given the Clinton legacy if she were the Dem nominee she would mobilize more people to vote against her than any of the others. In fact, I even registered as a Democrat today so as to cancel my stepdad’s vote for Hillary in the California primary. Given these issues, if someone did in fact hack the Diebold system I don’t think we can assume Clinton had anything to do with it.
On the other hand, in reviewing the exit polls she did seem to get a significant majority of last minute older female voters who may have in fact bought into her teary eyed BS on Monday. Also, there was lower university student voter turnout than expected – and that’s a population that Obama does well with. Given their age and how well he was doing in the polls, perhaps they decided their vote wouldn’t make a difference and decided to go skiing instead.
Give New Hampshire to the Taliban!
Primary Smell: Vote Machine Scandal Brewing - The Winning Ticket: Hillary and Diebold in 2008
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