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Diebold Voter Fraud Rumors in New Hampshire Primaries
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Jan 10, 2008 12:24 PM
from the oh-good-this-again dept.
from the oh-good-this-again dept.
Westech writes "Multiple indications of vote fraud are beginning to pop up regarding the New Hampshire primary elections. Roughly 80% of New Hampshire precincts use Diebold machines, while the remaining 20% are hand counted. A Black Box Voting contributor has compiled a chart of results from hand counted precincts vs. results from machine counted precincts. In machine counted precincts, Clinton beat Obama by almost 5%. In hand counted precincts, Obama beat Clinton by over 4%, which closely matches the scientific polls that were conducted leading up to the election.
Another issue is the Republican results from Sutton precinct. The final results showed Ron Paul with 0 votes in Sutton. The next day a Ron Paul supporter came forward claiming that both she and several of her family members had voted for Ron Paul in Sutton. Black Box Voting reports that after being asked about the discrepancy Sutton officials decided that Ron Paul actually received 31 votes in Sutton, but they were left off of the tally sheet due to 'human error.'"
Related Stories
[+]
New Hampshire Primaries Follow-Up Analysis 315 comments
Dr. Eggman writes "Ars Technica has posted a lengthy follow up analysis of the 2008 New Hampshire Primaries outcome. The article deals with the O'Dell machine/hand-count table that has been circulating through emails. It also points out the combination of factors that resulted in such an odd symmetry of numbers, although the article notes that these numbers have been corrected. The corrections still indicate a discrepancy among the tallies. The article also goes on to talk about the nature of the communities that arrived at these numbers and what/how the handcounts proceeds. This process has been inconclusive; something that does not bode well for the rest of the primaries and indeed the election itself, as only 16 states currently mandate both a voter-verified paper trail (VVPT) and a random manual audit of election results."
[+]
Recount Proves No Fraud In NH Primary 93 comments
murdocj writes "You can take off those tinfoil hats, because the recount results of the NH Primary are in, and the hand count matches the machine count. Everyone can now move on to the conspiracy around the Texas flying saucer. In fact, only 40% of the vote was recounted (that's all that Dennis Kucinich was willing to pay for), but that 40% shows that the machine and hand counts match up nicely. As was pointed out when this 'story' broke, areas that have machine counting tend to have different demographics than hand-counted areas, and thus a difference in voting patterns."
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These things happen (Score:5, Informative)
These things happen in primaries. Often a lot of independents swing the same way, or last-minute campaigning changes people's minds.
As Bob Somerby points out [dailyhowler.com], the polling for the New Hampshire primary was wrong, by a larger margin, the last time we had a two-party primary:
Re:These things happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Er, no, a candidate's ENTIRE share of votes at a precinct disappearing, doesn't happen. That is inexcusable.
This is why I've long held that the only way to ensure all votes are accurately counted, is to end the secret ballot. Don't make it available on the internet, but make it so groups, with stringent limitations, can audit the list, and people can check their own vote.
I mean, look at this -- people found that their votes weren't counted, simply because a weak reality check caught it. Imagine what it's like on all the times where it *isn't* painfully obvious your vote wasn't counted!
Re:These things happen (Score:5, Insightful)
All you need for that is to issue a serial number with a voting stub. Let the voter check that a given serial number exists in the tally, and what the vote was recorded as.
It would be trivial to publish the list of serial numbers, and their votes. Voters could see that their vote was recorded correctly and included in the tally. And the tallies could be independantly verified.
The only thing you couldn't do is track back who voted for who, which is a good thing I think.
Re:These things happen (Score:5, Interesting)
Why risk a return to the corruption that occurred when ballots weren't secret when modern technology (not computing, but applied mathematics) provides mechanisms to have our cake and eat it too?
Re:These things happen (Score:5, Insightful)
This wouldn't fix anything. The database can be built so that your own vote shows you who you really voted for, but the vote totals can still be skewed, since the total tallies can not be looked at person by person.
Re:These things happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:These things happen (Score:5, Insightful)
In practice, the easiest traditional ways of ballot stuffing still work with electronic voting. You can register fake voters, cast votes on the behalf of other people (including dead people), that sort of thing. They attack the determination of whether someone is allowed to cast a vote, not the voting system itself.
Actual, literal, ballot-box stuffing is easier with electronic voting - an attacker can subtract votes easily without needing access to the elections between voting and vote-counting, simply by pre-compromising the system. We have defences against this for traditional ballots, but electronic voting has no way of testing this sort of compromise. (A major issue is the sophistication of attacks that are possible - being simple is an advantage in this case.)
Re:These things happen (Score:5, Insightful)
So yeah, in modern real democracies ballot box stuffing is really very hard indeed, as it should be. Secret ballots are secret to protect the voter from retaliatory actions by the successful candidate. Just look at how the current US administration publicly attacked and excluded companies who supported other political parties, a clear demonstration of why it is necessary. Hell they even required that potential employees detailed which political party they registered to vote with in their employment applications, a clear and gross abuse of power.
Government is all about people, why should there be any machines in the process at all, except of course to bloat corporate profits and to allow a single easy point to corrupt the political process to yet further bloat corporate profits.
Re:These things happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:These things happen (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a solution to that problem.
When you vote, the system gives you a single digit number as your verification code. When you go on to the system to verify your vote, it presents you with a list of all the candidates with a single digit number (not the one it gave you earlier) next to each candidate that you didn't vote for and the number that it did give you next to the one you did vote for.
There is then no way for anyone other that you to see who you voted for - all you have to do is lie to your boss about which digit you were given.
This would need to be worked on a little to make it properly foolproof, but it could be done.
Extortion and American Luxury (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a sign of our easy position in the world that we think that 'vote buying' is the worst possible outcome of non-anonymous voting. As another poster said, the real reason to prevent votes from being connected to the voter is that then voters can be extorted.
On the most basic level you have people who physically threaten you; vote this way or we hurt you, your family, your business. Moving up in sophistication, though, you can stand to lose all sorts of things; you didn't vote the company line? No job for you. Worst is that it allows the government that gets elected to single out and quash people who did not vote for it. Oh, you didn't vote for Bush? Well, I hope you want a vacation to Cuba...
In the end the anonymous vote allows us to vote secure in our liberty. This has always been everyone's first priority. It is only a second priority that the vote be accurate and the result a representation of the public will. We are working on how to achieve this second without sacrificing the first.
Mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:These things happen (Score:5, Funny)
If ballots weren't secret, how would you keep people from coercing voters? How would you keep people from selling their votes? Ballots are secret for good reason.
Oh please. This is America; nobody's going to coerce my vote. They're going to buy it, fair and square.
Re:These things happen (Score:5, Insightful)
You didn't hire them 24/7. So what ever they do before 9 am and after 5 pm is not of your concern, and using that as reason to cancel a contract is a breach of contract, and furthermore it is against their right of free association.
That's the strange thing with freedom, it ends as soon as it limits other peoples freedom.
Re:These things happen (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:These things happen (Score:5, Interesting)
showing 0 (zero) just makes it painfuly obvious there is a problem... what we need is to design an effective open system so that there are no errors, or a way that the public at large can be assured that their vote counted.
Accounting error. (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, come on, the average precinct BARELY record 1000 votes and the biggest don't even hit 3000, yet the voting system for the average high school prom, while equally as complicated, extensive and at risk for fraud, is more secure and less prone to error.
I'm left pretty certain that the only way someone could produce such a system for simple integer tabulation with such comparatively huge error rates is if those errors were in fact deliberate and by design. There seems little other explanation and positively ZERO excuse.
Correlation vs. causation (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also important to note that there's actually a very simple explanation for the results: cities like Clinton.
If you take the cities from TFA (> 5,000 votes, all counted by machine), you get:
That sums up to 97,094 votes (1/3 of the total), of which 42% went for Clinton and 34% Obama. If you restrict to just the largest cities (> 15,000 votes, 13% of total), it's 45% to 31%.
So while it's clear that support for Clinton vs. Obama is correlated with machine-counting vs. hand-counting, it's also clear that both of those are correlated with city size, suggesting a much simpler and rather less nefarious underlying common cause. The tables in TFA don't show that simply because of the highly unbalanced manner in which they split up towns into size classes.
(That being said, of course I'd love to see this be the death knell for vote-counting machines which lack a paper trail. Beats me how anyone ever thought those were acceptable; they may be cheaper than hand-counting, but they simply don't do the same job, making a direct price comparison irrelevant. It's like buying a hammer because it's cheaper than a saw.)
Exit polls gave Obama a four point lead (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, I think it is possible to explain these very strange results without resorting to election fraud. Even so, I do think the current situation warants further scrutiny.
The Independent said there was a 11 point swing between the average of the polls (Obama +8) and the official results (Clinton +3). There are reasons other than fraud for Clinton to beat the polls:
-
Voter complacency after Obama's huge lead in the polls. This would lead more independents to vote in the Republican Primary instead of "wasting" their vote for Obama. Also, some first time voters (like students) may have stayed away from the polls confident that Obama would win easily. This could easily account for 3% of the swing.
- Females deciding to vote for Clinton in the last day. There were two events, both widely publicized by the MST that would have made Clinton more appealing to women. First, the way Edwards came to Obama's defense in the Saturday debate could have made both men appear to be anti-female. Second, the most widely publicized event of the primary was Clinton's teary moment that also might have appealed to females. The exit polls said the late deciders were a wash, they followed the trend of the entire vote. I think the two moments cited above nullified what would have been a swing towards Obama in the late deciders. I'd say this could account for 1 point in the overall 11 point swing.
-
The Bradley Effect [wikipedia.org] where white voters lie to pollsters in bi-racial elections. This is the non-fraud explanation for the 7% discrepancy in the exit polls (Obama +4 vs. Clinton +3). We must give this 7%.
IMO, the discrepancy in the exit polls is the most troubling statistic. If we don't see similar discrepancies (of 5% or more) in primaries in other mostly white states then I think election fraud would be the only possible explanation of the New Hampshire results.Re:These things happen (Score:5, Informative)
But I do not think that in this case Diebold is responsible. I am rather familiar with the state and could pretty much predict the outcome, once the pattern was seen. Clinton did best in cities with a conservative cultural heritage -- white-ethnic mill towns and places where working-class Massachusetts white voters have moved to. Manchester, Nashua, and Salem are good examples. Think Dunkin' Donuts places. Obama did best in places with more of a Starbucks cultural bent, including white-collar cities like Concord, Keene and Portsmouth and the western side of the state. Hand counting is done in the smaller towns, which are mostly Obama places. Actually, a lot of those towns are mainly Republican (McCain) places, but the Democrats there are more Obama fans.
Re:These things happen (Score:4, Interesting)
The interesting part is that the results from areas using Diebold machines are significantly different from the results in hand-counted areas -- by an margin amply large to change the result of the primary. The data being published at Black Box Voting show that the differences exist even when accounting for the size of the population centers.
Maybe nothing to see here, but there is certainly enough here to warrant a closer look.
Could it be cultural differences in the precincts? (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I would also like to point out that it might not be an error that the hand counted precincts give a different result than the machine counted ones. Is it possible that the precincts using the Diebold machines have significant cultural differences from the precincts still using hand-counting? For example, maybe the hand counted precincts are largely poorer rural and/or inner-city areas, while the machine counted precincts are urban and sub-urban communities with different ethnic cultures, levels of education, level of access to the Internet, religious beliefs, etc?
Why would it be reasonable to expect all precincts to vote the same way?
Re:These things happen (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:These things happen (Score:4, Informative)
Re:These things happen (Score:5, Informative)
But this is troubling, because we've had elections turn on less.
question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:question (Score:5, Insightful)
Banks care about money.
Banks care a lot about money.
Banks test them. They get contracts that probably say that if defects give money away, Diebold has to replace the money lost. Banks are willing to pay for a good ATM, not try to bid it out to the lowest priced person who comes along and cuts corners. If Diebold ATMs had this many problems, they wouldn't be in business long.
My only real question on this story is, how did the precincts differ other than the machines? Are the places that used the machines mostly urban? Is there something else that correlates that could explain the discrepancy, or does it appear to have no other correlating factors?
They used to say (Score:5, Insightful)
Time to grab the fire extinguisher and go see where this smoke is coming from.
In the words of Patriot Act protagonists: "if there is nothing to hide, there is no harm in looking"
If for no other reason than to help settle the country down, for fuck's sake, go do a recount and get it over with, then we can all go back to our regularly scheduled updates on Britany and those others.
And please, Quickly do the recount before these people start asking about where the money for the war was spent.
Bunch of freaking radicals... geesh
For heaven's sake... (Score:5, Insightful)
Please, not this again! Why do we bother having elections at all if they couldn't possibly deviate from "scientific polls"?
And that's "Dr. Ron Paul", thankyouverymuch.
Re:For heaven's sake... (Score:5, Insightful)
- a devout atheist
PS - sure, i'd even more prefer a scientist who believed in individual liberty, but have you looked at the crop of candidates?
I hope the Fraud is real (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a few reasons why I hope that the fraud is real and can be proven.
1) It will make for good television, and be highly entertaining to me.
2) It will force people to realize that such fraud is possible, and force a solution to be created before the next US Federal Election.
I may be a Canadian, but I am not naive enough to think that your election results wont have an effect on my country. Also, I suspect that the kind of people willing to rig an election are not the sort you want to have running the show.
For more conspiracy fodder, are the Clintons really stupid enough to have a hand in this?
END COMMUNICATION
Re:I hope the Fraud is real (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, the far more likely scenario, it will simply be disregarded by most as a crazy conspiracy theory and once again fuck up the election.
We go back to when Moses wore short pants (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We go back to when Moses wore short pants (Score:5, Insightful)
Adding Fuel to the Fire (Score:5, Informative)
The prize is the power, what would you do ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Electronic voting is/will be a fraud, the prize for winning is too high
I am not saying that it happened now, but i surely will happen, no matter what. Please all of you "good will" men/women come down to earth and stop pretending that electronic voting can be made perfect !
Electronic voting says: "trust me, I will count your vote for you in a way that you cannot verify". This is going to be a terrible democracy crash
Paper trail should/must be the one that counts, all the rest is exit polls (do we really care to know who the next president of US is in real time ? or better, what are we giving up to have real time results ?
poorly publicized pre-primary polls (Score:5, Insightful)
In Ossipee, where I spent the majority of my time, Clinton won 281 to 261 over Obama (hand counted). There was record-shattering voted turnout in the area for both parties. Previously, the record was ~1000 voters. On Tuesday over 1500 voters showed up. Several nearby towns even reported running out of paper ballots.
I think the real problem was how the media handled their polls. Many Obama supporters I talked to on primary day mentioned that they were planning to support Ron Paul or vote against a candidate in the Republican party because they didn't believe Obama needed their support. Mind you, these are people with Obama signs in their yards who had actively been helping in his campaign. I wonder how much credit we can attribute to voter complacency rather than some Diebold conspiracy theory.
In any case, I don't understand all the fuss. Obama and Clinton were awarded the same number of delegates. This whole mess only matters to the media and spin people.
one of the values of transparency (Score:4, Informative)
you need an army of conspirators working hard and long to mess with paper ballots to a large degree. you need one asshole in the right spot for 3 seconds to completely alter the results in any way you can imagine, including recreating plausible degrees of randomness, and you can cover your tracks completely
the order of magnitude increase in number of attack vectors that are introduced with electronic voting is one thing, and the radically increased potential for doing massive damage quickly is another. but the real threat electronic voting poses to democracy is that it is opaque. it can't be trusted, because nothing can be truly verified. any "verification" is comparing one piece of easily altered quicksilver to another
i am not in any way joking when i say the greatest threat to democracy in the 21st century is electronic voting. it erodes trust, faith, and confidence. strictly because when stories like this one spreads, and they always do, after every election, in every country, there is no way to dispel them. sour grapes or a genuine issue, no can tell for sure with electornic voting
paper voting should NEVER be replaced, and in fact mecahnical voting should be retired as well
i'll say it again: the greatest threat to democracy in the 21st century is electronic voting
i firmly believe that. it is a menace
when the next bush versus gore extremely close imbroglio occurs in another election, there won't be any hanging chadsto look at. just some assholes in suits form some private company with questionable political connections telling us over and over everything is ok and everything is verified and everything is squeaky clean. oh really? what you get after that is instant chaos, instant zero legitimacy in the government in the eyes of the public. out of the woodwork come all of the demagogues, spreading all of their lies, and public trust gets placed in the worng hands
give me hanging chads over electronic voting any day
Discrepancy on the GOP side as well (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe this information points not to voter fraud, or Diebold hacking, as much as I would like to see it happen (only to prove a point). Rather, across the board, i believe the larger districts were probably not accurately sampled in the majority of pre-election polling. Many of the media polls and other reported metrics were taken at gatherings and candidate rallies, as well. Typically, only the most passionate supporters, or those who are the most undecided attend these functions. It is difficult to accurately gauge voter opinion for the entire state from such small sample sizes.
Disclaimer: I am a registered Republican in the state of Arizona, and am undecided. I have no preference for a candidate at this time.
There are no "electronic voting" machines in NH (Score:5, Informative)
Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Very easy solution (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess you could have the booth print the ballot and then the voter check the ballot and then put the ballot in a box...
Except that someone might forget to put the ballot in the box. Or when they do a recount the ballot might be miss read. I guess you could use OCR but that isn't perfect.
Or you could print a barcode that would reflect the ballot that is printed... Unless they hacked that so it didn't match.
Re:Very easy solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Very easy solution (Score:5, Informative)
I haven't heard from anyone else I know in the state that they're using electronic only voting.
Re:Very easy solution (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thank God this is finally being reported (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Informative)
I've been here for years, have a four digit ID, and have NEVER had one of my stories posted. Sure, let's say most of them are crap, boring, stupid, lame, but I'd think at least ONE of them would have gotten thru in the last decade. I've seen a lot worse ideas actually get posted.
I'm not angry, I just don't give a crap any more. The other day, after years of not submitting anything, I tried another one, it was about Jack Thompson suing the Omaha Police Chief to get the video game records of the mall shooter. Seemed perfect for Slashdot. Bounced, rejected, nobody got their version posted either.
Just reaffirmed my belief that Slashdot is ran by tin-foil-hat wearing lizard conspiracy overlords trying to turn us slashdotters into mindless consumers.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe the Slashdot submission process is powered by Diebold?
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
and whenever Roland Piquewhatever gets another one of his stories posted I wonder what he's got that I haven't