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United States Government Politics

Diebold Voter Fraud Rumors in New Hampshire Primaries 861

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.'"
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Diebold Voter Fraud Rumors in New Hampshire Primaries

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  • These things happen (Score:5, Informative)

    by jamie ( 78724 ) * Works for Slashdot <jamie@slashdot.org> on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:26PM (#21986192) Journal

    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:

    On January 31 [2000], Broder reported that Bush and McCain were "deadlocked in the latest surveys." The next day, McCain won the race -- by 18 points!

    • by UbuntuDupe ( 970646 ) * on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:34PM (#21986340) Journal
      These things happen in primaries.

      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!
      • by vux984 ( 928602 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:47PM (#21986624)
        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.

        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: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Amouth ( 879122 )
          ahh but if anybody is able to see what any serail number voted.. what is to keep your boss asking you the day after what your serial # was? and then seeing if you voted his way?
          • Simple. Make that a protected subject at work, like age, sexual preference, race, gender, health statis, and the like. It already is to a certain extent anyway, just codify or clarify in law. Something like, "Employers are not allowed to discriminate based on voter preferences or statistics, nor are employers permitted to research, investigate, or record the voting record or preferences of any U.S. Citizen."

            I kind of like the idea of a serial number on a ballot in concert with a receipt, stub, or carb
          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by fredrated ( 639554 )
            How is asking for your serial number any different from asking how you voted? If it is illegal to ask how you voted then just make it illegal to ask your serial number.
          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by vux984 ( 928602 )
            ahh but if anybody is able to see what any serial number voted.. what is to keep your boss asking you the day after what your serial # was? and then seeing if you voted his way?

            How about bring in someone elses serial number? Hell, make it so that the elections people will, upon request, print you out someone elses serial number, based on the candidate you want it to reflect. So if you want an 'obama serial number', even though you voted for Paul, just ask, and you'll be given, at random, a copy of someone e
      • You may say whatever you want about Mexican politicians, but after several years of electoral frauds we have come with a system that is practically fraud-proof.

        There's nothing more secure than counting each and every vote, one by one, by hand. Any electronic system and sufficiently complex mechanical ones may be bent without anyone noticing it.

        In Mexico, representatives of each candidate are present when every vote is counted. You can be sure that your vote is counted because there's a supporter of

    • by Kristoph ( 242780 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:34PM (#21986350)
      It's important to note that in all these precincts the exit polls agreed with the actual results. So unless the machines made error s_and_ the voters lied at exit polling this is just sour grapes.

      ]{
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by megaditto ( 982598 )
        So are you implying that the precincts with younger and/or blacker voters, maybe (just maybe) weren't rich enough to buy e-voting machines?

        Does anyone know if the elections are paid for with local taxes?
        • by isdnip ( 49656 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @01:03PM (#21987036)
          If you knew New Hampshire, you wouldn't ask about blacker voters... the equivalent cultural divide, what's left of it, is more like French vs. English.

          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: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by pangur ( 95072 )
          I do love the automatic assumption of racism.

          A precinct in New Hampshire that is considered "blacker" than others would have sixty black people. No joke.

          The percentage of black people in NH in 2006 was 1.1%, which out of 1,314,895 people would be about 15,000. Take 301 voting precincts, and there is an average of fifty per precinct.

          Instead of automatically assuming that racism is involved, consider that there may be other factors involved.
      • by Amouth ( 879122 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:58PM (#21986936)
        except for the fact that it was reported that someone got 0 (zero) votes.. when voters said they did vote for the guy. which tells you there is a problem.. how many votes for other people didn't get counted? where did the votes go.. did they give the votes to someone else??

        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)

          by C10H14N2 ( 640033 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @01:47PM (#21987796)
          I used to have the unglamorous job of keeping an absolutely horrid, ground-up custom hack job accounting system more or less alive. This thing was written over several years by three or four people who had never met each other in a half dozen wonky relatively dead languages. I had an accounting manager roll into my office in hysterics screaming about how the internal reports and external audits varied by $112...over $250,000,000. This was obviously rounding and not even in error, but even the perceived error was on the order of 0.0000448% -- and that was considered unacceptable, which is a tad absurd when the values in question don't even have that many places. But, we're talking integers here. There is no rounding error.

          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.
      • by markov_chain ( 202465 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:58PM (#21986952)
        They probably used Diebold's Integrated Exit Polling system.
        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Bonewalker ( 631203 )
          I think you mean Diebold Integrated Exit Tracking, or DIET. It reduces and trims votes down to nothing! And literally by the end of the election, you'll have no votes left.

          Testimonials -
          DIET sure did for me what none of the other voting systems, either manual or electronic, had been able to do. It reduced my 31 votes to 0 votes in no time flat. Thanks, Diebold! - Ron Paul
      • by Dire Bonobo ( 812883 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @01:24PM (#21987444)

        It's important to note that in all these precincts the exit polls agreed with the actual results.

        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:
        • Concord: 10,939 votes, 3898 vs. 4367
        • Derry: 5,230 votes, 2387 vs. 1632
        • Dover: 7,405 votes, 2901 vs. 2772
        • Keene: 6,282 votes, 1922 vs. 2553
        • Londonderry: 5,369 votes, 1958 vs, 1803
        • Manchester: 20,935 votes, 9492 vs. 6382
        • Merrimack: 5,478 votes, 2325 vs. 1954
        • Nashua: 17,160 votes, 7713 vs. 5597
        • Portsmouth: 6,758 votes, 2368 vs. 2807
        • Rochester: 5,939 votes, 2682 vs. 1796
        • Salem: 5,599 votes, 2867 vs. 1508


        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.)
      • by DrJimbo ( 594231 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @03:26PM (#21989510)
        The UK Independent [independent.co.uk] said the exit polls gave Obama a 4 point lead:

        The exit polls were wrong too, giving Obama a smaller four-point lead.
        So unless you provide a link to some actual evidence, I'm going to have to call bullshit on you.

        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:
        1. 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.
        2. 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.
        3. 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.

    • by gunnk ( 463227 ) <gunnk@NospAm.mail.fpg.unc.edu> on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:37PM (#21986404) Homepage
      Sure, polls and results can differ. However, that is NOT what this is about.

      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.
      • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:53PM (#21986816)
        I'm not fan of Diebold's no-paper-trail voting machines. I think it's inexcusable that the Congress, States, and local boards of election allow such an obviously bad implementation of voting to exist.

        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: (Score:3, Informative)

        by GenKreton ( 884088 )
        As a NH voter - one of those damned independents Hillary and her campaign people were complaining about before she won - and a guy who actually hates and works to remove Diebold machines from the election process here, the differences are pretty minor and seem to be easily explained. The areas using the machines differ VASTLY from those that do not, in most cases. The socioeconomic classes and lifestyles vary across the entire state, and you tend to see the machines in places you see the same types of peopl
    • by Westech ( 710854 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:45PM (#21986566) Journal
      To me the larger issue is the Ron Paul votes that were missing then found again only after the officials were called out on it. This is a very serious problem that can't be refuted or explained away, and I hope it's not overshadowed by the Clinton/Obama issue.
      • by darjen ( 879890 )
        It has to make you wonder whether Ron Paul once again had enough votes to break in to double digits. If it did, I could imagine how it might have an impact on his chances in the next primary states.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Hodar ( 105577 )
      treason Pronunciation Key -[tree-zuhn] -noun
      1. the offense of acting to overthrow one's government or to harm or kill its sovereign.
      2. a violation of allegiance to one's sovereign or to one's state.
      3. the betrayal of a trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery.

      Perhaps if some investigations were done; and if rumors are shown to be true, and one can show and prove that tampering did occur; we should begin charging people for doing this. When someone takes it upon themselves to subvert the
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by JavaLord ( 680960 )
      These things happen in primaries. Often a lot of independents swing the same way, or last-minute campaigning changes people's minds.

      This is true, but it still doesn't explain the discrepancy between the Obama vote in Diebold districts vs hand counted districts. See for yourself. [bbvforums.org]

      The Ron Paul situation was inexcusable as well. How does someone receive 31 votes in a small town, but get called in to state headquarters as 0? This indicates one of three things:

      1. Whoever was calling in was horribly in
  • question (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pak9rabid ( 1011935 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:28PM (#21986220)
    This may be off topic and moderated as such, but why is it that Diebold can make ATM machines that don't seem to get hacked, but can't manage to prevent hacking in their e-voting machines? Call me crazy, but wouldn't there be just as much motivation (if not more) to hack ATM machines as there is to hack e-voting machines? Something smells fishy.
    • Re:question (Score:5, Insightful)

      by autocracy ( 192714 ) <slashdot2007@@@storyinmemo...com> on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:30PM (#21986250) Homepage
      The first trick is that the person making a transaction is authenticated, so everything can be logged in a tracable way. The second trick is that the banks give a damn.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      there are big kickbacks for fixing the vote.
    • Re:question (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:39PM (#21986454) Homepage

      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?

    • by Cajun Hell ( 725246 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @02:50PM (#21988860) Homepage Journal

      why is it that Diebold can make ATM machines that don't seem to get hacked
      ATM machines are inherently more reliable, due to redundancy. Suppose the "machine" fails: you still have the "M" in "ATM". Suppose the "M" fails: you still have "machine." As technology advances, things will be even better: we'll have automatic ATM machines, in which the automation is redundant. Some serious dreamers/futurists are even putting forth the idea of automated teller ATM machines. When using these machines, it is speculated that you'll have two chances to enter your PIN number before it eats your card.
  • They used to say (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zappepcs ( 820751 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:31PM (#21986278) Journal
    There is no smoke without fire...

    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
  • by Otter ( 3800 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:32PM (#21986298) Journal
    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.

    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.

  • by LordZardoz ( 155141 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:35PM (#21986366)
    And no, I am not an Obama supporter. I am a Canadian...

    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
  • by longacre ( 1090157 ) * on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:36PM (#21986390) Homepage
    Have you ever seen the people who work at polling places? Most of them run about the same age as Rasputin and left the workforce before their offices had touchtone phones, never mind computers. Now imagine these people attempting to operate fairly complicated and very important computer equipment. Throw in some younger folks who were too dumb to get jobs at the DMV and that's your typical local Board of Elections. Clearly something is wrong, but I don't think instantly blaming fraud is in order when there is such a real chance of simple incompetence.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kbielefe ( 606566 )

      Come to think of it, I can see why those Obama ballots would be trickier to load into a voting machine than a Clinton ballot. The pencil graphite moves from one side of the paper to the other, and really throws the balance off. ;-}

      I'll choose to believe the more likely explanation that Obama had bigger support in rural precincts, which is where hand counting is more likely.

    • by ColonelPanic ( 138077 ) * on Thursday January 10, 2008 @02:21PM (#21988328)
      I am an election judge. I take a day or two off every year from my supercomputer-design job to help run fair and accurate elections at the busiest precinct in my state. I make sure that everyone with a right to vote can do so and have their vote count. You're welcome. If you don't like your local election judges, become one. Or not. But quit whining.
  • by what about ( 730877 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:38PM (#21986432) Homepage

    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 ?

  • Vote Fraud (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:39PM (#21986450) Journal
    There will always be Vote Fraud, because there will always be humans involved.

    I'm not sure what scares me more, that either nobody counts the votes (automatic) or that people(manually) count the votes. What I'd like to see, is a double double balloting system, two ballots printed, each with both an encrypted vote, which is automatically scanned / counted by machines and human readable form. When discrepancies seem to creep in they can tally both sets of ballots using both automatic and human counters and make sure that all four counts line up, two encrypted and two human readable on two separate sets of ballots. We can even use four different sets of counters, to eliminate counter fraud.

    There is no excuse for something like what is being described in the article happening, ever. Ron Paul not getting any votes ... oops sorry, he actually did get votes. I don't trust the results at all when shit like this happens.

  • by RyLaN ( 608672 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:50PM (#21986704)
    I campaigned for Obama for several days out of the North Conway NH office. While the media reported a 10-12% lead, none of us inside the Obama campaign believed them. At best, our own internal polling put us at 1-2% behind Clinton in rural areas and slightly ahead in the urban counties.

    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.
  • is not that it verifies the results, but that it squelches the bullshit. say, for the sake of argument, that this story is 100% made up. with paper ballots, with enough pressure, you could force a recount. but with electornic voting, no one knows what is real, and what is not. the process is opaque. it's electronic, it's quicksilver

    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
  • by teebob21 ( 947095 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:52PM (#21986784) Journal
    I find it interesting to note as an impartial observer that Romney appears to have gained an even larger advantage via machine voting than did Clinton. Link: http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=REPUBLICANS [ronrox.com] In large towns, Obama fared 4.5% better than the statistical average in districts where Diebolds were used, where Clinton was almost 4% below average. On the GOP primary, Romney was a whopping 10.1% above average. Romney fared better than statistical models would predict in EVERY class of voting district. Clinton only gained machine votes in the small and medium towns, and gave back ground in the larger districts.

    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.
  • Ron Paul 0 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ObiWanStevobi ( 1030352 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @12:57PM (#21986910) Journal
    That's the very clear example. People know they voted for Paul, result says zero. What, the second time they ran the query, it came up with a different result? Bullshit. Something went wrong. I'd don't know or even care if it was intentional or not. If it can't even handle a primary, and has such an obvious and glaring error, we should not be using such a system. Especially if there is no way to verify the results.
  • by jocknerd ( 29758 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @01:10PM (#21987192)
    If voting could make a difference, it would be outlawed.

    Best signature every.
  • by kherr ( 602366 ) <kevinNO@SPAMpuppethead.com> on Thursday January 10, 2008 @01:16PM (#21987278) Homepage
    The headline really needs to be corrected. It's a question of election fraud, not voter fraud. This is a very important distinction: election fraud occurs when the vote counts are tampered with, voter fraud is when people vote multiple times. The Indiana voter ID requirement is currently being argued before the Supreme Court and the state is unable to document any voter fraud in Indiana's history.

    As for what's going on in NH, the paper trail means nothing if it's not used for counting. I've read that 80% of the Diebold paper ballots have not been counted. Since there are some serious questions about the results, why wouldn't everyone say, "Hey yeah, that's what the paper is for! Let's count the ballots?"

    This is all poisoned fruit from the electronic voting tree. Nobody believes election results anymore because of companies like Diebold who have taken an open process and made it closed, hiding away what's really happening. Mix in crap technology and you've got a crisis in confidence.

  • by xtheunknown ( 174416 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @01:22PM (#21987396)
    Every person in NH casts a paper ballot. Some are counted by electronic tabulating machines, but the paper ballots are still available for a recount. There is a big difference between an electronic voting machine (which typically don't have paper trails) and electronic tabulating machines. See this http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/1/10/02623/2264/85/434176 [dailykos.com] for a good discussion of why there was probably no fraud in the NH primary. The Ron Paul votes not being initially counted is another matter. Most likely just an incidence of human error.
  • Human error (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @06:14PM (#21992334)
    I see no reason to disbelieve this. If I were going to rig Ron Pauls votes , I would move them from 31 down to 20 or so. Then nobody can be sure its been done short of an audit. What I wouldn't do is move to them to zero since each of those 31 voters would know there is a fault. Why the hell would anyone rig one of the no-hope candidates anyway?

    The only reasonable explanation is human error. I know this will not compute with some of the conspiracy theory basket cases who support Ron Paul but there it is.

After all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than done.

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