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Diebold Voter Fraud Rumors in New Hampshire Primaries
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.'"
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, the polling for the New Hampshire primary was wrong, by a larger margin, the last time we had a two-party primary:
there are big kickbacks for fixing the vote.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/1/10/02623/2264/85/434176/
Note that the results don't deviate from the exit polls, they deviate from the pre-election polls. The exit polls were as accurate as usual.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Yah, I used to beleive that. Now it's more like "Send in your subscriptions, and waste your time."
:)
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.
Nachi worm infected Diebold ATMs
I seriously doubt that Clintons had a thing to do with this. Diebold is controlled by republicans. The polls show that Obama pretty much beats any pubs, but Clintons has just a slight lead.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't know what the rest of the state uses for vote counting, but in my town we fill in bubbles on a paper sheet. That sheet is then fed to the counting machine (Diebold?) and keeps the paper sheet. So there should be paper ballots to count.
I haven't heard from anyone else I know in the state that they're using electronic only voting.
New Hampshire law requires a human-readable paper record. The machines in question were optical scanners and the ballots in NH are fill-in-the-bubble sheets.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
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.
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 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.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
In fact that was the problem in 2000!
No, the problem is 2000 was that the ballots/machines were poor. This left the actual vote of many ballots open to interpretation. Depending on the method used to interpret (or disqualify) the ballots, different winners resulted. A good ballot (like the California absentee ballots) is not open to interpretation (e.g. no 'hanging chads', etc.).
People make mistakes.
In the vast majority of elections (hand-) counting mistakes will have no effect whatsoever on the results.
With overseers from all interested parties wanting to make sure each and every vote for them is counted, mistakes will be rare. Four people (counter, public overseer, Democrat, Republican) looking at a Republican vote are hardly going to count it as a Democratic vote with the Republican there to point out the mistake.
You also would have to have TEAMS of people counting each set of votes.
Yes. I fail to see how this is a problem.
And how do you know that the ballot boxes where not stuffed? Or the ballots changed? Like that has never happened.
We have very good methods for securing paper, which means:
1. Paper fraud is (i.e. can and should be) much harder to perpetrate than electronic fraud.
2. Paper fraud is much easier to detect than electronic fraud.
3. Paper fraud leaves a much easier trail to follow than electronic fraud.
Your "solution" isn't perfect. I don't know if we can have a perfect system and have a true secret ballot.
The idea is not to create a perfect system in which no mistakes are made, but to create a system highly resistant to fraud.
Here is another tool for examining the NH primary results. It compares each candidate's hand-counted to machine-counted vote ratio with the overall ratio, and can limit the report to towns producing a certain range of votes (e.g. say you only want to consider medium-sized towns to factor out the urban-vs-rural issue).
Please consider that the real way to deal with the risk of fraud is for citizens to organize their own exit polling. The commercial exit polling is not truthful-- it is known that they adjust their results to the actual election outcome and do not make the raw data available.
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 your candidate counting the votes.
Of course, in a country with more than 40 million people in poverty, there's almost nothing you can't buy. But I'm sure the USA can do a lot better than that.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
No. The exit polls did not agree with the vote count:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/usa/2008/01/exit_polls_obama_and_mccain_ah.html
Later, the exit poll is changed to agree with the vote count:
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/11/the_difference_.html
The CNN and NBC (MSNBC used the NBC results) exit poll results (still available on their sites) have Senator Clinton winning by 2% http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21225995/
Read the fine print at the bottom of the page: "Results are based on NBC News projections and unofficial returns". Those are a combination of lots of factors, and they are adjusted over time to reflect the actual vote count. The purpose of those numbers is to predict the official winner.
If you want to compare exit polls against actual returns, you need actual exit poll data, and that's nowhere to be found on that page.