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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.'"
Just pull out the physical paper ballots and count. . . Oh wait, no paper ballots to count.
Never mind.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
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
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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.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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!
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
These things happen in primaries.
Being forced to vote by methods that are easy to tamper with and have no way to prove otherwise? Oh, you meant something completely different.
Is it possible that people can refuse to use the Diebold machines when they get to the poll? Can't we just say, "give me the paper ballot?" Why do we have to do it one way or the other. If someone is not knowledgeable in the ways of corruption, cannot use paper for whatever reason, or want to use the modern technology they should be permitted to do so. OTOH, if someone (like me) knows that Diebold's results are easily corrupted w/o any trace, I want to use the tried and true method.
Why can't we?
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.
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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
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.
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The Western World SANCTIONS other countries when exit polls conflict with actual results. Despite the cries of the punditry, exit polls are highly accurate. Pollsters have been perfecting their methods for decades. If you ever start seeing a deviation, rather than saying "Polls are stupid anyway," you should be asking yourself "WTF is going on?" I'm not saying that the primary was rigged, but SOMETHING happened and we MUST find out if we're to have an honest Presidential election next time around. I know most people can't believe that election fraud on a wide scale can't happen here in "Democracy Central," but we've already found black and white evidence in 2000 and 2004. Ask Tim Griffin about caging lists :(
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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 ?
To what end?
If a significant number of voters choose the easy-but-insecure method of voting, then the fact that your vote was counted properly isn't going to matter.
"Let's see, 1% of voters are insisting on paper ballots, so I can't rig those. Ok, I'll skew the results I can rig by an extra 1% to compensate. Problem solved!"
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.
Apparently we just don't care. As long as my life runs smoothly I don't care. Bush is president and we didn't elect him who cares! We should be outraged we should demand this be fixed but the country as a whole or even a majority of the country doesn't seem to care. There was more outrage(IMO false outrage) over what Don Imus said and that didn't effect anyone. We've had it too easy for too long and we've lost the ability to learn to stand up and be heard when we're being wronged. /rant
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.
At least the war on the environment is going well
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?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
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 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.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
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.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
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?
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?
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Yes, but in this case, the exit polls matched the final results. It was the polling before the election that didn't match the final results.
There are several reasons this could be:
- Obama genuinely did better than Clinton in the smaller, more rural towns where votes were hand-counted.
- Many people made their decision on the last day.
- NH has an open primary -- since polls before the election showed Obama with a large lead, some of them may have voted on the Republican side for McCain.
- There is the issue that voters will say they're willing to vote for an African-American candidate, but once in the voting booth, find that they actually can't. Although we didn't see that in Iowa, so I don't think that's likely the case in NH.
- Turnout was extremely high -- much higher than expected -- and people who hadn't been in polls of "likely voters" came out and voted for Clinton.
Again, when exit polls don't match the results, there's a problem. When the polls before the election don't match the results, it means there were sampling problems in the polling, or a genuine swing in opinion in a short time.
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.
This is New Hampshire we're talking about here. The "blacker" voters are the ones that have been out in the sun a few minutes longer.
You could easily snap the picture of your marked ballot, then tell the poll worker you mismarked your ballot, get a new ballot and vote your actual preference. So, the candidate who accepts a cell phone picture as proof when buying your vote is not only evil but also stupid.
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 carbon copy that the voter retains for their own records, should they desire to do so. Of course, I also believe that voting should still be done on a medium that is physically marked or etched by the voter, to ensure that there's an audit trail to keep the counters honest.
Remember, it's not just he who votes, it's he who counts the votes that matters. I'd love it if U.S. election laws prohibited tallying equipment manufacturers from making political contributions and from lobbying in any way...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Then you quit and sue for a couple year's worth of *his* salary.
Or rather who says you have to tell them your serial number in the first place?
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
While the number of delegates may be the same, there is a trend that those who do not know who they want will side with whoever is ahead at that point. This is the "momentum" that can build up in these early primaries that is so important going into the big one(s).
Now, if Obama really did win in NH, that would be two victories, which would inspire those in SC, and if he were to win that one as well, Florida voters would be more inclined to vote for him. There is also the whole idea that most PEOPLE don't care about how many delegates, but they do care about who received the most votes. This is the issue with someone being able to win the popular vote yet lose the election type of problem.
So, these things may happen, but if it can be verified, then there should be a push to do a manual verification of ALL the numbers for every election, because these systems are so broken they should not be used at all.
Being able to check if your vote was tabulated correctly is worth introducing another way for bosses to abuse power
My other half worked for a major polling firm for over a year. She was shocked by what really happens there.
- polling questions can be crafted to lead to specific results.
For example, pharmaceutical companies looking for a
specific result set would ask the questions in a way that would
make their specific drug seem desired or appear to be effective.
- most importantly, not all demographics respond to polls. For example,
often lower income people were simply not home because they were
working two jobs. Many people did not speak English well enough
to understand the questions. Polling firms require that all questions
be answered. If the respondent does not understand the question
because the english is too advanced for them, the survey is ditched.
There are other things but I don't remember them for now.
It could be voting machines in part. But my girlfriend's experience has
definitely lead me to question ALL polls.
Are the same twits that really believe that "Clinton body count" email is true.
It's 8 years ago. Get over your Clinton Derangement Syndrome already.
Breach of contract, that's what wrong with that.
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.
Buying votes is not the major reason for secret ballots. Extorting votes is the reason for secret ballots. If you can call up a web page that shows who you voted for for your own verification, your boss can make you do so to make sure you voted for his candidate.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
[Ego]out
Absolutely. I don't want to oversimplify things, but the solution is right in the summary. Do like every other country does and hand-count the votes. Americans are clearly getting screwed over and over by those voting machines. They have to go.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Uh, wouldn't that depend on the contract I signed with the employee? It's quite normal to fire employees for what they do outside of the workplace. For example, breaking the law is one.
By your reasoning, if an employee seduced my wife and made a website about how he made a cuckold of me and how I'm a big knob I must still employ him, as long as he didn't do these things during working hours?
second that.
;)
and whenever Roland Piquewhatever gets another one of his stories posted I wonder what he's got that I haven't
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It just makes the true motivation for these machines crystal clear. Somebody wanted machines that are easily compromised and that's what they got.
People in other countries get killed or worse every election. When a dictator gets 99% of the vote, I think, "Wow, what a brave 1%. Too bad they and their families are getting tortured right now..."
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The Ron Paul votes not being initially counted is another matter. Most likely just an incidence of human error.
That happened twice in the same primary? I don't think so.
Hand counting is the best method for a couple of reasons:
You can have interested parties participate in the counting.
It takes many people to count, thus the conspiracy has to be large to have a big effect.
The overall totals can be verified by checking the precints.
It's auditable.
The downside:
It's more expensive because you have to pay those people to count the votes.
It's slower because you have to give those people time to count the votes.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Voter Fraud is the (largely imaginary) situation where someone tries to vote more than once, or using someone else's identity.
Election Fraud is tampering with the tabulation or recording of votes and results.
They are very different things.
Obama? I like him: he's upbeat, he's charismatic, he's idealistic, he's promising change and unity. All plusses, and on these fronts he's got anyone else beat. Here's the problem: in 2000, a lot of people voted for a candidate who was optimistic, who was likeable, who promised change, and promised to be a uniter, not a divider. And that's gotten our country into a bit of a mess. I'm not saying that Obama is like Bush, just that all those good qualities don't mean he'll necessarily be a good president. Obviously, there are major differences between Obama and Bush: first, I think Obama believes what he says. Second, Obama is an intelligent dude. He's got Al Gore smarts without the nerdiness.
But we're facing serious problems. Iraq's security has improved, but the civil war could return at any moment, because there's no political progress. Afghanistan is still a mess. The U.S. Army has been stretched thin by extended deployments, and ground down by guerilla warfare. The budget deficit is larger than ever, and the economy is looking bad.
Obama offers optimism, but optimism is not a military strategy. He's got hope, but hope is not going to placate the Republicans when he raises taxes, which he will have to do in order to balance the budget. He opposed the war, but now he will have to continue it: we will probably be there for 10 years, no matter what any candidate promises. I like what Obama has to offer, and I'm willing to consider him, but he has to show me that he's up to these challenges, and so far, he hasn't. We need someone with the combination of smarts, experience, and strength to get our country out of this hole. Right now, I think the best man for the job is Hillary Clinton, and that John McCain is a close second. I mean no disrespect to Obama or to you Obama supporters: I know why you like him; I know where you're coming from. I'm just offering my thoughts to explain why "experience" trumped "change" in New Hampshire, despite the polls, and why I feel that people should seriously consider her. Plus, putting Bill back in the White House means 8 years of great Daily Show/Colbert Report material!
In a well-designed system, ballot box stuffing would be hard. First, the ballot box stuffer needs to get their hands on the box and a bunch of valid ballots - if the process is properly designed, both will be closely watched. Secondly, there should be a seperate count (at the door) of the number of people who voted. If there are more ballots than people who voted, it's obvious that something's wrong.
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.)
I don't really want people who are too lazy or disinterested to vote to be voting. It just adds noise and the majority of these people will simply vote for the candidate whose name they've heard the most.
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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
You are assuming the machines recorded the votes accurately. One could just as well argue that the machines skewed the results and the amount of skew increased with the number of votes cast. If the machines were flawed in that way it would be much more difficult to catch while testing since the first few votes would look fine.