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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.'"
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.
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
RTFA. New Hampshire uses two voting methods: Either hand counted ballots, or optical scan vote counting machines. This means that in both cases the ballot is filled out by hand, there is a paper trail, and the results can be verified. We are not talking about ATM-style touch screen voting machines in New Hampshire.
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
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.
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
I'd rather have a minister who believes strongly in individual liberty than a scientist who believed in making people's choices for them.
- 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?
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.)