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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:
Dad, you're drunk again!
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
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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...
"Second, these results by themselves are NOT enough to prove that any fraud occured. They simply show that some things stand out as being odd and worthy of further investigation."
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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No need to "wait for it for days" just saying.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/1/10/02623/2264/85/434176/
Exactly!
The problem is, unless we can verify independently that the results are accurate, I certainly won't trust the results of any election - even without paranoid conspiracy articles!
Not to mention, when the presidential election comes- if there's no paper trail, then the votes will have been counted behind closed doors.
Even if I could review the source code- what assurance do I have that the source code I'm reading is ACTUALLY on the machine?
I know, I sound paranoid too, now. But after the reports of our last two "elections" (or what ever you want to call it), I think it's bout time we put some accountability into effect. Lest we have an incident like last time...
"We won't stop until all the votes are counted! "
*Somebody whispers into candidate's ear*
"Oh, sorry, just kidding, it was electronically tallied, I guess we just plainly lost, despite the 20 point difference from our exit polls."
I just don't know how much faith we can put into highly-tamperable procedure with no paper. There's a lot at stake here, so there'd be much motivation to rig things up.
Heck, if it *accidentally* counted each fifth vote incorrectly, that'd be enough to change an election.
Until we can get something as basic as an election down, everything built on top of it is set to crumble.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
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 ?
There will always be Vote Fraud, because there will always be humans involved.
... oops sorry, he actually did get votes. I don't trust the results at all when shit like this happens.
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
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
people keep saying that but what is to keep the machine from printing the wrong data on the paper trail?
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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
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.
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.
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
As a British expatriate, I want to ask did the British people deserve Bliar and NuLab. Britain has an uncorruptible voting system where the only choice you have is which of the corrupt to vote for.
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.
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.
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?
If you look at the chart of data though, most of the votes were in large towns. And in large towns Clinton did almost 4% better in hand votes than in machine. Wow, someone pissed off about how an election went is able to twist data.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong. The deviation in exit polls was well reported yesterday.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
If voting could make a difference, it would be outlawed.
Best signature every.
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.
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.
"Either hand counted ballots, or optical scan vote counting machines."
You mean I can just look at the candidate I want to vote for, and the retina scan vote counting machine will register my vote? What if I'm looking at the cute little blonde in the parking lot?
Sent from my iPhone
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.
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.)
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.
The people referring to "your boss" and "your job" are looking for polite examples. Do a search for "voter coercion" (depending on your political persuasion you may be more moved by the results if you add "union", "employer", or "government" to the search term) and you get an idea of the risks of non-secret ballots, which run into territory far more serious than missing a promotion, and which cannot be remedied by a lawsuit. You don't hear much "recent non-anecdotal" evidence of voter coercion because we have secret ballots, so it's not generally feasible (the victim can simply lie), but a relevant search will point you to examples from other countries, or non-government elections here.
-Scot
101010, 222, 52,
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.
I've been here for years, have a four digit ID, and have NEVER had one of my stories posted.
Maybe the Slashdot submission process is powered by Diebold?
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
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.
I don't see why choice versus inclination matters. These are still things that can be used to discriminate or intimidate.
Besides, in this data-mining-happy world, I would argue that voting records are very, very sensitive and important. Heck, I'd rank them up there, collectively, with medical records. The very survival of our society is dependent on how we choose our leaders and representatives and who we choose, and if we compromise the integrity of that then we may as well throw the Constitution out the window too.
Why are you against laws that protect the rights of the individual? Isn't that what law is for? Compare laws that protect the rights of people to the laws that restrict what people do and you find that restricting what people do has led to over a million people in jail right now for non-violent offenses. Protecting people doesn't put them in jail, by contrast...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I doubt it. I've been waiting for it too. It's been on the firehose for a day or two and it's a been all over Digg. I love Slashdot for the comment quality but sometimes it's so slow on big stories.
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
You mean I can just look at the candidate I want to vote for, and the retina scan vote counting machine will register my vote? What if I'm looking at the cute little blonde in the parking lot? Then maybe people would start getting interested in politcal debates again.
"Tonight with us, the little blonde from the parking lot and the hot brunette from the voting queue who took pollers by surprise and now seem to be the strongest contenders for the post of governor of New Hampshire. But first a word from our sponsors !"
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
second that.
;)
and whenever Roland Piquewhatever gets another one of his stories posted I wonder what he's got that I haven't
MP3 Search Engine
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
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.
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 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.We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
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
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..."
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
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.
Mr Coward, looking at your posting history you have _way_ more than a couple of UIDs...
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
Is that the gap between the user's experience on Slashdot and his subsequent disillusionment?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
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.
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.