Slashdot Mirror
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...
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.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/1/10/02623/2264/85/434176/
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 ?
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.
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 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?
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.
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.)
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
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
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
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
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