Recount Proves No Fraud In NH Primary

murdocj writes "You can take off those tinfoil hats, because the recount results of the NH Primary are in, and the hand count matches the machine count. Everyone can now move on to the conspiracy around the Texas flying saucer. In fact, only 40% of the vote was recounted (that's all that Dennis Kucinich was willing to pay for), but that 40% shows that the machine and hand counts match up nicely. As was pointed out when this 'story' broke, areas that have machine counting tend to have different demographics than hand-counted areas, and thus a difference in voting patterns."

Comments

Yeah, well

[Captain Splendid]

When your security procedures are this lax, anything can happen.

Sure..

[4D6963]

Recount Proves No Fraud

Sure, or maybe everybody frauded in a self canceling way.

</double tinfoil hat>

Pay for a recount?

[pembo13]

If there is uncertainty, why does anyone (voters or the candidates) have to (directly) pay for the recount?

Re:Pay for a recount?

[fyrie]

It varies from state-to-state, but typically it works like this: If an election is very close (within the margin of error of the vote tallying method), an automatic recount is done, and is payed for by the state. Any candidate can request a recount for any reason if they are willing to pay for it in the case the election did not fall into the automatic recount scenario.

Re:Pay for a recount?

[fyrie]

I left out why recounts are costly: The State Employees who do the recounting have to skip out on their regular job duties until the recount is done. In highly contested cases where lawyers and party representatives are bickering over every ballot, it can become a huge time sink.

Re:Pay for a recount?

[Original Replica]

"Uncertainty" according to whose standard?

It's pretty easy when you look at the vote tallies for your county and see that the candidate you voted for is showing zero votes. That makes it obvious that the original count is wrong. It's difficult to spot shifting vote numbers once the numbers get higher, which is why we need UN election oversight. This is a measure we insist on in other countries but yet refuse in our own. Uncertainty is when you vote is being counted by black box machines made by a company that employs know felons in key management areas. Strangely the people put in power by this voting system, don't want the system to change, funny that. True election reform which would break us out of our dysfunctional two party system, such as approval voting or instant runoff voting will never pass through a legislature put in power by a strong two party system. Uncertainty is when 56% of the population doesn't even show up to vote, because they do not feel represented by either of the two available choices.

Re:Pay for a recount?

[TheGreek]

Well, let's go in order, shall we?

It's pretty easy when you look at the vote tallies for your county and see that the candidate you voted for is showing zero votes. That makes it obvious that the original count is wrong.

The recount the Slashbots were talking about in the original story is the one Gollum asked for. The missing votes for Rep. Paul were neither germane to the Democratic primary nor anything more than a rounding error.

Uncertainty is when you vote is being counted by black box machines made by a company that employs know felons in key management areas.

The Diebold machines in NH are optical scan machines that count paper ballots. A hand recount of these machine-counted ballots appears to have resulted in highly similar results, well within Sen. Clinton's margin of victory.

Uncertainty is when 56% of the population doesn't even show up to vote, because they do not feel represented by either of the two available choices.

Then those 56% of the people are complacent retards who aren't even trying to improve the process. There can be no uncertainty over ballots not even cast. Nice strawman.

Proof?

[PseudoThink]

I think it only proves there's no fraud detectable by recount.

Re:Proof?

[Applekid]

Unit tests cannot prove there are no bugs, rather, proves the existance of a subset of possible bugs. I'd imagine a recount to be akin to those.

"Prove" is such a strong word. How about Proofiness?

Re:Great

[Stanistani]

Given the level of mistrust about the previous two presidential elections, I think it would be only prudent to have recounts randomly throughout the process, however they are initiated.

Legitimacy of the power wielded by the Chief Executive should be widely accepted.

Did Diebold write this?

[megamerican]

First of all, the Republican ballots haven't been counted yet. Secondly, Kucinich ran out of money so not all of the ballots on the Democratic side were counted. Not only that, but the chain of custody for the ballots was severely lacking. It would be alomst impossible to prove fraud when you can't fully account for where the ballots were and everyone who had custody of them. There were lots of discrepencies in the diebold counted places. Simply check out http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ and http://www.bradblog.com/ and you'll see how incredibly bad NH was.

The Republican ballots won't even have started to be counted for a few days. More money was donated to the 3rd party candidate to make the recount (mostly Ron Paul supporters through the Granny Warriors). There were at least two cities in NH that reported 0 votes for Ron Paul, then magically found them the next day when it was pointed out to them that people voted for him there (all by accident, of course).

The fact that the diebold ballots were so far off is very troubling, considering they make ATM's which don't miss a penny and are virtually fraud proof (not to mention there is a paper trail). LHS Associates, who counted 81% of the votes in NH also have an executive who was convicted of narcotics trafficking. It was also LHS Associates who handled a lot of the ballots after the voting was done. They can't use the Fry defense "Don't blame me, I'm a non-voting felon." They're vote counting felons.

Anyone who gets their votes counted through a Diebold machine should get stickers saying "I think I voted."

"Recount Proves NH Election Fraud Undetectable"

[R2.0]

Fixed that for ya'.

Logic says that one can never prove a negative, and here in conspiracy land we OBEY the laws of logic.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Legitimacy of the power wielded by the Chief Executive should be widely accepted.

I'll never accept it! I'm an anarchist! The only Chief Executive who tells me what to do is me!

<To self>: I'll never accept you as my master! I'm an anarchist! The only Chief Executive who tells me what to do is me!

<To self>: <To self>: I'll never accept you as my master! I'm an anarchist! The only Chief Executive who tells me what to do is me!

Re:Great

[Stanistani]

You give a newer, fresher definition to the term "loopy." :)

Re:Great

[quacking duck]

Further, given the metric crapload of money candidates already spend/waste on campaigning, you'd think there would be a system in place to skim off a percentage towards recounts. Election insurance, as it were.

Why the hell not? You're voting to give these clowns the right to skim money off *your* income for their pork barrel projects...

I forgot to add..

[megamerican]

I also forgot to add that the so called seals on the boxes were more like post it notes. You could take them off and put them back on and no one would ever notice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKQEQ7qHvgM
This video demonstrates how great the chain of custody was in NH. This basically proves that fraud could have easily happened and been undetectable.

Re:OF course

[Mr. Slippery]

Naturally, the recounts also "proved" there was no fraud in Florida 2000...

Until a media consortium hired independent assessors to evaluate the ballots, and found that the Gore got more than Bush votes in Florida in 2000.

As for Ohio, people went to jail for rigging the recount.

Which demonstrates that official recounts of a limited number of ballots may not tell the whole story.

The U.S. electoral system is no more reliable than that of the Ukraine or Kenya. But Americans are much more complacent about it.

"hand count matches the machine count"?

[mtgradwell]

Where do you get that from? Looking at the actual results, I see numerous instances where the initial count differs from the recount. More often than not it's just a 1 or 2 vote discrepancy, but it is pervasive. During the early stages of the recount it was being reported that getting on for 1% of the votes hadn't been counted; either the machines would ignore every 100th ballot or so, or they'd ignore a whole batch because pens with the wrong kind of ink had been used. Most of the batched errors were caught on the day of the count, but it took a recount to show up the sporadic individual errors.

Why is this important? One reason is because there is a demographic difference between hand-counted and machine-counted areas, so if you're going to disenfranchise 1% of the population in machine-counted areas, even if it's done entirely at random, that reduces the elective power of the demographic in those areas, which can tip a close election. Besides, isn't every vote supposed to be counted? Isn't that why you go and vote, because you believe that your vote will be counted? How many voters wouldn't bother if they knew it was some sort of lottery?

Another point: a partial recount will never disclose a fraud if the people choosing the areas to be recounted are also the people behind the fraud. They will simply leave the areas where the fraud took place until last, secure in the knowledge that the recount sponsor's finances or resolve will run out before the recount gets that far. And it certainly was the case that Kucinich couldn't specify exactly what was recounted. His requests for a tally of the uncast ballot papers, for instance, fell on deaf ears. So what happened to those uncast ballots? Did they get cast after all?

Proof against fraud

[HalAtWork]

Good, now we found a way to show that an election hasn't been rigged. Shouldn't we be doing this everywhere? That way if the machine is rigged, the hand count will show it. If the hand count is rigged, the machine count will show it. It's better than having a single point of failure.

Re:different demographics

[Straif]

Worse yet, I don't even believe New Hampshire requires you to be a resident to vote in their primaries, only that you "intend" to move there sometime in the future.

As for any type of voter verification, that will never happen in a Democratic primary; for some reason I can never find a legitimate rationalization for, the Democrats seems to think voter verification is equal to voter suppression.

Re:different demographics

[Prien715]

As for any type of voter verification, that will never happen in a Democratic primary; for some reason I can never find a legitimate rationalization for, the Democrats seems to think voter verification is equal to voter suppression.

Well, there was a recent bipartisan panel on the manner and it found that there's little actual incentive for individuals to cause voter fraud -- as one risks jail time for even voting twice -- which is unlikely to change the outcome of any election. There's also very little evidence to support that it actually happens either.

However, fraud from the people in charge of the machines or whatever is very likely, since while they risk prison time as well, they actually have the means to CHANGE an election. Consequently the panel found that requiring further voter verification is just a waste of tax money and does actually disenfranchise people too busy (not like us -- we're posting on /.!) to fulfill the requirements -- you may want to read up on your history vis a vis Jim Crow laws. Checking the counters however, seemed like a good use of time and money.

Even more interesting, is to trace the argument you make to its source, the astroturfing "American Center for Voting Rights" which conveniently disappeared last summer after the whole US attorney firings scandal (its head was involved in the Florida voting proceedings in 2000 for Bush/Cheney according to his still existent website.) Feel free to do more research online of course.

Gadfly, Nut, and Weirdo

[bill_mcgonigle]

Get over it. Ron Paul lost. He will continue to lose, because his ideas don't appeal to the majority of Americans.

Seriously? I'll bet you five dollars a majority of Americans have no clue what Ron Paul's ideas are.

Political activists, maybe, but even then > 50% is hard to believe. At least among the people I talk to, 10% have even looked at his website or heard about his policy ideas. Most of them know he's a gadfly, a nut, and a weirdo, though.

Easy Link for blackboxvoting.org

[bill_mcgonigle]

Here is one of the more incredible accounts.

I guess maybe punchscan has it right...