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Saturday, January 12, 2008

As long as the voting machines are themselves suspect, no election result can be trusted
Posted by Jill | 5:40 PM
I've avoided posting too much about the suspicions that something regarding the New Hampshire results just isn't right. Brad Friedman has been all over it since Tuesday's primary and Dennis Kucinich is calling for a recount. But the notion that someone (not necessarily people associated with the Clinton campaign) could have tampered with the machines in precincts that used Diebold's Accuvote (sic) optical scan machines is starting to gain traction, or at the very least, that voters are entitled to certainty.

Steve Rosenfeld reports that a number of experts think the results don't pass the smell test:


Election integrity activists parsing the precinct-level results from New Hampshire's Democratic Primary say their early analyses have found anomalies suggesting vote totals may have been altered to deliver a Hillary Clinton victory.

The activists, led by the Election Defense Alliance, a nonprofit formed after the 2004 election when exit polls also predicted a victory by a candidate other then the eventual winner, point to a series of discrepancies when comparing the official results from hand-counted and machine-counted paper ballots. Computer scanners, much like a standardized test, counted 80 percent of the ballots.

They begin by noting that Barack Obama won in hand-counted precincts, which tend to be more rural with fewer voters. In contrast, Clinton won in the precincts where computers tallied results, which are larger towns, cities and Boston suburbs. That discrepancy suggested that had the computer-counted ballots been tallied by hand, Clinton might not have won a victory defying pre-election polls, the activists said.

Anthony Stevens, New Hampshire's assistant secretary of state, said on Thursday that the hand count-computer count discrepancy was not unusual. He noted that in 2004 Democrat Howard Dean largely carried the hand-count precincts while John Kerry won most of the computer-count locales.

However, later on Thursday, Bruce O'Dell, an information technology consultant who is coordinating Election Defense Alliance's analysis, found the percentages of the vote given to Obama and Clinton, according to which counting method was used, were mirror images "down to the sixth decimal place."


Farhad Manjoo, predictably, is skeptical:

Eighty percent of New Hampshire's votes are counted by computers, while the other 20 percent -- mostly votes in smaller or more rural areas -- are counted manually. Activists looking into the possibility of theft thus took a straightforward investigative approach: Did the results in hand-count areas match up with the results in machine-count areas? If the results do match, you can pretty much definitively say that the election was not stolen.

But the counts don't match. A number of amateur analysts have pored over the results, each using slightly varying methods, and they've all found some difference in the results from hand-count areas versus those from places where votes were counted by machine.

The most thorough analysis I've seen was performed by an anonymous supporter of Ron Paul. Of the votes that have been counted so far, Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama in New Hampshire by 39.03 percent to 36.39 percent. The Ron Paulster's analysis shows that in machine-count areas, Clinton beat Obama by a better margin, 40.12 percent versus 35.76 percent. But in hand-counted areas, Obama beat Clinton by 38.76 percent to 34.70 percent.

In other words, if Obama had received the same margin across the state as he got in the areas where votes were counted manually, he would have won.

To some activists, this suggests fraud; the thinking is that Hillary Clinton's margin in machine-count areas is the product of hacking, while Obama's hand-count win represents the true result.

Thankfully, few activists are saying that what they've seen proves fraud -- they're being far more cautious, asking only that someone should look into this phenomenon.

That's because everyone understands that there is a reasonable reason for why Obama would win the hand-count areas while Clinton would win the machine-count areas: Those places simply vote differently.

American elections are hyper-local affairs. Election officials choose voting technologies based on their needs, and their calculation depends on demographics.

Officials in charge of small counties are more likely to choose to manually count their ballots. But if you've got 10,000 or 20,000 voters in your county -- like in Manchester or Concord -- you'll use machines. Money is also a factor; poorer places are less likely to have the resources for machines. Governmental efficiency might also matter -- some elections officials may not have gotten around, yet, to adopting machines -- as might local infrastructure, or any number of other factors.

But, of course, the same demographics would also affect voting results. It's likely, for example, that people in small places or poor places would vote very differently from people in large places or rich places -- and, therefore, variances in the result that look like they were caused by voting-machine fraud might actually only be the product of normal regional differences.


Manjoo could be right, of course, but shouldn't we count to make sure?

Here's why: The Accuvote optical scan machine is very easily hacked, as shown in these clips from the documentary Hacking Democracy ( should be viewed in sequence):







Like Brad, I'm not making any claims about election theft. But when you have something that seems so out of whack, and is out of whack so symmetrically, shouldn't we recount so that voters can have confidence in the results?

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1 Comments:
Blogger Bob said...
I chalk the result up to the vagaries of an open primary, a system I don't support.
1/13/08, 1:55 AM  
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