agog

What the Media isn’t telling you but you need to know

Dennis Kucinich Albert Howard

To revisit the New Hampshire Digression - How many of you know there is a New Hampshire vote recount taking place right now? Do a google search and try to find out what is going on. You would think there are nothing but wacko conspiracy theorist postings so complete is the absence of coverage. Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaign requested and has paid for a Democratic recount. Republican candidate Albert Howard also requested a recount of Republican ballots. What are they finding in New Hampshire four weeks after the election?

State officials were required to audit each voting machine during the election but most failed to do so.

Many Optical ballots were not counted - 550 in one town alone.

Some ballots were not read because voters used the wrong markers.

Memory cards which store the counts from each optical reader for transmission to the central tally machine are missing.

Optical paper ballots themselves, needed for the recount, are missing.

Problems with Diebold voting machines were reported in 21 towns on election night. Details are unknown.

The state is withholding “uncounted” and “spoiled” ballots from the recount against Kucinich’s express request that they be included.

Republican and Democratic ballots are all mixed up slowing down the recount.

Many towns have not send their paper ballots for recounting more than four weeks after the election.

The chain of custody of ballots is so flawed there is no way to verify that the ballots being recounted by hand are the same as those actually counted by the machines in the election. It is easy to imagine a bunch of folk in a back room busily marking ballots today trying to generate a set to match those machine counts.

Counters are slow, leading to speculation that they intentionally exhausted the money provided before finishing.

Counting was suspended in the Democratic recount when the initial funding ran out in the first week of the recount after the first two towns showed up 4% to 10% errors (In favor of Hillary).

This somehow all seems worthy of coverage and something all citizens need to and are entitled to know.
Rich Holt has introduced a national bill required paper ballots but as New Hampshire is showing very clearly, paper ballots alone will not fix the problems in voting.

Voters in New Hampshire mysteriously changed their minds about who to vote for in the last 24 hours before the Tuesday primary, defying nine polls showing a double digit lead for Barack Obama; but (even more mysteriously) only in those precincts using Diebold optical scan voting machines. See The Brad Blog. And Check the Votes. The pundits were working overtime to explain the unexplainable - Hillary showed emotion, more women showed up, Barack’s young voters stayed home, they showed up but voted for (Edwards or McCain take your pick), etc. all without any evidence. When Karl Rove of all people shows up to explain Hillary’s miraculous comeback, (in the Wall Street Journal, no less) red flags go up all over the place. Is Karl, master of character assassination and wedge issues politics, now secretly working for the Clinton campaign? Or are the Republicans simply trying to ensure that divisive Hillary is the Democratic nominee?

Diebold AccuVote Optical scanner highlighting notorious Memory Card

Here is a sample blog entry from Black Box Voting (Bev Harris’s group) following the New Hampshire Primary

Sunday the New York Times Magazine featured an article by Clive Thompson Can You Count on Voting Machines? The article paints a rather benign view of the machines and their vendors, does not even mention Bev Harris and her group’s work, and worse makes no mention of the many successful lawsuits against the machines. Thompson claims there is no evidence anywhere of fraud or tampering, flying in the face of massive evidence to the contrary and mounting numbers of mysterious outcomes. The article concludes that optically scanned, voter marked ballots are the best available system but neglects to point out that manual recounts of optical ballots are almost never done, making them as vulnerable to tampering as any other form of electronic counting.

And so, inevitably, controversy rages about the New Hampshire primary outcome. Kucinich is asking for a Recount. Even the Republicans are getting into the act. Yet here, finally, is an ideal opportunity for voting machine advocates to put the system to the test. Diebold, who are complaining that the machines give them terrible publicity, should sponsor a manual (no machines involved) recount of those optical ballots for both the Republican and Democratic primaries. So few people voted in this small state that the time and cost of a manual recount shouldn’t be prohibitive. Also the stakes are still low enough (this is only the second primary) to keep outside pressures to a minimum. If a manual recount confirms the machine counts, it would go some ways to reassuring a very nervous public that something is not seriously amiss with these machines.