The problem with our voting system is that many of the machines are not secure from hacking. It doesn’t matter whether you have a clean election or not, if a significant percentage of the people lack confidence in the results. If someone hacks a vote-counting tabulator the only way you will know it is if the results are wildly out of whack with the pre-election polls and the exit polls. If they are, you have reason to be suspicious. That is certainly the case with New Hampshire, with respect to the both the pre-election polling and the unadjusted exit polls.
That does not mean that the election was hacked. It means that the signs of hacking, the only signs of hacking you’ll ever see, are there. Combine this with a large contingent that is already suspicious, and it has the effect of undermining faith in our system of government. This should be obvious from the questions raised in the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections. The validity of those elections is routinely questioned. Should we, maybe, consider doing something about this?
What concerns me is that the media just doesn’t take this problem seriously. Take this piece from the Dallas Morning News. It notes that bloggers from BradBlog, AmericaBlog, Crooks & Liars, and Democratic Underground all raised questions about the Diebold machines in New Hampshire. Then it offers the smackdown from a familiar anti-voter fraud theory source:
Some of the nation’s most prominent bloggers sparred over the issue as well. Markos Moulitsas, who runs the popular site DailyKos, called the allegations “a load of bull” from “a bunch of cranks.” Mr. Moulitsas, who has said he’ll vote for Mr. Obama, also said it was typical of the blogosphere to host a “tiny minority” who pose “wild claims.”
“This is the price you pay for a medium that democratizes media access,” he said. “But really, is that any different than traditional media outlets who pushed the conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? A little skepticism from the public in regards to all media would be well advised.”
[As an aside, the inimitable DHinMI has a fairly well reasoned explanation for why we should be skeptical that fraud took place.]
The Dallas Morning News offers a rebuttal from Brad Friedman of BradBlog:
Mr. Friedman took issue with [Markos’] characterization, saying the process should be transparent and trustworthy, and that the polls were “wildly out of whack” with the results – combined with the questionable machines – should be enough to raise concerns.
“It’s no longer a theory that these systems are vulnerable to tampering,” he said. “And it doesn’t take a conspiracy, it takes one real person.”
So, they present a kind of he said/she said dichotomy, but they make zero effort to arbitrate between the two diametrically opposed positions. Look:
Online-buzz trackers said the conversation still hasn’t grown to the point where it’s more than a blip on the radar, if even that. But that could change if the objections gain traction, said Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president of strategic services for Nielsen Online, which tracks blogs and buzz on the Web.
“It could bubble into a broader conversation,” he said. “What will be interesting is, to what extent does the hoopla run into the next [contest]? … For a lot of the bloggers, they’re going to have to run the calculus of [whether] prying into this issue of alleged fraud is … a better conversation starter than the next primary.”
Those are the concluding paragraphs of the article. It leaves the impression that certain bloggers are going to push the voter fraud issue because it will earn them more pageviews than discussion of the primaries. Nowhere in the article is there any acknowledgment that there is at least something wrong with a system that creates so much skepticism and cynicism. That’s what I’d like to see, at a minimum.
As for putting people’s mind at ease about the New Hampshire results, there is an easy solution. There’s a complete paper ballot record. A hand recount would settle the issue. More than over any suspicion that the vote was hacked than as an investment in confidence building, those votes should counted by hand.
Are any of the candidates thinking of challenging the results?
I mean, otherwise essentially what we’re saying here is that the NH taxpayers should fund a recount of an uncontested election to assuage the fears of a few bloggers who probably don’t even live in NH.
That doesn’t seem right to me.
c’mon ej, it’s not just a few bloggers, it’s anyone with half a brain. What are exit polls for, after all?
Exit polls are primarily so that the hyperventilating bloviators on TV have something to talk about before the results have started to come in.
You know I fully believe that all kinds of electoral malfeasance takes place in our elections, including vote fraud and vote machine hacking. But IMHO the NH primary results are a piss poor place to fight that battle for all kinds of reasons.
Exit polls in places like the Ukraine are the main safeguard against tampering. That is their great importance, even if the networks here prefer their utility for gender/race/income information.
I understand that. I was being semi tongue-in-cheek with that response, since it appears to be all exit polls are used for here.
Andrew Kohut, who is the father of one of my high school friends, thinks it is straight up racism by lower class whites who refused to respond to pollsters (or lied).
This is off topic – but having the argument over whether it was racism or the womens vote seems to benefit Hillary. Either she is the better candidate because more woman will vote for her or she’s the better candidate because racists won’t vote for Obama.
Do you know if this guy is for real – is he an impartial observer? Could this be a planted issue by the Clinton campaign?
he runs Pew Research. He is a reputable guy, but you can see how hard you have to press to avoid an hypothesis that the vote count was wrong. If it wan’t racism, Kohut has nothing.
No I don’t have to press hard at all. He’s trying to explain why the pollsters got it wrong not that the vote was wrong.
Let’s say NH goes to the time and expense of a recount and it shows, as it did with Nader, that there is no significant difference between the recount and the election night count. Sure that gives us more faith that NH’s votes were counted (not a bad thing) but it doesn’t explain why the pre-voting polls were wrong. And there is no way to prove or disprove his theory because you can’t go back to all the people that refused to answer the pollsters questions and ask “are you racist?”
In the meantime it’s out there to be used by the Hillary camp.
but he has no other theory.
What does that have to do with the vote count being wrong? His theory is on why the pollsters got it wrong.
And just because he doesn’t write about other theories doesn’t mean there aren’t other theories out there.
He tackles all the other theories going around, debunks them and concludes:
Yet, if racism isn’t the answer, since he has already debunked a late surge, or the impact of large turnout, or gender voting, or polling methodology, only one thing remains. And that is that he polls were not wrong. But, of course, that is the possibility that must never be broached.
You broached that possibility. I and others disagreed with you. So never say never.
It’s a theory of why the polls were wrong. It’s a theory based on race and class of people who did not answer the pollster. He could be right. He could be wrong. He could, for all I know be partially right, and everyone who didn’t answer was poor and racist but were mostly women and would have voted for Hillary even if Obama wasn’t on the ballot. It cannot be proved either way because we can’t go back and ask the people who didn’t answer.
It can be proved one way. Count the votes.
And if the votes tally – it isn’t proved. And if the votes don’t tally it isn’t necessarily proved either because you won’t know who cast what ballot. So it can’t be proved that way.
You’re obsessed … bye.
If the votes don’t tally, we have another explanation for why the polls were wrong, and the racism hypothesis is superfluous and dropped because of Occam.
If this is true, it should make the nation proud of Iowans by comparison who actually stood up publicly and cast their votes for Obama.
Why does Kohut think lower class whites are more likely to lie about racism that wealthier whites. My experience in precinct works teaches me otherwise.
Given the past two presidential elections, recounting votes should be a “normal” procedure. even though at this time we are talking about Democratic behavior rather than that of the Republicans.
Personally, I did notice that Bill Clinton got quite peeved at the preelection poll findings, and as we all know, he is a liar, albeit one forgiven by the people. A liar is a liar, however, and one has to wonder if he wasn’t making phone calls at the time.
This is just my contribution to the conspiracy theories and is not to be taken seriously. Kos on the other hand doesn’t deserve the time.
We’re speaking of what the Republicans of Diebold purport to be the Democratic Party’s vote tallies.
Is it an easy solution? How expensive is it? How much time does it take out of the days of people who could be doing something else? Nader asked for one in 2004 didn’t he? Who payed for it and how much did it cost?
I ask this because what you’re saying is that the people of NH should have to go through a recount on an election that NONE of the candidates seem to think was flawed and you yourself say isn’t really necessary because of suspicion that the vote was hacked but “as an investment in confidence building”.
How much in terms of time and dollars will this investment take?
jinx!
I think I saw somewhere that it would cost $79,000 for a candidate to get a recount. I could be wrong.
But is that the actual cost to the state? Counting in the lost time that could be spent doing something else?
A full recount would be a time-consuming process. Yes it’s a small state but presumably it has a small government too.
I don’t know, but they did recount in 2004. So I imagine you can find your answers fairly easily.
In 2004 the Secretary of State of NH estimated the cost to do a full recount of NH at $80,000. It’s probably higher now. So let’s say $90-100 thousand. Link.
If I lived in NH, I’d say it was a waste of time of my election officials without some evidence either that there was a problem in THIS election or that there had been past problems.
When Nader recounted they found no significant discrepancies. Link.
Lisa’s posts below on this election are persuasive to me that a full recount isn’t necessary. And also … DHinMi. AND the fact that none of this is coming from any of the campaign people who were on the ground.
And as a practical matter, I believe it is the candidate who requests it and pays for it ultimately. Edwards doesn’t have the money to pay for it. Clinton isn’t going to request it. Do I want Obama spending money on this? Not to mention the distration? No.
while I support that all 50 states should be required to have paper trails, there’s no good reason for a recount in NH.
Uh, your reasoning not to recount is
Am I missing something?
What we should ask for is a hand AUDIT of precincts chosen in a statistically significant way. And we should be doing that in every state.
CA’s current law requires only 1% of the precincts be handcounted as an audit. That’s not enough unless there’s a huge margin of victory.
We should request a recount if the audit shows the machines are off (as they inevitably will, because most machines are NOT perfect, at all.)
But we should do this in a way that isn’t about sour grapes, either. It’s got to be about proving to ourselves and the world that we are counting votes accurately, not because of who won or lost.
And of course, if we were smart, we’d be pressing for Federal legislation that would have this built in.
That’s why, for the past two years, I’ve been blogging about Rush Holt’s bill.
Imagine this isn’t just NH, and that it’s November, when so much more is at stake.
Had we passed Rush Holt’s bill last session, we could have had mandatory audits in every state this fall.
But because many couldn’t accept the compromises that it took to get the legislation as far as it went, activists helped kill our only chance of protection.
It’s not entirely too late. Holt is going to introduce a bill in January, possibly as early as next week, that would offer emergency funding for any States/Counties willing to abide by some strict guidelines, which include making sure all votes are cast on paper, and that at least a portion of those are audited as a check on how accurately the machines are counting the vote.
I hope you’ll all join me in support of that. I’ll post when it’s introduced. We should NOT have to go through this in November!!
I think Brad’s point is unassailable. We know that both pre-polls and post-polls can be off, sometimes by a lot. But we also know that the only evidence of tampering is that they are, in fact, off by a lot.
Anytime that happens, and the machines are hackable, there should be a recount.
What I haven’t seen though, and neither has Brad, is proof (as in, actual data) that the exit polls WERE off.
The only ones I saw, less than 1/2 hour after the polls closed, showed Hillary up by 2 points. That’s only a point off, and in the correct direction, from the final results.
I had, earlier, MISREAD the polls and thought they showed a much larger spread, and was then VERY concerned. But when I saw the error was mine, I was much less concerned.
If we can get a recount, great. That this is raising people’s awareness of how little faith we can and should have in computer counted votes is great.
What would be sad is if we DO get a count, find it to be pretty accurate, and then say oh, there’s nothing really to this. ALL counts must ALWAYS be suspect without a hand check, period. So in that spirit, I support your call.
For this specific race, however, I will be very surprised if any significant irregularities show up. But i will also be very pleased if the results show Obama really DID win NH.
Lisa, Chris Matthews stated unequivocally and stridently on Hardball last night that the uncorrected exit polls showed Obama strongly ahead. He is in a position to know, and have great trouble seeing him making such a claim falsely or even having any reason to.
A sample is all that is needed. Below, I say 10 %. It could probably be as small as 2 %.
ANOTHER great post Booman, thanks!
I agree that a recount is a good idea.
I VEHEMENTLY disagree with the term “COMPLETE”. A complete recount would be expensive, inconclusive and confusing.
I suggest that we sample 10 % of precincts and do the recount there. 10 % is probably way too many, but would satisfy people. We do not need a recount of all precincts, but just enough to ensure that the opscan and hand results are not incorrect. In addition, we would wish to specify a degree of uncertainty. It is REALLY difficult to do a count which is 100 % the same, but if totals for BO, HC, BR, and JE were within 5 % of election night, I would be satisfied.
Statistically and actuarily, complete evaluations are almost never done. Sampling is the way to go – quick, cheap, conclusive.
We cannot believe the tally produced by Diebold.
We have no access to the source code that produces Diebold tallies.
We have only the word of known Republican Diebold that Hillary won the New Hampshire Democratic Party primary.
Nobody but Diebold assures us that nobody but Diebold can manipulate the tally.
Some, begging to differ, have published the requisite exploits.
Crackers have published exploits to the contrary.
For some reason, everybody seems to be of the opinion, well almost everybody, well at least everybody that matters, that Diebold won’t manipulate the vote except when they’re sure they can get away with it.
Why can voters not have access to the code which tallies our ballots?
This is not rocket science. The only reason to keep the software unpublished is to manipulate the outcomes of elections.
I don’t remember any remedies for the computers counting wrong last time around. Handcounts have to be done, and randomly in every state!
Please click and sign the petition below to help ensure we do NOT have this issue come November!
Ask Congress to support requiring that all votes be cast on paper and audited on paper.
http://pol.moveon.org/paper2008/?r_by=-337966-o1Qe62&rc=paste
See http://www.margieburns.com/blog/_archives/2008/1/9/3455407.html:
What scares me is the common element here. George Bush Sr. was head of the CIA before he ran for president. Did they help him?
Is Larry Johnson’s support of Clinton any indication of broader CIA support for Hillary?
Because if any org is capable of slipping past locks and seals and changing votes, it’s the CIA. Just wondering.
It is not a political monolith, never has been. I grew up in Arlington VA, I can tell you that Agency people are as diverse as any other group (I speak of the analyst side, obviously I wouldn’t know the operations side).
Del. Alan Mayer, former CIA worker and former Delegate to the Virginia General Assembly had one of the most liberal voting records in the legislature.
There just isn’t any pattern. Except the old CIA was pretty cold war, more Hubert Humphrey then George McGovern. But that was a long time ago.
I’m with Lisa and DataGuy. A hand AUDIT of anywhere from 2 – 10 percent of all precincts should ALWAYS be done in order to validate any technology used in ANY election. This is crucial and it can even be done days later but it needs to be routine. If, after the audit is conducted, they find anything more than minor discrepancies, they need to hit the brakes and recount everything.
Random hand audit and I’m on board.
By the way, here’s a video from BlacBoxVoting. The machine that they test in the video is THE SAME MODEL MACHINE used in every NH precinct that employes optical scanners. The memory card is programmed by the same private contractor in every case. This is dangerous stuff.
This is all the justification anyone should need for ALWYAS AUDITING a fair percentage of precincts.
The latest (and presumably final) tallies according to this site:
http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=DEMOCRATS
say that Clinton got 40.121% on Diebold machines and 34.703% by hand counts. Obama got 35.756% of machine votes and 38.785% of the hand-counted. All Democrats besides Clinton got a lower percentage of machine votes than hand-counted votes.
I have yet to see anyone explain this bizarre skew by machines towards Clinton. Considering that there were over 59,000 votes (a little over 20% of the votes) that were hand-counted and they would tend to be in more rural and conservative towns, presumably, it’s hard to explain how Clinton fared worse and Obama, Edwards and even Kucinich did better there than where machines were.
I don’t know enough about New Hampshire to make a reasonable analysis of voter groups that were hand-counted versus the Diebold machines. However, someone’s going to have to come up with a compelling theory of why it’s people who vote on Diebold machines and not the machines themselves that are the difference.
In New Hampshire, the cities are all machine-counted, and the myriad tiny towns are all hand-counted. Only in the mid-sized suburbs do you get a mix, which makes statistical analysis tricky. Since there are frequently rural/urban differences in voting patterns, the machine difference could be an artifact of that, but how do you test it? You could assume there is a linear variance with population size, other factors being equal, but that a very questionable assumption.
You test it by asking the company which produced the exit polls to separate the poll data according to the vote-counting method used in the precinct where the interviewed voter cast their vote.
That’s a good idea, though the exit pollsters are not releasing their raw data (if they did so by precinct, we could separate out by counting method ourselves), and I don’t know if it is possible or easy to compel them to. It has occurred to me that the results imply more support for Hillary in the cities than in small towns, which doesn’t seem to fit the demographics of Obama’s supporters. But perhaps small towns in New Hampshire are different somehow.
denis kucinich has officially requested a recount in new hampshire :
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080110006236&ne
wsLang=en
fucking amen, now we will know one way or the other.im tired of being called a conspiracy nut
just because i think a recount is in order since the polls were all “wildly off” . .
Notice that it’s Dennis, not any of the other Dems or Ron Paul, who’s standing up for the integrity of our elections. It’s another reason to support him!
Go Dennis!
http://dennis4president.com
Vote your conscience, choose peace!
Thank you for this.
It is the first reasonable account of the issues I have seen on the blogs I read. I got into the brawl last night on dailykos with the diary
of DHinMI who demeaned our concerns and called people names in the manor of Rush Limbaugh.
People are happy to discuss widely in all the media why Hillary lost and why seven polls were wrong, including exit polls, which used to be the gold standard. But otherwise intelligent people, including Kos and Josh Marshall, will hold as the sole authority, Diebold equipment that has proved to be defective in previous analyses.
I want to say that all of the theories of what happened in New Hampshire with Hillary’s win are useless if the machines operated like the Diebold machines usually operate– and they failed to come up with reasonably provable totals.
We are not saying that Hillary’s people hacked it.
I was getting to like Hillary quite a bit. I am an Edwards supporter, and I see a lot of good reasons for keeping the race from being decided prematurely.
But Diebold was always and is still unreliable.
There are many corporate interests, even Republican interests who would be happier with Hillary as a candidate.
Private, corporate run and corporate counted elections with no transparency and no oversight makes no sense.
Diebold has been proven to be incompetent at best and corrupt at worst. Unfortunately the other manufacturers are the same.
If there is wide variance with the exit polls, that is a red flag– verification of the tabulation results is essential. I believe with this equipment there is no way to do it.
We cannot forget all of the testing and all of the documented failures of the equipment, and become like newborn trusting souls of this same equipment.
What, are they kidding?
Bravo, Boo, for this post and for your comments. Your logic is impeccable.
Let me try to restate this, because it seems that some of the commenters just don’t get it. It’s not because Clinton WON and Obama LOST. It’s because the results of Clinton/Obama look very peculiar from a scientific perspective. People are now coming up with all kinds of brilliant theories as to how and why this could have happened. And true, nobody has any proof that there was something wrong with the actual count. But it is a plausible hypothesis, for a lot of reasons which others have discussed a lot better than I can.
Now, there is a way to investigate this. All the sociological theories and This Effect and That Effect are being bandied about, but, the other possibility is being largely ignored.
It’s not only the MSM that are ignoring it. As a matter of fact, the NY Times Magazine just did a major story on what’s wrong with e-voting just last Sunday.
That the MSM don’t want to talk about it isn’t so surprising. But it also appears that many of the bloggers really don’t want to know.
Boo Man is absolutely right. There is a very legitimate question here and it should be looked into. Problems of e-voting are a great deal better understood now by experts, by legislators, and by the general public, than they were four years ago. Yet too many on the Left of the spectrum give the impression that they just don’t want to know.
Pretending it’s not there will make it go away. That’s called denial. The only thing that will make it go away is if it’s looked into and verified that everything tallies. And if it’s found that it doesn’t tally, then something will have to be done about it.
You don’t need a hand recount to investigate this. You need to get the people who did exit polls to disaggregate the data by the vote-counting method used at the precinct where the voter cast their vote. It shouldn’t be that hard.
Then you can call for a hand recount.
January 11, 2008
Recount – Is Dennis Kucinich walking into a trap?
By Bev Harris
The election integrity community is abuzz with news that candidate Dennis Kucinich will ask for a recount in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul fans have been pushing him to recount as well. Careful.
NEW HAMPSHIRE ELECTION INTEGRITY ADVOCATE NANCY TOBI IS CORRECT:
“We have no control over the ballot chain of custody and we have learned the pain from the 2004 Nader recount, in which only 11 districts were counted, chosen by a highly questionable person, and then nothing showed up. Now all we hear is how the Nader recount validated the machines.”
As Tobi says, “A candidate asking for a recount may well be a tool used to ‘prove’ everything was okay and then that candidate will be further discredited.”
I’ll go further than that. The only way a recount makes any sense at all in New Hampshire is AFTER an assessment is made of the chain of custody issues. If the chain of custody isn’t intact the recount won’t be worth a cup of warm spit.
TOBI:
“This is high stakes.
“You do not walk into a battle ground not knowing where the snipers are, just because you were invited. Strategically, going into something like this where you have NO CONTROL is foolishness.
“And I say this as one of the strongest recount proponents of former times. Things I have come to learn and understand have changed my mind. The recount is someone else’s game, not ours.
“In the recount, we have no control, and we have already lost 48 long hours of ballot chain of custody oversight.
“We need citizen control and oversight. This is not going to come from the recount. If the election was rigged…don’t you think the riggers would have a backup Plan B for a rigged recount, knowing how easy it is to get a recount in NH?
No. It is time to take control. “
BLACK BOX VOTING:
The following is excerpted from our New Hampshire election protection information published in November 2007:
quote:
Knowing that the greatest opportunities for election fraud are with insiders, this tells us something about what to examine first. If you are a person with inside access in New Hampshire, because any candidate can ask to recount any location, if you plan to manipulate the election you’ll want to make sure you can achieve ballot substitution, ballot removal, or ballot stuffing. You need a strategy just in case someone asks for a hand count.
WHAT’S THE POINT OF A RECOUNT IF THE CANDIDATE DOESN’T EVEN KNOW…
IMMEDIATE CONCERNS
BALLOT CHAIN OF CUSTODY WAR STORIES
Patriot Richard Hayes Phillips, while writing his brilliant upcoming book “Witness to a Crime,” uncovered evidence that an Ohio County took delivery on 10,000 off-the-books ballots in 2004.
Employees for the Diebold ballot printing plant slipped us financials showing that Diebold was printing 25% more ballots than ordered. This could be handy: If a governmental entity doesn’t take official delivery on ballots, Plan B can sit at a print house somewhere, on private property and absent from either government bookkeeping or public records.
CONVICTED FELONS
The Diebold ballot printing plant at the time we got records on the overages, was being run by a convicted felon who had spent four years in prison on a narcotics trafficking charge. No, not New Hampshire’s voting machine programming exec Ken Hajjar, who cut a plea deal in 1990 for his role in cocaine distribution. This was another convicted felon, John Elder, who ran the Diebold ballot printing plant; he’s now an elections consultant.
We have so far been unable to learn whether New Hampshire has convicted felons printing their ballots; we’ve got a records request in on this. New Hampshire officials like to say “The state prints the ballots” but they sure aren’t printed in Secretary of State Bill Gardner’s office.
Frank S., one of the new breed of citizens jumping in to take back control of our elections, took the initiative on his own to help today by spending several hours trying to find the ballot printer in NH. It may be that convicted felons print the ballots: Frank turned up evidence that one state-paid printing vendor is NHCI – New Hampshire Correctional Industries, a prison-based printing outfit.
New Hampshire Correctional Industries is a job training program for inmates. After they get out of prison they have a skill! I’m not sure we want a bunch of ex-convicts running around in New Hampshire with ballot printing expertise, so I hope a different ballot printing vendor will show up.
Any candidate seeking a recount needs to know this stuff.
IDENTIFY NARROW SPOTS IN THE PIPELINE
What is the smallest number of people with access, and at what points does centralization of access occur?
WHERE HAVE THE BALLOTS BEEN DURING THE LAST 48 HOURS
If there’s going to be a recount of this magnitude, we need to know whether checks and balances have been followed. Let me give you an example of what I mean: In San Mateo County, California, citizen Brent Turner asked for ballot chain of custody records for 2007; a six-week gap in the access logs was revealed in the documents.
SHOULD CANDIDATES RECOUNT NEW HAMPSHIRE?
In concept I love the idea, but as it currently stands, it makes me queasy. They’re walking into this blind about the details that make or break the integrity of the process.
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD
Tobi calls for doing a real investigation in order to take corrective action by November. I’m not sure about that. New Hampshire had hearings on the hackable Diebold optical scan machines, and didn’t take any action to mitigate the risks.
New Hampshire knew it was running elections on machines that can’t be trusted. And today, thanks to the efforts of two more citizen volunteers, I learned that the New Hampshire Secretary of State knew about the narcotics trafficking conviction of Ken Hajjar, yet still authorized LHS to code every memory card in New Hampshire.
Harri Hursti himself testified in New Hampshire in Sept. 2007, urging them to disconnect the wiring allowing reprogramming of the memory card through the modem port. New Hampshire took no action.
New Hampshire didn’t take even the half-step actions other states used to beef up voting machine security.
Maybe there are better ways to skin this cat.
THE IDEA OF A RECOUNT STILL INTRIGUES ME BUT…
At this moment I can’t think of a way to offset the chain of custody unknowns. The last thing we want is a recount that doesn’t answer our questions, or raises new suspicions that aren’t answered.
There must be a way. It’s been a long day. Let me think on that.
Authors Website: http://www.blackboxvoting.org
Authors Bio: Bev Harris is executive director of Black Box Voting, Inc. an advocacy group committed to restoring citizen oversight to elections.
Back
We have all seen the statistics showing that Clinton won in the precincts with machine-scanned ballots and Obama in the precincts with hand-counted ballots.
Before anyone calls for a recount, they need to get exit polls aggregated by precinct vote-counting method. If the exit polls show the same discrepancy as the vote count, then there’s no evidence of foul play.
And why would something like that happen in the exit polls? Surely the vote-counting method doesn’t influence voter preference! No, but the point is that correlation doesn’t imply causation. I can imagine a bunch of socioeconomic variables correlating independently with both support for Clinton/Obama and machine/hand counting. The primary such correlate is population density. Urban areas have voting machines and went for Hillary. Rural areas don’t have voting machines and went for Obama.
There has been one diary here which highlights that there are huge variations within the exit poll data.Booman Tribune ~ What the exit polls tell us
This diary suggests that the Urban/Rural correlation I mentioned above could explain the observed difference between hand and machine counted ballots.
So, until someone produces an exit poll segregated by the vote-counting method at the precint where the voter was interviewed, there is no basis for calling for a recount.
Not that the claim shouldn’t be taken seriously, but that looking at the exit polls in this way is the necessary first step in investigating the claim.