Why We Can't Know Who Won the Primary in NH

A friend e-mailed me about a moveon.org petition along the lines of, aren't you glad they had paper ballots in NH and don't you wish they were everywhere? Which prompts this post.

Paper ballots or no, most NH votes were counted on Diebold optical scanners proven hackable and yielding dubious results in past elections. We know that in 2004, the media "adjusted" the exit polls to more closely match reported vote totals; so exit polls are no longer all that helpful. In NH, between the exit polls and the most recent previous polls not long before, there was a surprising swing in %'s away from Obama and in favor of Clinton -- but little or no changes in the %'s for other candidates.

Personally, I don't know what happened; but moveon's failure to fully grasp the problem gives me no confidence in their ability to identify the solution.

For help getting up to speed on this issue, start by checking out RFK, Jr.'s articles in Rolling Stone on election fraud in 2004 and subsequent elections, here and here, and then check for updates on the issue in democraticunderground.com's Election Reform forum.

Given that the problems have not been fixed, it's more important than ever that we vote in massive numbers.

UPDATES: Dennis Kucinich "has sent a letter to the New Hampshire Secretary of State asking for a recount of Tuesday’s election because of 'unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots.'" He says he's making the request not because he thinks a recount would affect his own total but in the interests of "public confidence in the integrity of the election process." More here.

But apparently, it's to be only a partial recount. Here's why one election fraud expert, Mark Crispin Miller, doesn't expect the recount to tell us whether or not fraud really occurred.