January 16, 2008 at 09:23:54

New Hampshire: U.S. Elections Still in SNAFU Mode

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By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers (about the author) Page 2 of 3 page(s)

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So, within that context, let's take a look at New Hampshire and see if the circumstantial evidence, statistical and anecdotal, suggests the need for a recount or, at the very least, major reforms in that state's, and other states', electoral processes.

1. Constant percentages in election returns: Normally, as the returns come in on election night, there are fluctuations over time. One guy's up, say, 46% to 33% in the early tabulating, and then it shifts maybe to 44% to 36% as later returns come in, and then still later, when the big-city large numbers pour in, it may change again, say to 42% to 38% or something else. When there are no measurable shifts over the entire evening, the inference one can draw is that something is fishy because vote returns almost never behave that way.

In the Obama/Clinton race, the percentages never really changed. Except in the very beginning, it was virtually always 39% to 37% to the very end. This is not conclusive of vote-tampering, but suggestive that perhaps vote-tabulating machines may have been programmed to yield that result. Some votes may not have been counted at all; in the small town of Sutton, for example, at least three members of one family say they voted for Ron Paul but no votes for Paul appeared ( http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=916 ) in the final tally in that town; reportedly, there were 28 others voting for Paul in that town, but he still got zero votes. Missing votes may have happened also to other candidates in other towns, but nobody noticed. (There are no random vote-audits in New Hampshire.)

2. The huge discrepancy between polling & "official" results: Of course, the announced results in the Democratic race probably would not have seemed worthy of any additional scrutiny except that Obama was ahead by as much as 14 percentage points in virtually every poll right up to voting day. Journalists on the ground felt an Obama groundswell, with huge, turnaway crowds at his rallies all across the state, and smaller rallies for Clinton. And it appeared that Clinton herself, reading her campaign's own polling data, was emotionally "down," preparing for a disappointing second-place finish.

Now, one can note that several major pollsters stopped their surveys the day before the election, and thus weren't able to question all the "undecideds," especially women, who went to the polls the next day -- pollster John Zogby says there may have been 18% undecided at that point -- and in large numbers apparently voted for Clinton. But the disparity between the late pre-election polls and the announced results would require an almost unprecedented two-digit shift in one day, which is almost unheard-of in polling history.

3. The exit-poll discrepancies. One can't easily dismiss the exit-polls, which are the gold coins of the polling realm. As a pollster, you're not extrapolating from what the likely voters told you before they went to their precincts. Exit polls get answers from random voters of both parties as they leave their precincts on Election Day. These exit polls provide famously reliable data and almost always match the announced voting results in an honest election, and, as has proven to be the case in country after country abroad where outside observers are brought in to monitor the election, are far more reliable than what the rulers announce as the official numbers.

In New Hampshire, the exit polls were showing a solid win-in-the-making for Obama: ( http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2008/01/10.html ). But, by the time it was all over, Clinton was declared the winner.

In elections in the past, newspaper groups or respected polling organizations would conduct the exit-polls. In New Hampshire, the Edison-Mitofsky organization got the bid. This is the same group that in 2004 tried to explain away Kerry's big exit-polling victory ( http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf ) by saying that Bush voters didn't want to participate in the post-election polling; they then "adjusted" their own exit-poll numbers to reflect the final announced totals. Some professional pollsters!

Daniel Patrick Welch ( www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/01/dont-count-on-it ) has a solid perspective:

>>"The OCSE, the Carter Center and other world groups consider exit polling data to be the only real check on whether a country is running free and fair elections. ... Absent some mass hypnosis or incredibly complex psy-op campaign, skewing the results on a broad scale is nearly impossible.

>>...The dirty little secret is that U.S. elections suck, pure and simple. Many Americans were outraged when international monitors offered to observe the 2004 elections, and when [former President] Carter bluntly stated that his organization couldn't participate because voting in the U.S. didn't rise to its minimum standards: centralized counting authority with uniform standards, etc."

4. Hand-counted vs. machine-counted votes: Another bit of circumstantial evidence from New Hampshire: In precincts where the ballots were counted by hand, Obama more or less matched the percentages anticipated in the pre-election and exit-polls. In those precincts where electronic voting machines (collecting data on memory cards) were used, Clinton emerged the winner, and those percentage-point leads remained constant throughout the evening (see point#1). Again, not conclusive of anything -- there might be electoral differences between small/rural precincts and the larger ones in bigger towns and cities -- but they do suggest that another look might be in order.

5. A suspicious vote-counting company: In days past, county election boards or superintendents ran the voting operation; these days, many states outsource the work to private companies. In New Hamsphire, the bid winner was LHS Associates, run by John Silvestro, a seller of voting machines manufactured by the infamous Diebold Corporation. (Diebold's leader, you may remember, promised Bush he would "deliver" a victory in Ohio in 2004, and it would seem that he did.)

And what about LHS in New England? "LHS President John Silvestro admitted his staff violated Connecticut election-security protocols during the 2006 election. Memory cards were swapped by LHS staff members," despite rulings from the State, which LHS had seen, indicating their technicians were not to touch the voting and vote-tabulating machines. ( http://talknationradio.com/?p=101 )

Even with the known risks of using the controversial, easily-hackable Diebold voting machines (both the touchscreen ones and the optical-scanners) and vote-tabulating machines, it appears there was not enough, if any, New Hampshire state supervision of how LHS handled its assignments. That company, using its secret software, tabulated the ballots of 81% of the state's voters. (Bad news: LHS is under contract to count the ballots in November for much of New England, including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut.)

According to Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, "LHS is not subject to public records requirements ... Their control over memory-card contents is absolute; when cards malfunction or get lost, LHS brings the replacements."

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Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (more...)

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