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HOW DOES NEW HAMPSHIRE'S RECOUNT CULTURE FACILITATE RATHER THAN DETER ELECTION RIGGING?

New Hampshire officials like to point to our accessible recounts as both a
deterrent to fraud and as "proof" that our machines are functioning just
dandy. But let's look at some of the characteristics of the NH culture, and
we see that it actually is a great cover for election rigging.

NH recount characteristics:
1) generally done for state rep races (low stakes)
2) almost never done for high stakes federal or gubernatorial or primary
races
3) candidates usually discouraged by their party from pursuing recounts
(sore loser factor)
4) candidates choose areas to begin recount, and often stop the recount
before it is completed if they find no reason to believe the recount will
result in a change of outcome

So with this in mind, let's look at a scenario for hacking NH:

We now understand that there is a confluence of the data mining and voting
industries. ChoicePoint, for instance, helped rig Florida 2000 by removing
undesirable voters from the Florida voting rolls (94,000 Black voters who it was believed would have voted Democrat).

In New Hampshire (and all of New England, in fact), LHS Associates is the
Diebold vendor. LHS programs our voting machines for every election: 81% of
NH ballots are controlled by LHS-Diebold programs.

Now here's what most people don't know: LHS has a secondary line of
business. They collect demographic, census-style data. They are a DATA MINING company.

So here is how it works:

Election rigging is never a wholesale swath of rigged machines across the
country. It is Florida 2000: identifying the demographic risks to your
candidate and then "taking care" of them. In Florida, it was taken care of via the voting rolls - they removed 94,000 eligible voters (identified demographically as leaning Democratic) from the rolls. Other methods include
programming the machines to flip votes from one candidate to the other.

NH Senate Race 2002
If you know, for instance, that certain wards in Manchester have the
demographic profile of giving their vote for Shaheen, then you rig those
machines to tweak Sununu enough votes to overcome the Shaheen demographic risk. Polls have shown that it is going to be a close race and indeed, the results proved this out.

But strangely, the election results exactly flipped the poll projections and
gave Sununu the win rather than Shaheen.

It's a little surprising in some typically Democratic leaning areas, but there was, after all, that VERY EFFECTIVE anti-Shaheen smear campaign the
weekend just before the election, wasn't there? And voters are so obviously
easily swayed by those last minute smear campaigns, as evidenced in these
vote flips going from Shaheen to Sununu so unexpectedly.

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