Inherent Uncertainty and NH's Primary Results

“I don’t trust in your statistics; I ain’t got no crystal ball. If I had a million dollars, well, I’d, I’d spend it all to Hand Count Paper Ballots. Toss those vote machines away. Pay my neighbors to guard the ballot box all day…” Santeria Ballots (with much apology to Sublime).

Blogs are bursting over the fact that ALL the major pollsters, including Hillary’s and Barack’s internal polling, had Obama winning New Hampshire’s presidential primary election.

Yet in a surreal recurring nightmare, official results say otherwise.

Votes that are recorded and counted in secret only and always produce inherent uncertainty. There’s no way around it. It’s why election experts from around the globe, when describing democratic elections, call for a secret vote and a transparent vote count.

Specifically as to vote counting, Goodwin-Gill notes in Free and Fair Elections, “votes are tallied in a process that inspires confidence in the electorate.” (p.152) But with an ever-expanding mountain of scientific condemnation of software-driven election systems, there is no basis for confidence in results from software-driven machines.

Because 1/5 of New Hampshire’s ballots are counted by hand, we can compare results from hand-counted precincts with computerized results. Lori Price, of Citizens for Legitimate Government, produced that comparison, which shows that in hand-counted precincts, Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton 39-35%. Ron Paul’s War Room is questioning the results in this 6-minute video, asking for a hand count.

Bob Koehler (Tribune Media Services) writes:

The fact is, whatever actually happened in New Hampshire voting booths on Tuesday, our elections are horrifically insecure. For instance, Bev Harris, of the highly respected voting watchdog organization Black Box Voting, recently wrote that the Diebold 1.94w optical scan machines used by 80% of New Hampshire’s voters are "the exact same make, model and version hacked in the Black Box Voting project in Leon County (Florida)" a few years ago. They haven't been upgraded; the security problems haven't been fixed.

This 10-minute video shows LHS’s president lying about the fixes to these optical scans, and it shows how easily optical scan machines can thwart the authentic vote.

Bev Harris reports:

LHS Associates programs every single voting machine in New Hampshire, Connecticut, almost all of Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine. But did state officials in five New England states ever do a criminal background check on this company's executives? Do the laws of these five states even ALLOW them to hire convicted criminals for services paid for by the state? What about over 500 local towns and municipalities?

According to my sources, LHS Marketing and Sales Director Kenneth Hajjar … pled guilty to "sale / CND" and was sentenced to 12 months in the Rockingham County Correctional facility, and fined $2000. As things go for the politically connected, he was then given a deferred sentence and $1000 of his fine was suspended.

Hajjar doesn't limit his involvement in the voting machine business to sales. According to an interview conducted by Brad Friedman, Hajjar totes memory cards around in the trunk of his car and defends the boggling concept of swapping out memory cards during the middle of elections.

Nancy Tobi, of Democracy for New Hampshire, notes in an email:

We do have a lot of questions. But we will never have answers as long as we have privatized secret vote counting. The questions are out there and maybe eventually will cause enough people to want to stop asking the questions and get rid of corporate-run elections.

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