New Hampshire is about to make recounts more difficult. That does not serve the voters well, regardless of how it is 'spun'. Read the article, Bev Harris's rebuttal and go online to comment. Can't hurt; we need to show the media that we know what's going on and they can't make a sow's ear into a silk purse and think we won't notice!
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Posted by Bev Harris on Sunday, April 6, 2008:
You may comment on this article here:
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080406/COLUMNISTS12/ 213410867/-1/columnists&disqus_reply=306159#comment-306159
Nashua Telegraph - April 6, 2008, by Kevin Landrigan
Getting recount may get harder
Albert Howard, you could be the last also-ran candidate for president
to get a statewide recount of the primary vote.
The Ann Arbor, Mich., Republican received only 44 votes in the primary
on Jan. 8, but New Hampshire law allows any finisher to request a
recount. Those who don’t come within 3 percent of the winner have to
pay for it.
As The Sunday Telegraph first reported, Howard got the $60,000 to make
the request from an online fundraising effort led by a hard-core North
Carolina supporter of GOP candidate Ron Paul, a Texas congressman.
After getting only 2 percent, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, of Ohio, paid more
than $20,000 to count about 30 percent of the Democratic presidential
ballots here.
Both recounts led to a flurry of sometimes hysterical, Internet-driven
charges that New Hampshire’s ballot custody standards somehow left the
state ripe for abuse.
Secretary of State Bill Gardner has supported a late-emerging
amendment to raise the bar for a recount request. It would be added to
a measure (SB 492) dealing with filling vacancies on primary ballots.
Sen. Jackie Cilley, D-Barrington, sought the bill, which allows the
party to fill a vacancy if a candidate jumps from one office sought to
another that’s also vacant.
Cilley did just that, recruited at the eleventh hour to drop her bid
for the House in 2006 and instead to run for the Senate seat she now
holds.
Originally, the thought was to permit only those who get at least 25
percent of the vote to seek a recount. This was lowered to 9 percent,
but only for presidential candidates, because that’s the threshold for
candidates to get delegate votes.
Rep. Shawn Jasper, R-Hudson, is squarely behind the change and is
optimistic both parties will embrace this reform.
"It’s just ridiculous how much time and effort Bill’s office had to
engage in to satisfy the ludicrous recount requests we had," Jasper
said. "This sets an appropriate standard any candidate has to meet to
be considered credible enough to get a recount."
A working group of the House Election Laws Committee has endorsed the
change.
My comments on this article:
"Hysterical". This is an example of journalistic sloppiness. Landrigan
has inserted his own subjective and perjorative characterization of
the findings of citizen observers. He should
(1) Familiarize himself with what the actual findings are
(2) Review New Hampshire elections law, where he will discover that
the recount violated at least four federal and New Hampshire laws
(3) Do a quick news search, which will reveal that precisely the
issues raised by "hysterical" citizen observers were exploited in a
ballot tampering scandal in Maine referred to as "Ballot-gate." Maine
beefed up its chain of custody laws and sent to an aide to the Maine
speaker of the House to jail. New Hampshire did nothing and continued
to use ballot containers that, as reporters in Maine observed, "are an
open invitation to tampering."
(4) Next, Landrigan should review the videotaped evidence collected by
at least six different election watchdog groups over a period of four
weeks. Perhaps now would be a good time for Landrigan to issue a
correction and for the Nashua Telegraph to do a real article on the
breakdown in chain of custody in the 2008 New Hampshire recount.
This kind of journalism is not what the founders had in mind when they
envisioned a media that would act as a check and balance.
"No government ought to be without censors...and where the press is
free, no one ever will...it would be undignified and criminal to
pamper the former [the government] and persecute the latter [its
critics]." -- Thomas Jefferson
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Use this link to go directly to full article:
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/show.cgi?8/73552 Bev Harris is executive director of Black Box Voting, Inc. an advocacy group committed to restoring citizen oversight to elections.