[A-List] More Questions About Diebold Voting Machines: Did Hillary Really Win New Hampshire?

[Macdonald Stainsby <mstainsby@xxxxxxxxx>]

January 11, 2008
More Questions About Diebold Voting Machines
Did Hillary Really Win New Hampshire?
http://counterpunch.org/lindorff01112008.html
By DAVE LINDORFF

Could someone have messed with the vote in New Hampshire?

That is what some people are wondering, after looking closely at the 
totals in the votes for surprise Democratic primary victor Hillary 
Clinton, and for Barack Obama, who placed instead of winning as all the 
polls had predicted he would. And thanks to candidate Dennis Kucinich, 
we are likely to find out. Kucinich today filed a request, and a 
required $2000 fee, to order up a manual recount of the machine ballots 
cast in the state.

Polls taken as late as the day before the Tuesday vote showed Obama up 
by 10 to 15 points over Clinton, whom he had just beaten the week before 
in Iowa, but when the votes were counted, Clinton ended up beating Obama 
in New Hampshire 39.4 per cent to 36.8 per cent. In a replay of what 
happened in Ohio in 2004, exit polling reportedly also showed Obama to 
be winning the New Hampshire primary.

When that's not what happened, shocked polling firms and surprised 
pundits, all of whom had been expecting a big Obama win, were left 
stumbling for explanations for the Hillary comeback from an 8 per cent 
drubbing in Iowa (even the Clinton campaign, whose own internal polling 
had predicted her defeat, were at a loss). Explanations ranged from her 
teary eyed final public appearance before primary day and some sexist 
heckling she had received, to dark talk about a wave of hidden racism in 
the voting booth.

But there were anomalies in the numbers that have some people suggesting 
something else: vote fraud.

What has had eyebrows raised is a significant discrepancy between the 
vote counts done by voting machine, and the ones done by hand.

In New Hampshire, 81 per cent of the voting was done in towns and cities 
that had purchased optical scan machines from the Diebold Election 
Systems (now called Premiere Election Solutions), a division of Diebold 
Corp., a company founded by and still linked to wealthy right-wing 
investors. In those towns, all voting was done on the devices, called 
Accuvote machines, which read paper ballots completed by voters who use 
pens or pencils to fill in little ovals next to the candidate of their 
choice. The ballots are then fed into, read, and tallied by the 
machines. The other 19 per cent of voting was done in towns that had 
opted not to use the machine, and to use hand-counted paper ballots instead.

The machine tally was Clinton 39.6 per cent, Obama 36.3 per cent - 
fairly close to the final outcome. But the hand-counted ballot count 
broke significantly differently: Clinton 34.9 per cent, Obama 38.6 per cent.

Could something have happened in those machines to shift some votes away 
from Obama or some of the other candidates in the race, and over to the 
Clinton total?

If all the votes cast had split the way the hand counts split, Obama 
would have won New Hampshire by over 10,000 votes, instead of losing to 
Clinton by about 5500 votes.

"My suspicion is that nothing untoward happened here," says Doug Jones, 
a professor of computer sciences at the University of Iowa and a member 
of the board of examiners that approved the use of the same Diebold 
optical scanning machines in Iowa. "But at the same time, the Diebold 
machines are vulnerable to viruses that can be spread through the 
machines by the PCMCIA memory cards, and there are other things that can 
go wrong too. I'd be much happier if they had a routine random audit 
procedure in New Hampshire."

A random audit, he says, would involve doing hand counts of some towns' 
optical scan ballots, and comparing those results with the results of 
the machine reading of those same ballots, as recorded election night.

While California does conduct such random audits as a matter of course, 
most states, including New Hampshire, do not. According to the New 
Hampshire Secretary of State's office, any recount of ballots would have 
to be requested by a candidate, and would have to be paid for by the 
candidate making the request.

An official in the press office of Obama's campaign in Chicago, 
contacted on Wednesday, claimed not to know about the discrepancy 
between the machine and hand-counted ballots. She said that there was no 
plan to call for a hand count of machine ballots.

As Prof. Jones notes, requiring a candidate to initiate any hand count 
makes such hand counts unlikely, since unless the evidence of vote 
tampering or fraud is overwhelming, such a call would open the candidate 
to charges of "poor loser."

Kucinich, in making his recount request, resolved that problem.

There is good reason to be suspicious of the results. The counting of 
the machine totals, in New Hampshire as in all states using the Diebold 
machines, is handled by a private contract firm, in this case 
Massachusetts-based LHS Associates, which controls and programs the 
machines' memory cards. Several studies have demonstrated the ease with 
which the memory cards in the Accuvote machines can be hacked, with some 
testers breaking into the system in minutes.

There are, to be sure, alternative quite innocent possible explanations 
for the discrepancy between the machine and hand votes for Clinton and 
Obama. All the state's larger towns and cities, like Nashua, Concord and 
Portsmouth, have gone to voting machines. While there are many small 
communities that have also opted for machines, it is almost exclusively 
the smaller towns and villages across the state that have stayed with 
hand counts-most of them in the more rural northern part of the state. 
So if Obama did better than Clinton in the small towns, and Clinton did 
better in the large ones, that could be the answer.

But that explanation flies in the face of logic, historic voting 
patterns, and most of the post ­election prognosticating.

If it is true that there was "behind the curtain" racism involved in 
people saying to pollsters that they were for Obama, while privately 
voting against him, surely it would be more likely that this would 
happen in the isolated towns of northern New Hampshire where black 
people are rarely to be seen. Clinton was also said to have fared better 
among people with lower incomes-again a demographic that is more 
prominent in the rural parts of the Granite State. Finally, Obama, in 
New Hampshire as in Iowa, did better among younger voters, and that is 
the demographic group that is typically in shorter supply in small 
towns, where job opportunities are limited. Furthermore, in Iowa, it was 
in the larger municipalities that Obama fared best, not in the rural 
towns, so how likely is it that his geographic appeal would be reversed 
in New Hampshire?

David Scanlan, New Hampshire's deputy secretary of state for elections, 
whom I contacted Thursday, said that while town election officials are 
required to do test runs of the Diebold machines in the days before an 
election, "to make sure that they are reading the ballot markings 
accurately," and that at that point the machines and the memory cards 
are sealed until the actual election day, there is no way for his office 
to independently conduct a post balloting test. The ballot boxes are 
sealed and the only way they can be opened if for a candidate to request 
(and pay for) a manual recount, or for a court to order one." Scanlan 
says that the same is true for the voting machines and the memory cards. 
While the sealed ballots are retained "for years," however, the memory 
cards will be back in the hands of the contractor, LHS Associates, in "a 
few months," to be erased and prepared for use in the general election 
next November.

Scanlan says that the state legislature is currently considering 
legislation to provide for routine audits of machines after elections, 
but that won't help this election cycle.

Scanlan said that because the machines are freestanding, there is no 
chance of their being hacked from the outside, but critics note that the 
hacking can be done in advance to the memory cards, which can pass 
changes to each other like a virus as each is programmed for a 
particular election.

Jonathan Simon, an attorney and co-founder of the group Election Defense 
Alliance, says that the vote discrepancies between machine and hand 
counts in New Hampshire's Democratic primary are troubling, and defy 
easy explanation.

"The trouble is, whenever you have a surprise result in an election, and 
it runs counter to the polls, the media always say the problem is the 
polling, not the counting." But he adds, "The thing is, these things 
always work in one direction-in favor of the more conservative 
candidate, and that defies the law of quantum mechanics."

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the 
Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His book of CounterPunch columns 
titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. 
Lindorff's newest book is "The Case for Impeachment", co-authored by 
Barbara Olshansky.

He can be reached at: dlindorff@xxxxxxxxx

--
Macdonald Stainsby
Coordinator, http://oilsandstruth.org
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