That vote percentage swap is crazy! It's certainly indicative that something is amiss, although I'm not sure how indicative it is of fraud, simply because it's hard to imagine why a fraudster would do it that way. (Much more sensible to simply swap the individual votes in the Diebold districts, not bothering to calculate percentages or create a suspicious coincidence.) But what other explanation is there?

I get most of my news analysis from Counterpunch (not because it's the best but because I'm not motivated to spend the time looking for something better); here are a couple of interesting articles from there:

• an article by David Lindorff on the possibility of fraud; interesting points:
  • even some people who doubt fraud in this case would like vote counting to be audited;
  • dark-horse candidates are important, since the direct victims of fraud don't want to look like sore losers by demanding a recount;
  • on the basis of demographics, you would expect Hillary to do worse and Obama to do better in the Diebold-counted precincts.
• an article by Bob Wing and Marqueece Harris-Dawson on the Bradley effect; this is (IMO) the obvious alternative explanation that one would want to test against as a null hypothesis (although obviously one should also try whatever other explanations are seriously proposed).

I do want to thank to TBG -- and, by extension, soros -- for bringing this to our attention, as well as Mig for really working his ass off and shining a ton of much-needed light on all of this for me.  You're both Godsends.

Where's your motherf*%&ing flag pin?

The published exit polls are normalized to match the official tallies, so they are not generally valid for checking those tallies, those if micro discrepancies survive macro adjustment, that would be interesting. However, both Chris Matthews and Bill Maher have stated that the unaltered polls showed Obama strongly ahead. Deeply suspicious in itself, independent of other factors. Like I said in the other thread, if we could just get the media to release raw exit poll data by precinct, we could correlate with counting method ourselves. But I doubt we could do that outside of court, and whether it is possible in court is beyond my knowledge.

A bunch of random thoughts and links in no particular order.  (Sorry for the incoherence, I'm still pretty sick and my head is kinda fuzzy.)

My main problem is that few of the sites you link to cite where they got their data, and at least one of those that does cite a source (but doesn't link to it) uses numbers that don't match the source.

Examples:  The guy from Election Defense Alliance says he got his data from the NH Secretary of State web site.  He doesn't link to it, but the data is here.

He says Clinton had 91,717 optical-scan votes and 20,889 hand-counted votes, for a total of 112,606 votes.  But the NH Secretary of State says Clinton got a total of 112,610 votes.  He says Obama got 81,495 optical-scan votes and  hand-counted votes for a total of 105,004 votes, but the NH SOS says he got a total of 105,007 votes.

He also doesn't say how he determined which votes were machine-counted and which were hand-counted.  Here's the official list of machine-counted municipalities, fyi.

The statistical exploration post  you were so impressed with says he got his data from this post at Reddit.  But the very first comment on his post points out that he got the machine/hand count towns wrong, so those data and calculations are useless until he gets those right.

An interesting post that I don't think you linked to gets different numbers and breaks it all down county-by-county.  I will note that he (I assume it's a he) says he got his data from politico.com, which is a commercial political journalism site, not an official source.  I haven't had time to poke around politico to see where their data came from, but if they're not idiots (and they're not) then it probably comes from the secretary of state.  But still, I wonder why the guy would rely on a middle-person rather than go directly to the source.

Also just FYI, this might be interesting to play around with.

Next, here's the AP's take on the matter, citing "experts" (whatever those are) who are skeptical about the claims of fraud.  I link to it because I do think it makes a couple of points.

First, the AP's own numbers don't show this weird percentage-switching either:

An analysis by The Associated Press' Election Research and Quality Control service found that Clinton led Obama by about 6 percentage points in machine-counted towns, where she earned 53 percent of the vote and Obama earned 47 percent. Obama led Clinton by about 8 percentage points in hand-counted towns, where he earned 54 percent of the vote and Clinton earned 46 percent.

I will note that the AP is very good at elections.  They did not call Florida for Bush in 2000.  They have screwed some stuff up in the past, but they take this stuff seriously and have some solid people working on it.

Second, they offer this explanation of the patterns we see, and note that it is not new.

Joe Lenski, executive vice president of Edison Media Research, one of two firms that conduct election exit polling for The AP and television networks, said those numbers fit the pattern.

"If you do a little more statistical digging, you find out that this isn't proving what they think it's proving. It's a pattern that's been around for years," he said.

In 2008, 2004 and 2000, towns and cities using ballot-counting machines skewed toward Democratic primary winners Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore, while those where ballots are hand-counted went to second-place finishers Obama, Howard Dean and Bill Bradley.

Lenski said it's all of a piece: Education, income and age -- factors that influence voters' candidate choices, also play into where they choose to live.

"We see those patterns in the vote, we see those patterns in the exit poll. It's not surprising we'd see those patterns when we looked at the types of equipment used because it's not randomly assigned, there are reasons why certain towns use paper ballots and certain cities use machines," Lenski said.

Manchester, for example, New Hampshire's most populous city, is largely working class and uses machines at its 12 polling stations. Clinton won there Tuesday, just as previous winners Kerry and Gore did. The small White Mountains towns of Franconia, Sugar Hill and Bethlehem, which hand-count ballots, all went to Obama as they did for Dean in 2004 and Bradley in 2000.

"Clinton, Kerry and Gore all seem to have a similar profile in New Hampshire. Their voters in New Hampshire were older, less likely to be college-educated and had on average lower incomes. For Dean and Obama and Bradley, they're most likely to have college degrees or postgraduate education, they're most likely to be younger and they're most likely to be higher income and higher educated," Lenski said.

"Also in terms of issues, the divide this time was pretty much experience versus change, and that's not too dissimilar from the divide between Kerry and Dean four years ago and the divide between Gore and Bradley eight years ago."

Also, as the AP story noted, there was a recount in the 2004 general election at the behest of Ralph Nader based on similar inconsistencies between machine-counted and hand-counted precincts.  It found no serious discrepancies.

Finally, this NYTimes Magazine piece on voting machines in general is very interesting.  It's not about NH specifically, just the issue of machines.

I have personally got serious reservations about the use of voting machines that don't leave a reliable, verifiable paper trail, and I think their use needs to be discontinued.  I have said this since 2000.

A friend of mine volunteered to staff a voting precinct in the 2004 election, in a suburban county in central Virginia.  He and the other election officers concluded that, despite the fact that they took their jobs seriously and made every effort to ensure that the voting was conducted fairly, they could not in fact guarantee that the results from their precinct reflected the voters' intentions because they couldn't vouch for the machines and there was no way to verify that the results the machines spit out were not tampered with.  He wrote a bunch of letters to the editor, but it got zero attention.  FWIW.

Corrections, criticism, brickbats, & etc requested.

====================

The shocking results of the New Hampshire primaries (both Republican and Democratic) have raised grave doubt as to the results.  Investigation has uncovered:

1.  the failure of Diebold (the maker of the voting machines used in New Hampshire) to fix known security flaws

2.  admitted "impropriety" by the management of Diebold

3. warnings from computer security experts regarding the voting machines

4.  evidence of the ease of 'hacking' the voting machines

5.  publicly admitted previous wrongdoing by LHS - the company who sold and operated the New Hampshire voting machines

6.  a history of criminal activity within LHS management

7.  wide divergence between the predicted and actual outcome of the New Hampshire primary

8.  evidence of votes not being correctly reported

9.  evidence of votes not being rapidly reported to the New Hampshire Secretary of State -- allowing time for a 'hack'

10.  evidence of unqualified personnel having access to the voting machines

11.  statistical evidence of unusual, if not unique, statewide voting patterns

--------------------------------------------------------
Support for Claims:

1.  

2.  Walden O'Dell, then-CEO of Ohio-based Diebold, wrote an invitation to a Bush re-election fundraiser in 2003 stating that he intended to help "Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." Ohio did get counted in the red column the following year, with its result providing the decisive margin of victory for the Republican incumbent.

But Diebold's new CEO, Thomas Swidarski, is also a Republican stalwart. Swidarski was one of about a dozen Diebold executives who helped fund the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004, with Swidarski himself making the maximum individual contribution of $2000.

Diebold has since barred its top administrators from making political donations. But the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported recently that three Diebold executives not covered by the ban have continued to contribute to GOP candidates in Ohio.

Two groups of investors are meanwhile suing Diebold in federal court on the grounds that the company gave misleading assurances about the security of its voting machines. Those allegedly false claims led to artificial inflation of Diebold's share prices, the lawsuits charge. The disgruntled investors complain that Diebold is "unable to assure the quality and working order of its voting machine products."

Taking note of these developments, The New York Times criticized Diebold's "flawed approach to its business" in a December editorial. "The counting of votes is a public trust," the Times declared. "Diebold, whose machines count many votes, has never acted as if it understood this."

Source here

3.  Vote fraud expert Bev Harris has warned that New Hampshire's electronic voting machines are wide open to fraud and that even modestly skilled computer programmers were able to identify key vulnerabilities within ten minutes of assessing them as key Democrat and Republican primaries unfold today.

Harris points out that LHS is a private company that will count over four fifths of the New Hampshire vote with no oversight whatsoever.

    LHS is not subject to public records requirements, as the government is, at least, not in New Hampshire. The control over memory card contents is absolute; when cards malfunction or get lost, LHS brings the replacements.

    Since LHS maintains the machines, repairs the machines, and replaces the machines -- often on Election Day -- when they malfunction, they have intimate access to the chips, sockets, ports, communications devices and other electronic components.

A recent CNN report featured on Lou Dobbs' show highlights just how easy it is to hack a voting machine and change how votes are tallied with just rudimentary programming skills. Experts warn that it takes only a minute for an unsupervised machine to be inserted with a virus and hacked.

Source:  here

4.

5.  In last week's program LHS President John Silvestro admitted his staff violated Connecticut security protocols during the 2006 election. Memory cards were swapped by LHS staff members who saw protocols from the State indicating they were not to touch machines.

Hajjar [see #6, below] doesn't limit his involvement in the voting machine business to sales. According to an interview conducted by Dori Smith, 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.

Other LHS staff members we spoke with, including Mike Carlson and Tom Burge, provided similar comments. They said they would open machines up during an election and swap memory cards as needed. This is illegal under Connecticut law and Deputy Secretary Mara told us she has since informed LHS that such actions were in violation of Connecticut election laws.

Source: here

6.  LHS Marketing and Sales Director Ken Hajjar grew up with owner John Silvestro in Lawrence, Massachusetts. They both moved to Londonderry, New Hampshire, where Ken Hajjar was arrested, indicted, and pleaded guilty to "sale / CND" and 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.

Source: here

7.  This needs to be nailed down.  there is exiting polling data here that needs to be qualified and verified

8.

9.

9A.  This comes from Ron Paul people here  we need to nail this down AS THIS IS OUR SECOND SMOKING GUN

10.

11.  NOTE:  This is our 'smoking gun' and Migeru or another qualified person needs to write this section.

------------END-----------------------------

Observation:  the Ron Paul people are really pissed and some were on the scene and witnessed voter count tampering.  These reports need to be verified.


Have epistemological model of Complex Information environments. Will Travel.