Sorry.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

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.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

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.

My initial suggestion was to compare the actual vote counts by hand vs. by machine against the exit polls, if an exit poll could be found that aggregated the data according to the vote counting method used in the precinct where the voter was interviewed. Of course this variable was not in the published exit polls. In my enthusiasm I imagined someone in the blogosphere knowing someone in one of the companies that do exit polls, so they could try to get the raw data from election night re-analysed. But see below.

Don't the candidates have private polling? Might  Kuchinch have the data thatis needed? or might he have the connections with people in Obamas campaign to get this taken seriously and so get their polling data released to us? OK there might be contractual reasons why this can't be done, but it's worth an ask.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

As to exit poll credibility I remember seeing a 49% approval rating for Bush.

Media also dutifully featured only their mainstream candidates in their election coverage.

National Election Archive Project

A draft analysis of New Hampshire Democratic Primary Raw Data shows that Clinton received a higher percentage of votes when ballots were counted electronically by Diebold, and Obama received a higher percentage of votes when ballots were counted by hand. The pattern is consistent with outcome-determinative vote miscount.

Well, gotta run!

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

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.

Scanlan said that New Hampshire's use of electronic voting machines is different than states like Ohio or Florida. The electronic machines are not linked, and all the electronic votes are backed by paper ballots.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/news/2008/01/kucinich_calls_for_recount_in_1.html

Hey, Grandma Moses started late!

What needs to be done?

Should you have sex on the first date?

(Answer the last, first.)

;-)


She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

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.


She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

However, LHS people were given unauthorized access to the machines, reportedly:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5553

CheckTheVotes.com has results by city/town, seemingly showing a statistically significant relationship between results and machine-counting on the Dem side:
http://checkthevotes.com/index.php?party=DEMOCRATS

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

(Before you know it you'll all get a friendly invitation to join a lodge...)

Example from Republicans Primary:

http://www.sos.nh.gov/presprim2008/rpresbelk.htm

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

Just signed up.  It's nice to see this issue being seriously debated!

Anyway I re-did the analysis using more reliable data.  Same results.  I then added various combinations of available socio-demographic data (household income, age, education) and so on.

I have found one factor - the percent of the population holding bachelor's degrees - very significantly linked with Clinton's results.  However, it is weaker than the Diebold which effect still remains with about the same strength.

PS.  Thanks to all the persons who cared to post election data.  Nice forum BTW.

http://www.eurotrib.com/files/825/NHDemVote.csv [38 Kb]

We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo

That was our smoking gun, and without it everything is circumstantial.  So the question arises, how come the early figures did show an exact reversal (and hence a smoking gun) and then this vanished.?

However there are other flaws in the fraud argument which became clear when it was noted that the votes were optically scanned using electronically stand-alone machines.  This prevents a mass reversal of votes across all machines unless all machines where physically interfered with before and after the count(to hide the trail)

However the last (political) point remains valid:

"It is in Hilary Clinton's best interests to ask for a re-count.  If it finds nothing is wrong she is a double winner.  If fraud is detected she has absolved herself from blame."

checklist of main points I made going through thread most of which were invalidated later

1.    The fact that the TOTAL Machine and hand counts EXACTLY reverse each other to 5 decimal places cannot be a coincidence by any normal statistical measure.

2.    Even if the Obama/Clinton votes hadn't reversed each other (I.e the results for machine and hand counted precincts EXACTLY MATCHED each other)  this would have been surprising - unless the distribution of Diebold machines was exactly random across all socio-economic types and sizes of precincts.   This is demonstrably not the case.

3.    If the machine counts were manipulated/falsified - to exactly reverse the hand-counted totals  - this could only have been done AFTER the hand counted totals had been calculated.  This would explain why machine counts were declared after the hand-counts.

4.    It would have been simpler to reverse the % for each candidate on a precinct by precinct basis - but that could have led to the "wrong result" if Hilary had actually won.  Thus they had to be sure that Obama was the "real" winner before reversing the votes - hence they had to wait until the hand counts were declared.  Given that there was an 80:20 split between machine and hand counts, any potential fraudster would know well in advance that an exact reversal of results would be sufficient to overturn the overall result - even after variation between the demographics of machine and hand counting precincts had been taken into account.  (Only in the case of an almost exact 50:50 vote split between the two leading candidates would this strategy run the risk of  not actually reversing the result)

5.    Any fraud on this scale would have required a simultaneous change to the programming on every Diebold machine - which in turn would have required an implementation on and communication from a central server.  Was that central server and its communications under any independent audit or monitoring?

6.    If there was fraud, it is unclear how a recount could detect it, given that any programming change made to distort the result could be reversed/erased after the count by the same server.

7.    All of the above does not depend in the slightest on any discrepancy between actual and exit polling results - where all sorts of other hypotheses - the Bradley effect, late swing by women voters angry at media coverage of Hilary's breakdown etc - could indeed come into play.  However these are irrelevant to points 1 to 6 above which rely solely on a statistical and technical analysis of the strange fact that the machine and hand counted percentages exactly reversed each other to 5 decimal places.  

8.    If the machine and hand-counted percentages for Edwards and the minor candidate exactly matches each other, it would make the exact Obama/Clinton reversal even more inconceivable. [it appears that here are also machine/hand discrepancies for other candidates - including on the republican side where these appear to favour McCain and Huckabee at the expense of Romney - do the same socio-economic factors explain this apparent bias?]

9.    Given that votes are machine counted but paper based makes it possible to do a reliable recount provided there has been secure custody of the ballots.

10.    The fact that vote counting (OPTICAL SCAN) are not linked makes a systematic fraud much more difficult to conduct and reverse (to cover all tracks) as all machines would have to be accessed individually at least twice.

11.     It is in Hilary Clinton's best interests to ask for a re-count.  If it finds nothing is wrong she is a double winner.  If fraud is detected she has absolved herself from blame.

This is the plot of the number of votes received by Clinton and Obama by precinct

And this is the plot of the same data on a log/log scale

I think it is immediately apparent that the log/log plot is better. The line is the result of the following regression:

Call:

lm(formula = log(Obama..d) ~ log(Clinton..d), data = NHDemVote,

    subset = Obama..d * Clinton..d > 0)

Residuals:

      Min        1Q    Median        3Q       Max

-1.898487 -0.252916 -0.003111  0.249842  1.066195

Coefficients:

                Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)

(Intercept)      0.69014    0.10753   6.418 5.41e-10 *

log(Clinton..d)  0.87164    0.01939  44.955  < 2e-16 *

---

Signif. codes:  0 `*' 0.001 `*' 0.01 `' 0.05 `.' 0.1 ` ' 1

Residual standard error: 0.3756 on 298 degrees of freedom

Multiple R-Squared: 0.8715,     Adjusted R-squared: 0.8711

F-statistic:  2021 on 1 and 298 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

Diebold's mere existence is a smoking gun, of course. E-voting machines are banned in California for the right reasons. With that precedent, I think a standard political campaign to get them banned everywhere else is feasible. We're going to be stuck in this state of paranoia for as long as this non-transparent system exists.

you are the media you consume.

The SLLN says that the average of a sample of a population becomes an increasingly good predictor of the true average of the population as the sample size increases, eventually reaching the true mean.

If we assume that the voting population of NH Dems is homogenous, regardless of voting method then the proportion of Obama voters should stay the same across hand counted and machine counted ballots, or that is what you would expect in a fair contest.

So the fact that the proportions exactly flip flopped is suspicious.

From the programming perspective it should be noted that flipping the candidate names is the easiest and least traceable method of stealing the election in the machine. It could be as easy doing a table or alteration.

Not making a judgment, just curious. ;)

It won't please the conspiracy theorists but perhaps we should take the lead and do a new Diary summarising our conclusions - and also explaining the basis 0f Kucinich's successful appeal.

Hint hint - Migaru, Drew, DoDo, ATinNM etc.

Index of Frank's Diaries

However, looking at the percentages and the sizes of the counties, we see that the largest county, Hillsborough, shows a very large near reversal of the percentages. Therefore, EDA has suggested that fraud might have tafen place only in Hillsborough.

Comments on that. The behaviour of the 10 counties is all over the place. Grafton went for Obama more strongly on machine-counted precincts than it dit on hand-counted precincts. Clinton won Coos more strongly on machine than on hand-counted precincts. In Stafford, both of them gote a higher vote share on machines than they did on hand counts.and so on. Now, given that the behaviour of the 10 counties is all over the place, the requirements for statistical significance for having a single county with a reversal are multiplied by 10. That is, the reversal needs to be very much closer to exact than otherwise. Especially because Hillsborough has been identified from looking at the the data. When you test a hypothesis formulated after looking at the data, the requirements for accepting it are stronger. I suppose the next step here is to do the same plot by municipality/ward within Hillsborough county.

We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo

The New Hampshire Primary recount started yesterday.  Paid for by the Dennis Kucinich campaign, the recount may or may not show a change of the winner of the event.  Even so, after one day, we've found enough out to be able to say that the recount is worth every penny!