Voting Irregularities in New Hampshire?

Shenanigans in New Hampshire?  I've been open to the issues of voting irregularities ever since we had NYU Media Studies Professor and Author Mark Crispin Miller come to our political communications class in NYC  to discuss issues that were "outside the sphere of controversy" and, as such, aren't covered by the media. Miller had written a book and his topic, stolen elections, were so "out there" that no one would touch it.  I've written about this in Censored Stories and those that are so controversial that they remain below the radar of stories that are permissible and acceptable to cover.  Voting irregularities is one such story that just now is "bubbling up".  The NYTimes wrote about voting irregularities in a ten-page online article Sunday, quoting officials from the organization ElectionOnline that the machines are just "prone to malfunctions we just can't anticipate".  It's all confusing, isn't it.  But go to the horse's mouth and you'll see less equivocation. The 2006 report from Election Online (pdf) goes deeper and concluded: "Computer scientists continued to warn -- and in some cases proved -- that tampering with new voting technology was possible..." and, in large type, concludes that "the questions about the accuracy and reliability of voting have only grown."

Outsourcing, touch screen versus optical scanning, paper trails -- the examples given in the NYTimes article (one of the first major media to touch this) focused mainly on Ohio. Voter I.D., third-party registration and so many tangles in this hairy subject. But New Hampshire and card tampering?   Election Online didn't even list New Hampshire as a "state to watch".  So?

Black Box Voting is a watchdog organization on these issues and came out Monday on the topic of vote tampering capabilities in New Hampshire with a link in that story to a video that  explains how the machines there can be hijacked in trying to highlight this problem. Like in 2004, the exit polling yesterday didn't match the actual votes but major media didn't touch it.   

Oh, this is just hogwash, all this voting story stuff.  We live in a democracy. Don't we.  And we can trust the media to be watchdogs. Can't we.  And our government can insure that our system works. Can't it.  Tough complicated issues? 

Switch over to perezhilton for the latest on Britney (last Friday was the busiest ever for the gossip site with over 10 million page views and internet gossip news was pushed to a new level).

Comments

[MotherPie]

Perhaps the people being polled weren't honest with their answers (called the Bradley effect). That happens. Here's another link I found interesting. South Carolina plans to use the same machines that have been banned in other states. Howard Kurtz writes about how the media covered the horserace results in New Hampshire. Dan Balz writes, "Tuesday's outcome defied the final poll results, which had shown Obama heading toward a handsome victory" and then he supposes why and how this happened, none of the reasons linked to (the untouchable topic of)tampering. The Hotline's Blogometer has a wrap-up of what bloggers think happpened.
I am not supporting any candidate at this time, btw, and am sorry that Bill Richardson, governor of my state, will not have a better chance as I think he is one of the most experience candidates.

[allison]

I knew I could count on you to keep us informed about this! Good work as usual. After watching the debates/forums, I like Richardson's answers, too.

[tut-tut]

Good god; there I was, thinking it was all just a "lying with statistics" problem, and it may be just plain old lying . . .

[MotherPie]

Most of what I've continued to see is what was wrong with the polling. The Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias' "How Wrong Were the Polls" is pretty typical. Maybe I'm way off on the voting irregularities?

[Cindy]

I wouldn't put it past the Clintons (or one of their Establishment backers) to pull off some crap like this. The Opti-scan devices and the databases that store the numbers are very easy to hack, as has been demonstrated many times before. While I was a fan of Bill Clinton and have voted Democrat many times before, there's such an avalanche of utter crap from the Clinton campaign this time around, that I won't vote for Hillary, even if she were to be nominated.

[Willemaq]

The pre-vote inaccuracies do not account for the exit polling which also showed Barack Obama beating Hillary Clinton by 5 points. Sounds irregular to me, especially when the Republican polls conducted by the same pollsters were dead on.

[A NH watchdog]

We want accountability and change. We get this NOT from a recount, but from an investigation. We need questions asked and answered, and changes made so we have a clean election in NH in November.

The first question that needs to be asked is why did the NH Ballot Law Commission approve this firmware in March 2006 when the vendor himself testified it was defective and after citizens testified for more than four hours against the approval. That's the first question. Then we want to know, why did the State not respond to citizen requests for a rehearing after the California decertification. Then we want to know why was every citizen request for risk mitigation through procedural changes and legislation rebuffed by the state. Why did the Deputy Sec of State testify to kill two bills in two sessions that called for full software disclosure for voting equipment? Why did the State do nothing after hearing expert testimony from Harri Hursti and Bruce Odell about risk mitigation procedures and also about new software in use in Florida that is supposed to have fixed the known defects in the firmware approved last year. And finally, did the State have any prior knowledge that an executive in the firm programming NH elections is a convicted drug trafficker, and does the State think this is appropriate for a firm handling such sensitive state data as our votes.

Once those questions are asked, the very last question must be: What changes will the State implement to make November's election more secure so voters can believe in the results?

The NH Fair Elections Committee has left a paper and video trail a mile long, documenting all of our efforts over the past four years for remediation. It is time for change. The chickens have come home to roost in NH, and if our State does not like the shit they are dropping all over our elections, then the State needs to FINALLY step up and take dramatic action to send them away.

The days of the status quo are over. And recount is just part of the status quo. We want an honest and open FIRST COUNT, and that will happen only with structural change, not a recount.