Now, I would not go so far as to say ’Hillary stole NH.’ I don’t have any evidence for that at all. But gosh! AT isn’t exactly a foil-lover’s CT rag, now is it? cautiously eyes lambert Perhaps this guy is about to get nothing but egg on his face, it’s still an interesting read.
The New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office has announced that they’ll be doing a statewide recount of the primary’s results, citing the Internet controversy (see below) over the results. I also want to add that, contrary to what is being reported at Wired’s “Threat Level” blog, this controversy is very much about electronic voting machines. I don’t really understand how a writer at an otherwise excellent infosec blog like “Threat Level” could make as elementary an error as equating “e-voting” solely with “paperless touchscreen voting machines,” but it happened. Memo to Wired and to the rest of the press: optical scanners are “electronic voting machines,” and they are just as vulnerable to hacking and tampering as touchscreens. See below for more on this.The problem with New Hampshire
On the subject of election integrity, I want to use this post to highlight a few very important points for the various pundits, bloggers, and other media types who may be working on this story.First, it is a huge mistake to assume (like this DKos poster) that the optical scan machines used in NH are somehow more secure than the much-maligned touchscreen machines, which didn’t seem to be that widely used in the primary. Optical scanners can actually be less secure than touchscreens, because they’re just as easy to tamper with (sometimes more so) as the touchscreens, but there’s typically only one per precinct—an attacker therefore has a single point of failure to manipulate. The fact that optical scanners leave a paper record is totally irrelevant if a random audit of the results is not mandatory by law after every election. And in New Hampshire, there are no mandatory audits. As I’ve said before, mandating a paper trail without also requiring post-election audits is like buying a security system for your house and then not turning it on.
Ron Paul and his supporters may be a bit loopy, but they are 100 percent correct in insisting on some type of audit of the NH results—not because Hillary hacked the vote (I currently think there are better explanations for the results than vote hacking), but because such audits should always occur as a matter of course. Again, when you use an electronic voting system, you must audit the results if you want to have confidence in them.
Second, I want to congratulate lefty blog stalwart Josh Marshall on his apparent clairvoyance. Clearly, he has access to information about the integrity of the NH elections that has been denied to the public. In a post entitled “Enough,” Marshall decried “the notion that public opinion surveys and even exit poll data is so reliable that any substantial discrepancy between those numbers and the official result is prima facie evidence of tampering. That is simply absurd.”
He went on insist that “the possibility or danger of tampering is not a license to assume it or imagine it—in the absence of any evidence—any time the vote doesn’t go how we’d like.”
I single Marshall out not just because I’m a daily reader of his blog, but because the attitude exemplified in this post is typical of well-intentioned journalists who don’t really grasp what’s at stake in the e-voting debate. So let me clarify, for the benefit of Marshall and the others:
In a truly democratic election, the burden of proof is on the state to provide evidence of the election’s integrity. This sentiment is behind the idea that ballots should be counted under the watchful eyes of the public’s representatives. So elections are held to a much different standard than criminal proceedings, where the burden of proof is on the one who brings a charge of wrongdoing.
Right now, in the absence of an audit of the New Hampshire results, the state has not met the requirement that it prove to the public that the election was fair. This is what the fuss is about. New Hampshire does not have the manual audit requirement that is necessary to prove that an election was fair, so that state’s ballots were effectively counted in secret by closed-source machine code. When ballots are counted in secret and it’s up to the voters to prove that the election was rigged when they’re surprised by the results, that’s not the kind of democracy that the Founders had in mind for us.
Hillary’s New Hampshire woes could be a prelude to a much bigger mess
I’ve saved the most important part of this post for last. Note that this is also the part of the post where I do what folks on the Internet are always wishing that “mainstream” journalists would do, and that’s call it exactly like I see it. So feel free to disagree, but I think even the small minority of our audience that believes the very worst about Hillary Clinton will have to concede that I have a point about the lay of the land here.All NH integrity issues aside, the real story in the mini-firestorm stirred up on the Internet in response to Clinton’s NH upset is that it has important implications for the any presidential contest that includes the former First Lady.
Imagine the scene on the day after the November 2008 presidential election if Hillary Rodham Clinton wins the presidency in an upset, after citizens in states like Ohio went to the polls and voted electronically. If you’re an independent who thinks that the left has made a big deal over the Florida results in the 2000 election, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Over the course of the 90s, segments of the right accused Clinton of a litany of sins that includes the murder of Vince Foster, so it’s not at all a stretch to assume that they could and would add mass electronic election fraud to that line-up.
My point is that given the simple fact of who she is and the feelings that she stirs in her opponents, a close Clinton victory—especially if that victory is at odds with pre- and post-election polling—could precipitate a major electoral controversy to a degree that is not true of any other candidate on either side. Unlike Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, no Republican candidate is likely to roll over and let Clinton take the White House if they can get substantial traction with accusations that she stole the election. So there’s a small possibility (or a large one, depending on how you judge the odds of a close Hillary victory), that we may be in for a mess that makes us long for the halcyon days of “hanging chads.”
From my perspective, this is what’s really at stake in the ongoing e-voting controversy: the government’s inability to fulfill its obligation to prove to the public that our elections are fair makes our democracy so much more fragile, and so much more susceptible to cracking under the shock of a major election controversy.
Just something to think about. I guess I’ll have to go over to Brad’s place and find out what’s going on.
Front page
Clear headed, incisive analysis...
And if there were any justice in the world commentary of this quality would be featured in mainstream media op-ed columns instead of the gassy bloviation that’s currently emitted, daily, from the cheese factories of American News, Inc.
Cheese factories... I like it
“Why are we refighting the issues of 2000?”
[rimshot, laughter]
Yeah, I dunno. The “burden of proof” argument is excellent.
I guess I’m connecting the controversy — and it’s possible I’ve been doing entirely too much meth, which is a lot worse than crack, over at Big Orange — so mentally I’ve got this classified with the “any stick to beat a dog” crap we’re seeing over there right now. Talk about a “food fight.” Want to take Hillary down? Fine. Taint the election results. I don’t believe for a second that if the results had not been favorable to Hillary, that is question would have gotten any traction at all. And so on.
The argument for “what about the general” is powerful, but in some ways, it’s almost too powerful, because, as usual, the Republicans will do what they do with no help from us. I mean, suppose Obama wins, and there’s any irregularity at all. (And by “any,” I mean anything they can gin up, like some little old lady had her thumb partly over the photograph on one of the five kinds of ID she brought.) Can’t you hear the cries of “Chicago machine politician”? The other way to look at this is the NH story prepositions mindshare for a narrative that’s bound to come anyhow. That story writes itself, now that the election theft narrative is “in play.”
It’s what we used to call “overly dynamic” in the cubes, or what “that one guy” in Snow Crash said: “Okay, we got a rapidly evolving situation.” Now the election theft football is in play on an extremely sloppy field.
In a perfect world [lambert screams, begins pounding forehead on desk] “we” wouldn’t have managed to trash a Democrat’s victory with charges of election fraud, and the Ron Paul forces would have been equally and visibly involved, to separate the issue of straightening out the totally fucked voting system from the issue of electing our partially fucked candidates. Right now, it looks (and I believe in the trenches, is) the usual “any stick to beat a dog” stuff, supra, feeding directly into and out of the deep well of Hillary Hatred, exactly because none of that was done.
And I don’t think the NH result will satisfy anyone anyhow no matter what the result, rationally because there’s no paper trail for the ballots, and because now that the narrative is in play, the various players are going to do whatever they want with it, and some of them are surely not going to accept what NH says.
Nor do I think the NH result will lead to any other voting systems being fixed, because there’s no time and no money and yadda yadda yadda. So in the end all we will have managed to do is either taint or take down a Democrat, Hillary* even if Diebold, a Republican company is the guilty party. It’s a lot like Xan’s post on cancer testing. Since no cure is possible in the time-frame, what do the test results give us, exactly?
Translation: We Are So Fucked.
Sorry.
I think I forgot to take my anti-cranky pill this morning.
NOTE A little evidence on the ground would have bee n helpful.
NOTE * An alternative scenario is that a Democratic operative is the guilty party, and this this can be shown with some sort of evidence, in which case I will be wrong, wrong, wrong, and will finally — what a relief — have been too cynical about something. A second scenario is that Diebold is shown to be guilty, and the Republican brand is trashed. Somehow, I’m not confident in that. Maybe I need to up the anti-cranky meds.
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
Thanks for this, which is
Thanks for this, which is pure gold:
Your words should be carved in stone and displayed on the Washington Mall.
more recount news:
Election integrity activists parsing the precinct-level results from New Hampshire’s Democratic Primary say their early analyses have found anomalies suggesting vote totals may have been altered to deliver a Hillary Clinton victory.
The activists, led by the Election Defense Alliance, a nonprofit formed after the 2004 election when exit polls also predicted a victory by a candidate other then the eventual winner, point to a series of discrepancies when comparing the official results from hand-counted and machine-counted paper ballots. Computer scanners, much like a standardized test, counted 80 percent of the ballots.
They begin by noting that Barack Obama won in hand-counted precincts, which tend to be more rural with fewer voters. In contrast, Clinton won in the precincts where computers tallied results, which are larger towns, cities and Boston suburbs. That discrepancy suggested that had the computer-counted ballots been tallied by hand, Clinton might not have won a victory defying pre-election polls, the activists said.
Anthony Stevens, New Hampshire’s assistant secretary of state, said on Thursday that the hand count-computer count discrepancy was not unusual. He noted that in 2004 Democrat Howard Dean largely carried the hand-count precincts while John Kerry won most of the computer-count locales.
However, later on Thursday, Bruce O’Dell, an information technology consultant who is coordinating Election Defense Alliance’s analysis, found the percentages of the vote given to Obama and Clinton, according to which counting method was used, were mirror images “down to the sixth decimal place.”
“There is a remarkable relationship between Obama and Clinton votes, when you look at votes tabulated by op-scan (computers) versus votes tabulated by hand:
Clinton optical scan: 91,717 (52.95%)
Obama optican scan: 81,495 (47.05%)
Clinton hand-counted: 20,889 (47.05%)
Obama hand-counted: 23,509 (52.95%)
“The percentages seem to be swapped,” he wrote, in a short piece posted Thursday on OpEdNews.com. “That seems highly unusual, to say the least.”
O’Dell’s report has lead many election integrity activists to conclude that New Hampshire’s Democratic primary was “stolen” for Clinton. There have been numerous emails saying exactly that on a list-serve used by activists who are parsing the official primary results. Clinton beat Obama by 7,603 votes, according to the official results.
Interviewed on Friday, O’Dell said it was premature to jump to any conclusion other than the Democratic primary results were “suspect.” He and others involved in scrutinizing the primary data said activists and others who were making premature conclusions would undermine their efforts to investigate the vote count.
“We are trying to be very careful on how we are phrasing this,” he said.
Parsing
the primary vote
O’Dell said he is focusing on examining the results within New Hampshire counties, to see if there are variations in candidate percentages in nearby precincts where ballots were counted by hand and counted by computer scanners. If there are variations in areas with similar socioeconomic profiles, he said that would re-enforce “the hypothesis” that the computerized count was inaccurate.
“This is a data-mining exercise,” O’Dell said, adding that by Friday he and other researchers had narrowed their focus to three counties in southeastern New Hampshire, where most of the state’s population lives. “We have made a considerable amount of progress,” he said.
O’Dell’s methodology has precedents. Election integrity activists in Ohio used it after 2004 to show the uneven deployment of voting machines in Franklin County caused John Kerry to lose nearly 17,000 votes. That figure emerged after activist investigators found that some precincts in Columbus’s inner city lacked sufficient numbers of voting machines. Thus, by comparing voter turnout in the properly supplied precincts to nearby precincts that lacked machines — causing long lines and people to leave — they projected how many votes were lost. That analysis led a federal judge to order Ohio counties to preserve 2004 election records.
the rest at alternet.
It wasn't Hillary hacked the election
Think about it. To which Democrat would it be easiest to summon Republican resistance???
If anyone hacked the election, it’d be the Republican committee. Getting her the Democratic nomination would be the best thing THEY could hope for.
Election Defense Alliance
Here.
Their data architect is impressive.
I can feel my anti-cranky pills finally kicking in.
(The problem with the purely numerical stuff is that randomness really does happen.)
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
I can see the Republicans butchering a Rovian ploy
’cause maybe to be Rovian you really need to be Rove.
But by the time November rolls around, agency and history will be lost…
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
Won't the ReThugs call foul on any close win by a Dem?
I don’t think it’s just Hillary—altho the reaction has been a bit amazing.
I’m glad they’ll be counting—but will it be the actual paper ballots?
Which NH can do, but many places have no paper backup.
This must be rectified before November.
jawbone: it will not. nothing will change, and we'll still
have problems, doubts, rumors and other niggling data points which don’t make sense.
*no* leading dem outside a dedicated handful including members of the CBC and rush holt are dealing with this issue. and if it that changed tomorrow, it’s too late, by many months, to make the needed changes in those areas which use machines. fixing computers and improving security on them takes time and money. very few areas have made serious efforts to fix the problems. very few, and certainly no where near a majority of states.
of course, we could go back to paper, but it seems that’s just “impossible” as far as our leaderz are concerned.
Josh Marshall
I do not understand this guy. Some days he is right on the money. And then other days he sounds like Dana Perino on ludes.
please ignore the magic numbers
As good work as EDA does, please ignore this silly hcpb = 53/47 opscan=47/53. It is the biggest red herring ever.
First of all it wasn’t based on SOS numbers as far as I can tell. So the magic coincidence numbers are probably off by a few votes. Anyways it really is a coincidence.
So you are telling me all of the precinct results are completely random, but somehow statewide they rigged opscan tabulation to magically be the inverse of the “actual vote”. It is dumb and third grade argument.
IF anything, Manchester and Nashua were rigged. But that (a) isn’t provable since there is almost now way to account for the total inventory of paper ballots or chain of custody (b) if you have been to those cities and seen the commuters into Mass, you will realize they probably did vote 45% Clinton.
The funniest part of this all, until recently it was only going to be a Dem primary recount. Where were all the Paultards then? Hurrah for a recount.. oh wait, no one on the (R) side ordered one. Does Kucinich now get his money back.
This will be a disaster because any place with opscan, a hand count WILL reveal a few ballots missing / uncounted / maybe even wrong. Will the Paultards and their new found joy for election integrity realize this, or rant and rave everytime the hand count comes up 32 instead of the reported 31.
My point is the 47/53 is just a meaningless coincidence. The real issue is the exit polls did not match, yet again. How many times are we going to let pollsters off the hook. I will remind you, certain eastern block elections were overturned based on such exit polling.
It isn't about Hillary, it's about the d---m machines.
Maybe if the right wingers got their fingers burnt by the machines they would get a clue. I won’t believe election result one if it’s done on computers.
DavidBodhi, DanS, you are so right
I could care less whether Hillary or Obama won the primary. Like Gnome Chomsky says, this $election has become a fight in the Company boardroom to see who runs the Business party.
What annoys is that all polls tended to match the handcounted election results- giving it a clear Obama win, while the Diebold cast votes gave a disproportionate win to Clinton.
Those are really funny data, and given the ease of hacking the Diebold system, makes me wonder if the Rethuglicans are just exercising their corporate muscles. Again.
After all, they want an airtight win in November.
No Hell below us
Above us, only sky
HRC
You seem to forget she’s “their candidate”!!!!!!!!
Great post CD
You ought to send that to part what’s his name (sorry it’s late and I’m tired of scrolling up) wants etched in the mall to the big papers as an op-ed or an LTE.
Lambert this is completely wrong: “And I don’t think the NH result will satisfy anyone anyhow no matter what the result, rationally because there’s no paper trail for the ballots”
There are indeed paper ballots. That’s what optiscans scan.
The 53/47 thing seems just a weird coincidence to me too. Fraud if it happened would probably have been done in those 3 counties intranets mentioned or a number of smaller ones, a few votes here, a few more there. Maybe a combo.
But seeing as it would only take a few of the LHS techs with memory cards to do the work they’d probably never find the perps if they themselves don’t crack. These machines can be tampered with days, even weeks before the election. If anything does turn up it’ll still probably cost Sec. of State Gardner his job and scare the living hell out Sec. of States all across the nation.
There’s still time for Congress to pass legislation to put at least a moratorium
on the use of these things and print up enough paper ballots for the general. That’s probably wishful thinking on my part but if there is fraud and there’s a big enough stink? Who knows?
Missing Link in the New Hampster Primary?
It’s no secret as to how much Corporate America is running this country, how much they control the media and what size the portion of Corporate America is inhabited by the military industrial complex.
This presidential election cycle, however, has them appearing to support Hillary Clinton (http://news.independent.co.uk/world/amer…) in stark contrast to the battle they gave Bill Clinton as he balanced the budget in part by shaving the military expenditures and closing bases.
It could very well be the case that THEY would be the ones tampering with the ballots …
The fact remains that in the days immediately preceding the Primary, several separate independently and scientifically conducted polls by organizations with high levels of historical accuracy came to the SAME conclusion in varying degrees; that Obama would win.
It just really looks like a funny thing happened to the ballot machines on the way from the polls …
No. It’s not just “the d - - n machines”!
There’s a HUGE recent history of vote caging and manipulation; 2000 election’s hanging chads that were a result of printing off-center on inferior card stock, 2004 election’s Cuyahoga County (OH)’s cherrypicking the ballots for the recount and a number of votes cast that greatly exceeded the number of registered voters with the corporate conglomerate MSM all the while IGNORING the issues that prove America is no longer a democracy …
Meanwhile, more and more of us are catching on. But are they prepared? Perhaps the stories of recently built concentration camps in the U.S. to hold 400,000 are true. Perhaps we SHOULD be concerned about the ability of the President to declare martial law and suspend the Constitution if he so determines the country needs it. And what’s that about habeous corpus?
And were the recent events in Pakistan in which many officials and other opposition leaders were jailed as the current U.S. administration’s little buddy there declared martial law a harbinger and a dry run for the next election cycle?
Again, it's about the chain of custody
lb - “because there’s no paper trail for the ballots”
markg - “There are indeed paper ballots. That’s what optiscans scan.”
paper trail FOR the ballots. (really audit trail).
So count all you want. Count in front of 100 people and video cameras. Count it 10 times. Count it on your toes. Eat the paper ballots and count what comes out the other end.
It doesn’t matter anymore. As soon as the diebold scanned ballots left the polls, unless you have unscrutible chain of custody, you are done. You would only need one insider to make the stack of ballots match what the memory cards say. So count away. And let me prepare my shocked face for Jan 18th.
Yes, I mistyped "paper trail" for "audit trail"
Thanks, intranets. IIRC you’ve been making that argument from the first.
Damn, if that check from HRC weren’t so damn small I wouldn’t have to be typing for so many hours….
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
intranets
As I stated before Tobi’s “Plan B”, replacing the valid paper ballots with fakes is much harder and riskier to do. If I remember correctly we’re talking about a 13,000 to 15,000 ballot discrepancy to get to her margin of victory vs. that 11% consensus spread in 16 polls. A lot more people would have to be in on it. Kucinich mounted his challenge on Thursday and imo it’d be a virtually impossible suicide mission to be moving boxes of new ballots in and old ballots out after that point. If the good people of NH want to do something constructive they should keep a 24/7 vigil on the places where the ballots are stored until the recount is done. It’s a shame it’s come to that in this country and it’s possible it’s too late but again we’re talking about a logistical nightmare for fraudsters and catching them in the act would be a huge victory for ballot integrity.
Even if nothing turns up and the paper ballots match the machine returns it will reinforce the message that these machines aren’t to be trusted. It’s an educational moment and if elected officials consistently catch enough heat for using them they’ll eventually decide they aren’t worth the trouble.
voting machines
It’s nice to tiptoe around the subject of voting machine fraud, because this is exactly what’s been done for years since the machines came out and mainstream media has been the worst offender of remaining silent.
If the public doesn’t take the election back into it’s own hands, they will continue to have illegal persons sitting in the WH doing their will instead of the will of the people.
And while I’m at it I would like to point out how the phrase ’election fraud’ became turned around by people like Karl Rove to be ’voter fraud’, and puppeted by the media nationwide. It is NOT voter fraud. The voters are not doing the fraud nor counting the ballots. So don’t be fooled into using that phrase any longer. The proper phrase is ELECTION FRAUD. The voters are the victims, and have been for a long time.
Poll workers should be randomly picked, just like juries are picked. Get rid of the ’volunteers’ in this deal. Do the same with election board members and change them each election with the random selection. No more of this hand wiping hand business to get on the board. Do not allow anyone to become entrenched in the voting system. Ohio put a couple of them in jail for fraud and still have investigations ongoing.
And if the machines are to be kept, they must produce a receipt showing the correct way the person voted and that receipt should be dropped into a ballot box…and the machines had better produce a tally to match the receipt ballot count. In case of machine failure, paper ballots must be kept at hand and plenty of them. Living in Ohio you get to know all the tricks. Anyone caught intimidating voters should be hauled off to jail and remain there during the duration of the voting and vote counting; followed by heavy fine and incarceration. Most of you have not experienced intimidation but those who have are not likely to forget it.
jeebus
Ohio put a couple of them in jail for fraud and still have investigations ongoing.
Ohio put NO ONE in jail. Let me be clear. Election officials breaking the law and rigging elections is not a crime. Is not punished.
Some old lady trying to voter without a photo ID is a big deal.
In Ohio those two BOE ladies did not go to jail. They were issued a retrial and the judge settled. They pleaded no contest in exchange their records will be purged in six months.
All of the BOE staff that broke federal and state laws and disposed of unvoted punchcards 60 days after the election in Ohio are still in office. None we even scolded for violating FEDERAL ELECTION LAW.
still, vinnie has some quality radical ideas
Poll workers should be randomly picked, just like juries are picked. Get rid of the ’volunteers’ in this deal. Do the same with election board members and change them each election with the random selection. No more of this hand wiping hand business to get on the board. Do not allow anyone to become entrenched in the voting system. Ohio put a couple of them in jail for fraud and still have investigations ongoing.
!
i feel your anger, friend. my sister votes in the dread c’hoga county. shudder.
yes, and yes. and here’s my totally rad suggestion: there should be an elected statewide public officer who does only two things: sends out an form to designated “jury-style” local election workers, right before the election. it’s a piece of paper, and on it are all the candidates (all of them, dammit!) and all the ballot issues. those workers copy machine/print it out on site, in large numbers, and people use that paper upon which to vote. it’s the same everywhere. it’s published in papers and put on the internet the week before, so everyone knows what it should look like. it’s marked by hand by the voter alone. it’s counted by hand by the election workers. they’re stored for four years after each election in a secure facility.
the other thing the state wide election officer will do is manage, only around election time, another group of “jury-style” selected election workers, whose only duty is to enforce election laws, and monitor election day activities. they are given ’plain english’ booklets of verboten election day activities, and they carry it around with them for anyone to examine on election day. any fraud they uncover is directly reported to area prosecutorial authorities, who are under legal mandate to prosecute lawbreakser immediately. any voter suppression, balloting shenanigans, or the like is not tolerated, anywhere, anytime.
rad!