...Bradblog is the place to go for recount and electronic voting info. Seeing as frontpagers on Kos and TPM saw fit to peremptorily wave away any concerns about the results in NH as wild conspiracy theories it's understandable that both Obama and Edwards decided that even bringing up the issue would earn them nothing but campaign killing tinfoil hats. If bloggers from A listers like Josh and Kos right down to lesser lights like lambert are embracing those views you can imagine what the whackjobs in the MSM like Dowd and Matthews would do with it.

As if suddenly after all the studies, demonstrations and reports that prove that these optiscan tabulators - that 80% of NH's votes are counted on - are insider vote fraud enabling junk don't even exist.

Let me remind you it would take one person with a memory card tainted by a untraceable program a high school kid could write a few minutes access to corrupt one of these machines and change the outcome at an entire polling place to any numbers he or she wants. Did that happen? I don't know. I can tell you when Bradblog guest blogger Dori Smith asked Ken Hajjar the Director of Sales and Marketing for LHS Associates, the company that runs virtually all of New England's elections including NH's, "about his admission that he and his company regularly replace voting machine memory cards (the keys to the kingdom!) at will, in the middle of elections, he told her, "I mean, I don't pay attention to every little law.""

Maybe all the polling was wrong, even Obama's that had him ahead by 14 on election day and Hillary's that had him ahead by 11. Maybe the unadjusted exit polling that showed him winning was way off base. Maybe you'd rather not think about it because you got the results you wanted. But that's not gonna help us if Hillary or Obama, ahead by 10, lose on election day now is it?

Kucinich's challenge is an opportunity, maybe the last one we'll have before November to discredit faith based vote counts on these machines. He probably doesn't have enough money to do a thorough job and everybody who gives a damn about winning an honest election in November ought to be throwing some cash his way.

Trying to fit Kucinich for a tinfoil hat in this case is disgusting. We should be making the case that these machines are endangering our democracy wherever we can make it. You're not going to put
the toothpaste back int tube. He's made his challenge. It's time to help him do what's right.

but clearly i'm too slow around here these days. which is great!

More distortion from the OFB. Why do I bother?

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

If the issue--I'll give Kucinich the benefit of the doubt--is the integrity of the voting process, how does this recount do anything, if only a small number of towns are counted, and there's no chain of custody for the ballots anyhow?

TROLL PROHYLACTIC No, I am not saying that Diebold doesn't suck, or that the voting process is sound.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

Read this Nancy Tobi post from an actual activist who is very familiar with every aspect of NH voting.

I don't know what Kucinich thinks this will accomplish other than for the pollsters to make their version of explanations as rock solid indisputable. (See either Exit Polls and all the pre-polls were wrong OR something is wrong with the election) So if a hand count rules out the election then their fudge factors to polling will be permanent.

Exit polling is pretty scientific and usually not off beyond the margin of error (hence the margin of error). It is really bizarre that exit polls have completely stopped working in swing states only and only since 2004 (and partly in 2000).

And WTF does Obama have to do with this? The polling being off and the election questions are so far removed from Obama. I don't get it. If he won by an equal margin above the poll numbers it would be the same story.

Check out the typical dkos response to a diary announcing a recount.

What can it hurt to count them by hand? Let them count.

I agree with Tobi's post except for the fact that stealing votes one paper ballot at a time is a time consuming proposition and almost impossible to do in secret. We're talking about a possible 13,000 to 15,000 vote discrepancy. Where I live there aren't a shitload of blank ballots floating around to do it with either. Each one is accounted for at the end of the night, the used ones, unused ones, even botched ballots that go into a separate envelope so the same number of ballots that go into a polling place on election day come out on election night.

You remember on Tuesday the Sec. of State was sending out Dem ballots to different polling places because they didn't have enough. You can't just go down to Kinkos and run off a new batch anymore than you can print up $10 bills. If you go by Tobi's thinking it's possible election judges in certain precincts decided to skew the results because they figured they weren't getting the results they wanted and asked for a few thousand more to rig the count. Highly unlikely if they match the number of ballots requested to the number of votes cast in NH like they do in IL as I said above.

But in her Plan B scenario you also need a lot more people barging into the chain of custody to switch those paper ballots. Conversely there's no "nefarious super spy" required to put a different memory card into the machine for a few minutes. Just one of LHS's techs who legally have access to the machines before, during and after election day.

If that happened I wouldn't necessarily say the Clintons had anything to do with it. They seemed as genuinely surprised as everyone else. But it doesn't take much imagination to come up with a whole range of reasons why someone with the ability to flip the results would do so.

lambert where's the distortion in anything I wrote sleepyhead?

On Wednesday you wrote, "My foil is as crinkly as anyone’s, but more—some!—evidence is needed. What does BradBlog say?"

On Thursday you wrote, "When and if there’s a Bradblog link, please post it, since that would have some authority and, who knows, maybe some evidence." and "When we were watching Ohio in 2004, there was plenty of hard evidence from the ground to back up the weird numbers. Until there’s some kind of evidence, all this figgerin is just wankery—unless and until the fluctuations are shown to have some statistical significance, which they haven’t been."

Well you have your Bradblog link and today it's all just bullshit? Sure in Ohio there was lots of evidence that people stood in line for hours when they shouldn't have had to. There were DRE machines trying to flip votes right on the screen. The whole purpose behind these tabulators is to move beyond the messy suppressive tactics and lull us to sleep with seamless undetectable election theft. You don't think they're trying to get better at it?

Where the hell do you expect to get evidence if you ridicule those who are trying to investigate? How do you expect to put the fear of exposure into the few people who have control of the machines if we don't challenge them even when the results are so completely at odds with everybody's predictions and the exit poll? Do you think a close election in November would be easier to contest when the media will be saying, "this same bunch could have fought that fight in January when the NH primary looked really skewed, but they didn't, they laughed at Kucinich and they're just sour grape hypocrits to pretend like that it's a problem now"?

Once again for a bunch of people who have been calling for us all to get up on our hind legs and fight, who also say they want free and clean elections, when it comes time to actually doing anything about it? feh.

The effort to get rid of the machines is gonna be a long drawn out fight. We won't win it until the crooks who make and sell these things can't make any money on them. That won't happen until a majority of the stupid politicians and bureaucrats who think these things help them count votes quickly and efficiently (or steal elections) come to the conclusion that using them isn't worth the grief they catch from the electorate.

Thank you for commenting, markg8. Your comment is important to us. Please do not hesitate to comment again. --CorrenteBot

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

"Where I live there aren’t a shitload of blank ballots floating around to do it with either."

What state do you live in? It must be nice, because most places have very little control over their unvoted ballots. In addition there is something called ballot-on-demand. Do they keep good tabs on those blanks? You may think there are not extra ballots floating around, but you would have to know all the ballots order (all of them?), any last minute orders, also how do you know the printers didn't make some extras? Also, very few places even audit and have to account for all of their ballots.

And, like Ohio, you can just shred all the unused ballots 60 days after an election (against federal and state law) and there is zero accounting for any stuffed ballot boxes. You'll note that there is no charges filed in Ohio or even any slap on the wrist for shredding the overwhelming number of unused ballots in Ohio in 2004. Violating election laws typically are not crimes if they are violated by elections officials.

...and live in DuPage Country Illinois funnyman. Bev Harris lists us as the first or second worst place to vote in the nation. I guess it's first now that California has a sane Secretary of State.

I'm active in IBIP. If you don't know what that is go look it up. Jean and Melisa who run our chapter finally got the State AG to rule that the DuPage County Election Commission can't destroy any election materials without written permission of the Local Records Commission just the other day as a matter of fact. Bob Saar the executive director, who I happened to get high with back in high school finally has admitted that he must keep all federal election materials for 22 months. It's not nearly enough but after years of banging our heads against the wall it is a start.

We have those same optiscan tabulators and even one TSX DRE in every polling place. I've told Republican election judges ever so politely that if they don't stop grabbing ballots out of voters' hands and examining them before they themselves shove them into the tabulator I can have a Democratic election lawyer with a deputy sheriff come explain the law to them.

Last November while pollwatching for Tammy Duckworth I called the Election Commission on my cell phone when the election judges couldn't get the paper scroll to work on the TSX and were about to find a hammer. After the morning rush I shifted to GOTV and got 3 phonecalls over the next few hours from befuddled morons at the DCEC asking if I got my TSX fixed yet. I finally told moron number 3
that I was a lowly pollwatcher who was no longer at the polling place and she should call her election judges to find that out. She asked if I had their number. Sheesh. They didn't get that piece of shit working til 3:30 in the afternoon after two different techs worked on it which suited me fine.
My old high school buddy Bob put up a news release after the election on the DCEC website bragging about "flawlessly" the new machines worked.

For all that most of our ballots are paper. And one thing they do here well is keep strict track of all the ballots used, unused or spoiled.

I put together a group from VoteTrustUSA and bugged my then congressman Jim Saxton's office (NJ-Lockheed) until he sent a staffer up from DC to meet with us so we could lobby him to co-sponsor Rush Holt's imperfect but better than nothing bill in 2005. I bugged my current congresswoman Judy Biggert until she agreed to meet with me and VoteTrustUSA's Illinois director on 9/11/06 about Holt's new bill. I do that kind of activism so keyboard commandos like you can have verified paper ballot backups and a fighting chance to get your vote counted.

Saxton never signed on, Biggert did after I told her she could back Holt's bill that she didn't like or wait til we took over congress and face a bill from Stephanie Tubbs Jones that she really hated. It made my day to see her blanch.

Now tell me intranets what have you done for ballot integrity? Surely someone as versed on the subject as you are has helped push the rock up the hill somewhere right?

Thanks for all you have done. I would recommend leaving people's names off our random internet forums because some people could read that as so-and-so hangs out with a pot smoker. They like to use all they can to minimize election activists.

Anyways, go read what Tobi has to say about NH, as she is in my mind the foremost authority on NH, and you should probably listen more to her instead of calling for a recount which hurt all the EI cause across the country. If you would like I can write the headlines for a few weeks down the road when they finish a recount. (Do you know how the precincts are chosen? Are they even random?)

Nearly every jurisdiction (county level in most states) whines every year that they need more election judges because these tend to be elderly people and those, alas, tend to croak.

I know everybody wants to be everywhere and doing everything on election days, and especially for those who have to make a personal sacrifice of taking a day off you want to get the most bang for your (non) buck. GOTV, phone banking, driving people to polls, etc. But as markg8 points out election judging is a very very key linchpin in the system.

Particularly those who are comfortable with electronics, which let's face it the current crop of elderly frequently are not, are needed in every polling place. When some pimply-faced person shows up with a clipboard and little toolbox and says he "got a call that you had a malfunctioning machine here" they are going to defer to him and have no idea what he's doing.

The HAVA rules have left a hodgepodge of systems all over the country. At least NH seems to have gone largely with the optical scan units which leave paper trails. Here in w. TN, this county anyway, we have CD's beloved "videopokervoting" boxes that look like big iPods, or at least what I imagine big iPods would look like, with the little dial to run the cursor up and down the page.

The reason was that when they ran the costs it turns out the optiscan people work like printer manufacturers do: sell the machine for next to nothing and then gouge you on the consumables. Jean the county voter registrar figured out that after two elections they would have to go back to the county board and ask that their office's budget be TRIPLED and then it went up after that. This was deemed unlikely to succeed (very poor county here) and so they went with the VPVs.

if somebody wanted to make a stink about what I, Bob or anybody else did in the 1970s. We could probably clean out about half the Republican clowns working in the county seat if it came to making everybody take urine tests.

I understand that Tobi was very disappointed in the 2004 Nader recount and the mystery out of state woman who was allowed to pick the precincts. It'd be nice to have a much bigger and better selection this time. If given the choice I don't want them random, I want them where the fraud most likely would have occurred if it happened.

DHinMI argues at Kos that the results last Tuesday were perfectly in line with PAST RESULTS and GEOGRAPHIC PATTERNS. (his caps not mine) Well duh.

My response to that is "I'd say if anybody has a grasp of the PAST RESULTS and GEOGRAPHIC PATTERNS it would be LHS employees who also had access to the optiscans and the GEM system wouldn't you? If anybody was gonna flip some votes they sure as hell wouldn't raise big red flags by doing where it would look like obvious fraud."

Regardless of all the arguments pro and con, like I said above, the toothpaste is out of the tube. If there's gonna be a recount we ought to try to make it as comprehensive as possible.