It is at least possible that HRC did a better job at getting supporters to vote absentee, before Iowa was a factor.

she worked that angle well, and it paid off.

http://presscue.com/node/38034

For another explanation, add in field operative Michael Whouley, via DK, which oddly, or not, doesn't mention voting machine issues at all.

On the other hand, sometimes the foil gets painfully tight. I don't like that the voting machines are easily backable LHS Associates-run Diebold machines. And I really don't like that the exit pollsters were Mitofsky/Edison.

No evidence, no evidence. But I hate this fun-show house of mirrors we're trapped in, where what should be the most solid number of all is subject to mistrust and contested. Eesh.

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

Am I mistaken, but aren't there a few ex-New Yorkers who've moved to NH? Or is that VT... Anyways, could be that proximity to NY was a major factor in this win. Just as proximity to IL maybe helped Obama a teeny bit in Iowa.

What is verry intereshting and, IMHO, not at all shtupidt!, is Romney's precipitous "eat me" vote-shrinkage in NH, where there are definitely plenty of ex-MA people. This was the factor that was supposed to slam-dunk his win there just a few months ago.

If any point can be taken from the voting besides the excellent one that this time around voters are finally not acting as pundit-zombies, it's this well-deserved dwindle of Mr. Mitts' popularity. If we promise cross our hearts and hope to miss the Rapture Train, can we ruffle his Brylcreem now?

I really like that formulation, Pookapooka.

And I think that an important segment of Hillary's vote was about voter resistance to all of the press coverage, and to the notion that one caucus and one primary might settle the issue of who is going to be the Democratic nominee. And yes, I think women responded to the unceasing vitriol aimed at Hillary.

And was it ever sweet to watch the poobahs of punditry made to look like utter fools last night, as they took turns explaining to us yokels why, fittingly, both Clintons would rightly find themselves utterly rejected by the end of the night, a sad humiliation brought on by themselves.

If guess a lot of people up there in NH spent the weekend watching the cablenets. I don't know why people do that, to me it's like doing your grocery shopping at 7/11. But CSPAN seemed to be running irrelevant to the election 10 year old historical stuff all weekend so I tuned in to MSNBC and CNN myself. We had Bill bitching about Hillary's lousy media coverage, misrepresenting Barack's statements and complaining about the lack of time to muddy him up.

Then came Hillary's "emotional" moment. I agree with Josh Marshall, Edward's boneheaded misogynism made all men look bad to a certain segment of voters, mostly women.

But imo the cablenets, softened up by Bill's criticism, did their best not to use it in a way to overtly influence the race one way or another knowing full well they could kill their own ratings by seeming to pile on or praising her for being real for a change. But in the end, CNN especially, so flummoxed that Hillary momentarily let her guard down wound up treating the incident as if they'd never seen just Hillary act like this, but any woman get emotional before. They treated her like some new and exotic species discovered in the jungle somewhere. Very weird. Be me guess a lot of people looking at that crazy shit coverage voted for her not so much to spite those media clowns who are forever on the lookout for the next fucked up celebrity but to confirm that human feelings aren't some bizarre behavior that has to be stamped out of a presidential nominee in the primary season.

I wish that were the case. But the pattern emerging seems to suggest zombification. With electronic voting and media black outs it's impossible to know who voted for whom. The tweak the results, feed you a couple of well edited victory shots, great musid, great narrative, and the next Potemkin puppet is in place. You still feel like you "fought the good fight." Without hand counted ballots this is really a circle jerk.

You ever see those little kids "playing" the trailers on video games. No tokens in the system, just the teaser, and this little kid whacking away at the controls like he's doing something. That's us, the american voter, no traction, no action.

getting news from cable is "like grocery shopping at 7-11."

consider that one stolen.

If there's a hell when they die Blitzer and Matthews should have to watch neverending loops of themselves letting their ids fly out of their mouths while they were alive. They have a tough job bloviating for hours on end every day but that's no excuse for being bubbleheads.

I'd be happier with a president who wells up a little bit before starting a damn war rather than afterward at soldiers' funerals.

Good point, X. The anti-P-Z interpretation of the voting results is valid only if they really were results and not "results" -- and nobody outside knows whether the reality is with ""'s or without.

I guess deep in my cerebral maelstrom there musta been some connection between Santa Claus and NH's relative proximity to his "residence." Or I'm just basically a happy, optimistic, carefree, trusting kind of guy. Kinda zombie-like, in that way.

There is no heisenberg pricipal of voting booths versus exit / entry polling. Somehow people want to vote black but in the private booth they can't handle the pressure? (You know a lot of the polling is anonymous)

Anyways, why is everyone grasping at explanations??? Why the fuck do we have to listen to theories and wild speculation to explain away like a magic show why the vote tally is SO FAR OFF from polls?

You know polling is a pseudo-scientific exercise in that statistical analysis is hard to fake out and these every stretching explanation like the Shy Bush voter in heavily Bush precincts is getting ridiculous.

How many decades and how many foreign elections have we used exit polling and pre-polling to sort out stolen and corrupt elections for American-democracy loving style of elections?

You know Venezuela and Iraq now have more trustworthy elections, in that polls and goddamn audits match the election results.

Now on to the magic NH numbers.


       Small Medium Large Towns
Clinton 33.7% 37.6% 40.3%
Obama   39.2% 36.6% 36.0%
Edwards 17.6% 17.9% 16.4%
Rchrdsn  5.8%  5.0%  4.3%
TOTALS: 22,095 81,059 184,426

You'll note a few things. Large towns (>1500 votes) heavily weight the total percentages because of the population. Small and medium towns are primarily hand count precincts and large and some medium are opscan.

Now 40% of the precincts are hand count, but only account for 25% of the total votes. (Note in this election they were only 20% of the total vote?? larger big city turnout?)


        Hand  Machine Count
Clinton 34.7% 40.1%
Obama   38.8% 35.8%
Edwards 17.6% 16.7%
Rchrdsn  5.6%  4.4%
       59,157 228,307

What sticks out to me is that half of the medium towns can be considered machines counted, and half in the hand count category. It is hard to me to imagine how you dilute 180,000 ballots of 40.3% Clinton with 40,000 ballots of 37.6% Clinton and end up with 40.1%... It would seem to me that technically the combination would be more like 39.8% So that seems odd to me.

Now notice that the large towns and/or machine counted ballots went heavily for Clinton. So you have to now wonder, were the electronic tabulations off? Or do certain areas of NH really vote that differently? It will be interesting to see if there are any hand recounts.

I thought for a moment, I was gonna have to say Hacking Democracy. Glitch!!!

"Pollsters flummoxed by New Hampshire primary"
link

... I can easily see that large and small towns would have different voting patterns.

I think, absent some serious, statistical number crunching, it's entirely reasonable that "certain areas of NH really vote that differently."

My foil is as crinkly as anyone's, but more--some!--evidence is needed. What does BradBlog say?

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

Rather my presentation above sort of puts to rest the idea of machine counts being the real problem. Normally when you look at machine versus hand count (like in Florida) you can see differences. In NH case it just happens that there are very few similar precincts (hand and machine of similar size and location). You'll note the machine and large precincts almost match. So we cannot rule out corrupted machine counts.

It will be very interesting to see a plot of precinct size versus % clinton. If there is a sharp jump where all machine counts are 40% clinton. There "should" be a gradual slope of %clinton where biggest precincts are heavily clinton.

That will determine precinct size being the factor or simply machine versus hand count. But again, any good corrupted vote count will have done this reasonably well. (ie. swap votes after 500 tabulated, then swap higher percent after 1000 votes tabulated, that is how you steal only the largest precincts).

The webpage has been updated and it looks more reasonable for townsize and hand counted vs. machine counted in each category tends to be close.
http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=DE...
http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=RE...

You'll note that what does seem very suspicious is that electronic counting may have been used by Romney to steal voted from Huckabee. I think there are only one or two hand counted large precincts, so it's hard to say for sure.

It took forever for Hanover and Durham to come in. Wasn't til about 11am and according to John King on CNN those were big Obama counties, U of NH in Durham and Dartmouth in Hanover. After AP and NBC called it for Hillary King explained those counties
still being out was the reason CNN wasn't ready to make their call it yet. Obama did take them but only by 500 in Durham and 1000 or so in Hanover. Conversely Manchester and Nashua the biggest towns and supposedly Hillary country were stuck at reporting only 83% and 55% of their totals when I went to bed at 11:20.

At about 8pm Hooksett - where Hillary had her election night HQ, just north of Manchester - came in with 1100 for Hillary, 812 for Kucinich and directly below him on the graph 0 for Obama. It stayed that way for about 15 minutes until they switched it to 812 for Obama and 19 for Kucinich. It accounted for Obama's dip to 34% on everyone's boards I looked at, CNN, ABC, Kos (working off CNN)
Politico and TPM. Was it a little mindfuck message by the Hillary folks saying, "We can pull this shit and there's nothing you can do about it."

... so?

When and if there's a Bradblog link, please post it, since that would have some authority and, who knows, maybe some evidence.

Until then, the "HRC stole the election" meme looks an awful lot like the OFB version of "sour grapes."

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.

Meanwhile, it seems to have escaped everyone's notice that the experts and the pundits and the pollsters and the shouting heads who "can't understand what happened" are the very same assholes who've already totally polluted our political discourse! I really can't wait to hear Chris Matthews or Bill O'Reilly screaming that Hillary stole an election. Lack of evidence never stopped them before, and when they do--I give it 24 hours--that's going to devalue any claims of Republican election theft, which is known to be in their playbook, in 2008. This is so, so stupid and silly. It's a circular firing squad with some of the shooters wearing tinfoil hats.

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

That's what I call switching Obama's numbers to Kucinich's in Hooksett. IOKIFYAR or a Clinton in your eyes eh Lambert? Classy.

Jeebus, ok, if it is not on Brad's blog it must not be true. Whatever.

So I did crunch the numbers for NH and graphed all counties reporting by number of votes and compared % Obama and % Clinton and it looks to be pretty consistent random spread across most hand count places compared to opscan polls.

It's pretty even, no real major trends other than HCPB might slightly favor Obama than HRC in similar size places. But less than 5% max shift. It could be the Bush close race 3% fudge was saw in Ohio in 2004.

There is some trends in both HCPB and opscans that show HRC doing slightly better in larger locations. Besides, it really doesn't make much sense to try and steal anything in NH. It is relatively cheap to recount by hand. Of course, you would only need to rig the two largest counties to put Hillary over the top.

Basically Nashua and Manchester gave HRC a win. Those two counties are 17% of the total vote and went 45% clinton / 30% obama. But you definitely cannot say make a case that every opscan town gave HRC a boost over Obama.

Lambert:

When and if there’s a Bradblog link, please post it, since that would have some authority and, who knows, maybe some evidence.

Intranets:

Jeebus, ok, if it is not on Brad’s blog it must not be true. Whatever.

I don't have time to deal with such wankery this morning.

Oh, guys, nice work destroying the credibility of any charges of election theft in the general. To adopt poor markg8's formulation: "Classy."

Out.

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

vigilance! that's all i'm saying. let's make sure there was not only no funny stuff, stealing and cheating, but that the machines were functioning and counted correctly. at this point, it's not about the foil, it's about the reality that computers crash and data is easy to lose. hillary had an amazing turnaround, good for her!

but how are we so sure that all the votes were counted? including those votes for her that may have been lost or misdirected?

no less than Diane Rheem (sp) did a show on this a day or two after the election, and honestly, they were more shrill than this post. i was kinda shocked to hear it on NPR, but there it is. videopoker voting is now officially a Village concern...not that they'll do anything about it but babble.

... here's the deal as I see it. Je repete:

0. I know Diebold is teh suxx0r so we don't need to relitigate that. In fact, any system where paper ballots are not counted by hand, like the Canadians do, is teh suxx0r, so we don't need to relitigate that.

1. In Ohio 2004 and Florida 2000 we had indications on the ground of malfeasance. Was it Cuyohoga County where the vote counting site was closed because of a fake terror threat? I haven't seen anything on the ground in NH, and at this point I'd expect the OFB or Brad to have produced it.

2. All we have is numeric fluctuations, any of which I've seen have plenty of alternative explanations, including differences between urban and rural. And an election "goes wrong," in Brad's phrase, because the election results differ from the polls? Well, for starters, then, we have elections why, exactly? And I'm reading the Brad post, and I'm not seeing words like say "statistically significant."

3. The election fraud meme is totally toxic, and to throw this stink bomb in a Democratic primary, with no evidence on the ground, is just inexcusable, because it will be used to discredit any election theft charges in the general, where election theft is a well-known page from the Republican playbook.

4. The whole mess is the OFB version of "sour grapes."

If there's evidence, fine. When the hand counts are in, fine. So much the better. But with no evidence, way, way, way worse. Shit, now the hand counts are so caught up in primary fever and the whole thing is so fucking tendentious that I'm going to start worrying about them.

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

Ok, let me rephrase this.

HRC won by only 7500 votes. In the top two cities, Manchester and Nashua, HRC netted 5200 votes.

Those are two large towns that can't really be compared to other places like HCPB towns. So other than polling there is nothing to compare those two to say anything about the electronic results. Short of a recount (which means nothing because there is no chain of custody) we will never know.

What people are doing is comparing HCBP towns and precincts versus Diebold ones. Unfortunately there is a slight trend there and people will be trumpeting it, and with the media actually questioning polls, they might run with the story and g-d forbid there is a hand recount.. It will show the ballots match and happy day everyone has to take all tabulation as golden from now on.

It is a terrible mess that is going to set up 2008 as a unquestioned free-for-all.

I was giving you all a heads up on the numbers. In my opinion there aren't enough data to say anything meaningful, and it isn't very neatly packed. But there is a trend towards diebold precincts giving HRC an edge compared to similar sized HCPB ones. I personally think why bother, but who knows, maybe practice, warm up for the big game. It really doesn't make much sense to rig a whole lot of places by a little bit. (But Ohio might indicate that is the winning strategy).

Anyways, the Paultards are running big with this and will make a big mess. Especially if they get a recount. Now I'm a big fan of transparency and recounts, but (a) this isn't a real election, so what you gain/lose ONE DELEGATE, (b) a recount will show nothing (c) it will put a kos-like stranglehold on any discussion of election tampering from now until Chelsea or one of the twins take office (or is Marvin next in line).

It's that the Ready, Fire, Aim approach on all this really frosts me. Especially when expressed in thousands of "me too" comments over at Big Orange. I'm spending too much time over there at the Meth Den, I think.

And now because there's no chain of custody we'll never know, even with a physical recount? Ya know, somehow I think that if Obama had won, we wouldn't even be having this election systems discussion during the primaries. Because the system sucks for the voter, right? Then it sucks at all times. Somehow, I doubt this will be a continuing concern. Unless and until Obama loses another primary, in which case the whole issue will rise, zombie-like, from the grave. I dislike instrumentalism....

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

it's late and i'm too tired to do the googling, but here's the only question i have for you, lb. and any other person who doesn't want to think about what videopoker voting means today:

what is different today, than in 2006, 04, 02 or 00? in terms of the machines themselves?

i hope you can agree with me, rolling stone, brad, that kennedy boy, and lots of others, that in all those elections, there were plenty of irregularities that went unexplained, and ultimately, not investigated, swept under the media rug, ignored and/or forgotten. it was only last year, in 07, that the 'final details' of 04 OH were officially understood, and those responsible finally and totally excused from their duties as vote counters. in the meantime- what's different, other than a few people moving on from their duties as vote counting officials and some counties switiching from one brand of machine to another?

not much, as far as i know. that is, (as was detailed on NPR on the show to which i made ref) few if any states have replaced faulty or questionable machines. few if any states have had sincere and detailed investigations into the potential problems those machines could have, few if any states have invested the money to 'upgrade' the technology those machines use to ensure they now properly function.

it's odd to me. in 04, there were lots of bloggers willing to speak of this matter, or at least raise the question, even if in contempt and disregard. today, although very little if anything has changed, "we" have all more or less adopted the attitude of Orange Satan: Speak Not of the Voting Machines, for Even if they are Untrustworthy, There's Nothing We Can Do to Change That.

That's really my only point. you, perhaps like me, didn't trust things in 04. why do you trust them now? or perhaps i'm wrong and you did think that 04 was more or less honest, and there's no real reason to worry about the fact that all computers break down sooner or later, and people fudge computer generated results to cover that fact, because they don't want to be bothered with counting things 'the old fashioned way.' which is fine for you to feel, like i said, it wouldn't be me if i didn't throw this out there.

being properly bush-age cynical, i'll remind you that you yourself are the one to constantly say that you often fail to think the worst of them, and this is one of those cases where i ask you- do you honestly think the issue is "no longer important" or a concern because they did the right thing?

NH was the home of the (convicted republican felon) phone jamming scandal, of course. does that mean they only use phones to throw elections? i don't think so. i'm not saying the republicans, or hillary, are responsible for NH's results.

I am saying: we've made no progress since HAVA was passed, or so little as to be marginal. i don't forget that, i hope others won't. the potential for abuse remains, and i'm going to keep asking these questions.

Granted, that's not clear.

All I can say is thank the God(ess)(e)(s) of Our Choice, If Any, that we're a comfy little C-list blog, because the level of nonsense at The Great Orange Satan was beyond belief. And when the whole topic melded with Hillary Hatred, as it did, the brew was toxic. Just ick.

I've got to spend less time over there. OTOH, it brings in some hits...

Channging the subject, did you see this? The Village wasn't this guy's place, either, come to think of it. I think the playbook was old by Clinton's time, if we look back.

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