New Hampshire is the Birthplace of Electronic Election Theft

[HomerRamone]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/harvey-wasserman/65890/new-hampshire-is-the-birthplace-of-electronic-election-theft

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman:

As the New Hampshire primary lurches toward the finish line, the reality of electronic election theft looms over the vote count...

Computerized voting machines with software programmed by partisan for-profit corporations, makes election fraud even easier. We have known about this for four decades. Roy G. Saltman’s work at the National Bureau of Standards has documented the vulnerability of computer voting since the 1970s...

The ultimate implication for this year's primary has yet to be played out. This year in New Hampshire, we have Bernie Sanders rolling into Election Day with a very strong lead. Barack Obama did much the same (though with far smaller margins) in 2008, and emerged the loser. Could a similar outcome follow for Bernie?

On the Republican side, it's anyone's guess.

But whatever happens, remember that for decades the Granite State has set the tone for the general election, and could do so again on Tuesday. It remains to be seen whether we get a legitimate outcome, or another strip and flip selection, with ultimate control of the government still at stake. But the whole world had better be watching.

[hedda_foil]

1. I like and respect Wasserman. We fought in the touchscreen trenches together but...

New Hampshire uses only optically scanned paper ballots and hand counted paper ballots in some small hamlets. The scanners are programmed by a third party vendor, LHS Associated, which also does the programming for Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut Recounts are 100% hand counted at the Secretary of State's office in Concord, in the open, with many party and activist observers present. Now any election results can be hacked, stolen, stuffed or thrown into the nearest river, but New Hampshire is pretty clean.

I was a co-founder of a group that set up a recount in NH in 2004. Ida Briggs, a totally awesome DUer, managed much of the work on the ground.

[mhatrw]

3. And that partial recount appeared to show a pretty damn clean election.

The only thing missing, as far as I can tell, is some documentation of the chain of custody of the recounted ballots. Where were those machines and ballots between the time they were fed into the machines and the time they were recounted? Who, if anyone, had access to the machines and/or ballots?

I love opscan machines vs. touchscreen aether "ballots" because at least the threat of a recount makes it much harder to cheat. But could the ballots/machines have somehow been switched out to "nearly" match the computer reported totals in the days leading up to the recount?

I wish we could just count paper ballots in public with observers from all parties as they do in Canada. Then we would not have to worry about any of this, and the fraud would only be possible if the observers themselves were crooked.

[hedda_foil]

4. Exactly, mhatrw. I have a dim recollection of state police being used to transport the ballots.

But in '04, we trusted the police for the most part.

[NurseJackie]

2. A-a-and here we go.