EXCLUSIVE: Kucinich Letter Cites Miscounts in NH, Requests State Carry Out 'Complete and Accurate Re

[peoli]

Democratic Presidential Candidate Details 'Significant Percentage Variances,' from 4 to 10%, Discovered So Far During Hand Counts as Paid for by His Campaign
SoS Downplays Mistallies After One County Counted: No Changes 'As Far as Where the Candidates Finished'...
Citing "significant percentage variances in four voting districts in Hillsborough County," Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is requesting that New Hampshire's Secretary of State, William Gardner, "order a complete and accurate recount of all ballots in the New Hamsphire Democratic Presidential Primary election," according to a letter sent this morning, as obtained by The BRAD BLOG.

The letter (posted in full at end of this article) details a number of the discrepancies revealed by the recent post-election hand count in Concord, as paid for by the Democratic Presidential candidate's campaign.

The count was suspended this morning, when "funds ran out," according to the NH SoS website, making way for a Republican hand count challenge by candidate Albert Howard to begin tomorrow, as The BRAD BLOG reported earlier today.

"The magnitude of the variances in the four voting locations raise questions about the integrity of the internal vote accounting procedures in use in Hillsborough County," wrote Kucinich. "A reconciliation of the records of votes cast to voters who signed in and received ballots should have detected these problems; why multiple locations with large over-voting discrepancies went undetected in Hillsborough remains unexplained."

Kucinich's references, detailed in the two-page letter, refer to counts in Nashua Ward 5 where there were variances discovered in the counting as high as 4.9%; in Manchester Ward 5 where tallies varied 10.6%; and in New Ipswich, which saw 7.5% differences in the hand count totals from the original count for one candidate. Those districts were all tabulated on Election Day solely by error-prone, hackable Diebold optical-scan voting systems.

As well, the hand counts revealed 100 fewer votes actually existed for Barack Obama, in the town of Wilton, than were actually recorded for him on the night of the election...


80% of New Hampshire's paper ballots are counted on the same Diebold optical-scan system used to hack a mock election, as seen in HBO's documentary, Hacking Democracy (watch the hack live here). New Hampshire has no human verification procedures for the machine-counted ballots. The rest of the state's paper ballots are counted by hand at the polling places on Election Night.

more...

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5598#more-5598


lets be good Democrats and fire off a letter to the NH SOS!

Location: State House, Room 204, Concord, N.H. 03301
Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]

[ORDagnabbit]

1. dont tell dailykos...they only want semi accurate elections....

[Lucinda]

2. The Dem recount has stopped. Kucinich ran out of funds.

http://www.sos.nh.gov/

The recount data to-date is here:

http://www.sos.nh.gov/recountresults.htm
http://www.sos.nh.gov/recounthills.htm

[gratuitous]

3. Where are these percentages coming from?

I checked the link to the New Hampshire Secretary of State's office for the results and the recount results, and I'm not seeing discrepancies of 4.9% or 10.6%. It would be very helpful (and aid the credibility) if the writer of bradblog would cite which candidates are having these discrepancies, and just how many votes a 10.6% change represents. I mean, if someone was credited with nine votes and the recount shows they got, that's a whopping 11% discrepancy, but only one undercounted vote. And one vote out of thousands cast hardly seems like a "stop the presses" kind of hyperventilating that we're seeing out of the Kucinich camp.

[BeFree]

4. Hyperventilating?

So, you don't care if the machines count your votes correctly, but if one does they are hyperventilating?

Tell ya what, bushco loves people who attack those trying to save our measly little votes.

[gratuitous]

5. No, I do care about accurate vote counts

But if out of 10,000 votes cast, there are three or four miscounts, that's unlikely to change the outcome of an election. As I said, I reviewed the count and recount compilation published by the New Hampshire Secretary of State. There were small discrepancies of a vote or three on some of the totals, but the majority of the hand recount totals matched the machine count number for number.

The bradblog report cited what sounded like some serious "percentage" discrepancies on certain unspecified counts. But as I also said, the failure to identify which counts he was talking about leads me to think that these "percentage" discrepancies represent a very low raw number of miscounted votes; in my review of the Secretary of State's results there were discrepancies of a few votes and in only one case that I saw was it more than five. And whether thousands of votes are counted by hand or by machine, there's going to be a certain error rate - it's inevitable, if you want to get a count done in a timely fashion.

And people who get all jazzed up over a discrepancy of less than 10 votes out of 100,000 ballots are indeed hyperventilating, desperately searching for a problem in search of their answer.

[gratuitous]

6. Dupe

Delete