Clinton & Obama in New Hampshire
Could someone have messed with the vote in New Hampshire?
That is what some people are wondering, after looking closely at the totals in the votes for surprise Democratic primary victor Hillary Clinton, and for Barack Obama, who placed instead of winning as all the polls had predicted he would. And thanks to candidate Dennis Kucinich, we are likely to find out. Kucinich today filed a request, and a required $2000 fee, to order up a manual recount of the machine ballots cast in the state.
Polls taken as late as the day before the Tuesday vote showed Obama up by 10 to 15 points over Clinton, whom he had just beaten the week before in Iowa, but when the votes were counted, Clinton ended up beating Obama in New Hampshire 39.4 per cent to 36.8 per cent. In a replay of what happened in Ohio in 2004, exit polling reportedly also showed Obama to be winning the New Hampshire primary.
When that’s not what happened, shocked polling firms and surprised pundits, all of whom had been expecting a big Obama win, were left stumbling for explanations for the Hillary comeback from an 8 per cent drubbing in Iowa (even the Clinton campaign, whose own internal polling had predicted her defeat, were at a loss). Explanations ranged from her teary eyed final public appearance before primary day and some sexist heckling she had received, to dark talk about a wave of hidden racism in the voting booth.
But there were anomalies in the numbers that have some people suggesting something else: vote fraud.
What has had eyebrows raised is a significant discrepancy between the vote counts done by voting machine, and the ones done by hand.
In New Hampshire, 81 per cent of the voting was done…
Robert Karaffa:
I still maintain that the latest style of manipulation of electronic vote tabulation is more important on a global scale than most are willing to admit, mostly to themselves. Sure it’s only a part of the massive manipulation of, well, everything; but if we’re going to have a decent shot at keeping criminal trash from running the empire (into the ground) while pillaging the rest of the world along with other criminals we need the baseline of hand-counted paper ballots. I live in Ohio and work in Haiti some of the year. The head of Diebold made a statement before the 2004 election that he would deliver Ohio to Bush. Blatant tabulation anomalies were everywhere. Extraordinary deviations from poll projections (some unprecedented when it comes to Ohio) should be paid attention to.
15 January 2008, 8:58 am