NH Republican vote recount cancelled!

I would be extremely negligent if I did not point out that, of the entire voting process she, by default, is the most suspect entity.
I would not want to read that at some point in the next few days, a potential hand recount had been canceled due to lobbying on her part; that such a recount would be pointless due to a fact similar to ... armed guards hadn't been sitting vigelently over the ballots 24/7 for the past few days.
I understand the chain of custody theory and its flaws but I do have some degree of faith in our enforcement community and some more in the integrity of the secretary of state. I have absolutly no faith in the company that programs the vote counting equipment, which I believe was the point of this recount, a spot check.
Bev Harris, as much as I like her work, is from my understanding, able to extract her living from the continuation of distrust in the voting process. This distrust will only grow if this recount is canceled through her "intervention".
I hope the Kucinich people are aware of this also, although again I suspect their true motivations.

RECOUNT THE VOTES!

http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Dem+hands+o...

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5563

http://www.boston.com/news/local/new_hampshire/articles/2008...

http://www.wmur.com/politics/15056906/detail.html

I may be a vegetarian, but I'll defend to the death my right to eat pork!

Is anyone else getting a realy bad feeling about this ?

Go to this site
http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2008/01/the_d...

Hi all, and quick responses to some of these points:

Brian, thanks very much for the spreadsheet and Chris, thanks for the analysis.

A word about spreadsheets: One reason we got out of the gate so quickly in New Hampshire was that Black Box Voting did the tedious work of putting every location matched up with hand count or Diebold/LHS count and published it for everyone to have before the numbers even started rolling in. When Brian and others provide spreadsheets, it offers a great shortcut for others to crunch their own numbers. Just preparing the spreadsheet takes time.

Caveat: When you get a spreadsheet from someone else, you have to quickly check every input number to make sure whoever put in the raw data didn't have typos. Nothing would be more embarrassing than announcing a grand conclusion based on a typo. You also have to eyeball the formulas entered, for the same reason.

I will say that I am privy to some back-channel information and that someone else has been doing an entirely different study, using a slightly different approach to Chris, and was coming up with the same issue. I got the more detailed results of that study about 10 minutes before receiving Chris's information on Friday, and Chris, I hope you don't mind, but I forwarded your info to the EDA statisticians with a note. I know they appreciated it. They are right now in the process of further examination and confirmation of initial findings.

I encourage other statistically-minded individuals to crunch the numbers. The Republican numbers need to be crunched! And another study that needs to be done is a comparison of the initial results reported to the media with the official results.

One more caveat: As new statistical analyses roll in, especially if significant anomalies are found and get legs in the blogosphere, you will see false analyses show up, planted to weaken the message. Beware of anything from an unknown entity that contains what looks like a knockout punch. We see these things all the time. They're called "honey pots" and they're usually (a) EASY to understand for people not statistically inclined (b) DRAMATIC conclusions and (c) Just enough "Wow!" details to get legs along with just enough information that someone will come in and debunk -- after it has been widely reported.

We're in the realm of power politics, and they are well versed in use of the Internet for damage control.

1-15-08: Can recount chain of custody be rescued?
At this point we can pretty much guarantee the New Hampshire recount for Kucinich will match -- and that's not a good thing, because unless chain of custody can be documented properly, the recount doesn't provide real answers.

Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich did not order a statewide recount today, only two counties, and the Republican candidate, Albert Howard, was cut out of the recount altogether. I'll write more on the details later this week.

I have been doing field work since Saturday here in New Hampshire. Donations have been helping underwrite the costs of a citizen dream team: I invited four outstanding people to join me here to evaluate chain of custody for the recount: Susan Pynchon (Florida Fair Elections Coalition, has helped unravel the Sarasota situation); Melisa Urda (Illinois Ballot Integrity Project, has helped get the Illinois attorney general to issue a special directive ordering DuPage County to follow the law); and Paddy Shaffer (Ohio Election Justice Campaign, with Richard Hayes Phillips helped unravel the ballot chain of custody in Ohio). Others, like Election Defense Alliance Sally Castleman, have been organizing a team of citizen videographers, while Bruce O'Dell and Theron Horton have been quietly crunching the numbers to pinpoint locations with unusual footprints. (I also hoped to have the great Kathleen Wynne, but had to red-eye out to New Hampshire on such short notice that the timing didn't work this time.)

VERDICT: New Hampshire is unable to document its chain of custody properly, lacks written procedures, its secretary of state has said he doesn't know where its memory cards are, and LHS has been encroaching on state elections with near-total control. I'll be preparing a Special Report when I return from New Hampshire with documents and video to support this assessment.

VIDEO CAMERA CONFISCATION?

In New Hampshire, ballots are brought from each town and ward to a central location for recounts. We got a tip today that the location would be the state archive building, so we went there hoping for a walk-through.

There, police told us that videotaping the delivery of the ballots and the unloading of the ballots, would be prohibited and cameras would be confiscated if people were caught doing this. The rationale, we were told, was that they had placed the ballot delivery area in a state building with a parking lot that belonged to a mental hospital located on the grounds about a block away. On the theory tha... More

1-12-08: Red Flags over New Hampshire
New Hampshire's 2008 primary election may prove to be the most fascinating presidential preference race in history.

- Both Democrat and Republican candidates have requested recounts

- More than half of New Hampshire's elections administrators hand count paper ballots in public at the polling place, with a public chain of custody. The rest of New Hampshire's towns and cities use Diebold voting machines to count votes in secret, with a secret chain of custody.

- Hand count and machine count locations, when calculated statewide, show an eerie statistic:

Clinton Optical scan 91,717 52.95%
Obama Optical scan 81,495 47.05%

Clinton Hand-counted 20,889 47.05%
Obama Hand-counted 23,509 52.95%

- Two hand count towns reported "zero" votes for candidate Ron Paul to the media, even though they did have votes for him. The town of Sutton reported zero, but had 31 votes; the town of Greenville reported zero, but had 25 votes. The two towns had misreported results affecting exactly the same candidate in exactly the same way.

- Results in many locations arrived up to four hours late on Election Night, surprisingly, from machine-counted locations -- not hand count locations;

- A single private entity had control over coding for every memory card in New Hampshire. According to the contract for LHS Associates, this firm requires a right of access to any voting machine at any time, services the machines, maintains the machines and handles repairs, replacements and troubleshooting on Election Day.

- Ken Hajjar, a key employee of this sole source private entity, LHS Associates, has a criminal record for narcotics trafficking. The state of New Hampshire knew of this conviction but approved the contractor anyway. According to a complaint filed with the New Hampshire Attorney General, Hajjar had called the Dan Pierce radio show in 1999 and threatened to rig an election.

- A high number of "other" votes appeared in Manchester, where over 570 people apparently decided to go to the polls and choose none of the first tier OR second tier candidates.

- The voting system in New Hampshire was updated, but to a version that had been proven to be vulnerable in studies in Florida and California. Instead of upgrading to newer versions which at least claim to address known security vulnerabilities, New Hampshire chose to implement none of the beefed up procedures or upgraded versions that other states are using.

Citizens from many different states are now examining New Hampshire's ballot chain of custody, because if that is as weak as their voting machine controls, the recounts will just produce new questions.

A newly aroused citizenry in New Hampshire and elsewhere is telling New Hampshire "trust us" is NOT the way to run elections.