ENOUGH with this CRAP already.  So, when Obama wins a caucus/primary, the gloating and putdowns have no end, the jubilation is boundless?  Then when he loses, the messiah would have to have lost because of criminal cheating by the Clinton campaign?   So, first we get all the gloating and putdowns and dismissives, and now, after Obama suffers a crushing defeat, we are treated to "NH voters are racists" and "Diebold cheat"?    How can this behavior be taken seriously anymore?

Major allegations of vote fraud in New Hampshire are circulating after Hillary Clinton reversed a mammoth pre-polling deficit to defeat Barack Obama with the aid of Diebold electronic voting machines, while confirmed votes for Ron Paul in the Sutton district were not even counted.

According to a voter in Sutton, New Hampshire, three of her family members voted for Ron Paul, yet when she checked the voting map on the Politico website, the total votes for Ron Paul were zero.

With 100% of precincts now reporting, the map reported zero votes for Ron Paul.
It's not as if Sutton had a handful of voters like some other districts - a total of 386 people voted yet we are led to believe that not one voted for Ron Paul? Judging by the Iowa results, around 10% of residents would be expected to vote for the Congressman, returning a total of around 38 votes in this district. Let's be ultra-conservative and say just 5% support Paul - he'd still get 19 votes - but he got absolutely none whatsoever. Is there something wrong with this picture?

Greenville also tallied 144 votes yet not one for Congressman Paul.

Anyone else in Sutton who voted for Ron Paul needs to go public immediately with the charge of vote fraud and make it known that they were cheated out of their right to vote.

Diebold voting machines also did Congressman Paul no favors last night - compared to hand counted ballots Giuliani gained just short of 0.5% from electronic voting whereas Paul lost over 2%, which was the difference between finishing 4th and 5th, as this graph documents.

Mitt Romney profited the most from the Diebold swing, he received 7% more votes compared to hand counted ballots.

In the Democratic race the Diebold voting machines clearly swung the primary in Hillary Clinton's favor at the expense of Barack Obama, who had a commanding lead over the New York Senator going into the contest.

Zogby polling numbers had Obama leading Clinton by a whopping 42/29 per cent, yet Clinton eventually took the primary by three per cent.

"If I was Barack Obama, I'd certainly not have conceded this election this quickly," writes The Brad Blog.

Note: Diebold Machines have created problems in every Election cycle (2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, etc.)

What do you make your hats out of?

Are the black helicopters still hovering over your home (or should I say mothers home?)?

Lets get real here.

Reality.

Clinton won.

While I'm an open-minded guy, there has just been too much crying wolf on this subject.  I can no longer spare the mental energy to objectively analyze each and every cry of "DIEBOLD!" every time someone's favorite candidate loses.

Yes, we should have paper ballots.  Yes, it's an important issue.  That is as far as I will go on the subject.

Instead of trying to imply foul play, you should at least learn something about whether or not those voting machines were randomly distributed or non-randomly distributed.

If they were evenly distributed you'd expect a similar result as hand counting or only a small difference, But if they were non-evenly distributed you should expect a difference based on the criteria that led to the placement.

Did they place those machine predominantly in urban centers? You'd get a different result favoring a certain candidate, if in suburban centers, the result would differ in an another way favoring the candidate that was strong suburban. Etc.

In fact if there was a non-even placement of machines the absence of a non-trivial difference in the percentage count would be far more damaging.

Which requires no tinfoil, and it seems plausible it accounted for some of the discrepancy between the polls and the vote results (it may even have accounted for enough to have been decisive.)  Pollsters usually randomly rotate the choices in multiple-choice questions to avoid having the order of the choices bias the responses. Reportedly, in this primary, NH used the same ballot order in every precinct, and the order was such that Clinton's name always was nearer the top of the ballot, and Obama's name nearer the bottom.

Very interesting stuff.

I just heard on Hardball tonight that even the MSNBC exit polls called the election for Obama. I can understand a regular poll being off because it's hard to predict who will turn out and vote, but exit polls survey people who have already voted.  Exit polls have historically been exceptionally accurate.

If you are willing to just study and consider these numbers, you may discover something.

What About This NH Primary Question?

Well, now I'm curious. Exactly how/when do the machines work? When is a vote "read" within a machine? Is it as soon as the ballot disappears or is it further down somewhere in the mechanism?The reason I ask this is that I watched three ballots be spit back and re-fed a total of three times each yesterday. One of them was mine. Was each vote counted three times?

The places with machines are Hillary country - Manchester, Nashua - the urban, working class areas - and the very large Massachusetts commuter towns.  The smaller, wealthy towns are more likely to do hand counts; that is Obama's demo here.  Hillary worked her ass off and she had a NH based organization; Obama made a decision not to hire the NH talent, which hurt him. Clinton hired Nick Clemons, who was the NH party executive director in the 2006 sweep. He brought a lot of the party staff with him.  Obama had the chance to hire some of them, but elected not to.  

All the Diebold vote fraud is documented right here:
http://www.bradblog.com/