Tears of a Crook? Or a Croc?

Did Hillary steal the NH primary?

When the nation first heard of Hillary's victory in the Granite State, many wondered why the polls were dead accurate on the Republican side but were off by so much for the Democrats.

The reason we have elections rather than just relying on polls is that elections are supposed to be more accurate than polls.  Polling is paid for by customers who want accurate information, however.  Inaccurate pollsters lose customers and go bankrupt so there's no incentive to falsify the results.

Polling firms go to great lengths to get accurate data, and the science of statistics gets more and more accurate all the time.  Based on the polls, there was talk of Hillary pulling out of the race.

Why were the polls so wrong about Hillary versus Obama?  Election results are generally a bit more accurate than polls, but polls have an advantage over elections - there's usually no reason to fiddle polls, but fiddling elections is very worthwhile given the money and power involved in holding office.

We're finding an explanation in the left-wing blogsphere.  The possibility has arisen - and, note, at this moment it would appear to be only a possibility - that the polls weren't wrong.  That is to say, Hillary's people may have stolen the election from Obama.

We at Scragged don't know whether this is so.  We're not claiming that Hillary stole the election, although we'd have no trouble believing it given other things the Clintons have done.  What we find newsworthy is that some well-known, left-wing sites are increasingly convinced that she stole the election.

If you Google "New Hampshire Vote Cheat Diebold" you get more than 3,000 hits, barely 36 hours after the polls closed.  Smaller New Hampshire towns use paper ballots which are counted by the old-fashioned mark-sensing machines that we all know and love from taking SAT tests.  In the bigger towns, however, votes are counted by Diebold machines which are reportedly so easy to hack that they've been decertified in several states - in part, because of a devastating video of Princeton scientists performing the hack, which was broadcast on national TV.  As you might expect, the larger towns where these sorry machines are found are strongholds both of Democratic voters in general and Obama supporters in particular.

A leftist online analyst compared the Hillary and Obama vote split in towns which used manual counting and in towns which used Diebold machines; you can check the results yourself and replicate the author's math if you like.

I used the Comma delimited database: NH municipalities hand count vs use Diebold machines from BlackBoxVoting.org to see if there was a deviation between the results from precincts which used hand counts and those which relied on Diebold machines.

Updated: 5:05 AM (EST) - Results tallied for 209 out of 236 of the municipalities.

By Percentage
Method Hillary Clinton Barack Obama
Diebold Machines 53.23% 46.77%
Hand Count 47.47% 52.53%
By Votes
Method Hillary Clinton Barack Obama
Diebold Machines 82860 72807
Hand Count 18898 20912
By Number of Municipalities Won
Method Hillary Clinton Barack Obama
Diebold Machines 54 33
Hand Count 43 77

About 81% of the votes will be "counted" by the Diebold machines.

"Fascinating," as Mr. Spock would say.  The raw numbers would indicate that Hillary won the "Diebold" vote whereas Obama won the hand-count vote!  In the manually hand-counted vote, it looks like Obama beat Hillary by about 6%, just as the polls said he would.

Another article says that Ron Paul was also a victim of vote fraud:

The New Hampshire town of Sutton admits that it voided every vote Ron Paul received. The Congressman got 31 votes and yet due to a "human error," Sutton reported zero votes for Ron Paul. How "human error" can explain not counting 31 votes in succession for one single candidate is beyond the pale and Ron Paul's campaign should ask for a recount across New Hampshire immediately.

As soon as people went public with the fact that their votes in Sutton had not been counted, other districts where Paul had supposedly received zero votes, such as Greenville, suddenly changed their final tallies and attributed votes to the Congressman.

Chicago's Mayor Daley, the man who made "Crook County" famous, used to say, "I don't care who records the votes so long as I get to count them;" Josef Stalin expressed much the same sentiment.  Democrats are famous for chicanery in counting votes, but they usually defraud Republicans, not each other.

However, bear in mind that we are not referencing the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy here; these allegations are coming from the political left, most noticeably the Daily Kos, and right-wing groups that are very, very far out of the mainstream by virtue of being in the Ron Paul camp.  So far, mainstream right-wing pundits appear to be sitting this one out.  Will we be hearing complaints from Hillary about a "Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy" now?

The Mainstream Media, of course, wouldn't touch this story with a 39-1/2 foot pole.  Thomas Jefferson, who believed very strongly in the constitutional function of a free press, would have loved the Internet.

If there is any truth to this very circumstantial evidence, we now have another possible explanation for Hillary's infamous crying fit: they were crocodile tears, which according to legend the beast sheds immediately prior to devouring its prey.

Read other Scragged.com articles by Hobbes or other articles on Partisanship.
Reader Comments
The numbers are a bit compelling until you think of the demographics REASON why that would be. Hillary does not appeal to rural folk - exactly the municipalities that use hand counting. The city dudes (that use the Accuvoter) DO side with her more often than not.
January 10, 2008 8:49 PM
Having grown up in NH myself, I'm not sure that's necessarily true. It seems to me that the more city-ish residents of the state would be more likely to vote for Obama, the way they tend to be everywhere including Iowa, whereas the more rural folks would be more inclined to go with the Clinton brand - after all, Clinton was the Comeback Kid there. This is certainly not conclusive evidence of fraud, but it does seem peculiar. NH has a pretty clean reputation; I'd like to hope that the Secretary of State would at least look into it, for peace of mind if nothing else.
January 10, 2008 9:18 PM
And now it begins... Dennis Kucinich, of all people, is demanding a recount, which under NH Law he has the right to do as long as he pays for it. Reports are that he has already sent the first payment, so by law there now will have to be a full manual recount. Whatever is found, we will owe Mr. Kucinich a debt of gratitude, for laying this matter to rest at his own expense.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8U3ERUO1&show_article=1
January 11, 2008 8:55 AM
I would not trust what the leftwingers are doing as reason for concern. There are mostly nothing but nuts on that side. Certainly if you consider the dailyKOOKS
January 11, 2008 10:06 AM
Hits on that google phrase are lot bigger than 3k unless I'm doing something wrong.
January 11, 2008 8:58 PM
The recount has begun
http://www.seacoastonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080116/NEWS/80116001/-1/NEWS19&sfad=1
I wonder what's the point, however, given that 80% or so of the vote was counted by electronic machines which do not have an audit trail. AS one of the defendants said in a long-ago computer fraud, "Nice thing about computers - erase marks don't show."
January 17, 2008 3:18 PM
That's a dumb defendant. Erase marks DO show on computers. Unless you shred the drive and burn the platters, you can go back and see all kinds of stuff. Even if you use overlay erasing, you can still see file headers. You can't recover them, but you can read the meta information. There is a whole industry behind this. I would say it's much harder and slower to completely erase hard drive data than paper data.
January 17, 2008 3:25 PM
Looks like something oddly similar took place in New York. In some districts, the first reports showed Obama with NO votes - but after a recount, he may have actually won. Strange, hmm?

http://www.nypost.com/seven/02162008/news/regionalnews/obama_robbed_in_ny_97932.htm
February 17, 2008 7:32 AM
Still no news about the flaws in NH, but Mayor Bloomberg has now publicly stated that there was fraud against Obama in New York:

http://www.nypost.com/seven/02192008/news/regionalnews/mike_bloomberg_claims_vote_fraud__98367.htm
February 20, 2008 10:27 AM
When you were on the Loeb article, did you note and did it concern you that he didn't know how to spell Goolsbee's name? The tendency to throw these accusations around must be so great that no one is using their fact checkers or have the fact checkers gone on strike?
March 6, 2008 7:31 PM
This information is showing that Clinton won the urban areas and Obama won the rural areas. That is drastically different than every other primary result to date. Interesting...
March 7, 2008 9:17 PM
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