One trait I acquired early on in life was a very natural curiosity about how things fit together and what made them work. That trait was further refined during my 4 years at engineering school, where I was taught to examine every possible means of solving a problem before arriving at a conclusion. There were often multiple ways at arriving at said conclusion, some of which were better than others,
but all of which were feasible. Ultimately, what I learned was to always keep an open mind, to investigate every situation as thoroughly as possible, and to be skeptical where evidence suggests that a given conclusion may be incorrect.
Having spent 12 years writing custom database software much like that which lies at the heart of our e-voting machines, it was natural for my curiosity to be piqued by them, especially once all the accusations of vote rigging surfaced in both the 2000 and 2004 elections. So I endeavored to learn as much as I could about the operation of these machines in order to determine for myself whether claims of vulnerability to hacking and
miscalculations were valid. The more I learned, the more convinced I became that things were as bad or worse than the claims I had read, and the more concerned I became over the use of these machines for managing our elections.
Study, after study, after study, as well as independent investigations conducted by election integrity groups such as BlackBoxVoting.org, validated my
fears that these machines could, with varying degrees of ease, be undetectably modified (either on purpose or by accident) in a manner that would corrupt
the results of an election.
To no surprise, supporters of the Bush administration and their stenographers in the corporate media were quick to apply the "conspiracy theorist" label to anyone who dared to question the results of either the 2000 or the 2004 elections. It didn't matter a whit to them that provable voting machine errors had occurred. The
media saw no reason to investigate further despite the other evidence of orchestrated attempts by the GOP to manipulate the election to their advantage through the use of caging lists and other forms of vote suppression. And the Democratic party was apparently too worried about appearing to be sore losers, or too concerned with "moving on" to push for investigations (can you hear me now, John Kerry??).
The wingnuts have successfully used the "conspiracy theorist" label to cover up so many crimes over the last 7 years that, frankly, I've come to wear it as a badge of honor. The president lied about WMD's in Iraq? "You conspiracy theorist!" He's been tapping all our phones without warrants since before 9/11? "You freaking conspiracy theorist!" It's the all-purpose put-down. I expect it from them.
I don't, however, expect it from those on the progressive side of the fence. Liberals/progressives, after all, tend to be more open-minded by nature, more tolerant of non-conforming views. Yet the use of "conspiracy theorist" in order to muzzle discussion of certain discomforting topics, for example, belief that the NH primary may have been hacked, appears to be all too alive and well on some
of the most popular left leaning blogs, such as DailyKos:
But in a front-page post over at dKos last week, titled "Enough with the 'Diebold Hacked the NH Primary' Lunacy", by anonymous diarist "DHinMI", in which questions of the sort I've been asking (not-anonymously) are supposedly "debunked" --- in both the article and the comments ---
and with a sizable arsenal of out-and-out inaccurate information, bludgeoned up and down the comments section, from the original diarist and his fellow "faith-based" voting supporters and blogging conspirators.
The eponymous Kos himself even jumped in to the comments thread on that story to warn, rather threateningly: "Anyone who persists with this crap is engaging in unsupported conspiracy theories and violating site policy, a bannable offense."
It was obvious after the 2004 election that Daily
Kos creator, Markos "kos" Zuniga was more afraid of the establishment than he would have people believe when he unilaterally declared that reports of election fraud would be stricken from his site. Despite years of evidence now gathered, despite the volumes published, despite expert opinion and analysis,
kos
' position has not wavered on this, despite daily reports of Republican-led election shenanigans across the country, with only the latest (and most benign) being the Romney campaign's corruption of a Florida GOP straw poll.
Regarding the NH primary skepticism, it is worth reminding everyone at this point of what we know and what we do not know. Here is what we do know:
Approx. 80% of NH ballots are counted by Diebold Optical Scanners
Approx. 20% of NH ballots are counted by hand
Hand counted vote totals (Obama: 38.7%, Clinton: 34.8%) were very much in synch with what had been predicted by pre-election polls, internal campaign polls, and, most importantly, early exit polls.
Machine counted totals (Clinton: 39.7%, Obama: 36.3%) were wildly divergent from pre-election polls, internal campaign polls and, most importantly, early exit polls, all of which had Obama beating Clinton by several points
Pre-election polls provide an educated guess of where the voters stand, but have high margins of error and cannot necessarily be relied on as an accurate predictor of the outcome of an election.
Exit polls, on the other hand, have a reputation of being highly reliable, though still not perfect, at predicting the outcome of elections. According to Edison/Mitofsky, "Exit Polls are interviews with voters after they have cast their votes at their polling places. A sample of precincts are scientifically selected to
collectively represent a state, or for the national Exit Poll, the nation. An interviewer gives every nth voter exiting the polling place a questionnaire to complete. There are questions about demographics such as gender, age, race, and issues related to the person's vote choice in different contests. Participation is voluntary and anonymous. The interviewing starts when the polls open and continue throughout the day until about an hour before the polls
close.". It should be noted that this same company's exit polls were considered so accurate by the US government that they were used to overturn the Ukrainian election. Exit polls are used by many countries around the world as a method of detecting election fraud.
The only Democratic candidates whose vote totals were wildly divergent from the New Hampshire polls were Clinton and Obama.
Diebold Optical scanners, which are the only e-voting machines used in NH, are susceptible to programming error as well as malicious hacking, both of which would very likely be undetectable to election officials or the public without a hand counted audit of the paper ballots
Here is what we do not know:
Whether the voting machines in NH tabulated the ballots accurately, and if they did not, whether it was due to error or sabotage, and if it was due to sabotage, who was responsible.
Why machine counted totals were so far off from the polling
Whether the various pre-election and exit polls were correct or incorrect
It is important to bear in mind that the machine counted ballots in NH have never actually been examined or counted by anything other than optical scanners. There has been no hand-counted audit of the results nor are there any requirements for such audits in New Hampshire like there are here in Connecticut where we use the same exact machines.
The fact that pre-election polls, internal campaign polls and early exit polls (early means before adjusting to match official election results) as well as hand counted ballots showed Obama winning while machine counted ballots did not, should, for those with an open and skeptical mind, raise serious concerns over the validity of New Hampshire's Democratic primary results. Yet as we witnessed in both 2000 and 2004, polling companies and pundits chose to ignore the possibility that the results were wrong, instead insisting
that their polling methodology was flawed or that certain candidates' voters must have lied to them. Such polling company excuses/explanations, which have proven wrong in the past and appear highly dubious in many cases this time around, are based on the assumption that the official NH election results are accurate. With 80% of the ballots having been tabulated by machine, and no verification of the accuracy of those tabulations, this is a highly
dubious assumption to make. One might even call this "faith-based election analysis" because it relies on the willingness to place unquestioned trust in the accuracy of privately maintained, secretly coded, insecure voting machines.
The bottom line is that nobody can say for sure what really happened in New Hampshire without a hand count of the ballots (assuming that the ballots have been transferred and stored securely with a proper chain-of-custody).
Let me ask the unquestioning believers this -- hypothetically, suppose that a person with access to the voting machines' memory cards succeeded in installing an undetected hack that added votes to one candidate and subtracted an equal number of votes from others. In that situation, which we know is possible thanks to the Hursti hack demonstrated in the video above, the total number of ballots and
voters would remain unchanged. However, the total number of votes for various candidates would be fraudulent. Were this to happen, the official vote totals for each of the affected candidates should show a large variance from what was anticipated by the exit polls. If discrepancies between polling data and actual data aren't enough to arouse your suspicions, what exactly will it take? Someone with a handlebar moustache and a neon sign saying, "I hacked the vote"? Seriously?
I would also ask what is the downside to verifying the results of an election? It strikes me as a win-win situation with exactly two potential outcomes. The hand count will match the machine counts, in which case (assuming that the ballots themselves had not been tampered with) it can be stated with confidence that the machines worked as intended and the election results were accurate. If this is the outcome, voters benefit by having greater confidence in the integrity of their elections.
And pollsters benefit by having greater confidence that their explanations of failure are based on fact and not assumption.
The other possibility is that the hand count won't match the machine count, in which case we would have uncovered a flawed election in time to correct the results and investigate what went wrong. Again, there is nothing but benefit to the voter here because we would have discovered and fixed an erroneous
election, potentially uncovered either a crime or a programming error that would require immediate attention, and ultimately taken a step to protect future elections. Pollsters would once again benefit because they would learn that their original polling methodology was accurate and that their polls had been correct.
When an election's results appear to be anomalous, as is the case in New Hampshire, we are delinquent in our responsibility as citizens of a democracy if we do not attempt to independently examine and verify the accuracy of those results. To villify those who are seeking to do that strikes me as the very antithesis
of what we claim to stand for in this country.
"This recount isn't about who won 39% of 36% or even 1%. It's about establishing whether 100% of the voters had 100% of their votes counted exactly the way they cast them," Kucinich said last week, after questions arose about the apparent come-from-behind win by Senator Hillary Clinton which had stunned pundits and pre-election pollsters who had predicted a substantial win by Senator Barrack Obama. (Source: BradBlog)
Without that assurance, the democracy we supposedly have here is nothing but an illusion.
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(Update - Thurs. Jan. 17th) - The NH recount got underway yesterday. Most of the wards in Manchester, which I believe is New Hampshire's second largest city, have been recounted. On the Democratic side, there are no major discrepancies (all under 1% error). On the Republican side, however, there are huge discrepancies based on percentages but not so great based on the number of votes that were off -- 3 candidates' totals were off by over 20%, which is
huge, but the largest number of votes gained/lost was 24. That should certainly send up some warning signals, nonetheless. Election protection specialists who converged on the state are reporting serious issues with the conduct of the election, particularly in regard to the handling of memory cards, some of which have gone missing, poll tapes that were not signed, and errors that occurred in the optical scanners on election day, such as one location that
used the wrong pens causing 550 ballots to be read as blank (This was caught by poll workers who then hand counted the ballots). See BradBlog and BlackBoxVoting for details and ongoing coverage.
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