Were the Polls Wrong in NH? Or Did Obama Get Diebolded?
Nothing can be proven, and if past elections are any indication, nothing will ever be proven. It seems that 81 percent of the votes in the New Hampshire primary were counted electronically. The counts were done on Diebold (now known as Premier Election Solutions) op-scan machines– the exact same ones that were hacked in the HBO documentary, “Hacking Democracy”. Black Box Voting says the optical scan counting was totally controlled by John Silvestro and his small private business, LHS Associates, which has the exclusive programming contracts for all New Hampshire voting machines.
Brad Friedman of BradBlog points out:
As we know, the presumption is always that the polls were wrong. Never the results. Despite how much less transparent the system used to count votes is than the system used to collect polling data. With that in mind, Matthew Yglesias at The Atlantic, makes the following point, in a post headlined “How Wrong Were the Polls?”, suggesting that the only numbers that changed here were Clinton’s. She surged. Everyone else, even Obama who just had an historic victory in Iowa five days ago, did not…
Pollster.com has more about the pre-election polls. The vote percentages for all the candidates in the GOP race were accurate, within the margin of error. So were the percentages for the Democrats, all except Hillary Clinton.
There was a statistically-significant discrepancy between precincts that hand-counted ballots and the Diebold-counted precincts– for Clinton only. Here is another analysis. The hand-count precincts tend to have fewer voters. It’s possible that Clinton won because she was more popular in the large precincts which happen to be tallied by Diebold machines. This could be a coincidence. It really could. Any candidate can request a hand recount of the machine-counted ballots.
Some are trying to account for Clinton’s results by citing the “Bradley Effect”, which implies that pollsters were lied to by many people who said they would vote for Obama but didn’t. Others say there was a last minute switch by Independents who decided to vote for McCain in the Republican primary instead of Obama. Neither of these theories explains why Obama’s pre-election poll numbers turned out to be accurate.
Somehow, mysteriously, Hillary got a lot of votes that the pollsters missed. I’m looking forward to an explanation of how that happened.
UPDATE: Blogger Rick Moran humbly suggests, “Brad Friedman of Bradblog is a dope… intrepid lefty dolt.”
UPDATE: Jay Carney at Time Magazine cites an unnamed “social scientist friend of a colleague here” for the following theory:
[A] certain percentage of Democratic voters in the last days of polling presumed Biden (especially) and (to a lesser degree) Dodd hadn’t dropped out. By and large, come election day, those Biden and Dodd supporters ended up casting ballots for Hillary. Also, of the 5 percent or so who were still undecideds in the last polls, almost all broke for Hillary. And a tiny percentage of Edwards supporters switched to Hillary.
That’s a lot of assumptions, but it could have happened. It does not explain why the Diebold counts gave Hillary so many more votes than the hand counts.
UPDATE: TPM’s Greg Sargent cites exit polls to argue Hillary’s last-minute support came from undecided voters who made up their minds yesterday, during the wall-to-wall coverage of The Tears.
UPDATE: Chris Matthews has apparently seen the raw exit poll results, which showed an eight-point loss by Hillary.
UPDATE: There’s a front-page post on DailyKos, Enough with the “Diebold Hacked the NH Primary” Lunacy.
UPDATE: The Kucinich campaign asks for a manual recount of New Hampshire:
“Ever since the 2000 election – and even before – the American people have been losing faith in the belief that their votes were actually counted. This recount isn’t about who won 39% or 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.â€
UPDATE: From OpEd News:
Analysts at the Election Defense Alliance (EDA) have confirmed that based on the official results on the New Hampshire Secretary of state web site, there is a remarkable relationship between Obama and Clinton votes, when you look at votes tabulated by op-scan v. votes tabulated by hand:
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%The percentages appear to be swapped. That seems highly unusual, to say the least.
January 9th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Richard - Over at Washinton Monthly, Kevin Drum has a post about this. He says, basically, there’s no single big reason but lots of little ones - for instance a bunch of Dodd and Biden supporters who hadn’t decided where to put their support until the last minute and the majority of the undecideds breaking for Hillary. I think that makes sense - the same thing happened in the Mayoral primary for Becker.
January 9th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Thanks for the link. I updated above using the original source, Jay Carney at Time Magazine.
January 9th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
The Iowa race went much more smoothly and nobody had to come up with any reasons why such a unexplainable result happened.
Without any machines!
Fine. Once again, a bunch of voters changed their minds at the last minute and decided not to do what was expected. Even Hillary’s numbers showed this wouldn’t happen. But if Dodd and Biden voters cast their votes for Hillary and racist voters lied and said they were voting for Obama and then voted for Hillary, or the people, (especially women), of New Hampshire were moved by Hillary’s tearful concern about Americas future, or the chocolate lovers found out Hillary likes chocolate more then Obama or the Jesus voters couldn’t vote for a black man or people voted for George Bush because he is a fighter pilot from the national guard and would keep our country safer then John Kerry and loves Jesus, ect, ect ect…
Computers don’t make mistakes. Trust the machine!
Brad Friedman never said he knew what happened. He’s just asking the question. Unless we find a way to count every vote with some sense of transparency, there will be questions in every future election at a cost of billions.
January 9th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Aside from the fact that I’m glad that the repub swiftboating will have to wait still longer for a clearly defined target, I also feel strongly that if anyone who suspects black-box vote machines may be bugged in a presidential election, would be foolish to not suspect they would be test driven again at this juncture.
I do not trust them.
January 10th, 2008 at 3:32 am
The BradBlog isn’t the only organization with questions about this story. Robert C. Koehler of Tribune Media Services has enough sense of journalism to give his take.
Here’s another interesting little story about the caliber of the folks Diebold hired to program the New Hampshire machines and count the votes.
Here’s a radical suggestion from Brad Friedman:
Tomorrow, I’m sure Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity will be salivating to count those ballots and watch Hillary get caught stealing an election. Don’t count on it. These guys are banned from saying anything bad about ANY privatized corporation. Especially one that has helped put their guys in Washington.
January 10th, 2008 at 9:49 am
OK, the scale and expense of a recount would be relatively small. If there was a hack, (and I’m not saying there was), justification for a recount of the ‘04Bush ‘landslide’ would then be staring everybody in the face. No?.
January 10th, 2008 at 9:57 am
As an Obama supporter, and someone who believes that Diebold is scamming the citizens of America, I think that there’s not an issue here. I think that a lot of Obama supporters (I got well over 100 emails yesterday on this topic) are now distracted, and not focused on the important thing for the Obama campaign. I don’t believe that there was anything nefarious here. And I’m tired of hearing about it. If anyone finds any facts to back the conspiracy theory up, I’ll jump on board. Until then, I have had to unsubscribe to two important national Obama Grassroots Groups because I can’t handle the email volume.
January 10th, 2008 at 10:06 am
I fully expect that the campaigns will move on, such is the momentum of a presidential race. Anyway, both Obama and Hillary got nine delegates out of New Hampshire, so it was really a tie. If I were an Obama supporter, I would focus on Nevada now.
OTOH, some of us have the luxury of commenting on the fact that raw exit poll numbers for the NH primary had Obama ahead by an average of eight points.
January 10th, 2008 at 10:18 am
I was just going to pipe in that; any recount would be Obamas call, and since he hasn’t…
Other than that, I’m looking only to support auditability and transparency in this process.
January 10th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
“Those that cast the votes mean nothing, those that count the votes mean everything”.
Joseph Stalin.
January 10th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
But don’t worry, it’s a small world. Read this report from an Ohio Television station from a year ago which states:
Be sure not to miss the last line in the story which reveals Micheal Vu’s previous gig:
My personal view, (no pun), is that the convictions of these smaller fish, (bad apples), in Ohio scared enough of the other small and larger fish around the nation to enable the Democrats to take over the House and Senate. Who knows, maybe even some local voucher battles. All I know is that Bush supposedly won Utah by 71% after four years of complete fiscal and every other kind of lunacy possible. I would love to know that we aren’t REALLY the biggest laughing stock in America. That is my quest.
January 10th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Oops, Forgot to give the link.
January 10th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
I believe that Diebolding only works well with close elections, where the polling margin of error can be used to explain away unusual election results. The GOP uses a wide variety of tactics, such as voter suppression, to make elections close.
The job of the Democrats should be– no more close contests. IMHO they could do this job by proposing policies that lots of people want, such as getting all our forces out of Iraq right away, restoring the Constitution, repairing the economic and fiscal damage done by Bush, universal health care (not “insurance”), etc.
January 10th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Richard:
You are exactly right! Those actions would start a true grass roots movement of every demographic. It would truly bring us together.
January 10th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Here’s another republican who got convicted for rigging elections and may have made poll workers and election officials more careful about what they were willing to do to make the books work to Diebold’s advantage in 2006, (nobody likes bad audits, but when prison is involved, well, you know) This Amy Goodman interview on “Democracy Now” This week was with a guy who spent his time in prison writing a book called “How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative”
Here is one of the funnier stories covered on BradBlog from a while back that should reinforce any aversions you may have to blindly trusting your top election officials. The Peter B. Collins show had Brad Friedman on with Monterey County, CA, Registrar Tony Anchundo. Here is a small part of the segment which you can hear in this article from December of 2006:
In July of 2006, Mr. Anchundo was charged with 43 criminal counts, including charges of forgery, misapplication of funds, embezzlement, falsification of accounts, and grand theft of nearly $80,000 of county money and served some jail time.
January 10th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Faith-based elections, Larry. It’s the new paradigm.
January 10th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Caveat:
Actually, a recount might be Ron Pauls call. Beverly Harris has a confession from an official that some of his votes were not recorded. Paul has the money to do the recount.
I’m hoping Diebold has to change their name again after that recount.
January 10th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
A diebold by any other name would still suck the same. I believe adolph stalin said that.
January 11th, 2008 at 1:12 am
I had to drive my boss’s car today and the radio was set to Glenn Beck. It appears the media’s take on this is that exit polls are not reliable and we should do away with them.
Of course, in 2004, America spent 15 million taxpayer dollars to conduct exit polls in Kiev Russia. Those exit polls didn’t match the voting results there. The candidate who “lost” had been poisoned and disfigured but went out into the streets with his supporters. George Bush proclaimed what a travesty it was that the Kiev Election results didn’t match the exit polling. Another election was held, and the guy who “lost” WON.
When Bush made that proclamation, the voting results had not matched the exit polls for HIS “election” in America. The media here had already started to float the “lets do away with exit polls” balloon. Of course John Kerry didn’t go out into the streets with his supporters and the rest is history.
I’m feeling very tired.
January 11th, 2008 at 6:53 am
In August 2007 [3] Diebold rebranded itself[4] as Premier Election Solutions
January 11th, 2008 at 8:32 am
The name change to Premier is noted in the original post. However, the term “diebolding” has already entered the political lexicon.
January 11th, 2008 at 11:06 am
If we start using the name Premier instead of Diebold, we’ll lose the humorous reaction the name invokes.
January 11th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Damn, diebolded by Premier! Didn’t see that coming.
January 11th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Not being much for conspiracy theories, I tend to agree with this analysis from Salon.com. Honestly, I’m an Obama supporter. But I think the idea that Hillary stole this election via Diebold hacking and corruption is a little weak.
http://machinist.salon.com/feature/2008/01/11/new_hampshire_vote/index.html
January 12th, 2008 at 1:50 am
Obi wan liberali:
If somebody rigged the machines, nobody knows who or why they did it. It’s even possible Diebold wouldnt know who did it. That’s the problem. Wouldn’t you say?
Since I am the resident “conspiracy theorist”, (I’m not ashamed to be awake enough to know that if somebody could steal an election, undetected, they would.) Let me say that it seems to me the Republican’s have been wanting Hillary as the candidate. They’ve been drilling it our minds that she would be for months now. I haven’t got the slightest idea why. Either it’s because they think they can beat her with all the trash they’ve been compiling all these years, (less work for them), or they like her because she’s a war hawk. Not being an insider, it’s impossible for me to know.
I haven’t heard a single person say they thought Hillary stole the election. In fact, I haven’t heard anyone say they know the machines were even hacked, but I’m glad this happened. Anything that can get this issue covered will bring us one step closer to throwing these crappy machines into the harbor whether Kucinich can prove something was amiss or not. If his audit proves the machines counted perfectly, it doesn’t mean a damn thing. Even the guy who wrote your article thinks the machines stink.
By the way, Salon refused to publish an article by Greg Palast that could have saved the country from a Bush “presidency” because his brother Jeb told them everything was OK in Florida. Part of a conspiracy? No, probably just trying to save their butts.
January 12th, 2008 at 7:28 am
Larry, if the power that be would diebold us in the persuit of a chimp presidency, it’s way beyond a conspriacy theory and full on into a shadow government. A low-life, depraved, moronic, incompetent, mostly repugnant, war-loving, racist, decietful, shadow government. Or am I being redundant?
January 12th, 2008 at 9:51 am
“If somebody rigged the machines, nobody knows who or why they did it”.
Wow, were in real trouble. Look to who benefits if the machines are rigged, start there and follow the bread crumbs home. That would often be the winner of a rigged election.
The cabal has wanted hilary as the candidate. Did you know that rep candidates collected 1/2 the money from corporate sponsors, than democrat candidates. this time around? The corporate cabal wants a demican this time out. We have absolutely nothing to say about it.
January 12th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
caveat:
I think your comment describes Dick Cheney perfectly. Tony Snow on Bill Maher’s show this week, now THAT’S redundant. About 8 years worth!
January 12th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
glenn:
I still think a demican is better then a republicrat. I just hate having to hope that Hillary is going to slowly turn things in our direction. I KNOW a Republican will never try. Dennis Kucinich or Edwards would grab the wheel and really stir things up. I think that’s what we need at this point.
Glad Maher covered this very issue this week. For once it was 4 against one. I have to hand it to Tony, it was brave of him to go on and try to defend complete nonsense, but then I guess he figures he’s dying anyway. I’m glad Maher and the others didn’t hold back because of his cancer. He deserved the grilling anyway.
January 12th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
I thought Tony Snow was dead. Wishful thinking I guess. And yes, in my list I did manage to leave out…and operating from an ‘undisclosed location’, (which would have been a give away - even while I know the entirety of our present shadiness mightn’t reside within our singularly horrible vice president - he’s representative). I want to love em, but it’s just sooo hard.
I suppose a little re-edumacation might be in order (not for me, of course, but for the neo-pods). Would it stick? Doubtful…Stalin and Pol Pot were loosers despite giving it a truely awful shot. I’m just ready to evolve some more. Seems like these turkeys have been working too hard to hold us back and, there’s an energy a building. May there be Peace.
Certainly there are actions beyond keyboarding that will be of more value. I’m going to hear Cornel West at the U on Martin Luther King Day. Kinda excited. Right up there with Super tuesday, and another pitch for sanity at and inside the polls. Along with the renewables v. nuclear confrontations that are rearing into our future.
Best of luck to you all. Till then, Cav.
January 13th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Viva la difference, we still got nafta, the war, and a host of bi partisan created problems.
Here is some interesting noise down at the space and science research center. Going by sunspot data derived by nasa.
Fire up the BarBQue.
January 15th, 2008 at 8:33 am
[...] Let’s review the problem of the New Hampshire Primary vote-counting discrepancy. [...]