The Nexus of 2024

Why the New Hampshire recount is important

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by

jon
in

There are a couple of excellent posts up on why even though there are plausible explanations for the discrepancies in candidates’ results between hand-counted and machine-counted precincts, the recount in the New Hampshire primary is a good thing.

In Off the Bus on the Huffington Post, after giving some background on the vulnerabilities of the Diebold (now renamed Premier Election Services) voting machines used in New Hampshire, Kirsten Anderson puts things in a broader context:

The demand for a recount isn’t about the New Hampshire primary–anything short of a result showing Obama winning by more than say, 5% would still put the vote within the realm of a Clinton “comeback” from Iowa. It’s about the amount of distrust that voters have in the machine voting systems–machines which studies have shown to be not just hackable, but often poorly conceived and constructed.

Jon Stokes on ArsTechnica discusses the implication on the presidential campaign of uninvestigated claims of vote fraud by Clinton, and similarly highlights the loss of confidence in the election process:

From my perspective, this is what’s really at stake in the ongoing e-voting controversy: the government’s inability to fulfill its obligation to prove to the public that our elections are fair makes our democracy so much more fragile, and so much more susceptible to cracking under the shock of a major election controversy.

A few months ago I was talking to a friend about voting fraud, and she asked me whether any US elections had been affected yet. For the less-sexy topic of fraudulent disenfranchisement, the answer’s clearly yes: denying votes to millions of people across the country does sway elections, and the Supreme Court case on unnecessarily burdensome voter ID laws is likely to have a huge impact on the 2008 elections. For voting machine fraud, it’s not clear; between the vulnerable machines and lack of meaningful checks-and-balances, the opportunities for fraud are certainly there, and it’s possible that somebody’s gotten away with it without being discovered. Or maybe not; there just isn’t any way to know.

As they say in Plan 9 from Outer Space, “Can you prove it didn’t happen?” Well, with proper audit trails (which the machines used in New Hampshire support), you can investigate; and it’s worth doing so.

Comments

7 responses to “Why the New Hampshire recount is important”

  1. jon Avatar
    jon

    Some initial results from the New Hampshire Democratic recount are up, and a quick look doesn’t seem to show any significant variances. But as Bev Harris documented on Black Box Voting, the “chain of custody” is a farce. Brad Friedman’s got an excellent summary.

    See, told you it was important!

    Reply
  2. jon Avatar
    jon

    And on the less-sexy but equally important “fraudulent disenfranchisement” I mentioned above, how about this report from Hugh who was in rural South Carolina for the primary:

    The clerk of elections in our precinct was an advocate for all voters, going out of his way to assist those without the straightforward credentials, guiding them with provisional ballots, changes of address forms, etc, and spending substantial time on the phone with the county office to track down where folks needed to be if they were in the wrong place.

    Our election protection attorney, a law student from the University of Tennessee, supposed that about five percent (~30) of the voters might not have otherwise been counted had the clerk not been such a staunch advocate for all of them.

    In many places, clerks are too overworked or undertrained to be able to do this effectively. Even worse, in some, they’re actively political — or racist. And this is just the tip of the disenfranchisement iceberg, at the polls. Not good.

    Thanks to Jack Turner in Jack and Jill Politics for the link!

    Reply
  3. jon Avatar
    jon

    Another good disenfranchisement story, this one by Abbie Boudreau and Scott Zamost on CNN: Paperwork backlog could prevent millions from voting

    More than a million people who want to vote in November’s general election probably won’t get the chance because of a delay in processing applications to become U.S. citizens, according to the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services….

    Immigrant rights groups estimate as many as 200,000 legal residents in Florida alone are waiting to learn if they’ll become citizens in time to vote. And in Florida, where the results of the 2000 election hung in the balance, thousands of new voters could swing the 2008 vote.

    Historically, Florida immigrants — many of them Cubans — tended to vote Republican. But as more apply for citizenship from other countries, experts say, the immigrant vote is now up for grabs.

    Reply
  4. jon Avatar
    jon

    Kim Zetter’s Company Connected to GOP and Romney Delivers Diebold Machines to Maryland Polls on Wired’s Threat Level:

    A company, whose head is the former chairman of the Maryland Republican Party and is on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign steering committee, has won a contract from Diebold to deliver its voting machines on Election Day to precincts in 14 Maryland voting districts.

    Reply
  5. Liminal states » Archive » “Double Bubble Trouble”: Massive voter disenfranchisement in California?

    […] of a democratic society.  With unchecked voter disenfranchisement on this scale combined with the massive irregularities with the “chain of custody” in New Hampshire, who can have confidence in the result of […]

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  6. Liminal states » Blog Archive » What democracy looks like in the US, February 2008

    […] in Louisiana, Georgia, Arizona, and most recently New York — and let’s not forget the New Hampshire recount, which revealed gaping problems in the “chain of custody” for ballots.  What a […]

    Reply
  7. Liminal states » A wiki, saving democracy?

    […] the population doesn’t believe the results — a point I and many others have been making since the New Hampshire recount back in […]

    Reply

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