Reply #12: your first instinct may have been closer [View All]

[foo_bar]

Kerry Beat Dean in New Hampshire by Only 1.5% When Computers Weren't Doing the Counting

Welcome to the land of Skull & Bones, with the help of Diebold are Republic is now gone. The New World Order is here, what do you wanna do about it ?.
In the New Hampshire Democratic Primary, exit polls, which are seldom far wrong, indicated a very close race. The final vote was not close. A close race would have constituted a win for Dean, given expectations. There is serious reason to be dubious of computerized vote counting systems (see Verified Voting or Black Box Voting for details). Such systems were used in New Hampshire, especially those of Diebold, the company that has attracted the most controversy, so I decided to analyze the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote in terms of who was doing the tabulation.

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/11/303703.shtml

What the USCV report does not mention is the finding by the Edison-Mitofsky report that the results for WPE <"Within Precinct Error"> by machine type appear hopelessly confounded by the regional (urban or rural) distribution of voting equipment. The E-M report includes a separate table (p. 40) that shows higher rates of WPE in urban areas for every type of voting equipment. Virtually all of the paper ballot precincts (88% -- 35 of 40) were in rural areas while two thirds of the machine count precincts (68% - 822 of 1209) were in urban areas.
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Nonetheless, USCV want us to consider that "errors in for all four automated voting systems could derive from errors in the election results." OK, let's consider that theory for a moment. If true, given the number of precincts involved, it implies a fraud extending to 97% of the precincts in the United States. They do not say how that theory squares with the central contention of their report that "corruption of the official vote count occurred most freely in districts that were overwhelmingly Bush strongholds" (p. 11). Their own estimates say the questionable strongholds are only 1.6% of precincts nationwide (p. 14, footnote). Keep in mind that their Appendix B now concedes that pattern of WPE by precinct is consistent with "a pervasive and more or less constant bias in exit polls because of a differential response by party" in all but the "highly partisan Bush precincts" (p. 25).

Presumably, their theory of errors derived from "all four automated voting systems" would also include New Hampshire, the state with fourth highest average WPE in the country (-13.6), where most ballots were counted using optical scan technology. In New Hampshire, Ralph Nader's organization requested a recount in 11 wards, wards specifically selected because their "results seemed anomalous in their support for President Bush." The results? According to a Nader press release:

In the eleven wards recounted, only very minor discrepancies were found between the optical scan machine counts of the ballots and the recount. The discrepancies are similar to those found when hand-counted ballots are recounted.

A Nader spokesman concluded, "it looks like a pretty accurate count here in New Hampshire."

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2005/04/what_the_uscv_r_1.html