13 January 2008

Vote fraud in the New Hampshire primary?

One has to take claims of vote fraud with many grains of salt, because losers always claim that something was amiss. The Iowa caucus results generated some controversy (not covered in the mainstream media) and the N.H. primary has resulted in more. Preelection polls and day-of-election exit polls often were different from final data - but this was explained by the assumption that the polls were inaccurate, or voters lied to pollsters.

Of more interest is that in New Hampshire, some precincts counted votes by hand, while others used computerized Diebold voting machines. The results were different. The initial explanation was that the difference occurred because small towns count by hand, large cities count by machine, and the difference in outcome occurred because people in small towns have different interests/preferences than people in cities.

But all the data are public, and they have undergone some intense scrutiny. Look at this analysis published today in the European Tribune:
... 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 versus votes tabulated by hand... the numbers match to within .0001% !

Optical Scan
Clinton 91,717 52.9507%
Obama 81,495 47.0493%
Total 173,212

Hand Counted
Clinton 20,889 47.0494%
Obama 23,509 52.9506%
Total 44,398

The percentages appear to be swapped.

Coincidences do occur - but coincidences to four decimal places are so unlikely as to mandate further study. That analysis is obviously of the Democratic primary. I may post some data re the Republican primary later.

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