New Hampshire Primary Rigged?

[UPDATED several times at end of article, and still developing with new updates…]

I’m not sure why Obama would have conceded so soon, given the virtually inexplicable turn of events in New Hampshire tonight.

What’s going on here? Before proceeding, I recommend you read the third section of the post I just ran
an hour or so ago, concerning the way the ballots are counted in New
Hampshire, largely on Diebold optical-scan voting systems, wholly
controlled and programmed by a very very bad company named LHS
Associates.

Those Diebold op-scan machines are the exact same ones that were hacked in the HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy.
See the previous report, as I recommend, which also includes a video of
that hack, and footage of the guy who runs LHS Associates.

That said, the the pre-election pollster’s numbers (NOTE: that’s not
Exit Polls, but Pre-Election Polls!) were dead-on, for the most part,
on the Republican side, as well as on the Democratic side. Except in
the do-or-die (for Hillary) Clinton v. Obama race. I’m watching MSNBC
right now, and they all seem to agree that the results, for the moment,
defy explanation.

I concur.

Here’s a screenshot of a round up of all of the latest polls from RealClearPolitics.com tonight, and more, to get an idea of the serious concerns here…

They were all not just wrong, but wildly wrong. But only for the Clinton/Obama race.

For a closer look, here’s Zogby’s predicted numbers, for both the Republicans and Democrats:

And here are the latest numbers from the MSNBC website (the numbers seem to be identical over at CNN and elsewhere):

As you’ll note, the numbers in Zogby’s latest polls, for all but
Clinton and Obama, seem to have been dead-on the money for both the
Republicans and Democrats. Edwards, for example, was polled at 17% in
Zogby’s poll, and he received exactly 17% in the MSNBC numbers, with
63% of precincts reporting. So are we to believe that only those voters who preferred Obama previously, decided to change to Hillary at the last minute? I suppose so.

This election was regarded as do-or-die for Clinton, after most in
the media had already written her off after her “thumpin’” in Iowa. But
Tim Russert just agreed with Brokaw and Matthews that “this was the
most stunning upset in the history of politics.”

They are already grasping for reasons that this happened: the
crying; she found her voice; the women turned out; oldline Dems showed
up, etc. All reminiscent, if you ask me, of “the evangelicals who
turned out at the very last minute to vote for Bush in 2004″ as the
Exit Poll apologists wrote in what would become conventional wisdom at
the time. (Where did they get that info? The Exit Polls, they’ll tell
you. The same ones that they will also tell you were wildly wrong on
every other count, apparently.)

Olbermann just called it “a titanic upset victory” for Clinton.

So, with another nod to the third section of the article I posted earlier here tonight, what’s going on here?

While I have no evidence at this time — let me repeat, no evidence at this time
— of chicanery, what we do know is that chicanery, with this
particular voting system, is not particularly difficult. Particularly
when one private company — and a less-than-respectable one at that,
as I detailed in the previous post — runs the entire process.

I should also note that some 40% of New Hampshire’s precincts are
hand-counted, which equals about 25% of the votes. All the rest are
counted on hackable Diebold op-scan systems, with completely hackable
memory cards, all programmed and managed by LHS Associates. As Bev
Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org who seems to share my concern, says, LHS is the “chain of custody” in New Hampshire elections.

Other folks that I’ve spoken to, who follow this sort of thing,
share my concern at this hour. Harris noted that it will be interesting
to compare numbers of the hand-counted precincts with those counted on
the hackable Diebold op-scan systems.

If I was Barack Obama, I’d certainly not have conceded this election
this quickly. I’m not quite sure what he was thinking. And as far as
offering an indication of whether he understands how these systems
work, and the necessity of making sure that votes are counted, and
counted accurately, it does not offer a great deal of confidence at
this hour.

I’m trying to get in touch with his campaign, to let them know of
these concerns. I hope you’ll feel free to let them know as well, if
any of you happen to be in touch with them, or a part of the campaign.
I will, of course, be happy to discuss these concerns with them if they
wish to call.

As mentioned, the numbers referred to above are not Exit Polls. They are Pre-Election Polls which are far
less reliable than Exit Polls. So, if anybody knows where any decent
Exit Polling data is, we’d appreciate it if you linked it in comments
below…

UPDATE 9:18pm PT: This AP report

includes information, said to be based on data from the Exit Polls. It
indicates that the independents in NH, who may vote in either the R or
D primary, voted mostly D, and were breaking for Obama. AP claims,
however, that the same data show that Clinton’s strength with women
“offset that”…

Note: the Exit Pollsters used here were Mitofsky/Edison, the same
ones who ran the infamous Exits in 2004 showing that, in state after
state, Kerry should have won. They also later said their own polling
was completely wrong (which is disputed strongly by statistics experts
such as U. of Pennsylvania Prof. Steven F. Freeman Ph.D.) So, it’s lovely that AP and the TV nets hired them again…

UPDATE 9:40pm PT: While the talking heads are trying to figure out what happened here on MSNBC, Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post,
while paging through a stack of papers said to be Exit Poll data, just
said: “Of those who made up their mind in the last three days, there
was a slight favoring for Obama. If there was a huge difference in a
move to Hillary, in the last three days, it doesn’t seem to be
reflected in the Exit Polling.”

UPDATE 9:48pm PT: Olbermann repeated what
Russert had said earlier, that Obama’s internal polls showed him
winning by 14%, Clinton’s internal polls had Obama winning by 11%.

The effect of Obama being an African-American, the so-called “Bradley Effect”,
is now being discussed as the newest “reason” to explain the numbers.
Though it’s noted that it didn’t effect Harold Ford in TN in ‘06, or
even Obama in Iowa just five days ago.

(ADDED: Josh Holland from Alternet points out via email,
correctly, concerning my point about the “Bradley Effect” not coming
into play in Iowa: “The ‘Bradley effect’ would not work in an open
caucus, where everyone can see whom everyone else is supporting. The
theory requires the privacy of a voting booth.” He’s correct. Thanks
for pointing that out! — BF)

UPDATE 11:06pm PT: 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…

Commenter Brian makes an observation
“No one is talking about how the polls actually nailed Obama’s number.
Obama didn’t lose this election. He stayed steady and Hillary surged
ahead.” That seems to be true. Here’s a chart comparing the actual
results to the most recent Pollster.com current standard estimate polling average.

Just as Brian says, the difference between the Obama poll level and
the Obama vote total level seems to just be your basic statistical
variance. The pollsters underestimated Clinton’s level of support.
People who were undecided as of the last round of polling seem to have
gone overwhelmingly in her direction.

So where did her votes come from, if Exit Polling data showed, as
mentioned by MSNBC above, that last minute deciders broke evenly, and
even a bit more for Obama??

UPDATE 1/9/08, 12:49am PT: Bev Harris offers this very useful information in comments below. Worth elevating the key points up here to the original post:

Additionally, BeeSting then makes our night, with a pointer to this Ron Paul website, which lists all of the precinct results, and how each one of them was counted (by hand, or by Diebold/LHS Associaties/John Silverstro).

Thank you BeeSting and Bev both! Looks like we’ll have lots to learn in the morning…

UPDATE 1/9/08 1:40am PT: Last update for the night. I hope. A quick note on all of this.

Over at Daily Kos, diarist “AHiddenSaint” has written a post quoting, and linking over to this one, by way of sharing his/her concerns about the NH results.

The result: an embarrassing thread of comments, smashing up
AHiddenSaint for posting something that the dKos commenters feel is
little more than “conspiracy theory”. Foolishly (for them), they have
taken a sentence from the original post, in which I noted that I “have no evidence at this time
— of chicanery,” to wonder why I would therefore write such a post at
all. Their claim: that I am some how charging that Clinton stole the
election.

I have made no such claim. In fact, if there was skullduggery here,
there are plenty of reasons to believe it could have been committed by
any number of interested parties, who have nothing to do with the
Clinton campaign.

Daily Kos, of course, is a Clinton-centric website, which, more
disturbingly, purged diaries and diarists after the 2004 Ohio election,
if they were judged to be questioning what went on there. I spoke to
Markos (the site’s founder) about that, when we were at a conference
together in Vegas last Summer. He stills stands by his decision to
purge those folks. That, despite so much that has come out since ‘04 to
show that what happened was a travesty of democracy. As I told him
then, he owes his readers an apology. He did add, however, that he has
someone (”Georgia10″) who now cover issues of Election Integrity on
their front page.

The result of his purge, is the mindset of the commenters now seen
over there. It seems to me they are are begging for a world of hurt,
someday, when their candidate doesn’t win, under questionable
circumstances. They will, of course, have cornered themselves such that
they won’t be able to ask questions themselvses. In the bargain, they
are now fostering a culture of fear. Fear of asking questions. Fear of
insisting that our democracy be transparent, of the people, by the
people and for the people. If it were only themselves they were hurting
by fostering that culture, I wouldn’t give a damn. But rest assured,
their comments, actions and attitudes will be leveraged, as we move
forward, to hurt all of us.

For the record, I am neither a Clinton supporter nor an Obama
supporter (nor a supporter of anyone else in the race at this time, in
any party.) I am a supporter of the VOTERS. Period. It’s they
— us — who could really use some support right about now. I intend
to do exactly that. All damned year. No matter how many “tin foil hats”
the shortsighted, self-destructive Kossack types, who are behaving like
the worst of the Republicans, try to throw at me.

That’s a promise.

– By Brad Friedman

Popularity: 2% [?]

You all amaze me. Why can’t you all admit that Senator Clinton could have won fair and square. Why can’t there be anything positive in the media. I read this for curiousity and you all proved me right nothing you all say makes a heck of a lot of difference. People do have a mind of their own regardless of what you all think. We’ll just have to wait until Nov to see who wins but of course if it is not the person you want to win, it was because it was rigged. No one seemed to care when Bush stoled the election. That was all okay. Yea Democrats regardless of who it is we will win

I too felt it odd that there was such a disparity in the results versus the polls. I find politics today to be such that an honest election seems almost impossible. I cannot believe a few tears can make that much of a difference in an election. Yes, I definitely think something was amiss in this election. I don’t have a favorite candidate at this time, but would hope that when I do decide it will be a fair and accurate vote count and not one that can be tampered with.

I agree completely with Ruth Salazar’s comments. Are any of you aware of the Truman-Dewey election in ‘48?? There too, the polls were way off. I’m certainly not saying rigged elections don’t happen, but this one?? Why hasn’t anyone suggested the same for the Iowa vote? Hillary was projected to win that one, but no one cried foul. Feh!

Mark Halperin’s “The Page” at Time.com is, at least, providing a list of explanations for the Clinton-only discrepancy… none of which (so far) even hint that the vote count could be incorrect. Debunkers and dismissers can feast on these talking points:

http://thepage.time.com/theories-to-explain-clintons-nh-polling-behind-obama/

That Daily Kos is a Clinton-centric blog is wildly inaccurate. Edwards and Obama consistently win the straw polls there and few Clinton supporters even post there. Hillary Clinton had no vote surge last night. Her numbers were steadily and consistently higher than Obama’s in exactly the districts she could have been expected to carry. These “rigging” accusations seem a disgraceful attempt on the part of pollsters to excuse their shabby performance–and yet another attempt to discredit Clinton and her supporters, as well as the voters of New Hampshire.

I’m not surprised by this. Why did the author of these comments state that he didn’t favor Obama or Clinton. Did he suspect that we’d gather this suspicion from his comments? Your antagonism against Hillary is shameful and appalling. It wouldn’t even have occured to you to examine the results, if any other candidate had won, by any margin.

Given the the Clinton’s propensity for rape, general thuggery and grifting this is nothing new. Also she seems to have the kiss of life from the Bush himself and he is no stranger to vote rigging.
There is a general feeling the last honest election was in 92. As I watched the numbers last night they were too good to be true. Smells of a fix. At no time was Obama ahead always trailing by a very few points, a logical looking fix. Colorado found all their computer based machines insecure. And we know that the Diebold vowed to fix Ohio and they did and it cost less than the trip to the Supremes.
Nothing personal about Clintons They are simply carnies. And their fans Rubes people from a simpler time who trust and beleive.

You were all so desperately hoping that the results in Iowa (is anyone examining what happended in Iowa to find out if there was corruption of the vote there) were the death knell to Hillary, that, now, you can’t believe your angry and embittered hearts.

She won, decisively.

Here is a glance at polls over the 3 days before the primary voting day, showing by how much Obama was imagined to have beaten Hillary: The most likely was taken the day before at 5 points.
gallup 13
rasmussen 12
cnn 10
strategic vis. 9
marist 8
cbs 7
suffolk uni. 5
fox 4
franklikn pierce 3
mason dixon 2
suffolk uni. 1

Now we know the truth, don’t we?

It is quite obvious to me why the services of Diebold and the corporate allied pollster’s services were retained to fix this primary. They (the corporate/ruling elites) cannot allow an Obama or an Edwards or a Ron Paul to take hold with the public consciousness. You should also look into the discrepancies in the Ron Paul counts. Had he beaten Rudy, as he in fact did, it would have been a boon for his campaign — and more free thinking. Not to be allowed in the “free transparent democracy” called America. Obama gave up immediately, just as did Gore and Kerry. The beat goes on…. and the middle class continues to disappear from the political spectrum. The United States — a great, but failed, experiment in free and independent political government.

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New Hampshire Primary Rigged?

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