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Title: No Problems in NH Hand Count Says Local Media
Source:
bradblog
URL Source: http://www.bradblog.com/
Published: Jan 17, 2008
Author: Brad Friedman
Post Date: 2008-01-17 20:35:06 by Horse
Keywords: None
Views: 504
Comments: 42
'No Problems' in NH Hand Count Says Local Media (Who Apparently Didn't Bother to Check First with Anybody but the SoS) Also meanwhile...Out there in MSM world, where reality creates its own definition, WMUR is reporting that all is fine in New Hampshire: CONCORD, N.H. --- The continuing Democratic primary recount in New Hampshire has not found any voting problems. Well, they're sort of correct. "Voting" problems aren't the concern. As we frequently point out, the voters are still doing fine. Leave them alone. The election problems, and the horrible administration thereof, is another matter entirely. And on that front, loads of problems have been "found". But only if you bother to look at them. of course. Given WMUR's following quote from NH Sec. of State Bill Gardner, which is demonstrably wrong in 3 seconds time if you bother to look at the SoS' very own web page for hand count results, it's not a surprise that WMUR thinks everything is just rosy: "We did nine of the 12 wards in Manchester, and a lot of the votes were exactly the same," Gardner said. "Some went up by a vote or two." That is what we in the business of actual reporting would call: a lie. Check the numbers for yourself. Yeah, "a lot of the votes were exactly the same," as Gardner says. Many more were not at all the same, ranging anywhere from 5 to 8 votes off in regular cases, across almost all candidates. And before you say that's no big deal, we'll remind you that in 2004, had just 6 votes per precinct been registered in Ohio for John Kerry instead of George W. Bush, we'd have a different person sitting in the White House right now. Other than that, and the fact that Gardner has no idea where the memory cards are for his Diebold machines, and all other matter of horrible election oversight, yeah, everything's just fine in New Hampshire.
Poster Comment: Black Box Voting reported that the real problem with the recount is the lack of chain of custody for both the memory cards and for the paper ballots. Since there is no guarantee that these are the same ballots that the voters cast, we cannot say that this will be an accurate recount and we will have a free and honest election in 2008. Let's see. I have a choice between Hillary Clinton who is a Bilderberger and a criminal, John McCain who amended his statement that he does not mind if we stay in Iraq for 100 years to say that 1,000 years was just fine and Michael Bloomberg, the Independent candidate, who is a Zionist and just might be the devil incarnate. I nearly forgot Senator Lieberman's second bid for the vice-presidency. I wonder if he will run with McCain or with Bloomberg? Looks like I will be voting for Ralph Nader again. I can't be the only lifelong Republican who voted for Nader against Bush. I pride myself in saying that I never voted for either Bush father or son for any office. I think Bloomberg will jump into the race if he feels he needs to threaten one or both of the major parties and/or their candidate with $500 million in attack ads. Nobody in their right mind would vote for him. The only point of a Bloomberg candidacy is to threaten the other candidates. The man is not electable outside New York City and then only against the crazies who run for mayor of New York.
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 12.
#8. To: Horse (#0)
a. No one is going to endanger their fixed machines on a minor primary. The variance is about 1 percent. b. Bloomberg ain't running. He can beat the Repuke, but not the dem. He is not stupid, and he will not spend $500 million of his own money unless he thinks he can win. He can't.
good point
www.blackboxvoting.org/ Red Flags on the New Hampshire Primary 1-16-08: How New Hampshire is sizing up We are finding in New Hampshire: the best of the best in MOST situations, but considerable naivete and in some areas, and an alarming and wilfull negligence. Among the "best of the best" of New Hampshire situations: (1) Beautiful, community oriented hand counted paper ballots in more than one hundred jurisdictions. (2) Very democratic and participatory township structure of government, combined with very high level of representation of local areas in the state legislature (3) Amazing level of responsiveness of public officials. Secretary of State Bill Gardner, for example, answers questions personally and tirelessly from just about everyone. Many, many high level officials perfectly willing to talk with and answer all questions from the public. (4) Beautiful, participatory 100% hand counted recounts. (5) Very good public records laws. If they have it in their possession, they let you see it THAT DAY. Along those lines, Paddy Shaffer did a hand written records request today which elicited some very good information. The dream team here is in the process of editing another request as I write this. On the almost schizophrenically BAD side: (1) A reckless reliance on a sole source private contractor. Not particularly bothered that the company has private chain of custody during critical points, no policy or even apparent concern with having convicted felons involved in the voting system. (2) Use of a system with known defects without even taking any mitigation steps that other states took. (3) NO REQUIREMENT to even save the memory cards. The explanation is that they get a disk with the "program" on it. VotersUnite attorney Jon Bonifaz questioned the assistant attorney general on this closely today, because federal law requires records retention of 22 months on electronic media. New Hampshire has a haphazard policy of allowing the memory cards to be kept, or not, with a chain of custody, or not, shipping back to LHS, or not, and it's perfectly okay with New Hampshire if the memory cards are erased altogether the day after the election. They profess to believe that if they just have LHS ship them a disk containing some purported program -- BEFORE the election, when there aren't even any votes registered -- everything is okay. No one could tell us if this is the memory card program, or the GEMS database file, or the optical scan chip. They seem to have no idea what they are doing with this and I would call this wilfull ignorance,... More 1-15-08: Can recount chain of custody be rescued? At this point we can pretty much guarantee the New Hampshire recount for Kucinich will match -- and that's not a good thing, because unless chain of custody can be documented properly, the recount doesn't provide real answers. Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich did not order a statewide recount today, only two counties, and the Republican candidate, Albert Howard, was cut out of the recount altogether. I'll write more on the details later this week. I have been doing field work since Saturday here in New Hampshire. Donations have been helping underwrite the costs of a citizen dream team: I invited some outstanding people to join me here to evaluate chain of custody for the recount: Susan Pynchon (Florida Fair Elections Coalition, has helped unravel the Sarasota situation); Melisa Urda (Illinois Ballot Integrity Project, has helped get the Illinois attorney general to issue a special directive ordering DuPage County to follow the law); and Paddy Shaffer (Ohio Election Justice Campaign, with Richard Hayes Phillips helped unravel the ballot chain of custody in Ohio). Others, like Election Defense Alliance Sally Castleman, have been organizing a team of citizen videographers, while Bruce O'Dell and Theron Horton have been quietly crunching the numbers to pinpoint locations with unusual footprints. (I also hoped to have the great Kathleen Wynne, but had to red-eye out to New Hampshire on such short notice that the timing didn't work this time.) VERDICT: New Hampshire is unable to document its chain of custody properly, lacks written procedures, its secretary of state has said he doesn't know where its memory cards are, and LHS has been encroaching on state elections with near-total control. I'll be preparing a Special Report when I return from New Hampshire with documents and video to support this assessment. VIDEO CAMERA CONFISCATION? In New Hampshire, ballots are brought from each town and ward to a central location for recounts. We got a tip today that the location would be the state archive building, so we went there hoping for a walk-through. There, police told us that videotaping the delivery of the ballots and the unloading of the ballots, would be prohibited and cameras would be confiscated if people were caught doing this. The rationale, we were told, was that they had placed the ballot delivery area in a state building with a parking lot that belonged to a mental hospital located on the grounds about a block away. On the theory tha... Message Bev Harris Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 7492 Registered: 12-2004 Best of Black Box? Posted on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 - 9:15 pm: At this point we can pretty much guarantee the New Hampshire recount for Kucinich will match -- and that's not a good thing, because unless chain of custody can be documented properly, the recount doesn't provide real answers. Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich did not order a statewide recount today, only two counties, and the Republican candidate, Albert Howard, was cut out of the recount altogether. I'll write more on the details later this week. I have been doing field work since Saturday here in New Hampshire. Donations have been helping underwrite the costs of a citizen dream team: I invited some outstanding people to join me here to evaluate chain of custody for the recount: Susan Pynchon (Florida Fair Elections Coalition, has helped unravel the Sarasota situation); Melisa Urda (Illinois Ballot Integrity Project, has helped get the Illinois attorney general to issue a special directive ordering DuPage County to follow the law); and Paddy Shaffer (Ohio Election Justice Campaign, with Richard Hayes Phillips helped unravel the ballot chain of custody in Ohio). Others, like Election Defense Alliance Sally Castleman, have been organizing a team of citizen videographers, while Bruce O'Dell and Theron Horton have been quietly crunching the numbers to pinpoint locations with unusual footprints. (I also hoped to have the great Kathleen Wynne, but had to red-eye out to New Hampshire on such short notice that the timing didn't work this time.) VERDICT: New Hampshire is unable to document its chain of custody properly, lacks written procedures, its secretary of state has said he doesn't know where its memory cards are, and LHS has been encroaching on state elections with near-total control. I'll be preparing a Special Report when I return from New Hampshire with documents and video to support this assessment. VIDEO CAMERA CONFISCATION? In New Hampshire, ballots are brought from each town and ward to a central location for recounts. We got a tip today that the location would be the state archive building, so we went there hoping for a walk-through. There, police told us that videotaping the delivery of the ballots and the unloading of the ballots, would be prohibited and cameras would be confiscated if people were caught doing this. The rationale, we were told, was that they had placed the ballot delivery area in a state building with a parking lot that belonged to a mental hospital located on the grounds about a block away. On the theory that cameras might catch a mental patient wandering around and invade his privacy, all videotaping would be prohibited. Now, there was 14 inches of snow yesterday and the drifts and mounds are up to 10 feet high, so the idea that a mental patient could even walk through this to the state archives to get their privacy invaded by a camera filming ballot unloading seemed preposterous. Paddy Shaffer got on the horn and called the chief of the "campus police" handling the mental hospital and he confirmed that cameras would be confiscated. We later alerted Secretary of State Bill Gardner, who called off the police video-busting rule. SECRECY IN CHAIN OF CUSTODY One official told us he thought the location of the delivered ballots should be a secret and that there would be no public observation of the intake process. We asked for the written procedures for the ballot intake and he said he hadn't been provided with any. Another member of the secretary of state's office said he could not confirm or deny that the ballots would be delivered to the archive building at all, and when you see the video of this you'll see that this was evasiveness, not lack of information. We received a verbal description of the check-in process, which included a list of locations coming in and a check-off sheet. When we asked about the observaton area the official left, then came back and said no ballots would be delivered to the archives. Later, we learned that they would, after all, be delivered to the archives but only one city at a time. No written procedures for any of this, and quite a confusing time was being had by all. "TRUST ME ELECTIONS" A member of the Kucinich campaign tried to "wave me off" from looking into ballot chain of custody this evening. Another member of the Kucinich campaign said she has 100% confidence in the ballot chain of custody, even though, when I asked, she admitted she didn't know where the ballots go after leaving the towns. This should be a huge concern for us. As the previous article, "Walking into a trap?" indicates, if you order a recount without first getting answers to the chain of custody questions, you may end up with a sham recount with stuffed or substituted ballots. No candidate's campaign should be satisfied with "trust" without asking and demanding answers to chain of custody questions. I was told by one of the Kucinich people that chain of custody has always been completely trustworthy in the past, and that I should stick to securing the memory cards and chips and not get into ballot chain of custody issues. Basing an analysis of the CURRENT chain of custody on past (or imagined) chain of custody perceptions is like saying, "I won't lock the door tonight because I have locked it in the past." WHAT'S NEXT? They are recounting Manchester ballots tomorrow. PREDICTION: They'll match all right. Exactly as Nancy Tobi predicted. This recount will be used to illustrate that the LHS-coded voting machines should be trusted. It's very difficult to prepare articles with documentation and video while spending days and nights in the field, but I hope to get more information to you shortly about some of the field work of Susan Pynchon and Melisa Urda, who visited New Hampshire election sites asking questions about ballot accounting procedures, memory card storage, and looking into various questions. They obtained a fairly horrific document from LHS Associates. Stay tuned. Posted on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 - 9:34 pm:
#13. To: TwentyTwelve (#12)
Interesting.
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#11. To: Mekons4 (#8)
b. Bloomberg ain't running. He can beat the Repuke, but not the dem. He is not stupid, and he will not spend $500 million of his own money unless he thinks he can win. He can't.
#12. To: robin, FOH, christine, Original_Intent, all (#11)
Replies to Comment # 12. and the Republican candidate, Albert Howard, was cut out of the recount altogether.
#14. To: TwentyTwelve (#12)
End Trace Mode for Comment # 12.