[US Count Votes are the mathematicians who put out good stuff in 2000 about how to mathematically show whether fraud or programming errors were a high probability or not. Since then then been developing their ideas about how all elections could be audited for fraud/errors and low cost and at high speed using small rigorous samples. In a related vein, they've been a very vocal advocte for the paper trails without which such audits are impossible. Here's a non-crazy version of the theory that Diebold computer errors led to the Hillary/Obama reversal]
http://electionarchive.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=149&Itemid=84 http://electionarchive.org/ucvData/NH/ReleaseReNHPrimary2008.pdf
RELEASE: NEW HAMPSHIRE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY ? WERE VOTES COUNTED ACCURATELY?
Park City, UT January 14, 2008 CONTACT: Kathy Dopp kathy at electionarchive.org 435-658-4657
NEW HAMPSHIRE'S DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY ELECTION RESULTS ARE SUSPICIOUS
Pre-election polls projected that Barrack Obama would win the New Hampshire Democratic primary election. An average of seven opinion polls predicted that 38.8 percent were going to vote for Obama, while 30 percent would vote for Clinton. The opinion polls came close to predicting the final results for New Hampshire's hand-counted votes - 39.2% for Obama and 34.9% for Clinton - but New Hampshire's Diebold/Premier machine-counted votes reversed the outcome.
The reversal of the machine and hand counts is consistent with programming errors counting votes cast for Obama, for Clinton and votes cast for Clinton, for Obama.
To see this consistency of New Hampshire's election results with programming error, analysts examined Clinton and Obama vote shares out of votes cast only for Obama and Clinton. Overall, Clinton's hand count share of such votes is 47.07% to Obama's 52.93% share and a virtually exact reverse pattern occurs with machine counts where Clinton's share is 52.95% to Obama's 47.05%.
A statistical analysis of New Hampshire's Democratic primary by the National Election Data Archive rules out precinct-size and seems to rule out demographic factors as possible causes for the reversal of Obama and Clinton's machine and hand-counted results; and shows that the pattern is consistent with vote miscount favoring Clinton.
The National Election Data Archive's New Hampshire analysis and raw data is posted on the Internet at ElectionArchive.org
http://electionarchive.org/ucvData/NH/DemPrimary2008-PairedPrecinctStudy.pdf and http://electionarchive.org/ucvData/NH/
About 80% of New Hampshire ballots were counted by Diebold/Premier optical scanning machines without any post-election manual audits to verify the machine count accuracy.
Press reports hypothesized theories for why Clinton beat Obama in New Hampshire including:
1. the "Bradley effect" (closet racism) that white voters lie to pollsters and "say" they'll vote for a Black, but given a secret ballot don't,
2. the "damsel in distress" theory that Clinton's tears brought women voters out for her,
3. the "good weather" theory, and
4. the "economy was key" theory.
It would be interesting to know why these effects would only occur when ballots are counted by Diebold/Premier voting machines but not when ballots are counted in public view by hand.
The "electronic miscount" theory could be a more plausible explanation for the discrepancies between the opinion polls and the machine-counted results.
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Michael