Red Flags over New Hampshire
By Bev Harris
New Hampshire’s 2008 primary election may prove to be the most fascinating presidential preference race in history.
– Both Democrat and Republican candidates have requested recounts
– More than half of New Hampshire’s elections administrators hand count paper ballots in public at the polling place, with a public chain of custody. The rest of New Hampshire’s towns and cities use Diebold voting machines to count votes in secret, with a secret chain of custody.
– Hand count and machine count locations, when calculated statewide, show an eerie statistic:
Clinton Optical scan 91,717 52.95%
Obama Optical scan 81,495 47.05%
Clinton Hand-counted 20,889 47.05%
Obama Hand-counted 23,509 52.95%
– Two hand count towns reported “zero” votes for candidate Ron Paul to the media, even though they did have votes for him. The town of Sutton reported zero, but had 31 votes; the town of Greenville reported zero, but had 25 votes. The two towns had misreported results affecting exactly the same candidate in exactly the same way.
– Results in many locations arrived up to four hours late on Election Night, surprisingly, from machine-counted locations — not hand count locations;
– A single private entity had control over coding for every memory card in New Hampshire. According to the contract for LHS Associates, this firm requires a right of access to any voting machine at any time, services the machines, maintains the machines and handles repairs, replacements and troubleshooting on Election Day.
– Ken Hajjar, a key employee of this sole source private entity, LHS Associates, has a criminal record for narcotics trafficking. The state of New Hampshire knew of this conviction but approved the contractor anyway. According to a complaint filed with the New Hampshire Attorney General, Hajjar had called the Dan Pierce radio show in 1999 and threatened to rig an election.
– A high number of “other” votes appeared in Manchester, where over 570 people apparently decided to go to the polls and choose none of the first tier OR second tier candidates.
– The voting system in New Hampshire was updated, but to a version that had been proven to be vulnerable in studies in Florida and California. Instead of upgrading to newer versions which at least claim to address known security vulnerabilities, New Hampshire chose to implement none of the beefed up procedures or upgraded versions that other states are using.
Citizens from many different states are now examining New Hampshire’s ballot chain of custody, because if that is as weak as their voting machine controls, the recounts will just produce new questions.
A newly aroused citizenry in New Hampshire and elsewhere is telling New Hampshire “trust us” is NOT the way to run elections.
Article Source: BlackBoxVoting.org
