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Kucinich calls for recount in NH.
In the last year not a lot of people have been talking about the fact that two years ago lots of watchdog groups were saying we were not ready to have a presidential election we could depend on--many of the electronic ballot-counting systems were actually worse at the time (for accountability) than New Hampshire's, which at least appears to keep a copy of a physical ballot. I'm not sure how far we've gotten since then.
One analysis group reports of the NH primary that comparison of *some* hand-counted ballots with *all* the electronic ballots show eerily switched percentages for Obama and Clinton compared to the total count reported. What's that Scalzi was just saying about how hard Clinton would fight for this election? Seriously, though, numbers do weird things sometimes. It's not always a conspiracy. But I'd like to see a recount like this done at a time when no one can argue the whole national economy is waiting with baited breath for the results and that therefore (this argument never held water for me) we have to stop counting the votes. Please, please, please, let's not have another Florida/Ohio/etc. situation. This is America. We really ought to be able to get this voting thing down. It's not really that complicated.
In the last year not a lot of people have been talking about the fact that two years ago lots of watchdog groups were saying we were not ready to have a presidential election we could depend on--many of the electronic ballot-counting systems were actually worse at the time (for accountability) than New Hampshire's, which at least appears to keep a copy of a physical ballot. I'm not sure how far we've gotten since then.
One analysis group reports of the NH primary that comparison of *some* hand-counted ballots with *all* the electronic ballots show eerily switched percentages for Obama and Clinton compared to the total count reported. What's that Scalzi was just saying about how hard Clinton would fight for this election? Seriously, though, numbers do weird things sometimes. It's not always a conspiracy. But I'd like to see a recount like this done at a time when no one can argue the whole national economy is waiting with baited breath for the results and that therefore (this argument never held water for me) we have to stop counting the votes. Please, please, please, let's not have another Florida/Ohio/etc. situation. This is America. We really ought to be able to get this voting thing down. It's not really that complicated.
no subject
No way. Not a chance.
Here, off the top of my head, are some reason that the idea of the Clintons fixing the primary is impossible:
1) Why? Bill and Hillary Clinton are not nearly stupid enough to risk throwing away their legacies to win one state primary. Even if you think that Hillary had to win New Hampshire to have any chance of getting the nomination, there's no way it is worth the risk. One person squeals, and everything they've done on the national stage in the last 16 years goes down the toilet.
2) When? New Hampshire didn't become a must-win for Clinton until she finished third in Iowa. That was five days before the New Hampshire primary. Even if you say that they started the process when she started slipping in the polls, they would have had to fix the primary in two weeks.
3) How? Even if I'm wrong about #1 and #2, it is impossible. These aren't touch-screen ballots like Ohio. These are the optical-scan ballots that we use in Michigan. Even if you hack all the machines at all the precincts to switch every third Obama vote to Clinton, which would be a trick in itself, it's really easy to recount Diebold ballots. I've been involved in a Diebold recount. You'd be risking everything on the fact that no one, in an era of internal and external polls and highly sophisticated result-projecting software, would notice there was a problem. Hell, in 1992, I had an Excel spreadsheet that tracked the results in every precinct, and we would have noticed if a few of them were really off, and that was written by a 23-year-old on a computer that probably couldn't run my washing machine these days.
I suspect there's a "Where?" in there somewhere. And a "What?"