MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT THOSE DAMNED DIEBOLD MACHINES

Dennis Kucinich has called for a re-count in the NH Democratic primary (he pays for it), in light of descrepancies between results in the hand-counting towns and those relying on Diebold electonic voting machines to record votes. David Lindoff at Counterpunch comments.

But there were anomalies in the numbers that have some people suggesting something else: vote fraud.

What has had eyebrows raised is a significant discrepancy between the vote counts done by voting machine, and the ones done by hand.

In New Hampshire, 81 per cent of the voting was done in towns and cities that had purchased optical scan machines from the Diebold Election Systems (now called Premiere Election Solutions), a division of Diebold Corp., a company founded by and still linked to wealthy right-wing investors. In those towns, all voting was done on the devices, called Accuvote machines, which read paper ballots completed by voters who use pens or pencils to fill in little ovals next to the candidate of their choice. The ballots are then fed into, read, and tallied by the machines. The other 19 per cent of voting was done in towns that had opted not to use the machine, and to use hand-counted paper ballots instead.

The machine tally was Clinton 39.6 per cent, Obama 36.3 per cent - fairly close to the final outcome. But the hand-counted ballot count broke significantly differently: Clinton 34.9 per cent, Obama 38.6 per cent.

Could something have happened in those machines to shift some votes away from Obama or some of the other candidates in the race, and over to the Clinton total?

I first heard about it earlier this morning on the WBUR radio program, On Point. The political news reporters were shocked....shocked! that anyone would bring up such a possibility! No surprise about their reaction.