Experts Question Clinton's New Hampshire Primary Win

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted January 11, 2008.

Election integrity activists parsing the precinct-level results from New Hampshire's Democratic Primary say their early analyses have found anomalies suggesting vote totals may have been altered to deliver a Hillary Clinton victory.

The activists, led by the Election Defense Alliance, a nonprofit formed after the 2004 election when exit polls also predicted a victory by a candidate other then the eventual winner, point to a series of discrepancies when comparing the official results from hand-counted and machine-counted paper ballots. Computer scanners, much like a standardized test, counted 80 percent of the ballots.

They begin by noting that Barack Obama won in hand-counted precincts, which tend to be more rural with fewer voters. In contrast, Clinton won in the precincts where computers tallied results, which are larger towns, cities and Boston suburbs. That discrepancy suggested that had the computer-counted ballots been tallied by hand, Clinton might not have won a victory defying pre-election polls, the activists said.

Anthony Stevens, New Hampshire's assistant secretary of state, said on Thursday that the hand count-computer count discrepancy was not unusual. He noted that in 2004 Democrat Howard Dean largely carried the hand-count precincts while John Kerry won most of the computer-count locales.

However, later on Thursday, Bruce O'Dell, an information technology consultant who is coordinating Election Defense Alliance's analysis, found the percentages of the vote given to Obama and Clinton, according to which counting method was used, were mirror images "down to the sixth decimal place."

"There is a remarkable relationship between Obama and Clinton votes, when you look at votes tabulated by op-scan (computers) versus votes tabulated by hand:

Clinton optical scan: 91,717 (52.95%)

Obama optican scan: 81,495 (47.05%)

Clinton hand-counted: 20,889 (47.05%)

Obama hand-counted: 23,509 (52.95%)

"The percentages seem to be swapped," he wrote, in a short piece posted Thursday on OpEdNews.com. "That seems highly unusual, to say the least."

O'Dell's report has lead many election integrity activists to conclude that New Hampshire's Democratic primary was "stolen" for Clinton. There have been numerous emails saying exactly that on a list-serve used by activists who are parsing the official primary results. Clinton beat Obama by 7,603 votes, according to the official results.

Interviewed on Friday, O'Dell said it was premature to jump to any conclusion other than the Democratic primary results were "suspect." He and others involved in scrutinizing the primary data said activists and others who were making premature conclusions would undermine their efforts to investigate the vote count.

"We are trying to be very careful on how we are phrasing this," he said.

Parsing the primary vote

O'Dell said he is focusing on examining the results within New Hampshire counties, to see if there are variations in candidate percentages in nearby precincts where ballots were counted by hand and counted by computer scanners. If there are variations in areas with similar socioeconomic profiles, he said that would re-enforce "the hypothesis" that the computerized count was inaccurate.

"This is a data-mining exercise," O'Dell said, adding that by Friday he and other researchers had narrowed their focus to three counties in southeastern New Hampshire, where most of the state's population lives. "We have made a considerable amount of progress," he said.

O'Dell's methodology has precedents. Election integrity activists in Ohio used it after 2004 to show the uneven deployment of voting machines in Franklin County caused John Kerry to lose nearly 17,000 votes. That figure emerged after activist investigators found that some precincts in Columbus's inner city lacked sufficient numbers of voting machines. Thus, by comparing voter turnout in the properly supplied precincts to nearby precincts that lacked machines -- causing long lines and people to leave -- they projected how many votes were lost. That analysis led a federal judge to order Ohio counties to preserve 2004 election records.

O'Dell also said he was looking for New Hampshire precincts with spikes in voter turnout and precincts where Clinton's margin was significantly greater than in neighboring towns. Spikes and margins, if found, could suggest vote padding. This methodology was used in Ohio in 2004, notably by Democratic staff investigators for the House Judiciary Committee, who found improbably high turnouts and vote margins favoring George W. Bush in rural counties.

See more stories tagged with: polling, voting system, election 2008, hillary clinton, barack obama, new hampshire

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election, with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).

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