NH PRIMARY DISINFO ALERT: 'Problems' with Paper Ballots in State Inaccurately Reported by
National Mainstream Media!
Reports of 'Voter Fraud' in Dixville Notch, Dem Ballots Unavailable to Voters, Both
Debunked by The BRAD BLOG
Though Reasons Remain for Concern About Tabulation on Diebold Machines...
-- Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG
Our Spidey-sense started tingling before going to bed last night and hearing reports, on
MSNBC, that there were 17 paper ballots cast in Dixville Notch, NH's midnight,
first-in-the-country voting. The report said that there were only 16 registered voters in
the tiny voting precinct, yet 17 votes had been cast --- suggesting that somehow, paper
ballot "voter fraud" skullduggery was afoot.
Following on that, reports throughout the day appeared that NH precincts were out of paper
ballots, and voters were unable to vote.
Trouble is, both reports are either completely untrue, or wholly misleading, or both, as
The BRAD BLOG was able to confirm with two simple phone calls.
Each of those reports, however, would seem to go a long way towards giving the impression
that paper ballots are a bad idea, and that "voter fraud" is easy to commit when using
them. Given that one of those reports seems to have begun on The DRUDGE REPORT earlier
today, we're not particularly surprised that the MSM kept repeating the easily-debunked
stories running all day.
That, even while there are reasons to be concerned about how the paper ballots used in the
New Hampshire Primary will actually be counted by the hackable Diebold optical-scan
systems used in the state, as controlled and programmed by an outrageously bad private
contractor there...
The Irresponsible Dixville Notch 'Voter Fraud' Rumor
First, as to the mainstream media debunking, we spoke to Dixville Notch NH's Town Clerk,
Rick Erwin, who explained exactly what happened concerning the 17 ballots cast last night.
ABC News even spoke to Erwin themselves, according to their report. Yet still, they
managed to scurrilously misreport the same irresponsible "voter fraud in Dixville Notch"
rumor today.
The report, filed by ABC's Karen Travers, was published on their website today at 3:40pm
ET --- an hour surely late enough to have actually confirmed the nonsense about the
midnight voting last night, as we did, before running it on their website. Their report,
as The BRAD BLOG bothered to confirm, was utter nonsense from the beginning!...
[T]here were 17 votes cast tonight. Yet Dixville Notch town clerk Rick Erwin told ABC News
this afternoon that there are only 16 residents of voting age in the town --- three
registered Republicans, two Democrats and 12 registered as undeclared.
Will Dixville Notch go down as the first voting irregularity of this election?
Probably! But only because ABC News misreported it as such! Town Clerk Erwin explained to
us what really happened.
"Yeah, that was due to the New Hampshire that law allows people to register on election
day when the polls open," Erwin explained to The BRAD BLOG in a phone call within the last
hour. "We had a gentleman who lived here, who moved away and came back --- the grandson of
the man who started the tradition [of voting at midnight in Dixville Notch], incidentally
--- he moved back, but missed the cut off date for getting onto the registration rolls."
Erwin confirmed that yes, prior to the polls opening, there were just 16 registered voters
in the tiny town, but after the new voter registered to vote, the total of 17 ballots cast
as counted and reported was exactly right.
The news reports to the contrary are extraordinarily irresponsible. Especially given the
case being heard in the U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow concerning Photo ID restrictions at
the polls, where Republicans have used a great deal of disinformation to suggest there is
a massive epidemic of polling place "voter fraud" occurring that requires such laws to be
implemented. That, despite the fact that some 10 to 30 million --- largely
Democratic-leaning --- voters, don't have driver's licenses that would meet the
requirement. Such laws, as the Indiana case being heard tomorrow before the SCOTUS, have
been regarded as a "modern day Jim Crow-era poll tax" by a number of federal judges, and
election experts alike, who have found such laws unconstitutional.
For the record, we also confirmed that the paper ballots used in Dixville Notch are
counted by hand, transparently, "in front of a million people," Erwin hastened to add.
Every Voter Was Able to Vote on a Paper Ballot in NH
Our Spidey-sense continued to tingle throughout the day, as we saw reports that indicated
paper ballots had run out in voting precincts across the state, due to a
larger-than-expected Democratic turnout. As if to say: "Had their only been electronic
voting machines in New Hampshire, this sort of thing wouldn't have happened."
Trouble is, a quick call to the NH Sec. of State's office quickly debunked that report as
well.
"There's a lot of disinformation, yes," Assistant Sec. of State Karen Ladd told The BRAD
BLOG after we'd bothered to call the office tonight at around 7:00pm ET. "We were getting
a lot of disinformation, calls from the media, that towns were running out of ballots, and
that was not true."
While there were concerns among some of the towns and wards that they might run out of
ballots later in the day, due to the large Democratic turnout, Ladd confirmed that it
wasn't until 6pm that "a few" places, "a coupla towns", actually did run out of ballots.
In the few instances where that happened, she told us, the clerks simply gave paper
absentee ballots to voters. If those ran out, they made xerox copies of paper ballots for
voters to vote on.
"So there will be a ballot from everybody. Nobody will be denied the right to vote because
they ran out of ballots," Ladd assured us.
So where did this rumor begin, we asked her, in reference to her comment about
"disinformation"? Apparently --- surprise, surprise --- The DRUDGE REPORT!
"The Drudge Report, that's where it started," she told us, "and everybody picked up on it,
and started calling" just after lunch, "around two-ish," she explained.
But the report from the DRUDGE, largely regarded as a rightwing propaganda outlet, was
wrong, she says. "The fact is that nobody was running out of ballots. Nobody had run out
of ballots. We did have calls that there was concerns that they might run out, but nobody
did run out."
Polls close at 7pm ET in most New Hampshire precincts, and at 8pm ET in a few of them. The
only large town voting precinct to run out of paper ballots, late in the day, was
Londerry, Ladd said, and they simply made copies to assure that every voter could vote.
All ballots are counted at the polls, either by hand or optical-scan systems, and results
are announced and/or posted at the precints before being shipped back to the Secretary of
State, Ladd told us. As it should be.
What You Should Actually Be Concerned About
However, for those in the media interested in actual concerns about the integrity of
today's NH Primary, we'd strongly recommend the following video primer. In it, you'll
learn that the Diebold optical-scan system used across most of New Hampshire (some 40% of
precincts still count paper ballots by hand, at the precinct), can be easily rigged by
insiders, and only if the paper ballots are properly audited by hand, in some fashion, can
the results of the op-scanners be trusted in any way, shape or form.
Reporters would do well to take note, particularly given the tightness of the race at this
hour on the Democratic side, between Obama and Clinton --- curious, given the final Zogby
polling numbers which were dead-on on the Republican side, but so far, seem wildly off on
the Dem side. Zogby's numbers had predicted an Obama blowout, 42/29 over Clinton.
The machines used in the state, are the same ones seen being hacked in HBO's documentary,
Hacking Democracy. As well, a single private company with a very bad record, LHS
Associates, Diebold's distributor and technical contractor in New England, runs the
elections and controls the vulnerable memory cards for the voting systems across the
state. That company, has a horrendous record of lax security policies and has admitted to
having replaced memory cards, on a whim, on their own, in the middle of past elections.
As well, their Director of Sales and Marketing, Ken Hajaar, has previously posted a
comment on The BRAD BLOG under his own name, declaring: "You are totally full of *****."
His tirade went on those concerned about transparency and Election Integrity, such as
ourselves and BlackBoxVoting.org's Bev Harris to be "deluded", "paranoid" and "loony
ideologues".
His comments here succeeded only having him be banned from working on elections in
Connecticut by Sec. of State there, where LHS Associates also irresponsibly and secretly,
plies their trade at tax-payer expense.
The video below shows LHS Associate President John Silvestro challenging Finnish computer
security expert Harri Hursti, during testimony in New Hampshire, after Hursti's landmark
hack of a Diebold optical-scan machine in late 2005 in Leon County, FL, as seen in Hacking
Democracy. That hack is again shown in this video, courtesy of www.BlackBoxVoting.org
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiiaBqwqkXs
Source : http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5529
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