1/18/08

NH Recount - 5th Ward Way Off After Hand Count

As the hand recount begins at Dennis Kucinich's request, The Brad Blog was going through recount results as they were coming in:
As mentioned earlier today, NH SoS Bill Gardner told WMUR in NH that "We did nine of the 12 wards in Manchester, and a lot of the votes were exactly the same...Some went up by a vote or two." He didn't, of course, note that a lot of the vote counts (most of them) were off by 5 or more.


And now, the rest of the numbers from the rest of the Manchester wards are coming on. And get a load of Ward 5:

Diebold
Result
Hand
Count
CLINTON683619
EDWARDS255217
OBAMA404365

All of the other candidates seem to have lost votes as well. No clue who received them instead...


From another of his posts, and after media reports that "a lot of the votes were exactly the same":
But many more vote counts were not at all the same, ranging anywhere from 5 to 8 votes off in regular cases, across almost all candidates.

And before you say that's no big deal, we'll remind you that in 2004, had just 6 votes per precinct been registered in Ohio for John Kerry instead of George W. Bush, we'd have a different person sitting in the White House right now.

So far, this is not looking very pretty. Not in retrospect, nor in looking forward...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The bad results in Manchester's Ward 5 were the result of hand counting!

The machine spits out ballots with write-in votes for president and/or vice president. Once the polls close, citizens hand count the write-in votes. If a presidential candidate already on the ballot received some write-in votes for PRESIDENT (don't know why people do that, but they do)then those votes are added to the totals generated by the machine.

In Ward 5, unfortunately, the vote counters mistakenly took the VICE PRESIDENTIAL write-in votes for the candidates and added them to the totals generated by the machines. At least in ward 5, the errors were caused by the hand counters, not the Diebold machine.

- Informed in NH

Connecticut Man1 said...

Thanks for the comment, anon. Regardless of the reasons for the numbers being revised, I think it shows that hand counts to verify afterwards, and before certification, are a necessity, IMHO.