UPDATED Jan. 12, 8:30 p.m.
New Hampshire Secretary of State William M. Gardner announced on Friday that two candidates in the New Hampshire primary have requested a recount of all ballots cast statewide.
The recount requests came from Republican presidential candidate Albert Howard and Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich. According to Gardner, the recounts will commence on Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008.
Kucinich petitioned for recount because of "unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots," according to a press release issued by the Kucinich campaign on Thursday.
"I am not making this request in the expectation that a recount will significantly affect the number of votes that were cast on my behalf," said Kucinich in his letter to Secretary of State William M. Gardner. "Serious and credible reports, allegations, and rumors have surfaced in the past few days. … It is imperative that these questions be addressed in the interest of public confidence in the integrity of the election process and the election machinery—not just in New Hampshire, but in every other state that conducts a primary election."
Election integrity was questioned on Wednesday in Sutton, N.H., where zero votes were recorded as the final count for Republican candidate Ron Paul. A Sutton family who had voted for Paul wondered why their votes weren't recorded and sent an Internet posting asking for help.
Bev Harris, founder of Black Box Voting Inc.,( blackboxvoting.org ) a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit, elections-watchdog group, took up the cause. Harris reported on the Austin-based Alex Jones radio show on Wednesday that she had spoken with Jennifer Call, Town Clerk in Sutton Township, who confirmed there was an error.
"Ron Paul got 31 votes, not 0. I asked her [Call] why the discrepancy, and she said they simply failed to put the right number on the form they sent to the media."
According to Harris and wheresthepaper.org, a Web site dedicated to election integrity, the classic method for rigging a hand count is to write the wrong number on the form.
Concerns About Electronic Voting Machines
Concerns of election integrity are also being raised with regard to the use of Diebold electronic voting machines. According to a table comparing all machine votes versus hand counts in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton benefited from Diebold-recorded votes by 5.419 percent, while Barack Obama lost 3.029 percent. In doing so, Clinton reversed a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby Poll pre-polling deficit of about 10 percent to defeat Barack Obama.
On the Republican side, Mitt Romney profited the most from the Diebold effect, receiving 7 percent more votes compared to hand-counted ballots, while Huckabee, McCain, and Paul lost the most, each more than 2 percent. Tables comparing all machine votes versus hand-counted votes can be viewed at checkthevotes.com.
The integrity of the voting process is under fire early in the 2008 presidential campaign, but it is not a new issue. After the Florida voting fiasco in the 2000 presidential campaign, activists such as Harris have stepped up their efforts.
Hacking Democracy, a documentary broadcast on HBO throughout November and December 2006, investigated and exposed the dangers of voting machines, which are currently used in approximately 90 percent of America's midterm and presidential elections, as well as county, state, and federal elections.
The two Ohio election staff members who are featured in Hacking Democracy were sentenced on March 13, 2007, for rigging the 2004 presidential recount. Incriminating footage from the documentary was used in their court case as evidence. Hacking Democracy can be viewed in its entirety on youtube.com or through Google video.
Millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on voting machines across the country. The operational and security vulnerabilities of the machines, however, indicates their reliability could be compromised.
"We analyzed the machine's hardware and software, performed experiments on it, and considered whether real election practices would leave it suitably secure. We found that the machine is vulnerable to a number of extremely serious attacks that undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces," stated Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felton in their Sept. 13, 2006, report "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine: Executive Summary," posted on the Web site of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.
The Princeton team concluded that malicious software can modify all the records to the point that careful examination will reveal nothing amiss. They also found that anyone can install such malicious software in as little as one minute, the machines are susceptible to computer viruses, and some of the problems can only be remedied by replacing the machines' hardware. The full text of their report can be viewed at http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting.
According to Harris, the same make and model of electronic voting machine hacked in the Black Box Voting project in Leon County as seen in Hacking Democracy was used throughout New Hampshire, where about 45 percent of elections administrators hand count paper ballots at the polling place, with the remaining locations all using the Diebold version 1.94w optical scan machine.
The blackboxvoting.org Web site cites specific cases when computerized voting systems didn't work.
In one case, polling data had to be read to a poll worker who manually typed them in; in another case hand-counted ballot totals were entirely different from machine results. In another, the machine's memory cards were replaced midstream, and paper records were destroyed.
Additional security concerns were raised on a "Lou Dobbs Tonight" program that aired on Oct. 29, 2006, when former San Diego County poll worker Patty Newton revealed that prior to the June 6 primary election, poll workers were allowed to take the voting machines home.
"We were given slips of paper, had them stamped by one of the staff members, and we were directed to drive across to the parking lot to pick up our voting machines, and take them home," said Newton. "We all felt an ominous kind of responsibility. It was not something that we were told we were going to be doing."
Losing Faith in the Election Process
"Ever since the 2000 election—and even before—the American people have been losing faith in the belief that their votes were actually counted," said Kucinich. "This recount isn't about who won 39 percent or 36 percent or even 1 percent. It's about establishing whether 100 percent of the voters had 100 percent of their votes counted exactly the way they cast them."
"New Hampshire is in the unique position to address—and, if so determined, [to] rectify—these issues before they escalate into a massive, nationwide suspicion of the process by which Americans elect their president. Based on the controversies surrounding the presidential elections in 2004 and 2000, New Hampshire is in a prime position to investigate possible irregularities and to issue findings for the benefit of the entire nation," Kucinich wrote in his letter.
Under New Hampshire law, the candidate(s) requesting the recount have to pay for it. Howard and Kucinich will foot the bill for the sake of restoring faith in the election process and deterring any fraud in the 2008 elections.
"Without an official recount, the voters of New Hampshire and the rest of the nation will never know whether there are flaws in our electoral system that need to be identified and addressed at this relatively early point in the presidential nominating process," he said.
Recount Integrity Also Questioned
Election-integrity activists stress that chain-of-ballot custody and citizen control and oversight are crucial throughout the election process. Without such checks and balances, the accuracy of a recount could be undermined.
"The only way a recount makes any sense at all in New Hampshire is after an assessment is made of the chain-of-custody issues," writes Harris in "Recount—Is Dennis Kucinich Walking Into a Trap?" published on opednews.com. "If the chain of custody isn't intact, the recount won't be worth a cup of warm spit."
The Power of One
The chain of custody for New Hampshire voting-machine data is ultimately controlled by one private entity. John Silvestro and his private business, LHS Associates, have exclusive programming contracts for all New Hampshire voting machines. The combined total of these machines counted about 81 percent of the New Hampshire primary votes. Silvestro also holds the programming contracts for Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont.
"LHS is not subject to public records requirements, as the government is, at least, not in New Hampshire," writes Harris. "The control over memory-card contents is absolute; when cards malfunction or get lost, LHS brings the replacements."
Breakdown of Checks and Balances
The New Hampshire Ballot Law Commission is entrusted with the responsibility of examining voting machines and devices for computerized casting and counting of ballots. Any voting machine or device that is altered must be re-approved before it is used in any New Hampshire election.
According to New Hampshire Title LXIII Elections, Chapter 656:41, "A machine shall be considered altered if any mechanical or electronic part, hardware, software, or programming has been altered."
Despite knowing there were at least 16 software defects that could cause the optical scanners to fail, the New Hampshire Ballot Law Commission passed a motion approving use of optical machines in New Hampshire elections in a split decision in March 2006. Proponents reasoned that the ballots could always be counted by hand if the machines ever failed.
Although subsequent independent studies, including the Princeton study, confirmed numerous security vulnerabilities, the New Hampshire Ballot Law Commission did not reconvene to approve any upgraded machines prior to Tuesday's primary.
The integrity of America's voting process is indeed in question. The security gaps that have been identified include known unreliability of voting machines and unknown integrity of memory cards prior to the election, potential unsupervised access to voting machines and their memory cards during elections, and the question of chain-of-ballot custody after the election.
What's at stake is not only the New Hampshire primary, but the integrity of America's election process. As it stands, citizen oversight is at best inconsistent throughout the process. It remains to be seen whether the New Hampshire experience will lead to secure procedures and accountability across the country in time to ensure a sound 2008 election.
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