Dave Lindorff: Did Hillary Really Win New Hapmpshire? It's Diebold, Stupid

Just when you thought that the Democrats' hands would be clean as far as primary voting was concerned, here comes the beginning of the circumstantial evidence that they're taking lessons from Bush 2000 and 2004 (and any number of Senate and House races going back to 1998 through 2006. (Look for an update on the exact 52.95% vs 47.05% Cbama-Clinton and Clinton-Obama reversal from hand counted to optical (switchable) machines. Makes me wonder if Rudy did indeed beat Ron Paul.) Besides this on Counterpunch, I've seen the vote reversal on the Agonist which notes that he's got it from Brad Friedman.
Ronald

January 11, 2008
More Questions About Diebold Voting Machines
Did Hillary Really Win New Hampshire?

By DAVE LINDORFF

Could someone have messed with the vote in New Hampshire?

That is what some people are wondering, after looking closely at the totals in the votes for surprise Democratic primary victor Hillary Clinton, and for Barack Obama, who placed instead of winning as all the polls had predicted he would. And thanks to candidate Dennis Kucinich, we are likely to find out. Kucinich today filed a request, and a required $2000 fee, to order up a manual recount of the machine ballots cast in the state.

Polls taken as late as the day before the Tuesday vote showed Obama up by 10 to 15 points over Clinton, whom he had just beaten the week before in Iowa, but when the votes were counted, Clinton ended up beating Obama in New Hampshire 39.4 per cent to 36.8 per cent. In a replay of what happened in Ohio in 2004, exit polling reportedly also showed Obama to be winning the New Hampshire primary.

When that's not what happened, shocked polling firms and surprised pundits, all of whom had been expecting a big Obama win, were left stumbling for explanations for the Hillary comeback from an 8 per cent drubbing in Iowa (even the Clinton campaign, whose own internal polling had predicted her defeat, were at a loss). Explanations ranged from her teary eyed final public appearance before primary day and some sexist heckling she had received, to dark talk about a wave of hidden racism in the voting booth.

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?

If all the votes cast had split the way the hand counts split, Obama would have won New Hampshire by over 10,000 votes, instead of losing to Clinton by about 5500 votes.

"My suspicion is that nothing untoward happened here," says Doug Jones, a professor of computer sciences at the University of Iowa and a member of the board of examiners that approved the use of the same Diebold optical scanning machines in Iowa. "But at the same time, the Diebold machines are vulnerable to viruses that can be spread through the machines by the PCMCIA memory cards, and there are other things that can go wrong too. I'd be much happier if they had a routine random audit procedure in New Hampshire."

A random audit, he says, would involve doing hand counts of some towns' optical scan ballots, and comparing those results with the results of the machine reading of those same ballots, as recorded election night.

While California does conduct such random audits as a matter of course, most states, including New Hampshire, do not. According to the New Hampshire Secretary of State's office, any recount of ballots would have to be requested by a candidate, and would have to be paid for by the candidate making the request.

An official in the press office of Obama's campaign in Chicago, contacted on Wednesday, claimed not to know about the discrepancy between the machine and hand-counted ballots. She said that there was no plan to call for a hand count of machine ballots.

As Prof. Jones notes, requiring a candidate to initiate any hand count makes such hand counts unlikely, since unless the evidence of vote tampering or fraud is overwhelming, such a call would open the candidate to charges of "poor loser."

Kucinich, in making his recount request, resolved that problem.

There is good reason to be suspicious of the results. The counting of the machine totals, in New Hampshire as in all states using the Diebold machines, is handled by a private contract firm, in this case Massachusetts-based LHS Associates, which controls and programs the machines' memory cards. Several studies have demonstrated the ease with which the memory cards in the Accuvote machines can be hacked, with some testers breaking into the system in minutes.

There are, to be sure, alternative quite innocent possible explanations for the discrepancy between the machine and hand votes for Clinton and Obama. All the state's larger towns and cities, like Nashua, Concord and Portsmouth, have gone to voting machines. While there are many small communities that have also opted for machines, it is almost exclusively the smaller towns and villages across the state that have stayed with hand counts-most of them in the more rural northern part of the state. So if Obama did better than Clinton in the small towns, and Clinton did better in the large ones, that could be the answer.

But that explanation flies in the face of logic, historic voting patterns, and most of the post election prognosticating.

If it is true that there was "behind the curtain" racism involved in people saying to pollsters that they were for Obama, while privately voting against him, surely it would be more likely that this would happen in the isolated towns of northern New Hampshire where black people are rarely to be seen. Clinton was also said to have fared better among people with lower incomes-again a demographic that is more prominent in the rural parts of the Granite State. Finally, Obama, in New Hampshire as in Iowa, did better among younger voters, and that is the demographic group that is typically in shorter supply in small towns, where job opportunities are limited. Furthermore, in Iowa, it was in the larger municipalities that Obama fared best, not in the rural towns, so how likely is it that his geographic appeal would be reversed in New Hampshire?

David Scanlan, New Hampshire's deputy secretary of state for elections, whom I contacted Thursday, said that while town election officials are required to do test runs of the Diebold machines in the days before an election, "to make sure that they are reading the ballot markings accurately," and that at that point the machines and the memory cards are sealed until the actual election day, there is no way for his office to independently conduct a post balloting test. The ballot boxes are sealed and the only way they can be opened if for a candidate to request (and pay for) a manual recount, or for a court to order one." Scanlan says that the same is true for the voting machines and the memory cards. While the sealed ballots are retained "for years," however, the memory cards will be back in the hands of the contractor, LHS Associates, in "a few months," to be erased and prepared for use in the general election next November.

Scanlan says that the state legislature is currently considering legislation to provide for routine audits of machines after elections, but that won't help this election cycle.

Scanlan said that because the machines are freestanding, there is no chance of their being hacked from the outside, but critics note that the hacking can be done in advance to the memory cards, which can pass changes to each other like a virus as each is programmed for a particular election.

Jonathan Simon, an attorney and co-founder of the group Election Defense Alliance, says that the vote discrepancies between machine and hand counts in New Hampshire's Democratic primary are troubling, and defy easy explanation.

"The trouble is, whenever you have a surprise result in an election, and it runs counter to the polls, the media always say the problem is the polling, not the counting." But he adds, "The thing is, these things always work in one direction-in favor of the more conservative candidate, and that defies the law of quantum mechanics."

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's newest book is "The Case for Impeachment", co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.

He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com

IPA: Hillary Clinton's Health Plan

It's not surprising that that Clinton is planning once again to stand in the way of reforming our broken health care system. She did so deliberately when she was in power and is doing the same again today and if she's elected. It's no secret that she supported Nixon and Goldwater. From Michael Moore's SICKO we learned how casually and clearly Nixon stood against health care for the middle and poorer classes. It's not surprising that Hillary is following her mentor and true ideological guiding star. The surprising thing is that she hasn't been exposed for who she is and what she stands for. Perhaps the electorate senses that like her husband (and unlike the others?), she's determined to win.
--Ronald
***

Institute for Public Accuracy
915 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
(202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org
___________________________________________________

September 18, 2007

Clinton Health Plan

DAVID HIMMELSTEIN, M.D., david_himmelstein@hms.harvard.edu, http://www.pnhp.org
Himmelstein is associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He said today: "Hillary Clinton is
combining two failed Massachusetts plans: the [former Gov. Michael] Dukakis plan, which fell apart 20 years ago,
and the [Gov. Mitt] Romney plan, which is in the process of falling apart.
"Clinton is advocating the Marie Antoinette approach to health care: 'Let them buy their own coverage.' She is
attempting to force middle class families to buy coverage without making it affordable. Clinton wants to keep the
private insurance industry in the middle of the system." Himmelstein is co-founder of Physicians for a National
Health Program.

QUENTIN YOUNG, M.D., info@pnhp.org, http://www.pnhp.org
Young is national coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program. He said: "It's always ironic to
hear Clinton talk about standing up to the insurance companies. She'd tried to work them into her plan [in the
mid-'90s], which is a large part of why it failed. The biggest insurance companies actually backed her plan for a
time while the smaller ones opposed it."

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167.

NYT: Hillary: USt to stay in Iraq indefinitely --- just like Bush

First read the letters that the Times printed in response to their article where Clinton says the US will stay in Iraq indefinitely.
If we can make it to 2008 without attacking Iran, we'll have to confront all the leading candidates promising to keep us at war for the long haul.
Talk about the power of the (few) big money men in New York.
Ronald



March 17, 2007
Parsing Hillary Clinton on Iraq (5 Letters)

To the Editor:

I read with alarm and dismay that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton stated that if elected president, she would continue a military presence in Iraq, albeit on a smaller scale (“Clinton Says Some G.I.’s in Iraq Would Remain if She Took Office,” front page, March 15).

She justifies this thinking by saying that the United States has “remaining vital national security interests” there, and presumably a complete exit would damage those interests. Senator Clinton goes on to say the remaining troops would not patrol the streets, leaving us in the position of merely observing the sectarian killing.

This was an interview awash in contradictions. Mrs. Clinton correctly believes that the “American people are done with Iraq.” If so, how would a continued, open-ended military presence enable the United States to extricate itself from Iraq?

Would not a continued military presence always raise the possibility of adding tens of thousands of additional troops in the face of unforeseen setbacks? Would not this policy continue this national nightmare?

Charles Apostolou
New York, March 15, 2007

•

To the Editor:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton says that if she is elected president, she would keep a reduced military force in Iraq “to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.” What if most Iraqis would prefer that the United States military leave?

Senator Clinton apparently believes that the president, whoever that person is, can place our military in any sovereign country if doing so serves our interests, as defined by the president. Is this not the Bush doctrine? How well has it served American interests?

Mrs. Clinton supported the Bush doctrine in the run-up to the war and is now embracing that policy as her own. We need leaders with more wisdom.

Arthur Karlin
Chappaqua, N.Y., March 15, 2007

•

To the Editor:

So Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton would keep some United States forces in Iraq. And Senator Barack Obama would do the same?

If I didn’t know better and implicitly trust these Democratic candidates for president, I’d be tempted to say that they are not only hedging their bets on Iraq, but also planning on keeping United States troops in Iraq indefinitely. Sounds a lot like “stay the course,” doesn’t it?

Politicians always try to have it both ways. John Kerry voted for the war before he voted against it. Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war, but now she is against it because she was “misled” and it has been “mismanaged.” But she still envisions keeping “some” American troops in Iraq for peacekeeping.

So can you believe her? Can you believe Mr. Obama? Sure! Just pick whatever conflicting statement from their political repertory that meets your needs.

And hold on to your hats, folks. Because over the next 18 months you are going to hear political double talk from these two the likes of which you’ve never heard before.

Patrick Curry
Irvine, Calif., March 15, 2007

•

To the Editor:

A salute to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for her courage in putting forth a thoughtful strategy for Iraq — one that recognizes reality on the ground, America’s national interests and its responsibilities to stability in the region and to the Kurds after its catastrophic intervention.

The simplistic pandering on both sides and the lack of sophisticated, realistic alternatives have been a disservice to the public’s need for meaningful debate on this critical issue.

Craig Conly
Oakland, Calif., March 15, 2007

•

To the Editor:

According to your article, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton would not try to protect Iraqis from sectarian violence even if it descended into ethnic cleansing. It is comforting to know up front that as president she would do no more to stop genocide in Iraq than the current president is doing in Sudan or the previous one did in Rwanda.

Apparently even though she knows now what she didn’t know then, she still would do nothing.

Let’s have a conversation.

Peter Feinman
Port Chester, N.Y., March 15, 2007
***
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/washington/15clinton.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

March 15, 2007
If Elected ...
Clinton Says Some G.I.’s in Iraq Would Remain
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and PATRICK HEALY

WASHINGTON, March 14 — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton foresees a “remaining military as well as political mission” in Iraq, and says that if elected president, she would keep a reduced military force there to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.

In a half-hour interview on Tuesday in her Senate office, Mrs. Clinton said the scaled-down American military force that she would maintain would stay off the streets in Baghdad and would no longer try to protect Iraqis from sectarian violence — even if it descended into ethnic cleansing.

In outlining how she would handle Iraq as commander in chief, Mrs. Clinton articulated a more nuanced position than the one she has provided at her campaign events, where she has backed the goal of “bringing the troops home.”

She said in the interview that there were “remaining vital national security interests in Iraq” that would require a continuing deployment of American troops.

The United States’ security would be undermined if parts of Iraq turned into a failed state “that serves as a petri dish for insurgents and Al Qaeda,” she said. “It is right in the heart of the oil region,” she said. “It is directly in opposition to our interests, to the interests of regimes, to Israel’s interests.”

“So it will be up to me to try to figure out how to protect those national security interests and continue to take our troops out of this urban warfare, which I think is a loser,” Mrs. Clinton added. She declined to estimate the number of American troops she would keep in Iraq, saying she would draw on the advice of military officers.

Mrs. Clinton’s plans carry some political risk. Although she has been extremely critical of the Bush administration’s handling of the war, some liberal Democrats are deeply suspicious of her intentions on Iraq, given that she voted in 2002 to authorize the use of force there and, unlike some of her rivals for the Democratic nomination, has not apologized for having done so.

Senator Clinton’s proposal is also likely to stir up debate among military specialists. Some counterinsurgency experts say the plan is unrealistic because Iraqis are unlikely to provide useful tips about Al Qaeda if American troops end their efforts to protect Iraqi neighborhoods.

But a former Pentagon official argued that such an approach would minimize American casualties and thus make it easier politically to sustain a long-term military presence that might prevent the fighting from spreading throughout the region.

Mrs. Clinton has said she would vote for a proposed Democratic resolution on Iraq now being debated on the floor of the Senate, which sets a goal of withdrawing combat forces by March 31, 2008. Asked if her plan was consistent with the resolution, Mrs. Clinton and her advisers said it was, noting that the resolution also called for “a limited number” of troops to stay in Iraq to protect the American Embassy and other personnel, train and equip Iraqi forces, and conduct “targeted counterterrorism operations.”

(Senator Barack Obama, a rival of Mrs. Clinton, has said that if elected president, he might keep a small number of troops in Iraq.)

With many Democratic primary voters favoring a total withdrawal, Senator Clinton appears to be trying to balance her political interests with the need to retain some flexibility. Like other Democratic candidates, she has called for engaging Iran and Syria in talks and called on President Bush to reverse his troop buildup.

But while Mrs. Clinton has criticized Mr. Bush’s troop reinforcements as an escalation of war, she said in the interview, “We’re doing it, and it’s unlikely we can stop it.”

“I’m going to root for it if it has any chance of success,” she said of Mr. Bush’s plan, “but I think it’s more likely that the anti-American violence and sectarian violence just moves from place to place to place, like the old Whac a Mole. Clear some neighborhoods in Baghdad, then face Ramadi. Clear Ramadi, then maybe it’s back in Falluja.”

Mrs. Clinton made it clear that she believed the next president is likely to face an Iraq that is still plagued by sectarian fighting and occupied by a sizable number of American troops. The likely problems, she said, include continued political disagreements in Baghdad, die-hard Sunni insurgents, Al Qaeda operatives, Turkish anxiety over the Kurds and the effort to “prevent Iran from crossing the border and having too much influence inside of Iraq.”

“The choices that one would face are neither good nor unlimited,” she said. “And from the vantage point of where I sit now, I can tell you, in the absence of a very vigorous diplomatic effort on the political front and on the regional and international front, I think it is unlikely there will be a stable situation that will be inherited.”

On the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly vowed to bring the war to a close if the fighting were still going on when she took office as president. “If we in Congress don’t end this war before January 2009, as president, I will,” she has said.

In the interview, she suggested that it was likely that the fighting among the Iraqis would continue for some time. In broad terms, her strategy is to abandon the American military effort to stop the sectarian violence and to focus instead on trying to prevent the strife from spreading throughout the region by shrinking and rearranging American troop deployments within Iraq.

The idea of repositioning American forces to minimize American casualties, discourage Iranian, Syrian and Turkish intervention, and forestall the Kurds’ declaring independence is not a new one. It has been advocated by Dov S. Zakheim, who served as the Pentagon’s comptroller under former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Mr. Zakheim has estimated that no more than 75,000 troops would be required, compared to the approximately 160,000 troops the United States will have in Iraq when the additional brigades in Mr. Bush’s plan are deployed.

While Mrs. Clinton declined to estimate the size of a residual American troop presence, she indicated that troops might be based north of Baghdad and in western Anbar Province.

“It would be far fewer troops,” she said. “But what we can do is to almost take a line sort of north of — between Baghdad and Kirkuk, and basically put our troops into that region, the ones that are going to remain for our antiterrorism mission, for our northern support mission, for our ability to respond to the Iranians, and to continue to provide support, if called for, for the Iraqis.”

Mrs. Clinton described a mission with serious constraints.

“We would not be doing patrols,” she added. “We would not be kicking in doors. We would not be trying to insert ourselves in the middle between the various Shiite and Sunni factions. I do not think that’s a smart or achievable mission for American forces.”

One question raised by counterinsurgency experts is whether the more limited military mission Mrs. Clinton is advocating would lead to a further escalation in the sectarian fighting, because it would shift the entire burden for protecting civilians to the nascent Iraqi Security Forces. A National Intelligence Estimate issued in January said those forces would be hard-pressed to take on significantly increased responsibilities in the next 12 to 18 months.

“Coalition capabilities, including force levels, resources and operations, remain an essential stabilizing element in Iraq,” the estimate noted, referring to the American-led forces.

Mrs. Clinton said the intelligence estimate was based on a “faulty premise” because it did not take into account the sort of “phased redeployment” plan she was advocating. But she acknowledged that under her strategy American troops would remain virtual bystanders if Shiites and Sunnis killed each other in sectarian attacks. “That may be inevitable,” she said. “And it certainly may be the only way to concentrate the attention of the parties.”

Asked if Americans would endure having troops in Iraq who do nothing to stop sectarian attacks there, she replied: “Look, I think the American people are done with Iraq. I think they are at a point where, whether they thought it was a good idea or not, they have seen misjudgment and blunder after blunder, and their attitude is, What is this getting us? What is this doing for us?”

“No one wants to sit by and see mass killing,” she added. “It’s going on every day! Thousands of people are dying every month in Iraq. Our presence there is not stopping it. And there is no potential opportunity I can imagine where it could. This is an Iraqi problem; we cannot save the Iraqis from themselves. If we had a different attitude going in there, if we had stopped the looting immediately, if we had asserted our authority — you can go down the lines, if, if, if — ”

Julie's letter to Senator Hillary R. Clinton on Iran

February 15, 2997

Julie wrote to Senator Hillary R. Clinton:

I was shocked to learn that you regard Iran's nuclear
>> energy program as an "existential threat" to the
>> United States. The U.S. signed the non-proliferation
>> treaty that gives Iran the right to develop nuclear
>> energy, so clearly the notion that such research is a
>> threat to us is a new one in U.S. policy circles.
>>
>> It is only Israel that until now has claimed an
>> "existential" fear of Iran developing nuclear weapons.
>> It is unclear to me why Israel is more worried about
>> Iran than Pakistan, when Iran hasn't invaded another
>> country in over two centuries. The U.S. has
>> encouraged both Pakistan and India to go nuclear.
>> Even in the unlikely event that Iran were to violate
>> the NPT successfully under the NPT inspections regime,
>> and Israel were to lose its nuclear monopoly in the
>> area, in what way would the outcome be anything but a
>> stalemate?--no more of an "existential threat" than
>> the one posed by the balance of nuclear power between
>> the U.S. and Russia, India and Pakistan, etc.
>>
>> Your willingness to threaten a country that does not
>> pose a serious threat to the U.S. with genocidal
>> nuclear annihilation is, to say the least, extremely
>> troubling. People's most fundamental human right is
>> the right to their own lives. The U.S. obliged
>> ourselves by signing the Geneva Conventions not to
>> arbitrarily threaten people because of their
>> nationality, and not to carry out genocidal assaults
>> on civilians or the infrastructure that supports their
>> day-to-day lives. You are currently sworn to uphold
>> the U.S. Constitution, which includes all our treaty
>> obligations.
>>
>> Senator Clinton, you were elected to represent the
>> people of New York and to uphold the U.S.
>> constitution. I am a Democratic Party District Leader
>> in Yonkers. Until your position vis a vis Iran
>> returns to respect for human rights and international
>> law, and against "pre-emptive" (i.e. aggressive) war,
>> I will be obliged to oppose your candidacy for higher
>> office.

Sincerely,
Julie ...