There has been a very interesting turn of events concerning the results of the New Hampshire Primary, where Presidential Candidate Hilary Clinton defied the odds and beat Senator Barack Obama. Congressman Dennis Kucinich has requested a statewide recount of the election results, and is calling for a manual count of all of the ballots cast in the Primary.The reason for this request is multi-fold: Polling data taken prior to the primary projected a sizable victory for Obama prior to the actual voting, and exit polls (which are traditionally representative of the actual results) also favored Obama. In fact, of all the candidates on the Democratic side, the only candidate whose actual results differed significantly from the exit poll data was Hilary Clinton, who pulled in 9% more support than exit polls indicated.
Also, a preliminary examination of the results by the Election Defense Alliance, a non-profit organization that works to uphold the validity and fairness of American elections, has raised some questions regarding the consistency and uniformity of the results in NH. While all of the votes were cast on paper ballots, a mixture of hand counting and optical scanning using Diebold machines were used to tally the results. It appears that the validity of the voting results obtained using the optical scanning may have been either skewed or misreported in Clinton's favor.
Bruce O'Dell, who is responsible for data analysis at the E.D.A., had this to say about their findings:
Theron Horton and I have confirmed that based on the official results on the New Hampshire Secretary of State web site, there is a remarkable relationship between Obama and Clinton votes, when you look at votes tabulated by op-scan versus votes tabulated by hand:
Clinton Optical scan 52.95%
Obama Optical scan 47.05%
Clinton Hand-counted 47.05%
Obama Hand-counted 52.95%
The percentages appear to be swapped. This seems highly unusual.
Here's another interesting tidbit that the data points out, of all the candidates, the ONLY person who gained support when comparing the optical scans against the hand counted ballots was....Hilary Clinton. Hmmm...
In any event, Kucinich has already put up the money necessary to start the recount, so we'll see how things develop in the next few days/weeks. Things should get pretty interesting in the Granite State.
I'm not saying I'm just saying,
O
