Friday, January 18, 2008

Huge disparities between votes cast on Diebold electronic voting machines and actual hand counted tallies are emerging during the New Hampshire recount, with Hillary Clinton gaining the most from over a hundred unaccounted for votes in one Manchester Ward.

The recount in Manchester's Ward 5 revealed a disparity whereby establishment candidates received over a hundred 'black hole' votes between them that could not be tallied during the hand count.

Diebold Result Hand Count

CLINTON --683   Hand Count -619

EDWARDS --255  Hand Count - 217

OBAMA --404      Hand Count 365

At the moment there is no indication of where these extra votes came from, but the figures again cast the accuracy of Diebold voting machines into severe doubt and provide further evidence of the need for a return to hand counted paper ballots only in all federal elections.

Brad Friedman at The Brad Blog continues to provide great coverage of the recount, unlike New Hampshire's foremost news outlet WMUR, whose "only source seems to be whatever (New Hampshire Secretary of State) Gardner tells them," according to Friedman.

In addition, 550 ballots in Stratham were not read by the Diebold machines at all and were rejected as blank ballots.

Voting Rights attorney John Bonifaz also told Friedman of his deep concerns about the transparency of both the initial election as well as the recount.

"I'm very concerned that this is not a fully transparent process that is happening there," he said.

Diebold memory cards used in New Hampshire, which have been proven to be vulnerable to hacking and could easily be used to steal an election, are "missing" according to state officials.

Bonifaz, "Says he was told by Secretary of State William Gardner that his office doesn't get involved in tracking what happens to those memory cards. Some have reportedly been returned to LHS, and may have had their memory erased already," reports Friedman.

"When you have a private company counting 80% of the votes, and you later learn that the memory cards are unaccounted for, you have a serious question about the transparency and accountability in that process," Bonifaz said.

Federal law mandates that all materials from elections be preserved for 22 months thereafter, so if the memory cards have been wiped then LHS Associates, who it was revealed last week had hired a narcotics trafficker to a high-level executive position, would be facing criminal charges.

In another shocking development, vote fraud expert Bev Harris witnessed first hand that a majority of ballot boxes had 8 inch slits in their side. Election Defense Alliance's Sally Castleman followed the boxes back to the ballot vault and also noticed the cuts. Read Bev's report here.

www.prisonplanet.com/articles/january2008/011808_diebold_disparities.htm