from the detroit business wire
DETROIT–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, the most outspoken advocate in the Presidential field and in Congress for election integrity, paper-ballot elections, and campaign finance reform, has sent a letter to the New Hampshire Secretary of State asking for a recount of Tuesday’s election because of “unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots.”
“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,” Kucinich stressed in a letter to Secretary of State William M. Gardner. But, “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.”
He added, “Ever since the 2000 election – and even before – the American people have been losing faith in the belief that their votes were actually counted. This recount isn’t about who won 39% of 36% or even 1%. It’s about establishing whether 100% of the voters had 100% of their votes counted exactly the way they cast them.”
Kucinich, who drew about 1.4% of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote, wrote, “This is not about my candidacy or any other individual candidacy. It is about the integrity of the election process.”
This is excellent news. This matter needs to be settled. Anyone with any common sense would agree we should verify the vote when the results are wildly off all predictions by every pollster that worked NH.
It’s what any good detective would do.
We’re lucky to have a guy like that on our side. Thank goodness!!!
Notice it’s Dennis, not BO, JE, HC or even Dr. RP who is standing up the integrity of our elections. I say that’s one more reason to support him!
Go Dennis!
http://dennis4president.com
Vote your conscience, choose peace!
January 11, 2008
Recount – Is Dennis Kucinich walking into a trap?
By Bev Harris
The election integrity community is abuzz with news that candidate Dennis Kucinich will ask for a recount in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul fans have been pushing him to recount as well. Careful.
NEW HAMPSHIRE ELECTION INTEGRITY ADVOCATE NANCY TOBI IS CORRECT:
“We have no control over the ballot chain of custody and we have learned the pain from the 2004 Nader recount, in which only 11 districts were counted, chosen by a highly questionable person, and then nothing showed up. Now all we hear is how the Nader recount validated the machines.”
As Tobi says, “A candidate asking for a recount may well be a tool used to ‘prove’ everything was okay and then that candidate will be further discredited.”
I’ll go further than that. 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. If the chain of custody isn’t intact the recount won’t be worth a cup of warm spit.
TOBI:
“This is high stakes.
“You do not walk into a battle ground not knowing where the snipers are, just because you were invited. Strategically, going into something like this where you have NO CONTROL is foolishness.
“And I say this as one of the strongest recount proponents of former times. Things I have come to learn and understand have changed my mind. The recount is someone else’s game, not ours.
“In the recount, we have no control, and we have already lost 48 long hours of ballot chain of custody oversight.
“We need citizen control and oversight. This is not going to come from the recount. If the election was rigged…don’t you think the riggers would have a backup Plan B for a rigged recount, knowing how easy it is to get a recount in NH?
No. It is time to take control. “
BLACK BOX VOTING:
The following is excerpted from our New Hampshire election protection information published in November 2007:
quote:
Knowing that the greatest opportunities for election fraud are with insiders, this tells us something about what to examine first. If you are a person with inside access in New Hampshire, because any candidate can ask to recount any location, if you plan to manipulate the election you’ll want to make sure you can achieve ballot substitution, ballot removal, or ballot stuffing. You need a strategy just in case someone asks for a hand count.
WHAT’S THE POINT OF A RECOUNT IF THE CANDIDATE DOESN’T EVEN KNOW…
IMMEDIATE CONCERNS
BALLOT CHAIN OF CUSTODY WAR STORIES
Patriot Richard Hayes Phillips, while writing his brilliant upcoming book “Witness to a Crime,” uncovered evidence that an Ohio County took delivery on 10,000 off-the-books ballots in 2004.
Employees for the Diebold ballot printing plant slipped us financials showing that Diebold was printing 25% more ballots than ordered. This could be handy: If a governmental entity doesn’t take official delivery on ballots, Plan B can sit at a print house somewhere, on private property and absent from either government bookkeeping or public records.
CONVICTED FELONS
The Diebold ballot printing plant at the time we got records on the overages, was being run by a convicted felon who had spent four years in prison on a narcotics trafficking charge. No, not New Hampshire’s voting machine programming exec Ken Hajjar, who cut a plea deal in 1990 for his role in cocaine distribution. This was another convicted felon, John Elder, who ran the Diebold ballot printing plant; he’s now an elections consultant.
We have so far been unable to learn whether New Hampshire has convicted felons printing their ballots; we’ve got a records request in on this. New Hampshire officials like to say “The state prints the ballots” but they sure aren’t printed in Secretary of State Bill Gardner’s office.
Frank S., one of the new breed of citizens jumping in to take back control of our elections, took the initiative on his own to help today by spending several hours trying to find the ballot printer in NH. It may be that convicted felons print the ballots: Frank turned up evidence that one state-paid printing vendor is NHCI – New Hampshire Correctional Industries, a prison-based printing outfit.
New Hampshire Correctional Industries is a job training program for inmates. After they get out of prison they have a skill! I’m not sure we want a bunch of ex-convicts running around in New Hampshire with ballot printing expertise, so I hope a different ballot printing vendor will show up.
Any candidate seeking a recount needs to know this stuff.
IDENTIFY NARROW SPOTS IN THE PIPELINE
What is the smallest number of people with access, and at what points does centralization of access occur?
WHERE HAVE THE BALLOTS BEEN DURING THE LAST 48 HOURS
If there’s going to be a recount of this magnitude, we need to know whether checks and balances have been followed. Let me give you an example of what I mean: In San Mateo County, California, citizen Brent Turner asked for ballot chain of custody records for 2007; a six-week gap in the access logs was revealed in the documents.
SHOULD CANDIDATES RECOUNT NEW HAMPSHIRE?
In concept I love the idea, but as it currently stands, it makes me queasy. They’re walking into this blind about the details that make or break the integrity of the process.
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD
Tobi calls for doing a real investigation in order to take corrective action by November. I’m not sure about that. New Hampshire had hearings on the hackable Diebold optical scan machines, and didn’t take any action to mitigate the risks.
New Hampshire knew it was running elections on machines that can’t be trusted. And today, thanks to the efforts of two more citizen volunteers, I learned that the New Hampshire Secretary of State knew about the narcotics trafficking conviction of Ken Hajjar, yet still authorized LHS to code every memory card in New Hampshire.
Harri Hursti himself testified in New Hampshire in Sept. 2007, urging them to disconnect the wiring allowing reprogramming of the memory card through the modem port. New Hampshire took no action.
New Hampshire didn’t take even the half-step actions other states used to beef up voting machine security.
Maybe there are better ways to skin this cat.
THE IDEA OF A RECOUNT STILL INTRIGUES ME BUT…
At this moment I can’t think of a way to offset the chain of custody unknowns. The last thing we want is a recount that doesn’t answer our questions, or raises new suspicions that aren’t answered.
There must be a way. It’s been a long day. Let me think on that.
Authors Website: http://www.blackboxvoting.org
Authors Bio: Bev Harris is executive director of Black Box Voting, Inc. an advocacy group committed to restoring citizen oversight to elections.
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sigh. thanks, Fullerg. Another day of depression, I guess. The bottom line seems to be that recounts don’t mean anything without integrity in the chain of custody. And voting results that are wildly off of every poll prediction don’t mean anything because people lie to them. And if you ask for a recount, you’re some sort of sore loser or spoiler.
and private companies count our votes with no checks and balances. And 7 years after the most obvious abberation of the process, nothing has changed.
so who is really going to believe that in november, the will of the people will win?
I predicted over the summer: Guliani and Hillary are the chosen candidates and Guliani will win by a 1-2percent margin. And it will be official: organized criminals run our country.
The bottom line is, as a few of us have been screaming for years, our election system needs a dramatic overhaul, and that’s only going to happen when many more people start raising the volume, AND passing legislation – incremental, if necessary, to take back our vote.
Our vote has been hackable for many years. We’re only now just trying to catch up.
What we really need are for ballots to be hand-counted before they leave the precincts, and then the hand counts need to be checked against the machine counts BEFORE they are summed in aggregate.
I see four distinct possibilities re NH:
What scares me is how hard it would be to tell #1 from #3.
If you aren’t on some voting integrity lists now, please join up. There are many places to go. Start at http://www.verifiedvoting.org and check for an organization in your state.
Sorry – I said four possibilities – the fourth is that while the mistake happened innocently, people may now change ballots to make the mistake stick.
Is Kucinich a sponsor of Rush Holt’s legislation?
He was a sponsor of Holt’s former legislation.
The new bill hasn’t been introduced yet, so there’s no listing showing cosponsors yet in Thomas.
From Connecticut Bob, we have this interview with Kucinich on the night of the New Hampshire Primary:
On the New Hampshire Secretary of State Web site, there’s a link to the REPUBLICAN primary recount request, but no acknowledgement of Kucinich’s request.
I hope he doesn’t drop that ball here. That would be disaster!
http://www.dennis4president.com/go/homepage-items/help-defend-the-integrity-of-our-voting-system/
Pony up!