Manchester Ward 5

A lot of noise is being made about the discrepancies between the hand and machine counts in Manchester's Ward 5. Let's clear things up.

First, the chief election official in Ward 5 is Jeff Michelsen. Michelsen is perhaps the most belligerently anti-Bush conspiracy theorist active in Manchester politics today. This guy makes Bev Harris look like the Warren Commission.

Second, the discrepancy has been traced to a transcription error:

The widest variations so far were in Manchester's Ward 5. Vote counters there mistakenly transposed write-in votes for vice president as votes for presidential candidate. As a result, all major candidates lost votes. Kucinich lost three in the ward and has a total of 20 votes there. Hillary Clinton lost 64 with a new total of 619; John Edwards lost 38 and has 217 votes; Barack Obama lost 39 and has 365, and Bill Richardson lost seven, leaving him 39.

I've cited this in a few topics this morning so far. :)

I forgot to include it:

http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Primary+recount+continues+with+minor+changes&articleId=ad21f73a-f6e4-4f50-864c-2e417e08cdf6

for another office as regular votes for a major candidate?

And, even if that is possible---how would we have known about an 11% disparity in the numbers had the recount not taken place? And, in how many other Wards did this occur?

It's not clear from the article whether the "vote counters" are people or machines. Either way, it is interesting the sort of things that turn up when you do a recount. We really should audit part of every election.

I wasn't it for the vote to change. I just think there should be automatic recounts where machines are involved. So it's all good in NH.

did the transposing are people or machines? I'm still trying to understand how much of NH's system is automated and where the interfaces between humans and machines are, as it's so different from how it's done in my state. Do the machine-counted precincts have the optiscan machines available at each polling place? It's okay if you don't know; I was just curious.

You fill out a paper with a marker and you personally put it in the scanner. The paper ballot is then kept in case of a recount.

fuzzy on how/where this transposition error took place -- was it a software/reading glitch in the machine, or did a human mis-read a column when results from precincts were tallied? The SOS keeps saying the machines aren't connected, so how in the heck are they adding things up statewide?

...the memory cards are removed from the readers and taken to the county BOE, where they are inserted into a central tabulator.

Special marker, mark the oval, then go slide it through the scanner. This is the first time I've voted with anything but a pencil and paper ballot, so progress has finally come to NH in 2008. :)

if it's human error, at a rate of 10%, we have some pretty poor counters. And, since when are Vice-presidential candidates on a primary ballot? :shrug:

unless the ballots for Ward 5 are different or something screwy like that. You never know. Murphy is the God of elections, which is why it's better to keep things as simple as possible.

Are you that lacking on history, ratboy? This is how VPs used to run, and while no one pays a bit of attention to it anymore, they still have a right to do so. It is an anachronism, more vanity campaign kinda thing to get themselves some popularity. Kinda parallel to Kucinich's presidential aspirations, but I digress.

and a VP slot is voted upon in New Hampshire...but, that's not true for all states. Some candidate named "Stebbins" won that primary race. Therefore, what we are being told, troll, is that the machines counted the votes, and then either the machines added a write in for VP to the presidential total of that candidate (which doesn't make any sense)---or that some idiot working the polls in Manchester---down the line---counted a write-in vote for "Hillary Clinton" (or other candidates) as VP as a vote for "Hillary Clinton" for POTUS.

That has to be some damned stupid fuck-ups who would do that. Why write in a vote when the name is on the freaking ballot?

That you jump onto the ones that are most improbable and most hysterical is hardly surrpising, given your track record around here.

Name more probable explanations, Narchead. And, if this explanation is correct, then when the SOS of New Hampshire gives the results of the write-ins for VP, the numbers for each should equal the discrepancies...right?

Bugs happen, and one that involves write-in candidates would be more likely to go undetected because the code might not be as thoroughly tested as it should. Not all states have VP primaries. If the programmer(s) carelessly cut and pasted the "presidential race" code over to "vice-presidential race" and didn't change everything, it could well be adding the write-in totals from the VP race to the Presidential totals. It could even be that this bug was discovered partway through burning the memory cards and LHS believes it sent out patches/updated cards but not everyone got updated.

Although I appreciate the more mature response than rateyes has been able to muster so far, it still comes down to the same end. That was a pretty long line of "what ifs" and "coulds" strung together there. Believe me, I know my state has a fair share of peculiarities, but I think we have a handle on how to manage the voting process. Like I said before, the X factor is invariably the voters themselves;




Hopefully this article (and the included video) will shed some more light on the process for the non-NH people, as it touches on the "chain of ownership" and the people who are spending the week doing the actual counting.

Of course it's speculation, since the article didn't say how the transposition occurred.

And I'm not sure the SOS is correct in underlined sentence the article quoted above. Unless the software is pretty dumb, a write-in vote and a filled-in oval for Edwards should count as one vote instead of an over-vote. Clearly there's no state law keeping the human counters from doing that. If the machine had counted the ballot as an over-vote, Edwards wouldn't have gotten either "vote" from the ballot. The discrepancy they found is that Edwards (and others) somehow got both -- but apparently only when Edwards was a write-in in the VP race.

It's just screwy. I'm hoping there will be future newspaper articles with more detailed explanations of the transposition error.

The ones who write in the name of a candidate already on the ballot are just the tip of the iceberg. I love the ones who write comments next to candidates names ("bitch", "asshole", "communist", "nazi"). Everybody should watch a hand count of Manchester ballots at least once in their political lifetime.

if the first count was machine read. First--if the first vote was machine read, how does the machine read more ballots than exist? Does the machine read some ballots twice...or do they, on their own, when a write in vote for a VP switch that vote to a vote for a major candidate? If so, we really have some major programming problems with the machines.

Second, if the counters were human, then they have to be fucking idiots to look at a ballot that contains a WRITE IN for a VP candidate and count it as a MARK for a POTUS candidate.

my thoughts on your questions

1. Candidates for VP? Sounds weird to me, but maybe it's a local thing.

2. "How does the machine read more ballots than exist?" I can think of two ways -- the poll-workers fed a batch of ballots through twice (this could be double-checked by recounting a down-ticket race) after a machine breakdown or there's a software bug that double-counts some ballots or miscounts write-ins from the VP column.

3. Poll-workers are taking the machine totals at the precinct level and transferring them up the chain via some method where transposition occurred -- but if this happened, how on Earth did the VP and the Presidential votes get added? I could see reading the wrong column, but adding them doesn't make sense. Are we supposed to think that the Presidential write-in columns were all zeroes, and that all the Presidential candidates got write-in votes in the VP races and that the poll-workers mistakenly added the VP write-ins to the Presidential rate totals? :shrug: Seems pretty Goldbergian.

http://concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080118/FRONTPAGE/801180340

As for how the counts are off at the moment, I'm not quite sure. But in that article there is a section about anomalies, citing examples such as one voter who drew a little arrow next to Clinton's name rater than fill in the oval. One can never discount the many ways that people can find to screw things up.

Overall though, the post-election catcalls about election faud that swiped an obama victory have proven to be quite unfounded.

The comments by the SoS about the blogger were interesting too.

the voting instructions on the ballot are, can you? I'm interested in what the sentence above the "opposite the write in line, like this o" says.

Looking at the SOS website, I see that there were some write-in votes for Republican Presidential candidates in the Democratic primary. Is that sort of thing allowed if you want to vote for downballot Dem candidates?

were the Presidential and VP races, yet there were a smattering of write-ins for R candidates. I guess some folks showed up at their usual polling places and just didn't want to go somewhere else so they wrote in the candidate they really wanted?? Does that count? :shrug:

Taking a Democratic ballot and writing in a Republican may be seen by some small-minded people as a "protest" of some sort. :shrug:

BTW, the same applies to the Republican totals - you will see Democratic votes there - I dunno why people do that.

Edit: it's also possible that some people don't know or don't want to say "I'll take a Democratic ballot" in front of their peers because there seemed to be a lot of Democratic votes on the Republican side for some reason (like 5000 total IIRC)

Trapped independents.

In NH, independents can take a Democratic or a Republican ballot. When they take a party ballot, they are considered to have changed their party affiliation to that party. As they leave the polls, they can fill out a card and return to independent status. Unfortunately, some people have brain farts and forget to fill out the card. So, someone who took a Dem ballot to vote in the 1st CD primary in 2006 for a Democratic candidate, but who loves Ron Paul or John McCain, could find themselves trapped into Dem registration, without having realized it until they went to the polls.

I saw this happen several times at Ward 2. In 2006, Jim Craig, a state rep from Ward 2, ran for Congress in the Democratic primary. A lot of his neighbors were independents who took a ballot to support him. Some of these people wanted to vote for McCain, but were unaware that they had become Dems a year and a half ago.

I value my "undeclared" status as much as any freedom in this country so the first thing I do once voting is ask "where do I go to re-register as undeclared?" I was not aware that not re-registering as undeclared would force you to take a ballot from the party you last voted for though. Interesting...

(if the news story is true) is that the dumbass counters (had to be more than one), added the total write=ins for VP to the POTUS column. That means, then, when the corrections are made the difference between the corrected POTUS numbers and the previous numbers should equal the amount of write-in votes that candidate received for VP.

Any site showing the VP numbers in Ward 5?

Where did you get the info about a transcription error?

The widest variations so far were in Manchester's Ward 5. Vote counters there mistakenly transposed write-in votes for vice president as votes for presidential candidate.

I interpreted this to mean that at some point in the tallying, one of the elderly and sleep deprived ballot clerks reported a number from the VP count where he or she shold have used a number from the presidential side. I've seen goofy stuff like this happen in recounts i the past. The biggest errors usually involve putting the wrong numbers on the wrong sheet. When you have 80 y/o clerks working at 1 AM, things have a way of getting messed up.

running one hell of a healthy write-in campaign for VP. I'm surprised there would be that much interest in the race, since it's essentially meaningless. It must be a big status thing, locally.

Nobody ever seriously campaigns for VP. Usually, whatever wingnut whose name is first on the ballot or is more pronouncable is the one who wins.

A lot of people, however, have some fun with the line. Some people write in their friend's name (I received a VP vote in Ward 2, courtesy of a local Democratic activist friend), while others write in the name of a favorite local politician. A lot of people use it as a chance to give a shout-out to a favorite national figure (Colin Powell and Mario Cuomo lways pulled a lot of VP votes), or to express their second choice for president. In 2004, John Edwards received a ton of VP votes from Kerry, Dean, Clark, and Lieberman supporters who liked the guy.

Personally, I wrote in Joe Biden for VP.

But in elections past I've written in the "Hemp Lady" for VP. Not even sure if she's still alive (was easily in her 60's back in the late 1990's), and I cannot recall her real name offhand but she used to come up to Plymouth State every election year and talk about the reformation of marijuana laws and hand out pot leaft-emblazoned campaign buttons. She was a blast. :)

I was annoyed that it was even there as I was worried that not voting there might mess up my Presidential vote. I guess that feeling was misplaced, but it does give me a sense of how many feel their vote wont count.

One thing that needs clarifying: 'vote counters' could refer to humans or machines. IOW, did the humans find the machine error, or did the recounters screw up the first time and get it right later?

We can take nothing for granted in a situation like this. Assumptions and technology are a potentially lethal mix.

Clinton, Obama, and Richardson are all down by few votes, Edwards up by a few, everyone else unchanged.

When there are small shifts (half a dozen votes or so), it is usually the result of ballots that didn't run through the machine properly. Sometimes, two ballots will get stuck together in the machine and feed through together. When the ballots are hand counted, the human counters can pull them apart and make sure the vote is accurately counted. These sorts of things are usually spread across the candidates, so a particular candidate isn't hurt more than another.

In last November's Manchester city elections, it rained cats and dogs most of the day. A lot of people dripped all over their ballot, so there were a lot that didn't feed properly. Some of these were taken care of as the ballot clerks were verifying things on election night, and others were straightened out during the two recounts. In the recount, the "new" votes were a wash, with each candidate picking up two or three votes.

I'm seeing tiny shifts in Manchester 3, 4, 10, 11 and Merrimack. Paper and moisture! Always a fun combination.