After Hillary Clinton’s surprise victory in New Hampshire, the web was alive with accusations of election fraud. In any election, there are always a few disgruntled people, who will cry “fraud” if their favorite candidate loses, but this was more than that. The topic of US election fraud has been bubbling through the Internet for some time now, driven to some extent by the fact that many Democrats have no doubt that George W Bush stole the 2000 elections and some harbor beliefs that there was fraud in 2004, in Ohio, the state that swung that election to Bush.

Add to that a rash of recent articles casting doubt on voting machines, such as:

How to Rig a Touch Screen Voting Machine
Texas: Voting System Allows “Corrections”
Wanna Change Votes in Ohio? Use a PDA and a Magnet, etc.

Throw in a little bit of court testimony on YouTube by a programmer alleging that he was asked to rig voting machines in Florida and you have sufficient conditions for election paranoia. All you then need is an election where the polls and the results disagreed, as in New Hampshire, and vote rigging seems like a plausible explanation.

The New Hampshire Voting Machines

In New Hampshire, in the areas where the totals were reckoned by hand-counting, Obama came out ahead by about 3 percent and in the areas where counting was electronic, Clinton won by about 3 percent. In total about 80 percent of the votes were tallied electronically. There was no similar disparity in the Republican contest and, indeed the polls got the Republican result about right.

In truth though, this proves nothing, because electronic counting machines are used in areas of denser population, in towns where voter opinion is often a little different than in sparsely populated areas.

Luckily there’s no need to speculate, because Democratic candidate, Dennis Kucinich and Republican candidate, Albert Howard of Michigan are both demanding (and paying for) a recount. Any recount will be completely by hand, will take two weeks and will be indisputable.

If you can’t wait for the result of that, then read this balanced and interesting post by a statistician. What happened in New Hampshire? The figures seem to suggest that there actually is “something rotten in the State of Denmark”.

That’s democracy for you. It isn’t who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes that counts.