Left Coast Views
columnist: William Westmiller

Topic: Ron Paul
Ron Paul Was Robbed - Queen Elizabeth Did It!

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It was all a secret plot to maintain the British drug trade. The American traitors used Black Boxes to eliminate all the votes for Ron Paul. Right.

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by William Westmiller
(Libertarian)
Friday, January 11, 2008

I really hate to mock those who are intent on finding a conspiracy behind every tragedy. I'm sure they are well intentioned, motivated by good causes, and that they are simply trying to put a face on those they consider to be nefarious "bad actors" who are trying to influence every international event. But, seriously, Ron Paul lost the New Hampshire Primary because of manipulation by vote counting machines?

The fact is that Paul had 2.001% more votes among hand-counted ballots than he did from optical scanners. If all of the presumed "errors" were "corrected," he would have had 7.924% of the vote, rather than the actual 7.843% tabulation. However, there's no evidence that there were any vote tabulation errors at all.

Smaller counties in New Hampshire are happy to manually count ballots; they also tend to be more religious and conservative. That might explain why John McCain (2.874%) and Mike Huckabee (2.646%) also had higher vote percentages in those small counties, well above any Ron Paul vote "discrepancy."

Do the people counting, recording, and reporting the vote make mistakes? Of course. In Sutton County, a poll worker entered zero for Ron Paul, rather than the 31 votes he received. When the totals were tabulated, there was an obvious error, which was immediately corrected by County Clerk Jennifer Call. All counties have similar "check-sums" that they use to validate the reported results. Sutton does not use Diebold machines.

There are legitimate concerns about "black box" voting machines. People like Beverly Harris of Seattle are to be commended for pointing out some technical problems. But the New Hampshire equipment wasn't "black box", it was Diebold optical scanning. There is a paper record of the actual ballot, not just a few electrons floating around, which might be subject to hacking. Almost every state has abandoned the all-electronic slates that fail to preserve a physical record of individual ballots. Serious academic studies have shown that machine counts are at least twice as accurate as hand counts.

Undoubtedly, there are "bad actors" who have manipulated voting results in the past and may try to do so in the future. Caution is a virtue practiced by almost every state election official. Vote fraud is a felony. Most allegations of "manipulation" involve discretionary administrative decisions about purging registration rolls or local "indiscretion" about the application of their election laws. Every state has some provision for recounts and maintains (for various periods) all the physical records. However, there has to be serious evidence of fraud that would actually effect the outcome of an election before recounts are even considered. There is no such evidence in New Hampshire. Nor was there any evidence of intentional miscounts in the Florida "Chad Wars."

There are a hundred reasons why Ron Paul didn't do better in New Hampshire. Vote fraud wasn't one of them.

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PS: I think the theory is that Queen Elizabeth authorized a franchise for an international conglomerate, which is the controlling shareholder in Diebold Corporation, in order to protect the British drug trade by manipulating elections around the world.

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Update1: GOP Presidential "candidate" Albert Howard may be able to double his 44 votes in the New Hampshire Primary, but it could cost him $10,000 per vote. Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich says he has filed for a recount as well.

Update2: New Hampshire election law doesn’t specify the costs for recounts when the candidate (in this case, a candidate for one of the 12 GOP delegate positions) margin is more than 3%, so the Secretary of State provides an estimate of the cost, which must be paid before the recount begins and will only be refunded if the results change in favor of the candidate. Kucinich has paid the $2,000 fee and is awaiting the final estimate.

Update3: Ron Paul agrees:

"In New Hampshire, while I would have hoped for a better result than eight percent, I am convinced that vote fraud played no role in this result. Rumors of vote fraud were investigated, and in the end they proved to be the result of errors in early media reports that were not reflected in the official numbers."

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2008 William Westmiller, all rights reserved.
Published: Friday, January 11, 2008
Last modified: Sunday, January 13, 2008

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