[ExI] elections again

[spike]

Do forgive me for continuing this possibly boring thread, but I have found
something extremely cool.  This post is not about any particular politician,
but rather about the mechanics of elections.

A recount of the New Hampshire primary vote has been requested by some
politician that no one ever heard of outside his immediate family
(Kookspinich?  Something like that.)  The reason I take interest in it is
there is an apparent discrepancy between the hand counted ballots and the
machine counted ballots.  In the case of seven of the nine candidates, their
machine counted ballots give similar looking results to the hand counted.
But two are discrepant: Senator Clinton and Senator Obama.  In those two
cases, the machine count is higher than the hand count for Clinton.  For
Senator Obama, the machine count is significantly lower than the hand count.

http://neggie.net/vote2008/nh_primary.cgi?min_votes=300&max_votes=900

This site lets you filter the New Hampshire vote by the size of the town.  I
entered 300 lower limit and 900 upper limit, and discovered this, after
doing the calculations:


			Hand count(%)	Machine count(%)
(machine-hand)/hand

McCain		41.7			39.6			-5.2
Romney		26.6			29.4			+10.6
Hucksterbee		13.6			13.2			-3.2
Giuliani		8.7			8.8			+0.1
Paul			9.3			9.1 			-2.1


Clinton		34.0			40.0			+17.6
Obama			42.1			35.5
-15.7
Edwards		18.1			19.3			+6.6
Richardson		5.8			5.2			-9.9


Does this look strange to anyone else besides me?  The handcount ballots
would have given the NH primary to Senator Obama.  But the unverifiable
machine ballots give it to Senator Clinton.  New Hampshire's motto might
need to be changed to "Live Free or Diebold."

spike