I've spent the better part of two days looking over numbers on web pages and spreadsheets, monitoring bulletin boards, sending out e-mails, and making calls, all in the name of sorting out what, if anything, went wrong with New Hampshire's presidential primary. Before I get into any kind of detailed discussion of the NH primary vote, I'll skip to the punchline and tell you the two conclusions that I've come to at this point:

Nobody really knows whether anything actually went wrong with New Hampshire's presidential primary, either on the Republican side or on the Democratic side.

The proposed recount may not truly end the dispute, or the underlying uncertainty.

Let me take these two conclusions one at a time, and explain how I've arrived at them. Along the way, I'll also try to draw some lessons about what NH might tell us about the November presidential contest.

Fearful symmetry: the hand count versus machine count discrepancies

On the day after the New Hampshire primary, Bruce O'Dell from the Election Defense Alliance posted the following startling vote tallies, which showed that Clinton's and Obama's percentages of the hand- versus machine-counted tallies were mirror images of each other—out to five decimal places.

Clinton Optical scan 91,717 52.95%

Obama Optical scan 81,495 47.05% Clinton Hand-counted 20,889 47.05%

Obama Hand-counted 23,509 52.95%

These numbers flew across the Internet, and for those who suspected election fraud, the table above was a smoking gun. Except that it wasn't a smoking gun—it was more like a temporary shape in the clouds that, for a brief moment, looked exactly like a smoking gun.

When I first saw those numbers my initial reaction was that they were fishy; and not fishy in the "Clinton really did steal the election" sense, but in the "something's wrong with the source data here" sense. I wracked my brain for possible fraud-related explanations, but ultimately I just couldn't conceive of an election theft situation that would result in a symmetry like this. I mean, no fraudster would deliberately do something as bizarre as reverse the hand-count and machine-count percentages like that. It made no sense.

After grabbing a copy of O'Dell's spreadsheet and hitting the NH Secretary of State's web site to compare and crunch the numbers myself, I soon discovered that there were two major problems with O'Dell's vote totals and with the remarkable symmetrical percentages that they produced. (Note that I was not alone in these conclusions; there were a few people in one of the forum threads I was monitoring who were asking the same questions.)

First, I spotted a number of districts that the spreadsheet incorrectly listed as "hand-count" districts, but that the NH Secretary of State's web site listed as machine-count districts. As it turns out, fourteen districts were incorrectly identified as hand-counted in O'Dell's source. So moving those fourteen counties from the "hand count" into the "machine count" column made the symmetry disappear. It also made the discrepancy between the hand count and machine count even wider, but more on that later.

The second thing wrong with the table above is that the numbers on which it was based were preliminary, and were still being updated on the Secretary of State web site. The updated vote tallies, which I accessed and compared to O'Dell's spreadsheet, also destroyed the symmetry of the percentages.

(O'Dell issued an update to the numbers Monday evening. So if you're someone who has been passing around the table above via e-mail or the Web, please pass this update along as well.)

The steady trickle of updates to the Secretary of State web site had another effect this story (besides removing the smoking gun) as I watched it rapidly develop at Internet speed. Spreadsheets and lists with different vote tallies, all of which came from the NH web site at different times, were flying through the tubes, with each set of numbers sprouting statistical and political analyses of varying degrees of detail and sanity. So if you've spent any portion of the past few days looking at different breakdowns of the hand versus machine counts for Obama and Clinton on different web sites and wondering which one is right, the answer is that they all are... or maybe none of them are. I stopped trying to figure out why this person's differed from that person's at about 7 PM Monday evening.

If you're interested in seeing the very latest number crunching, then check out any of the following links:

The consensus from the above links is that when you control for town size and a few other factors, vote-counting method (Diebold or hand) still correlates with the outcome (Clinton or Obama) to a non-trivial degree. The remaining question is whether there's some still unknown demographic variable that accounts for the correlation between a district's vote counting method and who came out ahead there, or whether monkey business was involved. I personally am leaning toward demographics as the final explanation, for various reasons that, in the end, are so vague as to not be worth going into here.

Lessons from the numbers

I want to draw a few general lessons from the story of the symmetrical percentages, and specifically from the amount of attention that these percentages got from traditional press outlets, blogs, and online news sources.

Lesson 1 : The Internet is full of people who have four things that make them dangerous, both to would-be election fraudsters and (paradoxically) to the larger cause of election integrity: computers, intermediate math skills, a mix of patriotic and entrepreneurial zeal, and the ability to publish in the blink of an eye. When you add a stream of evolving vote tallies to this mix and shake vigorously, the resulting concoction will produce lots and lots of foam. (Some of that foam may look just like the Virgin Mary for a bit, so you can get on the evening news with it if you're quick enough. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

: The Internet is full of people who have four things that make them dangerous, both to would-be election fraudsters and (paradoxically) to the larger cause of election integrity: computers, intermediate math skills, a mix of patriotic and entrepreneurial zeal, and the ability to publish in the blink of an eye. When you add a stream of evolving vote tallies to this mix and shake vigorously, the resulting concoction will produce lots and lots of foam. (Some of that foam may look just like the Virgin Mary for a bit, so you can get on the evening news with it if you're quick enough. But I'm getting ahead of myself.) Lesson 2 : The larger the cloud of numbers and statistical analyses grows, the less inclined reporters will be to actually download a spreadsheet and tackle the data themselves. They're just going to report what this or that group has uncovered, especially if it's juicy.

: The larger the cloud of numbers and statistical analyses grows, the less inclined reporters will be to actually download a spreadsheet and tackle the data themselves. They're just going to report what this or that group has uncovered, especially if it's juicy. Lesson 3: The e-voting activism world is an odd mix of patriotism, territorialism, and old-fashioned entrepreneurism. Basically, everyone is racing to find that remarkable scoop that's going to get them quoted on CNN.

So before the polls even close, there are all of these folks furiously sifting through the mix of testimony, rumor, data, background, reporting, and analysis that swirls about in the wake of a close election. With all of that energy and all of those numbers flying about in the ether, someone at some point is going to spot a compelling pattern that looks like the work of an intelligent designer. The odds of someone finding such a pattern probably increases with the volume of data and the number of eyeballs. And the person that finds that pattern may get a ton of press attention, for better (in the case of real fraud) or for worse (in the case of a wild goose chase).

My ultimate point with the lessons above is this—New Hampshire is a pretty small state; take what I've just described, imagine it on a national level, and you'll get a glimpse of what it will be like for me to cover the e-voting beat in November.

Chain of custody: what, exactly, are they (re)counting?

Now, for the reasoning behind my conclusion that the announced recount (courtesy of not of Ron Paul, but of the equally loopy Kucinich and crew) may not settle this.

Most of the questions that will be raised about the results of today's recount (see below for time and place) will have to do with chain of custody issues. For the recount to be reliable, a chain of custody must be established for all of the ballots involved. This means that each ballot must have been either under lock and key or under the watchful eye of a known and trusted list of state officials for every moment of its post-election life. If any point a group of ballots were left unattended, or if it's impossible to list exactly who could've had access to them, then establishing a secure chain of custody for those ballots will be impossible.

In the absence of a secure chain of custody, it's possible that someone could have replaced some of the ballots with counterfeits, or that they could have tried to alter them in some way. That's why establishing such a chain of custody is important—at least, it's important in theory.

What will almost certainly happen in practice is that no one will be able to establish a secure chain of custody for every ballot cast in New Hampshire, but that won't stop the press from reporting the results of the recount as if they're 100 percent reliable. And they may well be reliable; in fact, they probably are. But absent a secure chain of custody, no one can know for sure.

The other thing that's critical to a proper recount is that it be undertaken in full public view. Public recounts don't always happen, but they should.

There was a great scene from the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy in which e-voting activist Bev Harris confronted Cuyahoga County election officials over those officials' insistence on carrying out a recount of Ohio's 2004 presidential election in secret. Two of those officials were sentenced last March to 18 months in jail for rigging that recount's results to match the official tally, and the judge in the case said that he suspected that the recount rigging went beyond just those two employees.

My aim in bringing up Ohio is not so that we can all refight the 2004 election, though I'm sure that will happen in the discussion thread, since the mere mention of Ohio sends some of our forum denizens into apoplectic fits. Rather, I want to point out that election officials can have an extraordinarily strong incentive to prove that the election that they just oversaw was fair and to ensure that the recount bear out the quality of their stewardship of the vote. Otherwise, if the recount overturns the official tally, then there will be investigations and recriminations, and heads will roll. This is why voters must insist that recounts be carried out in public, under the gaze of representatives of all the interested parties.

Thankfully, it looks like the NH recount is on the right track in the transparency department. The forum post quoted below (from the BBV thread linked previously) gives details of today's recount, including the time and the place:

Okay, I just got off the phone with the Sec'y of State's office; ALL ballots, from EVERY jurisdiction in New Hampshire, are being trucked to Concord for the recount. That means EVERY SINGLE BALLOT CAST will be recounted, and the PAPER ballots from the Diebold districts will be counted (as opposed to simply recounting the machine totals). The recount will commence at approx. 900am [today], at the Archives Building in Concord, located at 71 South Fruit St. Anyone in the public is welcome to come, so I suggest anyone checking in here please go down and monitor the process closely. The campaigns are allowed to name particular monitors (I imagine they get a position close enough to read the tick marks on the ballots, whereas the public just watches the process from a gallery). I'm going to notify the campaigns as best I can, but if any readers know people from inside the campaigns, please notify them and have them contact the Secretary of State's office to insure access.

Let's hope that with respect to completeness and transparency (if not chain of custody), today's New Hampshire recount will serve as a model for any future recounts that may take place this election season.

Conclusions: thirty-four potential headaches

As of today, only sixteen states mandate both a voter-verified paper trail (VVPT) and a random manual audit of election results. The remaining 34 either don't have a mandatory VVPT, don't have mandatory audits, or don't have either. So that's 34 possibilities for a close presidential contest to produce the same blizzard of data, analysis, accusation, and uncertainty that we saw on a very small scale with New Hampshire. Let's hope for a blow-out, landslide victory by one side, because I get tired just thinking about anything closer.