Failure Caused Officials to Hand Count Ballots, While Questions Remain About Details of the Problems

Similar Reports Discovered Elsewhere, More on That Soon...

Brad Friedman Byon 1/12/2008, 6:07pm PT

VotersUnite.org's John Gideon calls our attention to this snippet, from this recent story at NH's SeaCoastOnline [emphasis ours]:

So many Democrats turned out in Stratham that Town Clerk Shirley Daley said she had to photocopy 87 ballots. Hartson said she began printing extra Democratic ballots at 6 p.m. when they began running low. Because of a glitch in the machines, clerks there had to hand count all of the extra ballots.

Gideon follows up by asking: "They had to hand-count all of the extra ballots. What about the ballots that had already been run on the machines (note the plural)? How many other machines across the state had the same 'glitch'?"

We tried to contact Town Clerk Daley on Friday, in order to find out, what came of the ballots counted before the problem was discovered, but their offices close at 12noon on Fridays.

As to further such incidents across the state, it seems there were far more than anyone has so far reported. We will have another article shortly, concerning such reports of problems on Diebold voting machine across the state during last week's Primary Election. 80% of New Hampshire votes were counted on such machines. To date, none of those ballots have been counted, verified or audited by any human being to our knowledge.

UPDATE 9:56pm As promised, further reports on problems with voting machines in other NH towns, now published here...

For related coverage, please see our index of notable New Hampshire-related BRAD BLOG articles , since the '08 Primary.



