A recount of the New Hampshire Democratic primary is underway in two counties in that state, and already the internet is abuzz over initial figures that show some clear discrepancies on optical-scan ballots cast in two polling locations in Hillsborough County, though officials say the discrepancies are the result of human error rather than machine error.

As you recall, Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich and Republican presidential candidate Albert Howard asked the state to recount the primary ballots after a blogger posted a chart showing that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama received more votes than Hillary Clinton in regions where officials counted the paper ballots by hand than in regions where they were counted by optical-scan machines made by Diebold Election Systems and that Republican presidential candidate John McCain also received more votes than Mitt Romney in hand-counted districts over machine-counted ones. The implication was that Clinton and Romney somehow benefitted from the optical-scan machines.

Voting activists say that pre-primary polls favoring Obama over Clinton add to suspicions that there was something wrong with the optical-scan machines

So the state is currently conducting a hand recount of ballots cast in the Democratic primary in Hillsborough and Rockingham counties (Kucinich will decide based on the results of the recount in these two counties whether he'll pay to have Democratic primary ballots in the rest of the state recounted). So far the numbers out of two polling places in the cities of Manchester and Nashua in Hillsborough County show consistently screwy changes in the totals for all of the top Democratic candidates (Clinton, Obama, Edwards) and, therefore, have some voting activists crying foul.

While the vote totals for the candidates in other voting districts changed by a handful – as they're expected to do in recounts for various reasons – each of these Democratic candidates lost a significant number of votes in the recount at Manchester Ward 5 and Nashua Ward 5, ranging from 7% to 15% of their totals in those precincts.

Here are the numbers for Manchester Ward 5, with the left-hand number representing the original count from the optical-scan machines and the right-hand number representing the recount (the number in parentheses indicates the percentage each candidate's total dropped in Manchester Ward 5 after the hand recount of ballots):

Clinton – 683 – 619 (9.5%) Edwards – 255 – 217 (15%) Obama – 404 – 365 (10%)

Here are the numbers for Nashua Ward 5 (I haven't included Obama's numbers here because he gained 5 votes in this precinct rather than losing any):

Clinton – 1,030 – 959 (7%) Edwards – 405 – 377 (7%)

So what gives?

According to this story the discrepancies in Manchester Ward 5 are due to human error, not machine error. Apparently a clerk recording the summary of totals from the machine count mistakenly added votes cast in the vice presidential slot to the presidential totals on the official tally sheet.

The New Hampshire Republican and Democratic ballots each include selections for a vice president and also offer a line for voters to write in the name of a candidate not offered among the vice presidential candidates. The Democratic ballot this year offered two choices for vice president – William Bryk and Raymond Stebbins. The Republican ballot listed Jack Barnes.

Some voters on the Democratic ballot opted not to vote for either candidate and wrote in Clinton, Obama or Edwards instead. At the end of the election when the write-in vice presidential votes were counted, a clerk mistakenly added those write-in vice presidential votes for Clinton, Obama and Edwards to each candidates' presidential tallies. The problem was caught during the recount, officials say.

But there was something a little off about this explanation when I first read it. An initial news report mentioned this as the explanation only for the discrepancies in Manchester Ward 5, but made no mention of Nashua Ward 5. Then another news report out today mentioned that the same problem occurred in Nashua Ward 5.

This had me wondering what were the odds that two different clerks in two different cities would make an identical mistake like this – a mistake that apparently clerks in other voting districts didn't make. (Manchester has 12 polling locations, and Nashua has 9. It's probably coincidental that it was Ward 5 in each city where the same problem occurred, although, unfortunately, this is the kind of coincidence from which conspiracy theories are made.) So I called the city clerks in Manchester and Nashua to find out what happened. (Unlike counties in other states, New Hampshire counties don't run elections, cities do – with oversight from the secretary of state's office). I haven't heard back from Manchester yet but did speak with Nashua city clerk Paul Bergeron.

Bergeron agreed that it would be very odd if two clerks in different cities made an identical error that no one else made but says that in this case the problems in each ward were actually different, though similar enough to confuse reporters. He says that as he understands it, the initial explanation for Manchester Ward 5 is correct – that the problem was a transcription error that occurred when a clerk mistakenly added write-in votes from the vice-presidential race to the presidential race tallies. But he says the problem in Nashua Ward 5 was different in that it occurred because election officials there tallied some presidential votes twice.

He explained that after recording the votes cast for president on the Democratic ballots, the optical-scan machines automatically sorted out ballots that contained write-in choices in the vice-presidential race so that election officials could count the write-in votes by hand. He says that election officials mistakenly believed that the machines had not already counted the presidential votes on those ballots and therefore tallied those votes by hand as well, resulting in double votes for the presidential candidates.

Officials say these problems would have been caught during the normal canvassing period when they reconciled the number of ballots cast with the number of presidential votes counted and the number of voters who signed in at the polls.

So that seems to explain the recount discrepancies found so far. But even before the state offered these explanations, a group of academics examined the data in New Hampshire and found no evidence that the choice of voting technology in certain counties played a role in favoring one candidate over another, based on what is known about voter make-up in New Hampshire counties and past election performance.

"Our results," they write, "are consistent with the differences being due entirely to the fact that New Hampshire wards that use Accuvote optical scan machines typically have voters with different political preferences than wards that use hand counted paper ballots."

Michael Herron, professor of government at Dartmouth College, Walter Mebane, Jr., professor of political science and statistics at the University of Michigan and Jonathan Wand, professor of political science at Stanford University, authored the report, which you can read here (PDF). Mebane and Wand, by the way, were part of a team that conducted extensive analysis of the 2000 presidential election, from which they concluded that Al Gore should have won the presidential race. I mention this only to point out that they have no problem disputing official election results when they see evidence to back such claims.

I'd also like to underscore a point they make in their New Hampshire report – that although they see no evidence to suggest that the technology played a role in skewing the election results in this case, they support the use of recounts as "the only comprehensive method for evaluating the accuracy of a given election’s vote tabulations."

In other words, we're able to get to the bottom of New Hampshire's tallies only because the state uses machines that provide a paper trail that can be hand counted to determine the voter's intent and that serve as an auditing mechanism by which to check the accuracy of the machine totals. This is why voting activists want all voting machines to provide paper trails and why they want states to be forced to conduct mandatory manual recounts of a certain percentage of ballots – as California does – as a matter of course after every election.

I'll add one final note about the New Hampshire election and the number of Republican write-in votes that showed up on the Democratic primary ballots. Readers will see from the recount totals that numerous New Hampshire voters cast a vote for a Republican presidential candidate on the Democratic ballot – using the write-in category to do so. John McCain was the most popular in this regard – he received 346 write-in votes so far on Democratic ballots cast in Hillsborough County (I say so far because officials are still recounting ballots cast in one Hillsborough city). Romney received 234 write-in votes.

An assistant in the New Hampshire secretary of state's office by the name of Diana (she won't give her last name and is the only person answering the phones at present) says that although New Hampshire has same-day registration – meaning that unregistered voters can walk into a polling place on Election Day and register to vote and choose a party affiliation – voters who have previously chosen a party cannot change their party affiliation on Election Day. The deadline for changing party affiliation for this election was back in October, she says.

Therefore many voters who were already registered to one party or who had previously voted in a particular party's primary and were therefore affiliated with that party in the registration database, mistakenly arrived to the polls thinking they could vote any primary ballot they wished or change their party affiliation on Election Day. When they found they couldn't and were given Democratic ballots, they voted outside the party anyway, writing in Republican candidates. The same thing occurred with write-in votes for Democratic candidates on the Republican ballot. Unfortunately, votes cast for McCain on the Democratic ballot or for Clinton on the Republican ballot are wasted votes, Diana says, since neither party will count votes cast for their party candidates if the votes are cast on the other party's primary ballot.

By the way, the Rockingham recount is expected to be completed this week. You can see the recount results as the state posts them here. Note that the recount numbers for Weare in Hillsborough County are still not available. The GOP recount will start after the Democratic recount is completed.