Was the New Hampshire vote stolen? (from Salon)

from the article:

Even more interesting is the third table on this page, which shows how the candidates did in places with more than 1,500 votes. Here, Clinton, not Obama, did better in hand-count areas -- a lot better, 44.17 percent to Obama's 31.61 percent. Meanwhile, in similarly large counties where machines counted the vote, Clinton's margin was smaller -- 40.28 percent to Obama's 35.96 percent.

Let me say that again: In large areas, Clinton did better in places where votes were counted by hand than where votes were counted by machine. Does that mean that it was Clinton who was robbed, in these places, by voting machines?

Almost certainly not. All of these variances are much more plausibly the product of differing demographics. If you check out the county-by-county results, it's possible to find many counties where Obama won handily even despite Diebold (Amherst, for instance, which uses optical-scan voting and where where he got 44.68 percent; if the Diebold machines were hacked for Clinton, they didn't do much good there).

At the same time, Clinton won in many areas that manually count their votes -- she got 44.44 percent in Boscawen, 43.93 percent in Carroll, 43.52 percent in Charleston, and on and on.

More at link:

http://machinist.salon.com/feature/2008/01/11/new_hampshire_vote/index.html

It simply ignores demographics and past election results, clicks its heels together, and says "there's no place like home".

I've yet to see a single NH DUer take the conspiracy theorists side in this argument. There's a reason for that. We've used this system for years, we know the numbers, we know the election officials, and we know our electoral history. A bunch of tinfoil hatters from out of state don't have the same perspective.

it's nice to see a reasonable response

but nice try

Any questions?

Do you think everything in the world reduces down to a matter of no more than who said what, and that Salon saying something makes a detailed analysis of verifiable vote counts in specific areas more questionable that someone else's gross state-wide statistics that don't bother with looking for demographic differences?

they are doing a recount. I think all elections should have at least some partial recounts as long as the electronic voting machines are used.