Daily Kos - "Enough with the "Diebold Hacked the NH Primary" Lunacy"

New Hampshire has no touchscreen voting. None.

Every ballot cast in New Hampshire except those few cast by the handicapped is written on a piece of paper. It's redundant to say this after the previous comment about touchscreen voting, but let's make it clear: in New Hampshire there is a paper trail.

The Diebold Accuvote-TS has been shown to be a piece of crap. The Diebold Accuvote-OS, the machine used in New Hampshire, has much of the same hardware and runs much of the same tabulation software, so these machines could conceivably be hacked. However, the incentive for hacking them is not very great, because unlike with the paperless voting, again, there's the paper trail. So if there were ever a recount—and there was after the 2004, when a survey of New Hampshire voting districts chosen by the Nader campaign showed there was virtual no difference between the scanned tabulation and the hand recount—the malfeasance would be easily discovered.

Many folks immediately suspect that any election results they found surprising—and whether they know enough about local and statewide voting patterns to be surprised is always a good question—are most easily explained by malfeasance by the Diebold corporation or exploitation of its machines. There are many problems for these folks who look for the most exotic (and maybe reassuring) explanation for an election result they don't like, but in this case, let's start out with a fairly basic one: voters in every town in New Hampshire cast their vote on a paper ballot, and in more than half of the towns in New Hampshire, the paper ballots are counted by hand.