So, why WERE the polls so WRONG about Clinton and Obama in NH (and why is dKos so stubbornly blind)?

hmmmm...? inquiring minds - and brad friedman - want to know...

[T]he way the ballots are counted in New Hampshire, largely on Diebold optical-scan voting systems, wholly controlled and programmed by a very very bad company named LHS Associates.

Those Diebold op-scan machines are the exact same ones that were hacked in the HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy.

i confess, i was very surprised to watch the results coming in last evening, and the same thought immediately crossed my mind...

[W]hat's going on here?

While I have no evidence at this time --- let me repeat, no evidence at this time --- of chicanery, what we do know is that chicanery, with this particular voting system, is not particularly difficult. Particularly when one private company --- and a less-than-respectable one at that, as I detailed in the previous post --- runs the entire process.

I should also note that some 40% of New Hampshire's precincts are hand-counted, which equals about 25% of the votes. All the rest are counted on hackable Diebold op-scan systems, with completely hackable memory cards, all programmed and managed by LHS Associates.

brad then goes on to point out, in no-holds-barred fashion, the same points about daily kos that i and a number of my fellow bloggers have been making for some time...

Over at Daily Kos, diarist "AHiddenSaint" has written a post quoting, and linking over to this one, by way of sharing his/her concerns about the NH results.

The result: an embarrassing thread of comments, smashing up AHiddenSaint for posting something that the dKos commenters feel is little more than "conspiracy theory". Foolishly (for them), they have taken a sentence from the original post, in which I noted that I "have no evidence at this time --- of chicanery," to wonder why I would therefore write such a post at all. Their claim: that I am some how charging that Clinton stole the election.

I have made no such claim. In fact, if there was skullduggery here, there are plenty of reasons to believe it could have been committed by any number of interested parties, who have nothing to do with the Clinton campaign.

Daily Kos, of course, is a Clinton-centric website, which, more disturbingly, purged diaries and diarists after the 2004 Ohio election, if they were judged to be questioning what went on there. I spoke to Markos (the site's founder) about that, when we were at a conference together in Vegas last Summer. He stills stands by his decision to purge those folks. That, despite so much that has come out since '04 to show that what happened was a travesty of democracy. As I told him then, he owes his readers an apology. He did add, however, that he has someone ("Georgia10") who now cover issues of Election Integrity on their front page.

The result of his purge, is the mindset of the commenters now seen over there. It seems to me they are are begging for a world of hurt, someday, when their candidate doesn't win, under questionable circumstances. They will, of course, have cornered themselves such that they won't be able to ask questions themselvses. In the bargain, they are now fostering a culture of fear. Fear of asking questions. Fear of insisting that our democracy be transparent, of the people, by the people and for the people. If it were only themselves they were hurting by fostering that culture, I wouldn't give a damn. But rest assured, their comments, actions and attitudes will be leveraged, as we move forward, to hurt all of us.

For the record, I am neither a Clinton supporter nor an Obama supporter (nor a supporter of anyone else in the race at this time, in any party.) I am a supporter of the VOTERS. Period. It's they --- us --- who could really use some support right about now. I intend to do exactly that. All damned year. No matter how many "tin foil hats" the shortsighted, self-destructive Kossack types, who are behaving like the worst of the Republicans, try to throw at me.

i think it's absolutely shameful that the proprietor of one of the first, biggest, and certainly most visible of the so-called "liberal," "progressive" blogs has chosen to stick his head firmly in the sand, setting both the role model and the expectation for his talented cast of front-pagers, his many thousands of members and diarists, and his millions of monthly visitors to do the same... i've never claimed to have a privileged access to the truth, but i know damn good and well that, to GET the truth, you have to be willing to follow it wherever it may lead... too bad markos does not accept that responsibility on behalf of those who make his site possible...

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