To preface this: I’m not saying there is a conspiracy. I’m not ready to fly off the handle. i have serious concerns about the electoral process, but I’m not jumping straight to saying that it’s obvious that elections are being stolen and democracy is dead.
“It’s not who votes that counts. It’s who counts the votes.â€
— Joseph Stalin.
John Silvestro counts the votes. He own a company called LHS. According to what I have been reading, LHS is the sole source for electronic voting machines in New Hampshire. John Silvestro is also old friends with Ken Hajjar, who is the LHS Marketing and Sales Director. Ken was once sentenced to 12 months in jail, and a $2,000 fine for “sale / CND.” That’s “Sale of Controled Narcotics/Drugs” who don’t speak dug-dealer-ese. Yup, the company responsible for counting votes has a drug dealer in their top levels. One who, thanks to his political connections, got his sentence deferred, and his fine cut in half. One who, consequently, sort of owes a favor to some of his political connections. From there, it just gets more and more interesting. Then, we get to some actual numbers from N.H…
Oh, and since LHS isn’t the government, it’s immune to Freedom Of Information Act Requests. So, if you want access to any of their internal memos about security procedures, or anything like that… Go sit on some poop.
Now, LHS has a pretty bad track record when it comes to not flagrantly violating state election law. Here are some tidbits from Connecticut:
We had conducted interviews with three LHS staff members who had worked the polls last year in Connecticut with back up memory cards in their pockets and back up voting machines in the trunks of their cars. That, despite the fact that the state’s voting machine security protocols, under Connecticut Statute 9, prevents them from even touching the machines.
…they’d address voting systems failures by opening machines to make memory card replacements on the spot.
both of those from : http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5320
So, we have a company run by criminals, which has no concern for violating state election laws, which somehow still has full control over N.H. voting machines. Now, first off, I’d like to address the issue of these failing memory cards. I haven’t personally worked with these voting machines, so I can only speculate about the circumstances. Naturally, I beg you to take that speculation with a grain of salt… We know thanks to Harri Hursti that it is very easy to load a program onto the memory cards for these voting machines which can tamper with the results of the election undetectably. And, from what I understand of these memory cards, they shouldn’t have very high failure rates. The technology isn’t that unusual. It could just be that they suffer from terrible construction quality, but there is no fundamental reason for the memory cards to act strangely as often as I seem to hear reports of it. Now, low level programming of embedded systems is relatively hard to do really well. If you were going to write a program to put on the memory cards to steal an election, it’d be basically impossibly to properly test it under real world conditions in a way that would make a software engineer happy. Odds are fairly good that it would pass your small scale tests with one voting machine, but might do something unexpected in the actual election. Maybe crash a few voting machines, or make them print something strange. Software bugs happen. So, all the reports of “failing memory cards” I read about start to sound like “failing software stored on the memory cards” to me at a certain point. And, “…they’d address voting systems failures by opening machines to make memory card replacements on the spot.” Starts to sound like “they had an updated version of the illegal software, so they illegally swapped out the old cards with new cards in the voting machines they weren’t legally allowed to touch.” Certainly, just speculation on my part. I can’t be certain that this idea is correct, but I feel I can’t discount it out of hand.
So, we have LHS. They had means, motive, and opportunity to destroy the election. But, is there any indication in the results that suggests that this is the case? Well, I wouldn’t have bothered typing all this if I didn’t feel there was, natch.
Here is Ars Technica talking about some allegations that Hillary masterminded a hack.
And, a Ron Paul supporter website shows a breakdown of Republican and Democrat relative success in areas with voting machines vs. the hand counted areas which wouldn’t have been trivial for LHS to tamper with. Now, pay real close attention to those Republican numbers, even though most people discussing possible tampering in NH are talking about Hillary and Obama.
According to the “Macine vs. Hand” column there, McCain, Huckabee, and Ron Paul all seem to have “lost” 2% of the vote in areas with the LHS electronic voting machines compared to what you would get from extrapolating the hand count numbers. Now, just to be clear, that’s about 2% of the *total* vote. Not 2% of their own take. This would feel more reasonable in my gut if the error correlated to their own total vote instead of correlating so well to the total vote. They lost an average of 2.4%, with a margin of error of only 0.4%. Now, seeing as McCain got a heck of a lot more votes than Ron Paul, you would expect that he would not have the same loss as Ron Paul. The fact that they all had such a similar loss is a truly stunning. Ron Paul “lost” 70% as many votes as McCain. Of course, while some candidates will naturally do slightly better in the hand counted area, some will do better in the machine counted areas in order to balance it out. So, if the people who benefit from the machine counts do so about equally, it will make the fact that the losers lost so equally a bit less suspicious…
Giuliani and Romney were the winners on the machines. Giuliani was up 0.5% on the machines, and Romney was up 7.5%. So, if you work out that ratio, America’s Mayor “won” 6.5% as many votes from the machines as Romney did. Or, Romney benefited from the machines almost 16 times as much as Rudy. IMHO, this makes the whole thing terribly suspicious.
This is *not* proof that Romney, who is clearly willing to say almost anything to win the election, is actually willing to do almost anything to win the election. It just seems really, amazingly suspicious the way all this lines up. It looks exactly like what would happen if Romney decided to siphon votes off three of his rovals for his own benefit. That could just be a coincidence. This is already really long. I’ll address the importance of recounts in another post. (Hint: useful recounts in N.H. are impossible.)
Obama, Hilary or John?