<p>I read in a NH paper that any candidate that finished with a loss greater than 3% of votes would have to pay for recount-but I assume then that Obama could have asked for a recount without cost (he lost, I believe by less than 3 percentage points). As a NH voter I think it is good to test out the accuracy of both machine and hand counting-and all communities should have audits and paper ballots to back up.</p>
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<p>Ah, here is the key. Why should we be willing to accept that?</p>
<p>As a software engineer of 18 years, I agree that computerized data collection is far more accurate than that collected by humans. In fact, assuming the software is bug-free, it works 100% according to the way the programmer intended.</p>
<p>The question is: what did the programmer intend?</p>
<p>Any scanner system should randomly handcount at least some of the machines to make sure there aren’t any irregularities (such as evil programmers), or evil damp days (or whatever it was that did in the SATs a few years ago.) I’ve heard enough about the Diebold machines (which I gather were similar to ATMs) to be worried. People saw their votes change but couldn’t change them. You could have the paper print out what you voted, but have the machine record something else. At least with scanners unless the checkers are there with erasers, you have the original ballots. </p>
<p>Way back in 1973, I got to witness a French election when Pompidou died and had to be replaced. The system was incredibly simple, but must have been horrible to count. They gave everyone two pieces of paper. One had Francois Mitterand’s name, the other Valery D’Estaigne. You put whichever one you liked in the box. Or both, or none.</p>
<p>Mathmom is right. People actually saw their votes change. That is obviously programmed. Not likely to be a bug. And whether it’s programmed or a bug, in either case, the machines have been shown to be untrustworthy.</p>
<p>Kucinich’s New Hampshire recount doesn’t change results" Hillary Clinton seems to have really won New Hampshire after all</p>
<p>To me (not me the simba, but the author), the initial evidence for fraud looked thin, but I was glad when presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich asked for a hand recount of the paper ballots – here was a chance to clear up the whole mess for certain.</p>
<p>He paid the state nearly $30,000 to conduct the recount. That was enough money to count all the Democratic ballots in the state’s most populous county – Hillsborough, which includes the cities of Manchester and Nashua – and some, but not all, of the ballots in another big county, Rockingham (which includes Portsmouth).</p>
<p>After a couple weeks of counting, the state concluded Kucinich’s requested recount on Wednesday, when funds ran out. At the time, officials had counted nearly 40 percent of the state’s votes by hand.</p>
<p>Here’s the upshot: The recount resulted in very few changes from the original results.</p>
<p>For instance, these are the results for Hillsborough County, where the majority of votes were tabulated on Diebold machines, and where Clinton won a plurality</p>
<p>[Machinist:</a> Tech Blog, Tech News, Technology Articles - Salon](<a href=“http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/01/25/nh_recount/index.html]Machinist:”>http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/01/25/nh_recount/index.html)</p>