To those who claim Kucinich's votes went backwards

[antiimperialist]

I have heard more than one DU'ers who were paying close attention to the results claim that Dennis Kucinich's votes went backwards at points.

Can You Count on Voting Machines?

The New York Times addressed the same issue 2 days ago:
January 6, 2008

As the primaries start in New Hampshire this week and roll on through the next few months, the erratic behavior of voting technology will once again find itself under a microscope. In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices “flip” from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward;

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html

[TwilightZone]

1. I thought that NH had hand-counted paper ballots.

:shrug:

[FogerRox]

2. Opscans IIRC, with tabulators

[TwilightZone]

4. Thanks.

I probably should have been less lazy and looked it up. :)

[mod mom]

5. MSM misinformation.

[HughMoran]

6. Paper optical ballots

They are very good - we turned this state from Red to Blue in 2004, so I can't complain!

[Egnever]

7. If so

The votes were counted way fast.

[ecstatic]

3. I'll say this to each one of them: If their votes are stolen, they deserve it

Because they had 7+ years to address this problem. :mad:

[GreenArrow]

8. I think Kucinich's votes actually

went to Edwards.

[Bishop Rook]

9. The "counting backwards" thing is a separate issue

What's mistakenly being referred to, at least as far as I've read, is that some voting machines were using data types that were too small to hold the tallies. A 16-bit integer for example (called a "short integer" usually) can hold up to a value of 32767... Once you get up to that maximum value, and add 1 to it, it loops all the way back around to -32768. Then as you continue adding 1, it goes to -32767, -32766, etc... Which some people mistakenly interpreted as counting backwards, or the display may have not been configured to show negative numbers properly.

There aren't really any places in New Hampshire that would suffer from that problem, because no machine, no precinct, would ever register more than 32 thousand votes.

Plus, as others have pointed out, NH doesn't use touch-screen machines. :)