Did Diebold Help Hillary Rig New Hampshire Or Was It The Bradley Effect?

Did Diebold Help Hillary Rig New Hampshire Or Was It The Bradley Effect?

I know, you’re probably thinking: “Wait a second, I thought Diebold was supposed to be a firm that was in the bag for Republicans, so why would they be helping Hillary Clinton steal the election in New Hampshire?”

I have no idea, but when Hillary took New Hampshire despite poll after poll after poll that indicated Obama would win, I knew that liberals would say the fix was in — and I wasn’t disappointed.

Here’s the The Brad Blog with an explanation,

I’m not sure why Obama would have conceded so soon, given the virtually inexplicable turn of events in New Hampshire tonight.

What’s going on here? Before proceeding, I recommend you read the third section of the post I just ran an hour or so ago, concerning the 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. See the previous report, as I recommend, which also includes a video of that hack, and footage of the guy who runs LHS Associates.

…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 — 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. I’ve just spoken to Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org who seems to share my concern, as have other folks who follow this sort of thing. Harris noted that it will be interesting to compare numbers of the hand-counted precincts with those counted on the hackable Diebold op-scan systems.

If I was Barack Obama, I’d certainly not have conceded this election this quickly. I’m not quite sure what he was thinking. And as far as offering an indication of whether he understands how these systems work, and the necessity of making sure that votes are counted, and counted accurately, it does not offer a great deal of confidence at this hour.

…The effect of Obama being an African-American, the so-called “Bradley Effect”, is now being discussed as the newest “reason” to explain the numbers. Though it’s noted that it didn’t effect Harold Ford in TN in ’06, or even Obama in Iowa just five days ago.

Incidentally, my best guess is that the “Bradley Effect” is indeed responsible for Obama’s loss because he definitely appeared headed for victory if you looked at the polls.

What’s the Bradley Effect, you ask? Well,

“As black candidates reaching out to largely white constituencies have discovered in the past, when it comes to measuring political popularity there are lies, damned lies–and polls, on which they rest their fate at their peril.

The phenomenon was first widely noted in 1982, when Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley lost a squeaker of a race for governor after being widely projected as the winner. Douglas Wilder also came up against the “Bradley Effect” when he barely won the 1989 contest for governor of Virginia, after leading comfortably in the polls.

Ronald Walters of the University of Maryland was at Wilder’s hotel as a projected easy victory turned into a nail-biter. That is a night “I’ll never forget,” says Walters, who thinks it “naive” to believe that things have changed very much. He believes that some percentage of whites–perhaps 5 percent or so, intent on being seen as less biased than they may be–will claim to support a nonwhite candidate when they actually do not.”

In Iowa, because everyone could see how everyone else was voting, it may have actually BOOSTED Obama’s numbers a bit. But in New Hampshire, the Bradley Effect may have kicked in. Moreover, in a Democratic primary, where you have a lot of politically correct, white liberals participating, you may see an even stronger distortion of polling numbers than you would in a general election.

Unless there’s some other explanation for how Hillary managed to pull NH out of the fire that’s better than “teh Diebold hax0red it for Hill,” I’m going to stick with the Bradley Effect as an explanation.

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