Tears of a Crook? Or a Croc?

When the nation first heard of Hillary's victory in the Granite State, many wondered why the polls were dead accurate on the Republican side but were off by so much for the Democrats.

The reason we have elections rather than just relying on polls is that elections are supposed to be more accurate than polls.  Polling is paid for by customers who want accurate information, however.  Inaccurate pollsters lose customers and go bankrupt so there's no incentive to falsify the results.

Polling firms go to great lengths to get accurate data, and the science of statistics gets more and more accurate all the time.  Based on the polls, there was talk of Hillary pulling out of the race.

Why were the polls so wrong about Hillary versus Obama?  Election results are generally a bit more accurate than polls, but polls have an advantage over elections - there's usually no reason to fiddle polls, but fiddling elections is very worthwhile given the money and power involved in holding office.

We're finding an explanation in the left-wing blogsphere.  The possibility has arisen - and, note, at this moment it would appear to be only a possibility - that the polls weren't wrong.  That is to say, Hillary's people may have stolen the election from Obama.

We at Scragged don't know whether this is so.  We're not claiming that Hillary stole the election, although we'd have no trouble believing it given other things the Clintons have done.  What we find newsworthy is that some well-known, left-wing sites are increasingly convinced that she stole the election.

If you Google "New Hampshire Vote Cheat Diebold" you get more than 3,000 hits, barely 36 hours after the polls closed.  Smaller New Hampshire towns use paper ballots which are counted by the old-fashioned mark-sensing machines that we all know and love from taking SAT tests.  In the bigger towns, however, votes are counted by Diebold machines which are reportedly so easy to hack that they've been decertified in several states - in part, because of a devastating video of Princeton scientists performing the hack, which was broadcast on national TV.  As you might expect, the larger towns where these sorry machines are found are strongholds both of Democratic voters in general and Obama supporters in particular.

A leftist online analyst compared the Hillary and Obama vote split in towns which used manual counting and in towns which used Diebold machines; you can check the results yourself and replicate the author's math if you like.

I used the Comma delimited database: NH municipalities hand count vs use Diebold machines from BlackBoxVoting.org to see if there was a deviation between the results from precincts which used hand counts and those which relied on Diebold machines.

Updated: 5:05 AM (EST) - Results tallied for 209 out of 236 of the municipalities.

By Percentage
Method	Hillary Clinton	Barack Obama
Diebold Machines	53.23%	46.77%
Hand Count	47.47%	52.53%

By Votes
Method	Hillary Clinton	Barack Obama
Diebold Machines	82860	72807
Hand Count	18898	20912

By Number of Municipalities Won
Method	Hillary Clinton	Barack Obama
Diebold Machines	54	33
Hand Count	43	77

About 81% of the votes will be "counted" by the Diebold machines.

"Fascinating," as Mr. Spock would say.  The raw numbers would indicate that Hillary won the "Diebold" vote whereas Obama won the hand-count vote!  In the manually hand-counted vote, it looks like Obama beat Hillary by about 6%, just as the polls said he would.

Another article says that Ron Paul was also a victim of vote fraud:

The New Hampshire town of Sutton admits that it voided every vote Ron Paul received. The Congressman got 31 votes and yet due to a "human error," Sutton reported zero votes for Ron Paul. How "human error" can explain not counting 31 votes in succession for one single candidate is beyond the pale and Ron Paul's campaign should ask for a recount across New Hampshire immediately.

As soon as people went public with the fact that their votes in Sutton had not been counted, other districts where Paul had supposedly received zero votes, such as Greenville, suddenly changed their final tallies and attributed votes to the Congressman.

Chicago's Mayor Daley, the man who made "Crook County" famous, used to say, "I don't care who records the votes so long as I get to count them;" Josef Stalin expressed much the same sentiment.  Democrats are famous for chicanery in counting votes, but they usually defraud Republicans, not each other.

However, bear in mind that we are not referencing the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy here; these allegations are coming from the political left, most noticeably the Daily Kos, and right-wing groups that are very, very far out of the mainstream by virtue of being in the Ron Paul camp.  So far, mainstream right-wing pundits appear to be sitting this one out.  Will we be hearing complaints from Hillary about a "Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy" now?

The Mainstream Media, of course, wouldn't touch this story with a 39-1/2 foot pole.  Thomas Jefferson, who believed very strongly in the constitutional function of a free press, would have loved the Internet.

If there is any truth to this very circumstantial evidence, we now have another possible explanation for Hillary's infamous crying fit: they were crocodile tears, which according to legend the beast sheds immediately prior to devouring its prey.