New Hampshire’s Polling Fiasco

Or you could save a lot of time and effort and do away with polls altogether. They serve no useful purpose other than to give the media pundits thousands of hours/pages of material to waste people’s time with.

I am glad somebody is talking about this! Here’s the problem. The polls accurately predicted to within 1% error EVERY SINGLE CANDIDATE EXCEPT OBAMA/CLINTON. If you look at the pre-vote polls for ALL other candidates, they match up exactly. I mean exactly. Then, it is as if the Clinton/Obama results are reversed. They’re both off by 5+% each. The statistical odds of this happening by chance must be astronomically small. This should cause a serious investigation into potential vote fraud. You must be able to explain this discrepancy and rule out fraud. Otherwise, fraud must be the prime suspect if we hope to have fair elections in the future!

I couldn’t agree more, just get rid of polling and let the people vote…there is such overkill with the news coverage and emphasis of polls, not to mention the nauseating phone calls soliciting even more info…maybe Obama could use this as his first change, since we haven;t heard about any of the others.

How about another possibility: Vote fraud. I would put nothing past the Clintons. polls can be wrong, but they are rarely that wrong. Running out of ballots and running out to get more was a bit suspicious,

Polls are worthless — to us. They are only worth it to you pundits, without them, all of you will be out of a job. This goes for sports as well. Why don’t you predict the weather tomorrow based on what it was a year ago on that date. Geez…

Call me crazy, but I seem to recall this isn’t the first time in recent election history that pollsters and pundits got things completely wrong. And this isn’t the first time that you media types have wrung your hands and called for some serious introspection in the wake of another screw-up. Blah, blah, blah. Whatever.

Hillary the victim, the shed tear, the hitching voice, one day before the election. Just in time to get the typical sympathy vote as she did in New York. Hillary only wins, it appears, when she plays the victim.
Go Obama.

Why would I ever tell tell pollsters what I voted, my vote is secret

Another vote for doing away with the polls. Some one should tell the reporters and analysts it’s 2008. It is an era of all day information and statistics.
Also, no one is mentioning that the caucuses allow for candidates to go with a second choice if their first is non-viable. Thats approximately 16,000 votes that could’ve gone either way. Important?

I totally agree with Eric. I would not put anything past the Clintons. They cannot be trusted.

New Hampshire is a pretty short bus ride from Mass. or NY–with the lax voting rules in NH don’t you suppose the Clintonistas helped a few voters find their ways to the polls??

I’m with Eric on this. They don’t call IT the “Clinton Family” ever. Ever! Do they? They call IT the “Clinton Machine.”
Highly speculative indeed but if the shoe fits…

“could it be that the Republicans WANT Hillary to get the nomination and are desperate enough to make it happen”
Huh.. take off your aluminum foil hat. As far as all the pundit’s thinking is the Republicans want Obama to win.

I feel so naive. I, at
34, felt hope for the first timein our elections. I saw someone who might actually be for real. I read Judiciary Watch, and am not claiming I think he’s perfect, but I found hope in him. This primary was stolen. Huge lead yesterday, exit polls talking about voting for change. Could we please not let this go.

I LIVE IN TEXAS… TONIGHT I WENT OUTSIDE, TRIPPED ON LOG AND HURT MY KNEE.. I KNOW THOSE DAMN CLINTONS DID IT…..GET A LIFE YOU CRY BABIES…OR TELL YOUR DADDY TOM DELAY…

Hillary had her “Oprah” moment in that cafe and it turned on a lot of old ladies. Either that or it was fraud,
which is nothing new to liberals, especially, the Clintons. I think Bill got an operative in there somehow. Either way, I don’t trust women that vote for a woman like Hillary on the basis of her “welling up”.

I don’t think anyone should consider those in New Hampshire as “independently minded anti-establishment” voters as they clearly picked the two biggest establishment candidates they could have. If they really did “vote against the media” it’s a sad day indeed; do they really feel rebellious by voting for Clinton ? A tough bunch they say; yeah, a tough bunch of automatons.
Personally I think the first poster was correct: the Diabold machines.

This is extremely disturbing, because it
may influence someone who already has been told that their candidate will loose to stay home, when their candidate
may still have a chance to win. And let’s face the fact that the media has
clearly favored Obama, and they told us
he would win. So, did they lie, or intentionally mislead us to influence the final result?

Hillary’s win was Hillary tearing up. It changed the discussion from “Obama is bringing in the youth vote for the first time” to “Hillary is a human being”.
There is no tactical explanation. It is big picture/strategic.
Not knocking Hillary for her tearing. I’ve run 3rd party Libertarian three times and every election night when I get 1% I’ve had the same physiological/psychological reaction, not crying but def welling up. It is real.
Regardless, I’m a Republican and no doubt Obama is the best Dem. President McCain the Democrats aren’t unhappy with; same feeling for President Obama from the Republican side.
Clinton is Kerry, a self-serving, well-marrying politican that regular people just don’t like. Dems should stop giving their pres. nomination to the machine that always loses on negatives in the General. Vote for a leader. Obama is a leader.

One thing that is getting understatedis the biracial polling and the historical errors — polls often overstate black candidates. What’s different about Iowa? It is not a secret vote, so people can’t secretly “switch” in the voting booth.

We were paid to saturate the polls to reflect better numbers for Obama. This way it would appear that Hillary came from behind to trounce him and help propell her forward. Bill even mentioned this in a speech but you all are to dumb to see this. Hillary will win.. we will see to that.!!

The polls were wrong because when the curtain closed the Progressives weren’t as progressive as they said they were.

I have a very simple, yet logical answer for what happened tonight. Lots of Republicans voted for Hillary. Heck.. It’s what I am planning to do when the Obama trainwreck hits my home state.

Yeah – hello! Gary you talk about everything from swamp gas to the moon in conjunction with Venus except the freaking pink elephant in the room – THE VOTE WAS RIGGED!!!!
Do you think its just coincidence that every President in recent history and most of their opposition have been members of the ‘Skull and Bones’, most from Yale, and its been Bush, Clinton, Bush and now inevitably Clinton.
Here is the real question for you validators of the status quo:
HOW CAN YOU SAY WE LIVE IN A DEMOCRACY?
HOW CAN YOU SAY WE HAVE A GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE FOR THE PEOPLE?
EXPLAIN THAT TRUTH WITH YOUR STATISTICAL DATA!

EVERY SINGLE POLL had Obama taking New Hampshire in an unprecedented double digit lead, and all of a sudden Hillary takes it by 3%? Why is this the ONLY poll to be off?
After Obama’s Iowa win, I had such high hopes that the Clintons stranglehold on American politics was finally over. Tonight the Clintons, thru their dirty tactics, stole the primary and stole my hope.

It’s rather easy to explain.
When a Republican beats the polls, fraud is the only explanation.
When a Clinton does it, HELLO COMEBACK HILLY!

Interesting results in the polls v actual results in this single race. Could it be voter fraud? Could it be machine malfunction? Unlikely, as all other races came out exactly as predicted. Perhaps the pollsters themselves fudged the data for their own reasons. Or could there have been a vast left-wing conspiracy to entice voters to vote for a particular candidate? Or could it be a simple sampling error on the part of all of the pollsters? Whatever the reason, it only shows up the faults of relying too heavily on polls. Remember, “It’s not over, til its over.”

Who votes that edwards got tonight would have gone to-?

Fact is that Hillary’s message has been drowned by an Obama obsessed media. A study done of the coverage revealed that Hillary has been getting hit hard by the media. Members of the media freely admit their biased for Obama. Finally Hillary started to hit Obama were it hurts, his claims that he’s always held the same stance on the war and other issues. Enough people in NH heard the message to turn the election. Democracy is a very messy thing, and no matter how much the media would like to convince us otherwise, they cannot predict elections with the certainty that they claim.

I love the paranoid liberals that are crying voter fraud. It seems to be OK when the Chicago political machine does it or when Acorn does it but if the media darling suffers suddenly it’s viter fraud? Bottom line, polls are crap. The media analysis is all crap. They are nothing more than a mutual admiration society.
NH used to be comservative back when Wm Loeb was publisher of the Manchester Union Leader. it was contest between Arizona (Goldwater country) and New Hampshire to see who was the most conservative. Now NH is full of liberals running to escape the Taxachusetts but ignorantly bringing their big govt socialism with them. Fred, Mitt or Rudy should be the big winner on the Republican side when the dust settles. Talk to real America instead of the select sample of morons you media types usually talk to.

The reason Clinton won is because of the Sean Hannity / Fox news conspiracy. If Clinton lost they would all be out of a job . I think Sean Hannity almost cried tonight seeing Clinton win. I’m sure they will whipped up the message of hate machine after this. But they are just more of the BUSH TRAIN WRECK of the last 7 years.

Yeah right, it’s the machines. And Bush was behind it all. Uh huh, sure.

Oh, and a question for those of youwho believe in conspiracies – why would the indefatigable “Clinton Machine” rig New Hampshire but let her lose Iowa so badly? If they let her lose IA and made her win NH, don’t you think they’re smart enough to realize that will raise some eyebrows? Or are you so ill that you really think they could engineer a massive fraud across the state in the five days they had between IA and NH, without a single person leaking it to the media / blogosphere / whatever realm you think is not controlled by the “Machine” (if any)? Eagerly awaiting the fairy tales you have for that.

And whats the deal with Iowa and NH deciding who are the viable candidates for the reset of us all? That’s crap… very undemocratic.
We should have some sort of lottery every election cycle for the primary order… way too much power in these tiny states.

There is no voter fraud here, Hillary won fair and sqaure. Every candidate has a large team of lawyers who watch all the polls for voting irregularity. No complaint has been filed because there has been no voter fraud! For all you conspirary theorists, remember how the polls were off for the 2004 election with Kerry and Bush, they had Kerry winning.
The real turn around in the election should be credited to the massive amounts of volunteers who showed up for Hillary. She had over 6,000 volunteers and 300 drivers canvassing, making phone calls, and doing visibility for her. Obama got too comfortable with his lead, cocky in fact, saying in the debates, to Hillary, “I guess you’re likeable, enough.” His supporters and volunteers rode up and down Elm Street in Manchester shouting “Obama, Obama” to Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” I’ve been a big Hillary supporter but if I were an undecided voter stunts like that would certainly turn me off to a candidate. Plus, Obama was coming down from his bump in the polls from his victory in Iowa, it normally takes five days for this to happen but since the primary was so soon after the caucus I wasn’t sure if the bump would ever level out.
And, let’s face it, people are probably finally beginning to realize that Obama, while he has amazing rhetoric, has no legitimate plans to support his broad generalizations about what he’ll do if elected. Plus, Obama doesn’t have the experience of creating change to back him up. Look at his senate record, when he was running for Senate he promised he’d never vote to increase funding to Iraq. He’s done just that hundreds of times.
Oh, and why did he lie about his head of his NH campaign being a lobbyist? it’s not that hard to find his name as a registered lobbyist for about six different companies or unions.

I am glad I am not the ony one who thinks these results are fishy. Being a Chicago boy, I remember the Daley Machine well

Chris – As unrepresentative as IA and NH are, do you know of any other states that would spend nine months studying the candidates, meeting and quizzing them in neighbors’ houses, showing up to town hall meetings, discussing their options as communities, etc.? I sure don’t, and I think these two tiny states serve a good purpose – they vet the candidates in ways no other state could or would (can you see New York doing that???).
Ultimately those two tiny states DON’T pick the nominee – they have a tiny fraction of the delegates. If you vote in your state’s primary based on how IA or NH voted, then that’s nobody’s fault but your own.

Did Hillary really win? Was it rigged? But let’s not lose sight on the fact that she had a double digit lead before this recent confused poll, now it’s only 3 in a real voting. That really tell me that Obama had caught up beautifully.

I think all of you have it backwards and are missing the point. You’re making the argument that something must be wrong with the Hillary/Obama numbers because everything else was nailed exactly.
The truth is, something is wrong because of those exact hits; polls are NEVER that good.
My take? The Hillary/Obama numbers may in fact be accurate, but the rest are definitely not.

Hillary won by busing in voters from NY??? Riiight… somehow they bussed in 10,000+ supporters without anybody noticing all the buses poring over the NH borders on the few highways leading in to the state?! Which precincts did all these buses show up at? I have to imagine at least one person would have captured a bus or two on a camera phone. Where did all the buses fill up for gas? Where did all the buses leave from? Any witnesses there, either? Where did the buses come from? Did they rent them from NY school districts? Surely an army of yellow school buses invading the state would have caught somebody’s attention! Oh, wait… they were probably invisible buses, beamed in with the help of the NSA! Lol

A lot of morons saying “polls are worthless; do away with polls…”
Any of you anti-poll folks want to tell me a better way to examine possible voter fraud? If you don’t have prior estimates, on what basis can you even begin to think an election is fraudulent?

Barak Obama is not a serious candidate for president of USA, he will have tough time winning governor of his state let alone president of USA. The man is propped up by Republicans to drain Hillary by the time real election comes. This trick will not work. Republicans will loose no matter what tricks they play.

Chris: Then your problem is with the voters, not the order of the primaries. If momentum is so binding and the staggered primary system is so ineffective in choosing candidates, then why not just have every state hold their primary on the same day, like the general election? Momentum from IA and NH is more meaningful than momentum from a New York since the people actually pay attention, fulfill their obligation to be informed citizens, and actually turn out to vote. I personally wouldn’t want anybody to get momentum from New York since they will just vote for whichever candidate has the most money and can get the most ads on TV. Try holding a caucus in NYC. Clearly votes cannot be bought in IA and NH (Romney outspent Huckabee by 20 to 1! He also buried McCain in NH spending.)

Polls are mostly a FRAUD, and not just because many (from the stats to the questions asked) are skewed with bias. The other reason is that respondants LIE THRU THEIR TEETH as an expression of contempt for the talking heads who’ll repeat these “scientific findings” to an increasingly cynical audience who knows better.

Other Chris: What you say makes sense, except when you consider that if all primaries were held on the same day, candidates would go from NY to MI to FL to CA etc. and skip the smaller states. This is one of the reasons we have the electoral college, and every state gets 2 senators, reguardless of population.
You have to have some kind of order, I just disagree with the same states always being first. Alot of others agree with me, as you can see by the situation in Florida and other states that defied their national party and moved up their primaries.

I saw some little green men being dropped off by a black helicopter being flown by Dick Cheney behind my polling station…. the truth must come out!!!###****$$&%%&

To Riverrat , what are you talking about?

Are you sure the problem was with the polls? Have you ever heard of voter fraud?

You can fool some of the people all the time…… You know the rest. You may have fooled stupid Iowans, you are not going to fool rest of us.

It is going to be hilarious watching the liberal media try to explain why their dimwitted pollsters got it so wrong.
Somehow liberals are just too darn stupid to take a poll correctly. And they want to run this country? No way!

In the polls I read they stated that 40% of the voters were independent and most were undecided wouldn’t that be the difference from the polls? IMO, McC ain and Clinton are the best canidates running

So I guess this is the democrat MO. When you don’t like the results, it MUST be fraud. (I won’t even dignify the racism remarks) Ironic to see it used against the clintons.

If Hillary can fix the voting machine then more power to her. Its about time democrats learn how to win elections.

This was clear manipulation of poll data. Voter fraud would show up in the other races too. It didn’t. Yet, somebody had a plan and carried it out.
Last night I suspected this exact scenario would play out. Why? I looked at both Clinton’s reactions. Something was wrong and it was not the thought of losing New Hampshire. It wasn’t fraud, it was manipulation to win the expectation game. If you know what you are doing, it is a LOT easier to manufacture polling results then it is to manufacture votes. Bill is the ultimate manipulator. He even stated himself that he had a feeling of this result last night. Right! I bet that is at least part of the truth. A feeling for him is probably more like knowledge.
I don’t trust the Clinton’s and never have. But I don’t think they would do anything illegal, just maybe borderline unethical. Afterall, Bill told us once that it depends upon what the word ‘is’ is.
This issue should not be dropped. The polling companies have much at stake here. They will do an investigation. But even if they find out the truth, they are likely to keep the truth secret. The only thing they are interested in is getting the results correct in the future. If data was minipulated over many polls at the same time, then I know they will not want that information public. It would make them look worse than they already do.

It was fraud. Not enough ballots, etc.; a double digit lead disappears in one day? Barack does not have a chance against the corrupt Clinton Democrat machine. Republicans better get their act together, nominate a viable candidate, and ensure that very stringent security measures are in place for November.

AMack, if the third party actually treats all citizens as….well citizens and get’s their votes by not promising goodies and no taxes I’d look. All citizens should pay to play not just those that don’t tend to vote democrat.

I spent all of yesterday giving of my time for the Barack Obama campaign in New Hampshire, going door to door and doing the work of democracy, physically helping the person who I believe to be most worthy of the Presidency of the United States. I have felt tremendously inspired by this man ever since the Audacity of Hope speech in 2004, and through reading his books and watching his speeches, I believe that I agree with him on a large host of issues facing the American people. After victory in Iowa, recent poll numbers showed Obama with a significant lead in New Hampshire, and I believed that a broad majority of Americans shared this view of America’s future, which filled me with hope.
And yet, here I am, feeling exactly as I have every time that there has been a Presidential election in this country that I have been old enough care about – confused and defeated.
The questions seem endless at the moment – How could the polls be so wrong? How could an organization as tight as the one I witnessed in New Hampshire fail? Where were the young voters when we needed them? Did they feel complacent after the Iowa win? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But in the end, none of it was good enough, as the results of the New Hampshire Democratic Primary crushed my hopes yet again. Crushed just as they were when John Kerry was defeated by George W. Bush, after years of what I believed to be perverse failure. Crushed just as they were when Bush defeated Gore in 2000, after I had been brought up in a Democratic home where Bill Clinton was looked upon with favor. In each case, a repudiation of the values and beliefs most important to me seems to have taken place, whether by the entire nation, as was the case in the Bush wins, or, on a smaller scale, by New Hampshire voters yesterday.
This has led me to reconsider whether or not Barack Obama’s idea of building a working majority based on shared hopes, dreams, and a bond which will not break – is as valuable as it first sounded to my ears. If his supporters agree with him on all of the issues, and think that the positions he has outlined accurately summarize what is important to us, then the kind of constant defeat that this thinking has endured this decade suggests that perhaps we aren’t as unified as a people as we may have thought.
I hope I’m overreacting here, and that Obama rebounds from this loss to win the Democratic nomination and then the Presidency, because if those things don’t happen, then it will be evident that his views (and subsequently, the views of his supporters) are not the views of American society at large, which is a depressing prospect, to be sure.
I suppose the only thing we young Democrats can do is to continue along the path of what we think is right and good. Maybe someday, there will be validation at the other side of the road.

But hey that’s ok. We’ve only been using the same flawed technology since the late 1990′s. Diebold is very hackable.
Don’t take my word for it,. Google the terms. Make up your own minds.
Notice the trends of how these polls never make mistakes, then all of a sudden there is no explanation?
Or are your memory banks faulty as well?
You can go back to sleep now….

I think its somewhat obvious the reason. The polls are generally conducted by 3rd party organizations which are then read by the media. With this amount of polling going on so often the result is data with a lifetime measured in hours.
Thus the problem: such data requires analysis since it represents a very small slice of time, and theres a great many of these slices from previous polls. At this point the level of analysis we’re getting from the media, especially mainstream, is more aptly comparable to a horse race.
‘Obama is up 3%, Hillary is down 2%, can Edwards use this to his advantage?’
Garbage and meaningless except for entertainment. And thus you end up at the other end of the problem: the act of observing changes the observed. Can one know the results of a poll and not be affected by the data? The media has proven this to not be the case, so perhaps it should consider how much weight its own presence had in distorting the reality of the situation.
Finally, the biggest reason that the media for the most part is fairly useless in providing useful information on candidates is that the horse-race method is quantitative and thus easier to sell. Whos up, whos down, whos entering, whos leaving; its a drama and a contest at the same time. This is a qualitative subject and as such can only limitedly be measured in numbers. Polls provide only a narrow view into the process.

Chuckly, it’s not difficult to explain: no one in her machine thought she would lose Iowa. Your logic is flawed.
And you don’t think conspiracies exist ?
When tens of thousands of people are charged with “conspiracy” each year what is being asserted ?!?

Here is why something has got to be up with these polls: I have never, ever been called nor do I know ANYONE who has ever been called!
My demographic is very important
Who are they calling!?

I’m a Ron Paul supporter, but I have some relevant things to say, too.
I totally agree that it’s funny when a republican wins it’s fraud, but when Hillary wins it’s a comeback. The really funny thing is more than half of NH said they’d vote AGAINST her.
I have to make one correction, and I know it’s not about the Dems, but…
On the republican side, EVERYBODY’S final numbers changed, except for Ron Paul’s, who came in at 8% on the dot just as expected, even though he has the largest grassroots support of all the candidates (over 94,000 in meetup groups alone). It was reported in Sutton, NH that RP got zero votes, yet there have already been 6 people come forward to say that they voted for him.
I suspect… I hope… for everyone’s sake that a recount occurs. We all deserve a fair election.

How many voters did Hilhave to bus in to eke out a “victory?”

The polls werent wrong is my belief. My belief as a white Canadian is that people in the states don’t want to admit they are racists; so they lie to the pollsters. But in the privacy of the voting booth the reality of voting for a black candidate hits them and they just choose to go for the white establishment candidate. All New Hampshire primary proved is that Americans are adept at electing candidates that will further alienate America from the rest of the world.

Why is it so hard for Americans to believe their election system is incredibly flawed with paperless voting? Why is there so little examination and discussion of the possibility when Computer experts have testified before a House Subcommittee that they can and have thrown elections for candidates using Diebold, Sequoia etc machines. The 3 major voting machines in use were de-certified by California’s Secretary of State as being easily open to fraudulent manipulation. I personally think the Republicans out and out stole the ’04 elections, and probably ’00 too, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they manipulated some New Hampshire returns in Hillary’s favor thinking she will be easier to beat than Obama once they unleash their attack machine on her and Bill. IMO, the Republicans are not going to give up their power without a deadly struggle, however criminal it might be. Bev Harris who wrote Black Box Voting has been unstintingly and courageously uncovering election fraud for years. Fascism is not a nice thing.

Laserbeam:
Every election year in the US, multitudes of “nonwhite” candidates are successful in being elected to office at every level of government.
I suppose it was to be expected, once there was a black candidate in the Presidential race, that we could expect that if he did not win there would be ignorant voices declaiming that The Reason he didn’t win was purely because of his race. It couldn’t be because the voters evaluated his platform and that of his opponent and chose his opponent’s platform.
The problem that shallow-thinkers have this year is that there would be as likely to be as much prejudice against a woman President in some quarters as there would be against a black President…and you can’t explain that away by your theory.
Incidentally, I had the opportunity to visit the Canadian Parliament two years ago while it was in session and it hardly looked like “the melting pot of the world” racially.
Kindly do not undertake to speak of matters about which you know nothing.

Julie…
Good question. Why is it that no matter how much we demand a paper ballot, we’re refused?
And why is it that the states, who have the right to proceed with the voting method of its choice, has implemented fraudulent machines just because of the “Help America Vote Act?”

Polls are extremely accurate, and are becoming more so every year. They provide a priceless service in a democracy.
IF YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE VALUE OF POLLS, THEN YOU ARE NOT INTELLIGENT ENOUGH POST ON A POLITICAL SITE. (I suggest that you high-tail it to your closest community college and take a few courses in PolySci, since your “raw intelligence” is failing you badly.
This is a horrible situation and I applaud ABC for taking their job seriously and that they will do their best to attempt to find out what happened.
IF HRC’s supporters committed voter fraud (I will not tell you the easiest and most often used, but it was probably used in this instance, and ABC knows how it is done, so they can check) they did her no favor, other than keeping her alive a bit longer. In fact, their fraud hurts her in the long run because they are PRETENDING that there are votes for her when there are not.
IF it turns out that HRC did what I suspect she did, then the NH Republicans (and ALL of the state Republican Parties) had better get their legal teams in gear because fraud must be stopped.

Gary,
Face it, Hillary has what it takes because she is white. Americans are racist and when it boils down to it are not ready for a black president.

Jen, also some good questions. Bev Harris has some very interesting things to say about the NH machines and the kingpin who supplies over 80 percent of them.It’s WAY past time for people to wake up to the fact their vote is not secure.
The Help America Vote Act…a sham and you’ve got to look at the Administration that brought us this little gem.

I think the bottom line is that the media WANTS ANY democrat candidate. Obama is clearly more attractive than Hillary and everyone is on his train. I predicted after Iowa that Obama would not win New Hampshire where the electorate are TRUE socialist and actually know something about what is going on.

Has anyone considered voting machine tampering and election stealing in New Hampshire. It seems odd all the pollsters were wrong.

Oh plbbbt, with 97% of the precincts reporting, Clinton wins by a mere 2%, perhaps less in the morning. Obama’s support was within the margin of error, as is the results. We are talking such a small number of votes, that both candidates have the same number of New Hampshire Delegates

You damn right there is voter fraud. Ron Paul was cheated and the Ron Paul supporters will get to the bottom of this!!!

Brian, I’m sorry. I was the one that brought up HAVA.

Let there be know doubt that us Republicans will be much much more driven to vote AGAINST Clinton than ANY of the candidates.

OK. What evidence of actual voter fraud is there? I find it difficult to believe voter fraud–I know the safe guards in place. It may not be impossible; but anyone responsible for such an act is asking for some serious jail time.
I know for a fact how polls can be manipulated and doing so not nearly as much of a risk.
Polls are generally accurate, but not always. When they are this far off in one race but not on any other, then there is something very wrong. It does not mean there is voter fraud (although that potential still needs to be checked). When you have such a drastic change in the poll numbers in such a short period of time, then they must be suspect.
You can manipulate some of the polls some of the time; you can even manipulate all the polls some of the time; but you cannot manipulate all the polls all the time. To manipulate any poll these days, it would take an insider to do so. If there was any monkey business, then there will be a trail that leads to the culprits. But somebody qualified to investigate has to look.

Julie:
There is no “serious research” showing that Republicans “stole” any elections. You might as well talk about someone making off with Madison Square Gardens.
This has to be the second biggest “flat-earth” theory of this or the last century, running right behind the very bad science of “global warming” (did you know there’s already a question of “global cooling” being studied?).

In college football only the top two teams in the polls get to play for the championship. Edwards would not have been on the playing field, where he likely took votes from Obama.

I was very surprised and happy at the results. Young people are easily excited by jingles, slogans and fluffy feelings. Thank God we now have a possibility again of getting a progressive in office. Obama has no record or developed ideas. Hillary and Bill did the hard work necessary for victory and developing articulated political positions on the issues. In the end the SS Obama had nothing to stand on and sank to the bottom along with his support.

I live in NH and was getting twenty calls a day the last few days. Just for giggles, I lied to every one of them. It is nobody’s business to know how I am going to vote. I suspect there are more people like me out there.

Stanley:
You are in great company as you rejoice about Hillary’s win.
(Pssst! Don’t look now, but don’t a lot of those people who are partying with you look like…umm… Republicans? Think “HIGH NEGATIVES!”)
Hillary: The Candidate Lots of People Hate/Fear/Believe is Insane.

The creeeepy clintons were involved. Whaddaya expect?

So may blogs, so little time. Does anyone think that Hillary’s tears were coincidental/incidental? I’m a Hillary backer & think the planned tactic was brilliant. It’s right there on page 9 of her Strategy Guide. See, only a woman could pull this off. Muskie got hammered when he cried in NH years ago, but with a woman, it’s a wonderful tactic. Hillary now will use the tears again when the time is appropriate (like to show compassion, etc.) I say, go Hillary. Whatever works, right? It’s the goal of every successful politician to find a tool that works, right? So what’s everyone worked up about? Finally, the polls were right, but what happened is that the Clinton machine were able to get out the vote. Duh! husband Bill already knew the outcome (Pure coincidence? Don’t think so.) What’s so sinister about that? And paying folks to get others to the polls, what’s sinister about that? And getting folks from other states to vote, and dead folks to vote, and other voter fraud–what’s so sinister, uh, wait, I’ve gone too far. Well, at least there’s nothing new here, right? I predict Hillary will ultimately win the Presidency & America will get what it deserves: 8 more years of a Clinton. May God have mercy on our souls. I just absolutely love it!!!

Steve:
At least we’ve been “assured” that if Hillary is elected Bill won’t be allowed to attend National Security briefings with her.
One wonders what Bill *will* be doing during those briefings while Hillary’s tied up and he’s “off the leash”, so to speak. Bill Clinton wandering around loose for a couple of hours…what might he be “up” to? We just might want to insist that he be allowed – no, required – to attend the briefings, where the CIA can keep an eye on him. We all now know that the briefings are bogus anyway, so what’s the harm?

Brian, just because you say it, and very supercilliously, that there is no research to support my view that US elections are vulnerable to widespread fraud and cannot be secured with a paperless ballot, doesn’t make it true. But kudos on your “methods of logical argumentation.”

Julie:
There’s nothing supercilious about my observation that you do not know when a thing has been proven and when it has not. The “evidence” that you provide, including this latest, does not constitute proof of your claim that the Republicans “stole” the election in either 02 or 04. It merely shines a brighter light on your naivete, or perhaps your desire to see “evidence” where there is none.

Brian:
You are right on! With Bill wandering about, we KNOW what he will do. No mystery. With Hillary as Pres, we KNOW what she will do. Again, no mystery. Isn’t it gratifying to know EXACTLY what the candidate will do when in office? It’s also refreshing, since they are the only couple that “what you see is what you’ll get”? You see, America does NOT really want an honest president (ala Carter). They want one they can count on to do all the underhanded, behind-the-scenes dealings for our collective “good”. Think about it: do we really want a Pres that shows all his/her cards to the world? Don’t we want one that puts America first regardless of what it takes? Hillary is all these things. As in Wall Street where “greed is good”; in the Presidency, “sculduggery is good”. We NEED a President who will perform in office & lie with a straight face. With the Clintons we have all of these particularly appropriate attributes. My vote’s for Hillary, hands down. You go girl!

your comments are quite amusing from This side of the pond, especially those of you who call for a recount.
A recount of votes is not possible as only 23% of the votes were paper ballots.
“Voters dont matter, the people who count the votes decide who wins”
Joseph stalin
I bet he wishes he’d used diebold.
Good luck and best wishes when the election is cancelled and a state of emergency declared by GWB and the ohio nat guard is told to do police work in new york and vice versa.

Polls are for the pundits and the 24/7 cable news. Next time I won’t pay attention to them.

Hillary wins, but she only wins by a TEAR!!! There is no doubt in my mind that the polling showing Obama winning large, swung some of the votes to the GOP.

Hi, Julie:
You say that you “think” the Republicans stole the election, and that makes it all right. In other words, you’re “entitled” to just think anything you care to think. You are not entitled to “think” anything you happen to like to “think”. In a democratic society, you are OBLIGED to be informed, not merely to “think” anything that suits your fancy or supports a position you like.
We say “Well, that’s my opinion!” as if it makes no difference whatsoever how we came by our opinion. We seem to think that all “opinions” have equal value, or that one opinion might not be closer to the truth than another.
There IS a difference between “an opinion” and “an informed opinion”, and I urge you to discover that difference.

I find it interesting that she won in a state using diebold voting machines. If Obama wins in states that don’t use Diebold voting machines and Clinton wins in states that do, you know there’s a lot more going on than a simple miscalculation.

I was unable to vote due to long lines. If everyone who wanted to vote got to the results might have been different. When will internet voting start. This driving to the local poll, looking for a place to park & then wait in a line is ancient in this day & age. If everyone is afraid of fraud then for sure we need a ID to vote as fraud is committed every election in person rather than on a computer!

It will be interesting to see how this fairly significant error on the part of the pollsters plays out. I was surprised to see how wrong they were for the Dems. I could say I agree with some of the postings in this way, young voters, or voters who are there to just play around with the pollsters. I would hope that we are not dealing with intentional screw ups because of the historical factor of this Democratic race.

Brian, thanks for your attempts to turn me into a more well informed person who doesn’t simply ply personal opinions in the face of all the documentation, research, and erudite proof that’s going on here. While I have made a few concrete references: Bev Harris’ Black Box Voting, the House Subcommittee on Election Reform; the California Secretary of State’s report on voting machines, I regret that my comments haven’t measured up to your lofty standards. But, I have found some of your comments helpful. Thank you. (from Canada where I have found a modicum of peace in no longer living in Bush country where torture has become official policy.)

The only reason she won is because more women voted for her then Obama and that’s only because she shed a few would-be crocodile dears. So much for feminism, huh, Hillary? I’m a women and enraged with my gender because they’ll vote for somebody SOLELY on her gender.

there is also the issue of vote fraud. new hampshire has same day voter registration and people from mass. were coming up to assist hillary clintons sagging campaign in the late stages of the campaign. there have been rumors that kerry’s campaign with the assistance of some unions, trucked in thousands of people to vote in different urban precincts around the state in 2004. a number of republicans complained in 2004 that mass. school buses were shipping voters around the state to polling locations and there has always been speculation that those voters may not have been residents. as everyone knows kerry won the state but not by much and bush won in 2000 and would have won even without nader on the ballot that year. the state of new hampshire will tell people that they have strict guidelines requiring proof of residency. but one has to wonder.

Even though I don’t believe there was voter fraud in NH, I absolutely believe that there were serious problems in the last two presidential elections. Electronic voting machines built by Republican owned companies (like Diebold) should be banned, and there is no justifiable reason for paperless elections. It simply doesn’t make sense. As long as we have them there will always be people who cry foul after the fact. We should revert back to paper ballots, and we should allow the UN to monitor every presidential election to help ensure fairness. They do it for democratic countries all over the world, and I guarantee they would tell you that currently we do not meet the minimum standards for what would be called a fair, honest election.

Ron Paul was projected to get squat. He ended up with squat. What’s the problem?

In the last 2 weeks the phone rang every 30 minutes with a new poll. The latest call came in at 9:40pm most at dinner time. If the call was answered at all they were given bad information just to send a message “STOP”. Last night ABC was calling the race at 8:10, thats just 10 minutes after the close of the polls. What kind of responsible journalism is that???? 7000 votes out of a 500,000 were counted and they are calling the race!? You wonder why the networks have been belittled in their impact and viewership!

Can anyone say voter fraud? The fact that New Hampshire allows someone to walk up and register the day of the election is a shame in of itself. It would not surprise me to find out that many out of state voters came to the granite state to cheat

When a socialist/liberal candidate doesn’t win (Obama) the vacuous left cries “fraud.”

The youth came, celebrated Obama, whooped it up, and forgot to get around to voting. The youth vote will continue to be curve balls for pollsters.

Duh!
It was the “Clinton Tears.” No one likes to see a woman cry. She played the female card and the result of that strategy was too late to be picked up by any poll.
Bill’s tirade against the press coverage didn’t hurt either.
Harry

I think there is a much stronger undercurrent for Clinton than is generally acknowledged. With so much of the media fawning over Obama, it sometimes seems almost un-American not to be an Obama convert, but Clinton supporters like me appreciate her policy-wonk nature, and feel she would be a great president. I’ve talked to friends, family acquaintences, fedex delivery people, telephone solicitors, etc. and have run into a large number of people who support her, but who don’t make a big hoopla about it. It has absolutely nothing to do with Obama – I’d vote for him with pleasure if he were nominated, as I would 90% of the other Democratic candidates (aren’t we lucky this year?) – it has to do with preferring Clinton as a candidate who has the skills, the personal strength, the ideas and the ability to work with people and get things done. Iowa merely kicked us in the butt and told us to get out to the polls.

No wonder it’s called the granite state, they are all dumb as rocks.

Polls are worthless as the pollster can skew the data or the question for any outcome they want. I don’t believe any of them.
Change, change, Change is coming.
Higher Taxes, mandated crappy health care, a tanked economy, sky high interest rates, much bigger government, Big Brother watching your every move, less take home money, more illegal aliens flaunting our laws and abusing the system (which will lead to more and higher taxes), layoffs, a massive recession, 5 dollar a gallon gasoline.
Yes, change is coming, when Hillary or Obama take the white house.

If I was this wrong in my job even once I’d be fired. That’s the problem. Pollsters aren’t held accountable.
And there is clearly a short term memory problem here. Anyone remember exit polls in 2000 and 2004 predicting Gore and Kerrey as winners? I could have guessed these numbers and been just as acurate.

We really need to ask how the republican polls were so accurate and the democrate so terribly wrong. Shortage of ballots at various polls, ease in which voters can register to vote should raise serious questions about ballot box stuffing and voter fraud. Where are the election journalist and why are they not asking these questions?
Gray Ghost

I think NH voters heard the media saying the Dem race was over and said whoa! not so fast. Lets mix this up and let the rest of the country weigh in.

vote fraud: hillary is more easily defeat-able than obama. the republicans tipped the scales to put the hillary on top, because they would rather run against her than obama.

One of the problem with the polls may be that they only polled New Hampshire residents. NH voting rules allow registration at the voting place and has no residency requirement. In the words of a NH senator, you don’t have to be a NH resident to vote in the primary. You can vote ther if you think you might want o move to NH some day. (Check out USAToday to read about this.) Vermont has an extensive and highly motivated Democrat machine in place. Many of the new voters in last night’s primary may well have been Vermonters mobilized to give Hillary a boost.

Hillary must cry for the next ten months? Men have been losing fights in this way since the beginning of time! She cries, the girls rally and the pollsters are left to explain it. LOL GOOD LUCK!!!

The media is forgetting the “Iron My Shirt!” factor.
Those two guys who disrupted Hillary’s rally the day before with the classic sexist message “Hillary, Iron my shirt!” have rallied women like nothing else.
That was a line men used against women in the early days of the women’s liberation movement, and many of the old women who came out for Hillary in large numbers have felt the sting of those words.
That’s all there is to it. Why can’t the media just look at the obvious?

People finally wised up and the New Hampshire voters said “not so fast, who are you Obama?” Now they want to make this a racial thing. Shame on the Press for starting a new load of crap and lies. As it has been said “You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time”. Obama just isn’t ready..so now if he loses a state the state is going to be racist? Sheesh!

Devil,
How are Ron Brown and Vince Foster doing?

Socks the Cat,
How’s your dollar doing?
How’s your war in Iraq going?
How’s your health care, and your gas prices, and your warrantless wiretap, and…oh forget it.
Keep pretending that everything is fine. See you in hell.

Well, folks lie to polsters. Duh! and on Hillary with a few more primaries to go yet, whenn suggested to tax corporate America (that would be the folks who give you a job, numbskull, they’ll just move their headquarters over-seas to more favorable nations.
No, don’t tax corporations – lower their taxes so they will have to incentive to remain and keep jobs in America – that would be The United States of America.

Poster George is a fool- yeah- the Republicans did it! Hah. Just like they are behind 9/11, global warming, and the murder of John Lennon. Moron

People found it a lot easier to not vote for a black when they were in the privacy of the booth. Black & muslim are two not so very good things in a mostly white state.

I have seen the comment and agree whole heartedly. DO AWAY WITH THE POLLS. Let the voters decide who will win. With only 11% of the precincts counted they already predicted McCain the winner. Like everything else “THE MEDIA” once again is trying to sway the way we think. THE MEDIA is backing Obama and thats who they like to see win, it’s obvious. I bet if for one or two days they talked up Richardson who should bow out, he’d move up in the polls. BACK OFF MEDIA!!!

THE BRADLEY EFFECT

The only thing more corrupt then the liberal press are the Clintons.

HILLARY NOT ONLY WOMAN IN ARIZONA
PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY!!
That’s right. This is the most under-reported story of the Primary season.
Arizona has produced a slew of candidates for the highest office in the nation. That’s right, more candidates to choose from. While the country and its political pundits are focused on tiny East Coast states, some ten Republicans and fifteen new Democratic candidates will appear in the Arizona Primary ballot this February. An effort sponsored by The Tucson Weekly, an Arizona alternative newspaper, has opened the gates for a stable of dark-horse candidates.
As with all politics the sparks are already flying. Candidate Sean “CF” Murphy responds to a political ad filed by Democratic candidate Doctress Neutopia in which she desecrates the American flag by cutting a hole in it. Follow the antics of America’s grass-roots candidates by tuning in to the campaigns blog.
http://projectwhitehouse.wordpress.com/
and
http://www.projectwhitehouse08.com

I am sick of the people and the media piling on the Clintons. Calculated tears? Voter fraud? And that’s just today. The moment when she explained why she was running for president was beautiful, warm and elegant and STRONG. IF you saw the clip in its entirety, which of course, was not what they wanted to show you. Hillary is not an actress, in fact, she sucks at it, which is why you had not had a moment out of her like that up until that point. BECAUSE it was honest.
No attacks on the Golden Boy, Obama’s, inconsistencies, on his unfair assessments. The media has given him a pass, and, if he is not tested in this campaign, we will pay for it.

How can anyone say polls are useless. They run our country. Politicians rule depending on what polls are saying. I dont agree with it but its the sad truth.

Wasn’t it another Democrat from New York (Boss Tweed) that told people to vote early and vote often. I guess Hillary is trying to make a new Tammany Hall in the White House

Those Collich Kids demonstrated once again that you can’t count on them to vote when you need them.

Let’s not forget that the Clintons were notorious for busing in supporters from other states to make their crowds look bigger. We are dealing with the Clintons, the most unscrupulous duo to ever hit the scene in politics.
Why should we even bother to vote this election? Between the media bias and the morally bankrupt Clintons who WILL except nothing short of victory, it’s already over. It was over 12 years ago when we first heard whisperings that Hillary would make a great president.

“15 – no child act has raised education excellence nationwide; 16 – inflation has been kept in check”
Holy cow, these are both WAY, WAY OFF. You might consider doing some research on something besides http://www.rush.com and fox news, just because Rush says it doesn’t make it true. My God you are dumb, did you even READ this thing before you copied and pasted it?

The now famous”Clinton Tears”was the turning point of the game.It proves that we have now gone full circle from a”John Wayne”nation to an “Alan Alda”nation.And the Islamos must be honing their blades in anticipation of our November suicide.

This insane obsession with polls is helping thwart our democracy. They most definitley can sway an election. I’ve been polled twice in the last few years coming out of my election place and both times I have lied to the pollster about who I supported. If everyone does this then polling will become ineffective and we can get back to having a true democracy not influenced by the media.

Well said, Nez…well said.

Not to worry. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton will get it straightened out. Oh wait, no they won’t. I forgot. There is only voter irregularity when a Republican wins the contest. “Get out the Bushes”, Oh how I miss that poetry.

Who knew that the lily-white New Hampshire-ites are a bunch of racists? It was mainly the under-educated people earning less than 50k who voted for hillary…

The real problem here is voter fraud. You have to ask yourself the question who is the party that wants to enforce identity verification (Picture DL, SS#, check stub and utility bill) and which party is vehemently opposed stating discrimination and intimidation. Iowa and New Hampshire primaries should not have such bell weather influence in the way the candidates get coverage moving onto later primaries. The crocodile non-teary coverage of Hillary over the past 24 hours was played out like a zapruder film. The media has been experiencing polling problems going back to the 2000 election. Its a feeding frenzy to get election results out first. What would happen if there were to be a 36 or 48 blackout of TV and Radio news prior to the actual voting and until well after all of the votes had been counted. Would the results be more accuratly reflect voter sentiment. Why are would anyone get an uptick because of ballot position and who gets the benefit of the stupid voter vote in an open primary State like NH?

Just shows how polls can be used. Only a few times have I ever heard from a Pollster..and each time I Told them otherwise..Of course I am in a Union and here in Mass. I must Register Correctly or be out of work..JUST IMAGINE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF HILL’S UNION SUPPORTERS WERE TO CALL AND I SAID I WAS VOTING FOR BARACK..THIS TIME WE WERE TOLD TO SAY THAT SO HILLARY COULD BE THE “COMEBACK KID” AND THE POLLSTERS TOOK IT IN LIKE IT WAS CASH IN THE BANK. DIRTY TRICKS ARE DIRTY TRICKS AND YOU ALL GOT TRICKED!

Polls matter, the problem with the NH pre-election poll was the Indies deciding to vote for McCain and not voting for Obama. Obama would have won, if McCain was not available as a choice.

The stupiditiy in using old assumptions and “adjustments” for samples in these polls is proving itself again. Over estimation of the “young” vote, turn out and flat out lying to pollsters make using these predictions little more than a finger in the wind. Also listen to the “heads” on TV interpret this garbage. It is sometimes mind numbing.

I was contacted by a woman who said she was conducting a poll for CNN. I told her that I didn’t trust CNN and therefore did not care to answer her questions. She laughed and said I was not the only one who had told her that.
If you want to stop the leftstream Democrat media from using polls to engage in election tampering, just say no thanks when they call.

The answer to this is simple. Clinton was elected by a sudden shift in the female vote. Why? Because of her little crying stunt. That’s all it took to vacuum all of Obama’s Oprah votes into Clinton’s camp. Pretty scary thought about the intellect of the average voter, and particularly the female voter.

Damn right this smells.
The sight of the Clinton makes me want to hurl!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe if you slacker punks could put down your bong and Xbox controller long enough to actually go vote…

This is why we have elections to decide candidates rather than using polls. It is also why we have a representative government. The news media have tried to change the our government so that all decisions are made by polls, which they control of course.

Here’s my impersonation of Don:
“Bush is great, here’s my proof”
(show list of things that are not true, and any educated person knows they aren’t true. educated person calls out list saying it’s untrue)
“Oh, you just don’t believe anything.”
You are RIGHT Don! CONGRATULATIONS! I don’t just believe anything! I read my news from dozens of different sources from around the world to form my own thoughts and opinions of what is going on in the world. YOU get all of your information from right-wing sources and take it all as gospel. I feel very, very sorry for you. You are an especially challenged individual. Bless you and best of luck to you. Please read the list you presented, and RESEARCH EVERY CLAIM ON IT. Jeez, some of them you shouldn’t HAVE to research. YOU HAVE BEEN BRAINWASHED! SNAP OUT OF IT!

Hey “the devil”…..do you have a job? A life? Just asking is all.
I’m off to work.

Maybe people in the elite Northeast do not fully understand Dems power patterns. Powerful Dems have a system here in La. if the vote is not going their way. Go to the poor, black communities with busses and cars, pay them a few bucks and take them to the polls to vote for who they are told to vote for. It is historical in La. And if their candidate is near the top of the ballot, so much the better.

How pathetic and scared you people are who have fallen for the systematic and calculated attacks on the Clintons over the years. You have learned how to do it yourselves, using the same nonexistent “standard”. History will use you as an effective psychological study in the distant future. Your mob mentality, how you fed off of each other… it will be interesting.

The Democrats & the Media deemed Hillary the winner a long time ago.
Iowa was a fluke.
The teary eyes, the “iron my shirt” stunt , all pointed to Hillary’s humanity, touching the hearts of the TV numbed electorate.
She’s heading to the coronation y’all. She earned it. It’s her turn now.This primary sham is all about media hype & selling advertising.

How about the fact that the polls, the pollsters and the pundits are all misleading crap. Point a finger at the pollsters? Then point a finger at the know-it-all pundits who smugly claimed Candidate A or Candidate B was leading. The fact is the mainstream media is totally misleading in every way possible and this fiasco shows we would be better off to watch youtube.com

Research 2000 Most Accurate in NH
January 9th, 2008 ·
Research 2000, the Nation’s most unbiased and reliable research firm, released their final New Hampshire polls before the Democratic and Republican debates on January 5th. The margin for error for both primary polls is plus or minus 5%.
While pundits and talking heads are bashing all pollsters for projecting a double digit win for Obama and a Romney victory, Research 2000′s final poll within the margin for error showed the tightest margin between Obama and Clinton and showed as they did in Iowa, the most accurate result in the Republican contest. Below are the New Hampshire 2008
Results against the Research 2000 NH Polls:
Democratic Primary (margin for error 5%)
conducted for The Concord Monitor
Clinton Obama
Research 2000 33% 34%
Election Results 39% 37%
Republican Primary (margin for error 5%)
conducted for The Concord Monitor
McCain Romney
Research 2000 35% 29%
Election Results 37% 32%
——————————————————————————–

The conspiracy theorists need to take a big swig of purple Kool-aid from Jim Jones’ five gallon jug. The over exuberance and swagger I saw Mr Obama exhibit the last couple of days turned me off just enough, that I would have changed my vote at the last minute. It was a vote change due to a last minute display of Hillary’s tears vs Barack’s overconfidence. Never doubt the emotions voted by the electorate.

This is a historical glitch and should be investigated. I suggest a in-depth audit of 1000 voters and should it turn out okay then we should carry on.
I read the thousands of blogs and they were mostly anti-Clinton – yet this was a unregulated expression of a large segment of the NH population

Polls, as others have well said, are useless to people who actually use their brains. I have been polled a few times and like others here, I answer on the contrary because I like to screw with the polls because they mean nothing. THE POLL that matters is the election.

Giving up, Don? I’m glad. Because you can’t win. You are so wrong, it hurts.
Now go on and try to spread your groundless, insipid venom. See how many people with an IQ over 80 will listen to you. What they hey, it’s probably still about 40% of the country.

I was assigned to monitor the counting of the vote in my small town, Springfield, NH. The town is roughly 50-50 Republican-Democratic. Obama beat Clinton by 20 percentage points, and Ron Paul came in third, ahead of both Guiliani and Huckabee, the latter by a huge margin. These are facts. Make of them what you will.

Now at least we know where all those extra ballots went that they nedded! Can you say voter fraud?

The late polls, including Clinton’s, were consistent in giving Obama a sizable win. They averaged 8 points for him, but some were much higher – and the margin seemed to be growing every half-day, concurrent with the glowing media coverage of Obama and the cynical “it’s over” coverage of Clinton. The pictures they showed of her were mostly downbeat or odd, while the pictures of him were heroic. The headlines were diametrically opposed.
But it’s hard to poll right down to the final hour and process the numbers in time for the election. And something happened in the second half of Monday, and even early Tuesday.
The media did play that clip over and over and over again of Hillary talking to the coffee house group about how it’s hard and she cares so much. The headlines that went with that mostly suggested that she was at the breaking point.
But I think that a good chunk of the electorate, namely women in her age group and others, found her to be genuine in that moment as we haven’t often seen her before. They heard the headlines or the news anchors that promised that this tape was going to show her cracking up. And when the tape didn’t show her cracking up, the viewers thought, “what is the news media trying to tell me? why do they say crack up when it’s just normal human reflection at a stressful time? she’s not a robot – she’s a person who cares.”
And with that, they called their best friend, talked about it and got out to vote on a spring-like day in January.
And they showed the media who’s the real boss – the voters are. They won’t be told what to think of a 2-minute clip–they’ll make up they’re own minds about it–particularly if the headlines and pundits characterize it as something it wasn’t.
http://www.lezident.com

I told everyone I knew that “crybaby” Shillary would win NH by hook or by crook. How many cars with license plates from Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, etc. were parked at the polling places? Is it coincidence that the NH governor who changed the state’s election laws to stop mandating the checking of ID’s for state residence is a Clinton supporter?
The polls of the NH voters by the media were correct! The problem was they did not include ILLEGAL voters from outside NH, who broke 99-1% for Clinton!
Furthermore, why aren’t the Obama supporters and the media calling for investigations into voter fraud? After all, the polls are NEVER wrong!
Shillary will be our next president by hook or by CROOK, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it…

devil,
you can afford a computer, the internet and obviously don’t have to work so sounds like you are doing pretty well in this oh-so-terrible economy. Says a lot about you that you spend that time and resources spewing hatred at your fellow countrymen – assuming you are a US citizen. Hope you get well soon.

I wholeheartedly agree that election polls should be done away with completely. Too many times if a persons candidate is behind in the “polls” they won’t waste their vote on him/her. I feel the same with electoral voting versus popular voting. Get rid of electoral voting!! The whole system needs revamped after Bush’s double voter fraud win. Heck, it got so bad at the last Presidential election there was talk of bringing in UN monitors at election sites.

The Clintons are CRIMINAL.

Finally reality check for the Obama “reality show” campaign! Time to talk about the real issues, this is the race for the Presidency and not for American Idol or Oprah Show. Now Senator Obama has to bring his real agenda, talk about real issues and talk about his record and how he can bring change. No more “BIG WORDS” that sounds like a FAIRY TAIL!
My vote in SC goes to Edwards who has also been written off by the pundits and the polls.

Consider the FOX news poll only, there is a 99.65% chance their +/- 5% poll is accurate, that means one in 250 chance it is not. Then they had the exit polling, the polling from CNN, the polling from the independent groups, all saying the same thing…. that drives the odds off error much lower, and the spread of possibilities much closer….
Think of it like this. We have a box of marbles, red and green, there are 10,000 marbles, with 1000 being green.
Now we have 24 groups pull 100 marbles from the box, and compare how many are red, and how many are green…. then average the results….
By the time the 24 groups are done the average will very ,very closely tell the results. we can count on that. In fact, we count on that simple truth in accounting, engineering, medicine, government economic reporting, manufacturing, and just about any other area of life where a large population of data exist.
The odds of this error are greater than 1 in a billion…..
And yes, I used to TEACH how to create samples that would accurately predict outcomes in upper level accounting courses in college. So I have some experience in these things…
NH is the new Chicago…

If this had been a poll problem between a Republican and a Democrat the media would be screaming fowl, but since it’s between two democrats, it’s just an intellectual curiosity. Let’s remember this the next time a poll is wrong and see what happens!

My own guess would be that since there is a significant difference in the ages of the candidates’ supporters, maybe there is some age-related technological difference. Like maybe all the older folks were less likely to participate in a poll because they were tired of getting phone calls. Or have less phone lines. And we know that the older population favored Hilary. Just a guess…

It is simple to explain what happend. Clintons managed to put just enough doubt on Obama’s ‘change’ and ‘hope’, in the minds of voters to force them rethink.
Clintons used Karl Rove’s book (He was able to put just enough doubts about John Kerry in 2004, to scare voters).
Clintons used the words like ‘talker’ vs ‘doers’, ‘no beef in Obama’s rhetoric’ and ‘fair tale’ etc.
It all started on Saturday debate when she was shrewed enough to grab the chance and gave a lecture on change. I think Obama is finished if he opts not to attacke Clintons.

Could it just be that the pollsters neglected to sample sizeable numbers of Massachusetts residents who would be taking time off from work, or their welfare-supported activities, for a day trip to the granite state and and visit to the polls, where residency requirements are becoming a thing of the past. Voter fraud is and will play an increasing role in perverting the 2008 election process. Motor voter stikes again, this time to Hillary’s benefit.

The Problem: The liberal racists of the North were found out. What would the reports be if this happened in South Carolina?

Interesting how we continue to see many an election where the results don’t match the polls. This has become much more commonplace since the inception of electronic voting machines.
Oh well, the dream of democracy was a wonderful dream. As Stalin once said: “Those who make the votes decide nothing. Those that count the votes decide everything”.
R.I.P American Democracy
Those that want to deny it are simply ignoring reality.

Hillary’s where’s the beef? line likely won last minute voters.
How might Obama now respond?
“Hillary, you ask where’s the beef. So let’s talk about beef; and while we’re at it, let’s talk about content too.
In the old America, the beef is everywhere. Blue staters got a beef with Red staters; red states got a beef with blue staters. And far too many politicians and pundits make a living peddling their beef with other citizens.
Lots of Republicans have a deep beef with you and Bill, because they feel you shade things — as with what Bill did to my Iraq stance.
So, that’s where the beef is. In the bin of yesterday.
Now as regards great thoughtful detail and content in policy, I am glad you ask the question, because that’s what will make our dreams reality:
On defense…
On healthcare…
On social security…
etc.
Hillary, the poetry of campaigning is a lead in to the beautiful prose of harmonius and civic governing…where, as I’ve said, we disagree without being disagreeable. Where we work through problems without airing and nursing our beefs with perceived vast conspiracies of the other side.
I am thrilled about your great detail and dedication in working in the Senate. I have seen it first hand, and commend you for it.
I also commend you for having worked amicably with fellow Senators, and that’s why I find it regrettable that you state that Republicans future testing of our convictions that I will face in the general election an ‘attack machine’…while calling your, and your campaigns, attacks on my record ‘vetting’.
Hillary, it seems the minute you left the Senate for the campaign trail, you left aside the civic interplay that won you respect their. And headed straight for the old beef.
And that is why Americans who work through the tight details of foreign policy, where I an warning tyrants who turn a blind eye to terrorists that they will they final price if such terrorists ever nuke or poison a mass of Americans, or health care, where I am telling the pharma industry that there are new powerful players at the decision table, such as Jon Edwards
Americans who want the deep detail and thought of great policy do not want yesterday’s stale political beef to again impede our national progress, and put a continued stench in our civic discourse.”
hmm… I’m no speechwriter, but with that bit of role play it does seem that Obama has some room to respond strongly and continue building his desired new majority.

The answer seems obvious to me, while i have no trust of the Clinton machine I doubt it was fraud. This is New Hampshire, and as we saw over and over people there often dont make up there minds until the parking lot before they vote.
Many liked Obama, but changed there mind at the last minute. A NH Voter changing there mind is like the sun rising and setting, something that can be relied on.
And i just have to say, I love how some wackos are saying the republicans fixed the poles, are you going to blame President Bush the next time you drop something or trip as well?

It seems to me that an audit is in order. Call me paranoid but I am suspicious of the Clinton’s.

Living in NH and having one’s phone ring off the hook with candidates and pollsters, after awhile one either ignores the calls or gives different answers to each caller, hence the polls are flawed. I know a lot of people here that do this just to keep everyone guessing. Polls are useless. The real problem is 3 year election campaigning…ugh!

Just remember to always lie to pols, treat them like a thief that wants your personal information. The media should be polling the Electoral College to see who they have been told to vote for.

If everyone would just not answer the poll callers they would stop calling.
Iowa wants Obama and Huckabee, New Hampshire wants Billary and McCain.
Both states can have them all as far as I am concerned. They are all the problem not the solution. Wake up folks.

When we begin using polls to actually elect people, then we can worry about why they were wrong. Just yet another reason the media is so stupid and corrupt. This polling stuff makes the entire election process of joke and they should always be taken as nothing more than a joke.

Kathy if thats how you decide who to vote for then I understand now why we end up with the tripe we call politicians.
All of them are intelligent and competent? I would hate to see what you consider stupid and incompetent.

Folks, the answer is already public. Independents who are allowed to vote in the primary of their choosing, where expected to show up more on the Dem side by about 70% to just 30& for the GOP. Instead according to exit poll numbers abouot 60 % voted in the Dem primary while 40 % did so in the GOP primary. So that hurt Obama and Romney and helped McCain and Clinton.

This article assumes we’re stupid. Very first paragraph “It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong. We need to know why”.
This amateur actually wants us to forget that pollsters (his business) were totally screwing it up a long time ago in 2000 and 2004. Oh, and remember “Dewey defeats Truman”?
Total laughing stock.

polls. lol. i try telling everyone i talk to you that polls dont mean anything. the only poll that matters is the one’s that come out after people have voted. polls are so inaccurant because what pollsters fail to realize is that most people who particapate in polls dont end up showing up on election day. most people dont vote. so why should thier opinion in a poll mean anything. i hate polls. all this poll taking garbage really started getting out of hand during the clinton era , where he polled everything to determine where he stood on the issues. i am so sick and tired of polls because again they are always wrong. p.s. the lib media also use polls to scare people into thinking thier candidate doesnt have a chance so why go out and vote. therefore the candadant the media wants to win , does so. again usually they do this to get libs elected. again. the only poll that matters is the ones that come out after we’ve voted on election day.

I doubt that it is mathematically possible for the pollsters to be within their projected limits on all but these two candidates. There can only be one conclusion, and that is something sneaky going on with the results. Think FRAUD. No question on that one. Next question: Will anything be done about it? (Answer: Probably nothing)

Democrats make all decisions based on emotion. Well, HILLARY CRIED, right? Need I say more?

The exit polling by MSNBC explains things perfectly
It looks like women voted in the Democratic primary and went overwhelmingly for Clinton, and men voted in the republican primary disproportionately.
Democrat exit poll
Sex
Category % Total Biden Clinton Dodd Edwards Gravel Kucinich Obama Richardson
Male 43 0 30 0 19 0 2 42 7
Female 57 0 47 0 15 0 1 34 3
Republican exit poll
Sex
Category % Total Giuliani Huckabee Hunter McCain Paul Romney Thompson
Male 57 8 10 1 35 11 31 1
Female 43 10 13 0 38 4 32 1

Cool! I love it when the pollsters get it wrong. If everybody believed that the pollsters would be 100% correct, why would they bother to vote? I hope they goof up on Super Tuesday as well. It’s reassuring to think that Americans are making up their own minds and are willing to tell the media to back off.

In the town of Sutton, at least 3 people voted for Ron Paul, but their votes were not tallied http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/files/elections/2008/by_county/NH_GOP_0108.html?SITE=NPRELN&SECTION=POLITICS yet check this out: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=82909
“My mom, aunt, and dad all voted for RP today in my hometown, My mom and aunt both work passing out ballots, and checking them off. I just looked at the politico map and it says their town has ZERO votes for Ron. Now i know that there isn’t corruption on voting in that little town, so where they reported it must be. What do I do, anyone know???

Do we need polls? Do we need caucus’s? Can’t we just have primary day and election day? We are on overload and that’s when people get annoyed, and lie.

this is just one more instance of ABC news having to protect their interests ,
GET DEMS ELECTED .
We are glad to see most of your readers see through all your redirect .
to bad I grew up depending on this stations honesty , we have not watched it for over 10 years witch seems to be a trend .
J.C.

It was just killing me that all of the polling (save for one poll that showed Barack with a mere 3 point win) was so desperately wrong…how could the voting have been so unpredictable? I knew our ground game was AS good, if not better than Hillary’s.
Then I remembered where we were. New Hampshire. The same state that despite predictions for a Bush win in 2000, John McCain was aided by DEMOCRATS that crossed over because Al Gore was basically unapposed (Bradley was through after IA). Dems/Indies in NH voted for McCain because we all knew a Bush candidacy would be a tough win. I think the reverse has happened to us, my friends!
The Huckabee, Guliani and Fred Thompson percentages were extraordinarily depressed; performing far under expectation. Even the Romney votes were a bit under waht was expected. My supposition is that Republicans crossed over and supported Hillary knowing that a Hillary nomination id the best, easiest road to the WH. It wouldn’t suprise me to hear of a local radion station (AM tallk, that is) encouraging such activity in certain NH markets.
Clearly the polling was off as well, but I do beleive that some sort of chicanery is at work here, too!
Thoughts?

Now I’ve heard it all… The pollsters were right and the voters were wrong?
I agree with Joe 100%

perhaps many nh voters simply exercised an individual private right to vote while expressing contempt for pushy pollsters, politicians and pundits with a little duplicity of their own.

It is unclear whether or not there was fraudulent activity on the Democratic side. The discrepancy between the polls on the Republican side and the actual results compared with the Democratic side raise significant concerns. For all of you Obama supporters, this shows why same day registration is a bad idea. This stuff should not be taken lightly. The possibility that large numbers of out of staters came in or that there may have been repeat voting is far more likely under this system. Remember the old Democratic axiom, “Vote early and vote often.” For years Republicans have warned everyone about Clinton tactics. For once a Democrat may have become victim to the same playbook.
I do not understand the infatuation some people have with the Clintons. He was originally elected with the smallest plurality ever obtained (about 42%) the first time he ran. This is hardly a mandate. Nor did he gain a majority vote when he ran for re-election. Hillary was no better, conveniently picking a liberal state to run for Senate where she had absolutely no ties. She took a page from Bobby Kennedy, realizing New Yorkers would be stupid enough to vote in a dead dog, if it was a Democrat.
The whooshing sound you are hearing, are all the enthusiastic independent Obama supporters leaving the room, after the Clintons have sucked up all the oxygen.
As an American, I was hoping Obama would win to bring some intelligence and decency back into the Democratic Party (the last Dem I voted for was McGovern). As a Republican, I’ll root for Hillary, knowing she’ll get her butt kicked in November.
For any blacks reading this post, consider how you are treated by the Democratic Party. They want to keep you poor to get your vote, but don’t expect any real power.

Good question. With the Clinton nothing is impossible. I would start looking at the moment when the Democrats ran out of ballots and had to go scrambling for more. I would also look into the bus loads of union members the Clinton machine brought into New Hampshire.

To say that the pre-election polls are skewed by the pollsters is trite and redundant. That is why we require citizens to actually show up and cast a ballot. To question whether the ballot casting process is legit can be justified by examining who is behind the challenges to States requiring official ID from voters to cross-reference from the registration lists. The arguments are to be heard by the Supreme Court today.
These tiny primararies are totally manipulated start to finish by the media. Obama is a media-created fairy tale (ONE thing to agree w/ Bill about). Had the Sun Times corporation not sued to open sealed transcripts of two divorce prceedings he would stil be a STATE senator. And the Clintons are sold on the potential of Hillary being another comeback kid.
And I was aware of this long before I ever heard of Gary Langer. By the way, what business does a news organization have conducting polls. Whatever happened to not creating the news?

Maureen Dowd,
“There was a poignancy about the moment, seeing Hillary crack with exhaustion from decades of yearning to be the principal rather than the plus-one. But there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing.”
Congratuations women of New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton used you and you’re pathetic.

Maverick, you should keep quiet about Clinton’s smallest plurality. At least he had more votes than the other guys. The guy you voted for in the 2000 Election did not.
And what this guy did in 2004 Ohio is much closer to voter fraud, because the exit polls there showed an oppositie result to the actual vote. In NH yesterday, the exit polls matched the actual vote.

John Silvestro and his small private business, LHS Associates, has exclusive programming contracts for ALL New Hampshire voting machines, which combined will count about 81 percent of the vote in the primary. The Diebold voting machines have had many serious security and progamming flaws and the “hacking” community has instructions on reprogramming the memory cards to alter the vote counts.

Of course there was vote fraud. The Diebold machines are in place. 4 people voted for Ron Paul in Sutton County but the Diebold numbers say zero. Of course Clinton the machines were hacked to marginalize Paul and Obama. We the citizens are unable to choose our own leaders because of vote fraud.

Am I wrong to think that the people who pick up the phone and agree to speak to a pollster for 15-20 minutes are already out of the norm for the general public? And also, the people who do participate in these polls are much more likely to be following politics, than your everyday average voter. Therefore, they would be more likely to be following the election coverage which was obviously and sometimes even admittedly(NBC News) pro-Obama.

The pollsters missed all the dead folks that obviously voted for Hillary. It happens in every election where the democratic machine is working. Blacks need to realize the Democrats are using them and will suppress them when they try to rise above a level acceptable to the Democratic power brokers.

Free at Last – Free at Last – No More Phone Polls – Im Free at Last!
Icondog Southern N’Hampsha

Hey you guys guess what? My milk spoiled yesterday!! I know that somehow Hillary Clinton is behind that!
All of you people screaming “fraud” need to grow up. Seriously.

Don’t forget — the people of New Hampshire are INDEPENDENTS. That means a lot of things, including upending the pollsters by changing their “vote” every time another polling firm calls them. If you hate polls, try to subvert them!

Did you forget????? We are dealing with the Clintons here. Wise up America.

To the idiot that said to “do away with exit polling”: do you realize that without them we would be less likely to catch election rigging when it occurs.

Kudos to the liars! Now, the pundits are all in a tizzy. Did anyone see Chris Matthews on Morning Joe today? Matthews looked like he was having a stroke.

Yesterdays’ polls had Obama at +5, +13, +7, tie. 4 different polls. But now in the election today Hillery leads by 4% with 70% reporting? I suspect election fraud.
The day before yesterday was +9, +1, +8, +10, +7, +13, +3, +9, +10, +11, +4. What the hell?!
I bet they will try to explain this result by saying, “well, I guess Hillery really connected with people. Maybe it was her emotion”(yesterday she gave an interview where she almost cried).

All the Polls were right on the money except the one involving Hillary Clinton? She somehow shocked everyone with a win. One good sign that all is not right was the sight of several buses with out of state license plates sitting parked outside most of the Hillary speaking events.The explanation given was that supporters were brought in from nearby Mass and even NY to fill the seats at the events so they would not appear empty on TV. Maybe these folks did more than just attend meetings to falsely make it appear she was drawing big crowds.

Ummm… gee… no mention of the most likely cause of the inaccurate polls: VOTE FRAUD! No mention of that in the mainstream media. No mention of a single, private company running the Diebold voting machines. Let’s jump through hoops trying to explain the inaccuracy without mentioning vote fraud. Pathetic.

New Hampshire does not normally follow Iowa. Look at history.
Polls mean nothing. You can do your own poll and have it come out the way you want it to. Just the way you ask the questions.
Obama wins and all is ok, Clinton wins one and you jump on the fraud bandwagon.
No wonder this country is messed up, most of you don’t have a clue what is going on. Get off your computers and vote.

Polls DO NOT WORK. Time and time again they are proven to be incorrect in one way or another. Clinton’s “crying” incident does not help her because SHE IS FAKE!!!!! She changes like the wind and morphs into whatever audience is in front of her. Remember her accent going country or her language in front of a predominantly black audience? She is FAKE and not geniune at all and there is no amount of evidence that will refute this because she’s on video with each incident proving she’s fake.

where was Bill at Hillary’s speech last night? while Hillary is shedding tears in front of a small group of women, bill is bashing the hell out of Obama in front of another group at the same time.
who are dems voting for? Hillary or Bill?

This reeks of voting machine rigging or Media ineptitude!

I love polls. They are so astronomically stupid it is funny. I have been “polled” many times and always, without fail, give the opposite answer of what I really intend to do.

Don’t put it past the Clinton crew to have rigged the voting.

this story will go nowhere… because it happened on the democratic side… you will never hear another peep about it in the media

Ha ha ha

clinton’s fraud

Use your brain folks…it is obviously voter fraud. Hillary has already been chosen to be the next President. You cannot trust the media. Do your own research………………………

It’s easy to explain why the polls were so wrong for the democrats and dead on for the republicans. Hillary’s people are sneaky crooks and either they imported people from other states to vote or they stuffed the ballot box. Remember, HILLARY WILL DO ANYTHING TO GET ELECTED!!!!!!!!!!

I don’t know whether the Polls were wrong, whether their was voter fraud or if this was just some freak occurance. However I do find the fact that you can register and vote ON the day of the Primary troubling. I know many other states have cut offs for the day you need to be registered by, for you to vote in any election. The sudden massive turn out of ‘new’ voters on Primary day is highly suspicious! I wonder if all were verified properly before they were allowed to vote. WA state had many ‘strange’ registrations in the last Governor race… Can you believe many people use storage units as their ‘legal’ address? There were also single family homes with many more registered voters than could actually fit in the home. The deceased AND felons whose rights hadnt been restored were voting… THIS is a HUGE problem for our Nation! It might indeed be time for ID to be required at the polling sites. Its all too possible for non citizens to vote and people voting in several locations. They are stealing elections and it needs to STOP!

the whole system is ludicrous. Why should Iowa and NH have such a disporportionate inflence on who may eventually emerge.
appologies as an outsider in Ireland

seimi, Iowa and NH have developed cultural traditions that make them well-positioned to be the 1st caucus and primary states, respectively. Their citizens are much more likely than others to attend political events. They pay attention to debates. They read up on candidates’ positions. In sum, Iowans and New Hampshire-ites have built-in BS detectors, and the rest of us have delegated the winnowing of the presidential field to them.

When I saw the sudden dramatic shift in favor of McCain when he and Romney had been virtually tied all day in the exit polls, I was very surprised. When I saw what happened with Clinton/Obama, I was stunned and became suspicious. After a little research, I learned a lot and am now alarmed. Just one small point from all I learned last night; an expert checked the voting machines in New Hampshire a few days ago and said that in ten minutes, a mediocre hacker would be able to cook the books.

Let’s get this straight. Opinion polls, statistics, predictions have most often than not turned out contrary to reality. There are still many intangibles out there that pollsters/statisticians can’t still seem to come to understand. The argument is always – how come we went wrong. It must be the people who done us in! It’s only in something like an election that a statistician goes wrong so “publicly” and the results are there for all to see. Most other statistics are clothed in so much jargon that hardly anybody cares to read them or whoever does interprets in any way they want.

ONE WORD…..DIEBOLD….These are brand new in NH and I smell a “flip” w/ the Obama / Clinton count! Go Edwards

Did anyone else watch Chris Matthews twisting and turning in his seat last night as Hillary got closer to a win? He was visably upset that Obama wasn’t winning.

If Hillary were a Republican, people would be saying she won by vote fraud.

As they say in Chicago, “Vote early and often.”

Please stop the wah wahing over Hillary’s victory and don’t EVEN talk to me about election fraud considering the 2000 presidential election and Florida. Anyone remember that? I really don’t think those of you who are talking fraud want to go there, do you?

Hillary is a sweetheart and she would never stand for voter fraud to advance her march to the White House. She cares so much about our country, she nearly cried on TV. I saw it myself.
Hillary’s friends in the media know that she is a fine person with integrity and a sense of fair play who would rather lose the race than stand by while, unknown to her, there were some misguided souls stuffing the ballot box. Voter fraud? Don’t be silly. There is really no need to look into the misguided and nasty voter fraud possibility. Hillary is just too moral. No need to look into this; no need at all. Unless….President George W. Bush himself was not really in Israel. Yes, there might be someone who will swear under oath that they saw President George W. Bush at several polling places with ballots under his arm…..that’s the ticket. If, by some investigation by the media of this Democrat primary vote (yea, right) and proof is found that there was indeed voter fraud in NH, it could only be…. the Bush administration.

Voter FRAUD, wow the Clintons corruption team is back Carville Begala and Clinton Criminal Inc is in full force! To let you know Hairy Reid an Demonicrat Senate leader refused to put Republicans on the FEC (Federal Election Commsion)in the senate bill to fund the FEC so we don’t have a working funded FEC, if you look it up you will get mad as hell! Another thing Bloomberg is waiting until march to be the Clinton Schill as he is Perot of 2008 bought and paid for by the Clinton INC! Beware Clinton will steal another election, if you want to even get more pissed off Clinton INC in the late 90′s and early 2000 used the Third party candidate Perot formula to to elect Socialists all over Europe look it up, now most have been voted out, but my point is Hillary can never get more than 37% of any general electition she will attemp to steal the presidency with BLOOMBERG! Every single thing these criminals do is scripted and the will attemp to hijack America! Ask yourself every poll had Hillary losing by 8-15% and she won, the same polls had McCain winning by 2-5% they where dead on, these people do polls for a living, how much will we tolerate of voter fraud by the Clinton Criminal INC? Call your senator call all house members demand an investigation of VOTER fraud and why the FEC is not up and running with a bipatisan panel and investigations! Sorass her money man got a 775,000 dollar fine from the FEC in 2006 for VOTER FRAUD by ACORN a liberal voter group in OHIO for registering 200,000 voters that did not exist, call congress now melt the phone lines DEMAND VOTER ID AT ALL POLLING PLACES! Access to FBI files is a felony and she has dirt on everyone in DC and the federal government BEWARE! Are we ready to be a Bannana Republic and Have HUGO Hillary Chavez Clinton be president? No so fight call make people aware of the voter fraud of these criminals the Clintons!!!!!!!

What is amazing is the fact that the media is complaining about the polls in the first place? Where was the complaining about the sampling when it involved a poll that looked negatively on President Bush? The media took those polls as being correct without any complaints. Now that it involves the Democratic nomination it becomes a problem. I’m sick and tired of the media spinning things when it suites their needs. The media is pathetic. Where is the fairness doctrine when you need it? I’m sick and tired of the media treating Obama and Clinton as the second coming of Christ. Elect them if you wish but be ready for 4 to 8 years of another Jimmy Carter type presidency.

Take a deep breath before screaming fraud.
Pre-voting polls don’t provide any evidence for that, only exit polls do.
If exit polls show a major discrepancy from recorded votes, then maybe there’s something worth looking at…

Look for Hillary to pull a ‘Tammy Faye Baker’ before each Primary…

One thing you can be pretty sure of…There will certainly not be “a critical look at the final pre-election polls” from yesterday. There never is. Has anyone seen the results from the extensive review that was suposed to take place of polling flaws from the 2004 Presidential election??? Of course not…these pin head polsters would never let you look over their shoulders to see what whacky conclusions they are reaching after talking to only 200 people.

I’m a self proclaimed computer geek. I personally know that you can compromise the electronic vote, I’ve done it. I can say with absolute certainty that the NH vote had to be rigged. My heart broke when I saw Barack become the victim of the Clinton’s fraud machine. I actually really like Hilary, I just want her to win fair and square.

I agree that the polls should be done a wy with. In, fact I am surprised that they have not been made illegal (as they are used by pundits and news agencies) due to their ability to easily effect the RESULTS of the election. Like it or not, people constantly bombarded with polling information, will be swayed to follow them in their actual voting. This is a matter of fact that advertisers are well aware of. Give people constant stimulation to purchase or perform and they will ultimately do it.
Polling by the individual campaign’s however, is beneficial I suppose to the campaign, but they do their own private polling to gain their needed info.
I say shut these polls down. And shut the media up. It leads only to corruption.

Every poll including the exit polls were consistent,….but something “flipped” in the Obama/Clinton count,….Diebold must GO!! check out this website for NH voting fraud…

Why doesn’t ABC run a story on the questionable nature of the Diebold voting machines?! We need to return to paper ballots.

Media polls should be ileagle! What they tell us from the get go is who has a chance and who does not. The whole point of having a couple small states have the first primary is that it gives many candidates a chance to present their platforms or views with out having to spend millions of dollars in adds running up to the elections. Retail politicx is nothing but sound bites. If we went by inteligence, vision, Problem solveing abilities and moral values to elect our president. would any of these candidates be the best choice our nation has to offer? Probably not. However haveing media from day one telling us who is a head in bs polls leaked to the press is a huge detriment to all of us that would like to make up our own minds on the ideas of the candidates rather than the opinions and polls published by all the media. BAN polls other than internal polls of the candidates. Save our democracy or just hold a lotery. Lets face it. If you have to spend millions of dollars to get a job that pays 5% of what the sallary is than you got to be bending over for a lot of powerfull interest.

I smell another Clinton scandal. I think they had people voting that should not have been voting in New Hampshire. Any place that you can register the day of the vote is asking for trouble! They do not have time to dispute votes and the Clinton’s took advantage of this. I am not the only who thinks this is what happened.

Eliott:
Why must race be brought into this.
It’s only the Dems that seem to mention it. Have you not noticed this?

“Simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong?” How do we forget so easily? Does anyone remember the polls right up until 8p.m. election night in 2000 and 2004?

Who ever gets elected, Hillary, McCain, Guliani, Huckabee, Edwards, or Obama, it’s going to be four more years of the same ol’ Divided States of America crap. America hates everybody, even themselves. We got all these half soldiers, might as well have half a country. A house divided will fall.

The votes don’t match the exit polling or any other polling. Fraud, Fraud, Fraud. Diebold, Diebold, Diebold. Manual Recount, Manual Recount, Manual Recount.
Enough is enough!

you mean my vote in Warcraft didn’t count?

DIEBOLD. Enough said.

If half of the Country really wants Hillary as President, I don’t know I want to live here anymore. France is looking more and more like the New America. Go Sarkozy!

If these were the GOP candidates we would be investigating ballot fraud. How about charging Clinton with that? how refreshing it would be to have the same bunch hype up stupid charges of voter fraud against one of their own.
How could the polls be so wrong? Hmmmm?
Since she has a D next to her name we will hear none of that talk. Double stanndard junk.

Hey,
Maybe she just won.
Did you ever think of that?
No jokes, no funny stuff.
Hooray for Hillary!!!

Just maybe the voters told pollster a lie, like I would if asked. I would intentional say that I was voting for X, when actually I’d vote for Y.
I’m certain many people do lie, because how I vote is of no concern to anyone but me.

I understand all those who hate the Clinton’s. I feel the same way, only possibly more so, about Bush. I despise him. The good thing for me, is there are a hell of a lot more people who think like me than there are who think like the Clinton haters. See you in November!

I believe the polls may have suppressed the youth vote (as Andrew stated.) I also believe that lead was based on large percentages of independents. With the margins so large, many of them may have decided to vote Republican (McCain), so that both parties would have a nominee they could live with.
(Of course, fraud cannot be ruled out. Certain precincts in the Philly area that are overwhelmingly Democratic had a 110% turnout in 2004.)

Most of the comments on this board are totally foolish. I am in NH and I proudly voted for Clinton. I have never and will never tell a pollster the truth. For the national news media to claim that Obama lost because he is black and that people didn’t tell pollsters the truth because they were ashamed of their views is elitist and ridiculous. I couldn’t care less if Obama is black white or purple. I voted for Clinton because her message resonated with me and Obama’s didn’t. He is the candidate for “change”. He never clearly articulated what he meant by that and so I was left with an empty slogan from a candidate with virtually no experience. He makes a nice speech and I would certainly be willing to consider him in the future when there is more substance to him, but as of now, he is not ready for prime time. As a native of NH, I believe that is the sentiment of the majority of voters in the state and based on past results we are virtually never wrong. As to the pollsters and pundits – WRONG AGAIN!

My God! What a collection of crackpots and paranoids we have here. The first question that comes to mind is what are all of these people doing up in the wee hours of the morning, but then one realizes that this period, between wakefullness and sleep, is probably when most conspiracy theories are hatched.
Polls are useful tools. They tell merchants what to stock their shelves with at Christmastime so Jane and Johnny can have that perfect gift. In a thousand different ways they help to make our lives better. For those of us who are social beings they give insight into what is important to our friends and neighbors. Polls were no doubt helpful in John McCain’s “get[ing] it” on the immigration issue (not that I agree with him). Someday there may even be a poll broad and accurate enough to explain why the French don’t like us.
Once we put our prejudices aside, the rational thing to do here is to compare the exit polls to the pre-exit polls, examine the matrix of questions and calculations that were used in the polls to determine what happened, why it happened (perhaps it was no error at all perhaps the people of New Hampshire are very indecisive, or perhaps they are inordinately moved by displays of strong emotion.) and factor that in to future polling techniques. Certianly the comments here would lead one to believe that not all of those voting are moved by rational behavior.
It does scare me that I am writing this to this forum, given the adage about insanity.
Hey you all have a good day and watch your backs.

Yes, I really want an American president who shows emotions on their sleeve, and who will wet up, crack their voice and sob sooo sad. Ahmedinejad does too, as well as Putin, Bin Ladin and the Chinese.
They are licken’ their chops and praying for a Hillary, phoney balooney charlatan to be president. Then we will be right where they want us. It won’t even be a fair fight, whereupon the tears will again flow, but our foes will not be sympatheic in the least.
Spineless New Hampster fools!

Well if you look at Sutton, where we know that Ron Paul votes were cast, and that not votes were recorded for him, then we know that votes went missing.
It’s no isolated to the democrats, and it’s stupid to even think so. If it can be rigged, it’s rigged for everything.
WE want the Diebold SourceCode!

There is nothing wrong with polling. Hillary’s “tears” were a seismic event that polls could not capture the impact of in real time. I live in Boston and have WMUR (NH’s only major network) on my cable system which I watched heavily in the days up to the election. The play on this was extraordinary.

Pre-Vote Polling mostly took place among New Hampshire residents.
Hillary had to bus people in from NY to fill seats at her rallys in New Hampshire, because of a lack of interest. Parking lots of schools where she held campaign events were full of cars with Mass. plates. Since you don’t have to be a NH resident to vote in their primary, how many of these out of state Clinton supporters do you think voted for her before going home?
The Clintons, Carville and George Soros are agents of Satan himself. Wake up people and see what they are doing.

sotonightthatimightsee,
Have your fun, I’m not for Obama anyway. I’m for Romney, and to be honest, I’d rather see Hillary go all the way, spend all her money, and then get shot down in the very end. Do you think she’ll cry then?

could also be explained by some sort of fraudulent activity on clinton’s part.

Obama should quietly, but quickly, move to have polling records subpoened. In future, he should plan to have two unbribable witnesses present at each polling location.

It helps when you run out of ballots in polling places during election day and have to push a resupply out.
I’d hate to think any of those ballots were premarked….

This was a good paragraph (at least from the point of view of a professional statistician): There will be a serious, critical look at the final pre-election polls in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire; that is essential. It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong. We need to know why.
But we need to know it through careful, empirically based analysis.
I’ve never seen the markets and polls miss like that, by that much. Leave out the idea that the Clinton’s (or Republicans) rigged the election, as is already being speculated. (Besides these were not exit polls that were wrong, these were pre-election polls). Also leave out ideas like “polls are useless” (They are not), and leave out the idea that this could be something like sampling error across that many polls. (Conspiracy is more likely). The only remaining answer is that the voting picture changed within the last day or so. This is quite possible; it changed that quickly following Iowa, for example. What changed in the last day or so? Here are the best explanations I’ve heard (and both were probably a factor:
1) Hillary crying and Edwards saying that this showed she lacked presidential toughness seemed to offend women voters enough to get them to the polls in greater numbers.
2) Independents made a calculation. Based on the polling, they decided there vote was needed more in the Republican race, in support of McCain, rather than in the Democratic race.

The only problem with people saying that people lie to pollsters is that they didn’t lie for the other 8-10 candidates! All of them placed within 1% of the average of what polls predicted EXCEPT for Hillary/Obama.
So this idea that a preposterous # of Hillary supporters would lie to say they’re voting for Obama or are more secretive than the rest of New Hampshire doesn’t make sense.
The Bradley Effect doesn’t either as that’s from 1982. It’s 25 years later and we’re in New Hampshire not the deep south!
If these statistics are true about the differences in percentages for hand counted vs. machine counted ballots a 5-7% range is pretty significant and worth of an investigation.
Interestingly enough, if you take the extra %5 away from Hillary and add it to Obama you end up having him win by at least an 8-10 point margin — right where the polls were predicting.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s a simple question of examining #’s that really don’t pass the smell test.

The precints that used Diebold machines vs the precincts where the votes were hand counted favored hillary an extra 4.5%
Bev Harris who identified that the same Diebold machines that Harri Hursti had proven were so easily hackable were the exact same ones used in New Hampshire.She anticipated this and people were tracking it.
It’s pretty clear that someone hacked the machines for Hillary. Hillary is not an alternative to international corporate candidates. Hillary IS a international corporate candidate just like Bill Clinton was. Remember Bill Clinton-not the republicans- voted in Nafta and half the other stuff that gave the country to the foreign owned international corporations and has nearly cost the USA all our USA based manufacturing. Hillary started meeting with the head of fox news, Rupert Murdoch last year to everyone’s surprise. You don’t do that if they really were after yuor husband and thatmattered. She is really a corporate candidate and Fox has been favoring her all along. (The one the DON’T want is Edwards and they ignore or denigrate him every day.)
The evidence (not conspiracy “theories”) shows clearly that the vote was fixed. Not only that, Bev Harris showed there was a problem in Iowa as well in the republican camp.
Furthermore the exit polls clearly show it. it’s time for the REAL investigation to begin – the one the follows the evidence that shows a massive vote theft has been occurring in recent elections and an investigation that starts tracing the whos and whys and start convicting fro treason. It isn’t a game. It’s our country.

The difference between the polls and the vote is result of the hidden racism of Americans. Many might call Obama a statesman at a public caucus or to pollster, but vote differently in their secret ballot. The people who put Hillary over the top are the old babes who cringe in fear when a black man gets in the elevator.
I’m for Obama, but I fear America is still much too racist to elect him.

That’s why the news media should go back to REPORTING the news instead of trying to MAKE IT! You’d think they would have learned that after the 2000 presidential election…but noooooo. The News media uses polls to MAKE NEWS and they get burned every election year.

Polling in bi-racial contests? So the numbers were off because one candidate was white and the other one black?
Good grief you are deluded!
Maybe you should recheck your algorithims and your brain cells.

To the morons still crying about the 2000 presidential election:
The only thing surprising about that election was that the Republicans didn’t cave in like they usually do and let the Democrats steal the election like they’ve stole countless local and state elections for years. The only voting problems in Florida were in Democrat-controlled counties.
It reminded me of the 1972 Olympics where the U.S.S.R. had at least three illegimate chances to win the final basketball game against the U.S. and were able to steal the game due to corrupt officials.

The long and short of it is, NH was compromised by voters who shouldn’t be voting there. The only logical conclusion is, Hillary’s people cheated. Everyday it gets more pathetic.

I can’t stop laughing at all of this!! Dems screaming about voter fraud at other dems!!! HAHAHAHA.
Listen, Dems.. it is YOU that want people to be able to register to vote the day of the election. YOU!
The GOP say that promotes voter fraud, but YOU don’t care because you think it will help Dems beat the GOP, but now it comes back and bites YOU in the tail.
Awesome!

This isnt rocket science. Liberals are too consumed with White Guilt to admitt they’re not voting for the black guy. So they lie to prove to the pollster that they are good people. Liberals lie all the time, especially to themselves.

It’s easy. There was voter fraud. Duh…

We also know that some voters votes were not counted for the person they voted for (sounfd familiar?) which means the voter totals can be correct while still switching the votes to some other candidate.
For example this person shows that voted for ron paul and yet no votes were recorded for ron paul in her precinct
vote totals.
Obviously those votes were shifted to another candidate making the voter totals add up but the election be rigged.
This was already proven to have happened in Ohio in 2004 if you follow the legal group “caseohio” which has been winning in court for the past four years and getting repulbicans sent to jail from ohio for rigging the voter audit checks. (funny faux news hasn’t been reporting that.)
here is the ron paul voters quote:
Very fishy in one town, my hometown!!!
Posted January 9th, 2008 by asnitko
My mom, aunt, and dad all voted for RP today in my hometown, My mom and aunt both work passing out ballots, and checking them off. I just looked at the politico map and it says their town has ZERO votes for Ron. Now i know that there isn’t corruption on voting in that little town, so where they reported it must be. What do I do, anyone know???

Or, the polls and the election are rigged.

I have lived in NH my entire life and I know the people.
Many folks voted AGAINST Obama more than they voted FOR Hillary.
ALso – the colleges are out on semester break in NH, so many college students were back in their home states which proves how lame it is for them to vote here in the first place. All those Obama votes went POOF!

My God! Polls don’t match? 81% of vote was done on DIEBOLD machines? Same ones used to throw Florida?
Are most of you just dense?
Iowa was thrown via private cell phone reporting. Now this.
Wake up people!!!!!!! The fix is in!
McCain..Mr. PRO WAR, WINS?

Has anyone checked to find out how many of those Clinton votes were cast by out-of-staters? Remember that in the New Hampshire primary busses from Massachusettes can have a significant effect on “turnout.”

I do understand your concern here – but isn’t there also a possibility that polls in New Hampshire were measuring the level of enthusiasm for Obama after Iowa, rather than the actual intention to vote.
Voting in a poll is one thing – being in a private booth is another. Hilary is a safer option, a steady hand at a time when the economy is in downturn. The economy was the most important issue there – and she won huge support among the deprived and people who are suffering from the downturn.
Obama’s “change” campaign may have excited people, especially after Iowa – enough to give him good polls. But the enthusiasm for change and a new face may have been overturned by the serious matter of actually voting, in which people worried about their wallets will usually vote for experience.
Is that possible?
N

Vote Fraud, vote fraud, vote fraud.
It’s so obvious. Obama wins hand counted
votes in conservative areas, loses in
liberal urban areas. If Obama doesn’t
address vote fraud than he is a bit of
a fraud himself – Edwards anyone? All
that time, money, effort that candidates
put into their run can be negated in
seconds by a computer hack, where is
the outrage?

Actually, it doesn’t matter whether or not the Clintons pulled any shenanigans during the NH primary. Most of us, whether you loved the Clintons or hated them, knew deep down that there was little or nothing they would try to grasp and keep power. For those who loved the Clintons, it didn’t matter if they used shady tactics to confound their Republican opponents. All that mattered was that the GOP didn’t win. But when the Clintons obtain what appears to be a questionable victory over someone like Obama, those suspicions about questionable behavior only further add to those who, over the years, have grown to dislike or outright despise the Clinton machine. Hillary’s come from way behind finish in New Hampshire will only further alienate some members of the voting public. Hillary could very well have won New Hampshire, only to sew the seeds of her own defeat later on this year.

Skep41 is right. I am reminded of the futility of polling in Eastern Europe right after the Empire’s collapse. The polls were worthless as most of the people simply lied and gave an answer that would put them in favorable light. Libs, especially females, do anything to hide their racism. Swarming to see the Oprah show is part of the same phenomenon.

The notion that polls are “useless” to voters is absolutely ridiculous. Most of us are strategic voters. We are hesitant to throw our votes away on a candidate who is very unlikely to win. This isn’t saying that polls are somehow essential to a functioning democracy, but to say that they are only useful to pundits is just flat-out wrong.

The reason the polling was so off was because of the demographics. The Obmama crowd tended to be young idealists, ie: non-voters, as opposed to Clinton’s older supporters who would take the time to vote in a single election for dog catcher. Yeah Obama has oodles of support, but not by any who matters.

I just read a Boston Globe article in which a NH voter is quoted saying he wrote in Obama on the Republican ballot.
If NH works the way my state does, those votes would never get reported. And voters do things like that all the time; it is amazing how clueless they are about the election process. Sometimes 10% of the ballots at the precinct where I am a judge have to be “tossed” because people write-in not-legal candidates. (To be a legal a write-in candidate has to have filed a form indicating that status.)

Why is Obama letting Hillary get away with the experience argument? Barack worked with low-income residents in Chicago as director of the Developing Communities Project. He’s held elected office longer than Hillary Clinton, having been elected to the IL state senate in 1996. If he wants to pull a Clinton, then he needs to talk about his “25 years” of experience, being an agent of change.
If we’re all being honest, Hillary’s supporters just miss Bill Clinton. Hillary cannot run on her own merit. Some of her supporters even wear “I Miss Bill” t-shirts to her rallies! Some of her supporters say that they get ’2 for 1′ with the Clintons, or cite it as a good thing that Hillary will have Bill to advise her.
Even if she gets the nom and gets the White House, I won’t consider her the first ‘true’ woman president, because she didn’t get it on her own; she used her husband. There is no way Hillary on her own would be where she is today.
Barack has gotten where he is today on his own merit.

Hillary took a page out of Al Gore’s 2000 campaign and figured out how to push 20000 votes her way.
We can’t elect someone who would cry

Everyone is getting this wrong.
It’s no conspiracy by the Clintons.
It’s no error by the pollsters.
It’s not lies by those who were polled.
It’s what got Huckabee the win in Iowa.
It’s what galvanized Evangelicals behind Huckabee in such a massively disproportionate manner to non-Evangelicals.
But no one will look deep enough into it and those who effected it will not own up to it.
Evangelicals have their own reasons, and blatant reasons, for voting against the Mormon candidate. What most don’t realize is that the Independents of NH wanted a reason to vote for McCain and there by against Romney, not because they believe their religion is the true one, but merely because they are bigoted against Mormonism but are wise enough to not own up to it. They had every excuse in the world, they voted McCain and all the polls were telling them that anti-establishment Obama win was ‘in the bag’ however much they may have not wanted Hillary they felt comfortable (I mean look at the poll discrepancies) in letting their fellow independents do the Clinton kill while they tried to off Romney and the Mormon thing while hiding under the guise of a McCain resuscitation.
Yes Romney polled high for a long time, but he did in Iowa also, and just as a portion of the populace in Iowa (evangelicals) were searching for a way out of supporting the Mormon, so to were the independents looking for a way out of supporting the Mormon.
I know many will argue this but it is what it is. Anti-Mormon bigotry fueled, in some, by enmity, in most others by ignorance. But mark my words, both the Huckaboom and the polling fiasco are outgrowths of anti-Mormon bigotry.

Wow. All you idiots who are talking about pundits and strategy and race and any other such thing are wasting your breath.
The election was rigged. Obama won.
Do you not understand that nothing else matters if the voting tally does not match the actual vote?

Difficulties in polling with biracial candidates? All in the past? Look at Harold Ford in Tennessee in 2006. The polls had him at a dead heat with his opponent. He lost by 9 points.
Also, the author’s assertion that Iowa proves race played no part in New Hampshire is a bit off.
In Iowa the process was entirely public. If you said you were an Obama supporter, you had to sit in a group with others in public. Maybe you felt more courage about voting for a Black person in a group.
In New Hampshire, your personal fears and worries about actually voting for a Black person were free to travel down your arm into your fingertips and onto the ballot – without anyone knowing.

Easy answer. The press, who very much want to keep Hillary in the race, manipulated the polling to make independents believe that Obama had such a wide lead that they could then vote for McCain rather than show up for Obama. Thus, the press was able to kill two birds with one stone. Clinton won and kept the thrill of a close race b/w the Democrats alive, and McCain, who everyone knows is a RINO, beat out legitimate Republican contenders too. The press is about 1/2 of what is wrong with American politics today.

Fools! Diebold is a Republican-owned and Republican-influenced company with a history of giving money to the various Republican candidates.
Why would they want Clinton to emerge victorious?
Secondly, to the depressed people who believe that “ultra-white New Hampshire people could not bring themselves to vote for the black man”, I suggest that no one should ever vote for a candidate based on his/her skin color. In Florida Primary later this month I am not voting for Obama either. Does that make me a racist? I just simply found someone I like better than him and it’s not Hillary.

There was nothing wrong with the polls… You just can’t poll New Hampshire. The 2/3 days before the election, every ad on TV is political. For a state that has about 1.3 million, they candidates have spent almost $100 million here over the last few months. In 2000 Bush was only 3-6pts behind McCain in the polls before the primary and McCain won by 19pts. If 5k people change their mind the night before the election, with the relative low number of vote (comparatively), that’s a healthy %pt.

As the NH poster said, NH voters simply lied to the pollsters. There was one pollster on the networks who said Hillary Clinton would come in first and OBAMA second. That’s when I knew that many NH voters had lied to the pollsters. This was also mentioned online way before the NH primary. People in NH will lie about who they’re going to vote for. I think OBAMA did extremely well. He still has more voter delegates than Clinton. I also think the Clintons had some outside help. But we have to take Clinton’s win at face value. Change takes courage. Many NH voters demonstrated that courage when they made OBAMA a very close second to Hillary’s win. It was so close, they ended up with the same number of delegates. If there was any dirty politics involved in Clinton’s win, we’ll find out down the road. FOR RIGHT NOW, the most important thing is to GET THE VOTE OUT FOR SEN. OBAMA. Like Sen. OBAMA, I’m still fired up and ready to go!

Yes, the tear factor worked but more than that you can vote in NH if you say you are planning to move there. My guess is that bus loads came in with that story and voted…….Rasmussen is never that far off……
Yes……FRAUD!!!!!

Once again for the overly stressed – the NH Primary exit polls MATCHED the NH Primary results. So for any of you who suggested vote fraud that should tell you – the voters successfully voted for who they intended to vote (which was not the case in Ohio 2004)

All you shills bending over backwards
to obscure the obvious vote fraud,
give it up. I’m not an Obama fan, but
this is so outragious, so blatant, so
destructive to our republic, that this
must be addressed. If Obama remains silent on this than he is as fraudulent as the voting. There is no more important issue. A voting system that can’t be audited is useless and it’s results are always suspect. The greatest democracy, ya, right. Welcome to the 3rd world USA.

I wonder how many dead people voted for clinton? her tearing up on television the other night was demeaning to the feminine gender. give me a break. that woman couldn’t have a feeling if you gave it to her.
Get your goose stepping in line if she wins, socialism will be just around the corner

The author inadvertently left out one more groundbreaking candidate–Mitt Romney, who will become the first Mormon President.

How could it be that the percentages for All of the candidates remained UNCHANGED for over four hours until the end? Only if the percentages of votes cast were the same everywhere. Do you suppose that the people in the college towns voted the identical pattern as the farmers in the boondocks? And every other district as well? Or, the other possibility, do you really believe that some districts could offset others so perfectly as to keep the vote coming in identical proportions? This is incredible.

If they’re willing to rig the voting
machines, i’d think they’d be willing to
rig the exit polls, ya think? Exit polls
can be a gamed as easily as the diebold machines. Vote fraud, the newest American pastime.

Dorothy: I agree. I can see Clinton picking up rural parts of NH, but the districts next to colleges? These people OVERWHELMINGLY would vote for Obama yet it didn’t change his %.

Michael.
If you would ask a readable question, I will be happy to answer.
Crackpot

Salvador Campos, check your own link. It supports the exit polls MATCHING the primary results!

Why are these polls important? Is the press suppose to be changing moods and momentum of an election?

Your comment that “It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong.” is false.
Numerous polls in the 2004 Presidential election were just as incorrect, some more so, especially in Ohio as the with the Democratic Primary.
Part of the ‘why’ is polling is more an art and not the science many of the people involved try to portray. Ask a flawed or leading question and you will not receive a free or unbiased response. Use a sample that is not representative of the ultimate population and you will arrive at a flawed result. Have too great a lead time between the sampling and the actual vote and you will not be able to account for some contemporaneous events that sway the minds of undecided voters. Overcoming those inherent flaws is, again, more an art than science.
Part of the ‘why’ is just purposeful deceit by those sponsoring and using the polls to influence behavior with known false and/or flawed data.
And I, for one, am really tired of the media conducting polls and then REPORTING those polls as hard news.

The failure of pre-election polls to predict the Democratic primary should motivate Gallup and other organizations to be more transparent with their methods for deciding “likely voters.” Pollsters have traditionally guarded these methods closely, but doing so hinders the ability of the industry to make needed adjustments to improve survey accuracy.
As for election fraud, comparing pre-election polls and actual results is useless. One must compare EXIT POLLS to actual results because only these provide information about people who actually show up.

I’ve lied in every poll I’ve ever taken. The people in NH are savey enough to play these games with the media. They must be so sick of being polled, why not screw with the results.

How about this possibility; the polls themselves worked against Obama. 40%+ in NH are independent, and can vote in either primary. With polls so decisively for Obama before the primary, folks may have chosen to vote in the Republican race instead, which is clearly more “up for grabs”, and therefore more compelling.

To all the Clinton haters searching for what went wrong, the real answer lies in the seven straight elections (3 governorships, 2 senate races, 2 Presidential campaigns)the Clintons have won since 1980. And let me tell you how the story ends. 9 straight elections that include 4 Presidential campaigns, giving Hillary a political resume equal to Bills. And unquestionably the greatest run in American political history. By a country mile. Me, if I was a Clinton hater I’d save myself the embarassment of disputing that, and quietly go on not liking it. But that’s just me.

accountability for the electronic voting systems in our country
The weak point is the casting of the ballots, not the counting:
Where I voted (Nashua, NH) we use a pen to fill in a bubble on a paper ballot that gets optically scanned, and can easily be recounted by hand.
On the other hand, nobody checked my ID, I just told them my name and address, they looked it up, they handed me a ballot, and they crossed me off. Anyone with a decent list of dead unpurged voters and extremely unlikely voters (such as folks known to be out of town for the day) and a few volunteers willing to spend a day driving around the state breaking the law with low chance of being caught could pick up a few hundred votes pretty easily.

Chris: if NH voters love the Clinton, why did 17 out of the last 17 polls show Obama winning by an average of 8%?
Tim: If you post a link showing 17 polls in a row breaking one way and the results are off by 12% (like in this case), I’ll believe you. And of course polls have a margin of error, but to have SO many polls (the last 17 in a row) break for Obama? Again, polls picked Obama winning IA by 7.8% (he won by 8%) and Huckabee winning by 4%. Polls picked McCain winning NH by 4% and Obama winning by 8% in NH.
Why is it ONLY Dem votes in NH is the one off?

I am glad I’m not the only one who suspects something fishy happened here.
For the polls to be that far off for the dems but ok for the republicans, something is very wrong.

If Hillary’s little emotional moment persuaded the women in New Hampshire to vote for her because she appeared more human… it just goes to show that the Founding Fathers were wise when they set up the system and women were not allowed to vote. This is serious business – electing leaders of a country, we should go back to the way it was and abolish women’s suffrage. As a group, they are too emotional for making these kind of decisions.

The best thing to do with poll data is to file it in a drawer with a date-stamp and pull it out after the fact.
Telling people what is going to happen alters what DOES happen … the “oh, yeah? I’ll show you” factor.

stopMADD and Dave H arenow a honorary members of PLOPP (People Lying On Political Polls) of which I formed in 1988 and which now is finally having an impact. Why should the media, based on polls, anoint the front runners? They do so because (a) the stories might be there, (b) the money tends to pour in and, (c) that money buys ads on the media outlets! There is no democracy in that!
During the 5 days between Iowa and NH, Independents especially were the recipients of some 10 polling calls per day and some 3 – 5 personal visits from campaign volunteers (these are my stats). I heard countless stories of people refusing to answer both the telephone and the knock on the door as they didn’t want to engage anyone anymore.
What I heard even more frequently were stories of people, like stopMADD and others, who “lied” on these political polls. Personally, I voted for every candidate from each party, save for Duncan Hunter. Can you imagine if we all “lied” on these polls and skewed the data sufficiently so that it was totally unreliable? The pundits would have nothing, the pollsters would leave us alone, and the candidates would have to be themselves rather than tailor their messages based on polling (of course, they all deny they pay any attention to the polls). McCain won because of his personal integrity and unwavering position on the issues – whether you agree with him or not.
So, fellow New Hampshirites, when the general election comes around, join with me and many others in People Lying On Political Polls. Let’s see these polls go PLOPP!

Polls are worthless. We need the news to give us the actual positions of the candidates, instead of horse race handicapping and “expert” opinions. But that would be actual work for the press, instead of just phoning up a few hundred people and trying to be the first to guess who will win. The news media should report the news, not try to make it.

Eugene:
Perhaps there was no vote fraud, but something fishy happened. Maybe Hillary took a bunch of union supporters from NY that day, maybe she got a bunch of people to vote twice or vote for dead people.
Whatever it is, it’s definitely something fishy.

Vote fraud by the Democrats, pure and simple. The next President of the United States will be Hillary Clinton by hook or by crook, probably the latter. In part, Bill Clinton sees this as payback for the Bush 43 Florida count time before last. In part, it’s media manipulation by Clinton, Inc. and pandering to the Clintons by the media.

I find it unbelievable that some trust in polls to such a degree that when the polls are wrong, they immediately assume voter fraud. Folks, these polls usually consist of a sampling of about 1,000 people (give or take a couple of hundred). The polling sample is almost never more than 2,000 even in the national polls which supposedly represent the results for a couple hundred million people. While polls can be useful in making general predictions, if you have to choose one to live by it’s the actual vote, not the polls. I am versed in statistics, standard deviations, margins of error and the like, however due to the very nature of polls (entirely statistical results from a tiny population sample) versus the human factor involving indecision, emotion, idealism and pragmatism, polls should be taken at face value. If there’s an error (or a change) it’s in the polls and not the result of voter fraud. If polls are so perfect, why don’t we just scrap elections and telephone polling of 1,000 individuals choose our politicians? People who are incredulous at how wrong the polls can be just don’t understand the inner workings of polls nor have a clue about statistics.

For all you people that say “well NH voters just lied”, why didn’t NH Repubs voters lie? Those polls matched the results exactly.
And how is it that Dem voters lied, but in every one of the last 17 (!) polls Obama won?
In order for that to be true ONLY Clinton supporters would have to lie and say they would vote for Obama, and Obama voters would tell the truth? Is that what you are saying?
If Clinton was “really” up by 3 this whole time, then all of the Obama voters would tell the truth and a good portion of the Clinton voters would ALWAYS lie in the last 17 polls (remember, they are asking DIFFERENT PEOPLE in every poll) and say they are voting for Obama when they are not?
DOES NOT MAKE SENSE

It was the WEATHER. That is the only thing polls could not predict: May like weather in the middle of January. Lazy Clinton supporters, boosted by the weather and the prospect of a loss, finally made it out to the polls. Flightly Obama supporter, expecting a victory, decided to enjoy themselves by grabbing an ice cream or drinking booze in the park. All the other candidates poll numbers were accurate because they had no shot at winning or losing anything more than was already predicted.

Ralph Phelan
In the “open” caucuses of Iowa, you do not even have to present your ID at all!
It is far easier to rig the Iowa caucuses than any secret ballot vote. Just bring a bunch of your volunteers who will join the group of your supporters. There you go.
So why did Clintons not win Iowa caucuses? Surely, it should have been there for the taking!

Examination of polling results and methods — Yeah, Right! Polls are increasingly used to manipulate public opinion, not measure it.

Nah, we should only be concerned about voter fraud and “irregularities” when Republicans win. Notice how in 2000 and 2004 we heard about problems in Florida and Ohio, respectively but in 2006 when the Dems won we didn’t hear a peep ?

What happened here is pretty simple, and was obvious to me yesterday afternoon when I heard that turnout, particularly amongst older folks, was way up yesterday in NH. The most racist people in the country are old democrats, and there was no way they were going to let an African-American win in their state. Not that surprising, really.

So my choices are: 1) The pollsters were right about every other race but not Obama/Clinton (not likely), 2) Bush rigged it so that Hillary is the candidate (I thought he’s supposed to be stupid), 3) Liberals in New Hampshire lied to pollsters (Liberals lied!!!!!!) 4) Hillary re-invented herself, again, and her near-tears worked (this would only work on mind-numbed Liberals), 5) Hillary’s camp bused in voters from nearby states and pulled a Chicago-style coup (most likely). Either way, I’m glad she’s still in the game just to make things interesting.

2 reasons: Hillary Clinton always does well when she is perceived as the underdog and put-upon victim. It’s the dysfunctional triangle of victim/persecutor/rescuer tha the Clinton’s live by. She cried – pulled the undecided chains, and they rushed out to rescue her. I don’t think that triangle will work w/Putin.
Senator McCain drained the independent vote away from Senator Obama.

Simple answer. Conspiracy theory. Diebold machines. The private company that controls them all. Manipulated results to try and insure Clinton is the candidate, since Republicans want to run against her, not the other Democrats. There. Occam has spoken.

The only obvious conclusion I can come to after reading through most of the comments here is that Matt Drudge has linked to this page. What a bunch of loonies.

People who claim to be ‘undecided’ just don’t tell the media what they are thinking, and rightfully so. The polls mean absolutely nothing. Kind of like the pointspread of a football game – doesn’t mean a thing until the final whistle is blown.

I cannot escape the conclusion that the NH Primary on the Demo side was a fraud. Hillary’s win deserves an asterisk and a Justice Department investigation.

IMHO polls are never accurate. They have never, not once, ever in history been exactly right. They are based on probality theory which we all know is a bunch of hooey. If it has anything at all to do with science and mathematics, it must be wrong. It is impossible to quantify anything having to do with humans, that is why medical studies have no value. Finally, as everyone knows Hilliary and her husband are responsible for the subprime disaster, the current recession, and unregulated hedge fund trading by brokerage houses and rich speculators. Everyone knows the Clintons were responsible for the polunium poisioning death of the exiled Russian spy who was living in England. The only question remaining is if the Clintons are really human. I can’t understand why more people refuse to accept the truth, that they are really members of a first wave of aliens from Pluto attempting to conquer Earth. We need to elect a president who will install a space net around Earth to protect us from aliens like Bill, Hillary and Eastwood Clinton.

Here’s what went wrong with the polls:
The polls were all of “likely” voters. But 100,000 first-time voters turned up. This primary election was decided by unlikely voters. By people the pollsters never thought to ask.

Like everyone else here in N.H., each of our phone lines received 5 – 10 poll or candidate calls a day during the last week. After the first day both my wife and I were fed up so we started to answer the questions with random responses. For polls that had an obvious agenda we purposely took the opposite stance. I suspect that a large number of others here in the libertarian state did the same – being fed up with constant interruptions.

I’m a female, and would very much like to see a woman as President of the United States…but the right woman. Not a woman who owes her political career to nepotism and an inflated resume. Not a woman who but for riding the coattails of her husband would even be in this race. Not a woman who confuses nastiness and deception with strength.
More than the right woman, I want to vote for the right candidate without regard to gender. Our times are much too serious to do gender based voting. In my view, Hillary Clinton is far from the best person in this race to carry the mantle of POTUS.
What happened in NH was essentially, “I am woman, hear me weep”…the eleventh hour rallying cry (literally!) for many of those who, I suspect, ultimately voted for her.
Tuesday January 8th 2008: A dark day indeed for those of us who champion a woman’s rise to the top based on honesty, integrity and merit.

“It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong. We need to know why.” We do?? Why??
Why don’t you write an article on WHY we “neeed” polls?

They forgot to poll Vermont and Mass. dems with a car and a map of New Hampshire.

So people voted for Hillary because she was teary? Wow, what a way to select the Chief Executive. In Lilliput they jump over a little stick.

This is hilarious – I am loving this. Hillary defies the odds (set up by the media) and comes back to win a squeaker…the instinct among democrats/liberals who don’t get their way is to yell “voter fraud”, but now they would be yelling that at their own kind!!!! They can’t do that, so they need to assign the blame outside the party. Now we have unhinged lunatics out there who believe the Republicans want Hillary to win so they engineered this Obama defeat. Then there is the unhinged media saying “***gasp!!**- is it possible the exit poll numbers were wrong???? Could it be that our system of exit polling is flawed???”
I love it…point to everyone but yourselves – typical liberals. If every Republican disappeared off the face of the earth, you would still blame the ghost of George Bush and Karl Rove for engineering voter fraud from the grave – you’re all pathetic.

I think that the commentary by Lou Dobbs today was right on the money. We have the media calling the outcome early (incorrectly) before the voting population has finished. Now we have others suggesting vote fraud. Why is so much time spent on rationalizing the outcome? There is still a long way to go.

“Nashua, which is just up the road, an hour by bus, from Massachusetts”
Ummmm … it’s an hour by bus from Boston. More like fiteen minutes from Lowell. From Tyngsboro you can walk.
“EXIT POLLS MATCHED THE RESULTS”
Which, again, would be perfectly consistent with cheating by bringing in ringers.
I would very much like to know if there was an unusually large number of same-day registrations this year, and if so in which districts.

Democrats going to make it easy on the Republicans by nominating Bill Clinton’s wife? Fun.

we have a good president–
I am disappointed that there has been so much nastiness about him.
President Bush has been and still is a fine man. We all should take a deep breath and start learning.

Because Vermont has such an open registration/voting process, vote fraud is easy. So, pollsters call KNOWN registered voters and get one result, illigitimate voters are bused in for one candidate, and you get the final vote results shown. Pretty simple. If the press wants to save their reputation, don’t take the hit, investigate it and report the truth.

thanks tinfoil hat…Diebold wins again! I’ll check the results per town.
How come everyone keeps talking about crying when she barely choked up,….wasn’t even good acting! Go Edwards!

Fistly, let me say I am undecided, however, I believe the outcome in NH was a combinaton of a weeping Hillary and the “Bradley Effect”. I will not go into what the “Bradley Effect” means. Those of you who do not know can research it. Although not surpising, I am ashamed that Americans would do such a thing as lie to the pollsters. It is disheartening.

Liberal Tinfoil Meme – “The VOTE was wrong, the POLLS were right!”.

I find it interesting that the exit polling data for the last 3 elections has something to be desired. In 2000, first Gore then Bush. 2004 Kerry supposedly has a 10% lead and looses, and here in 2008 Obama with a supposed 10%+ lead to lose by 3%. WOW!!
Hilliary’s little crying thingy may have helped IF you believed her. (I don’t)
Something else to consider cam from Mathews on Morning Joe (Monday). He basically stated that the powers that be won’t allow Obama to win and will do what ever they can to ensure he won’t win.
As a Republican, all of this just reinforces what I saw when ‘ole Bill was in office. Do whatever it takes to win…

Way to go Hillary!

Mary,
“…they high-tailed it down to the voting booth to vote for …. Clinton. That explains the later voting activity, people desperate to get their vote in to reverse the Obama tide…”
Think about it, when the polls opened Hillary was way behind in the polls taken the day before. If they wanted to save Hillary they would have already been motivated. When they sat down to dinner the polls showed Hillary AHEAD by 3-4 points. So they could relax. The exit polls had Clinton ahead from the start.
The only way that I can think of to explain this is that the polls (that were accurate for the Republicans) did not consider the good folks from MA who boarded Clinton Machine busses to vote in NH.

I’ve never heard this much talk of voter fraud in an election before. . . it’s only a matter of time before the media starts doing some digging. Everyone I know is talking about it. Republicans and Democrats think something’s awry in NH.
And still no answers. Don’t let the status quo push us back to cynicism and apathy.
But the media really does need to start looking into this — no one wants to be called a conspiracy theorist or leftwing/rightwing fanatic, but the facts are increasingly becoming unavoidable.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to add voter fraud to the possible reasons the polls were so wrong. Why NOT investigate? Seriously – should we assume our government is being truthful? HAH!

The Democrat machine(s) is very well oiled when it comes to stuffing the ballot boxes (with paper so why not electronically). The Dems have a long history of ‘fixing’ things on election day against their Republican opponents.
It’s doubtful that Obam has access to the keys to start the machine but it is no doubt the Clintons have the pink slip.
So if Hillary was supposed to be the one… why wouldn’t Carville and Bill start the machine and aim it at a fellow Dem.. if that is what was needed!

My hunch? Buyer’s remorse.
The Democratic base in NH wasn’t ready to jump on the Obama Express. It kicked the tires and thought better of sending Hillary and Bill home for the duration.
I also think the polls led as much to the result of the vote counts and turnout as the candidates’ campaigns. Having been told a day before what the final tally would be and its impact on the Clinton campaign, NH voters decided to talk back.

Clinton won because of her “show of emotion” the day before the primary. As a result, many women voted for her, NOT because of her stance on the various issues, but because she’s a woman! As one woman stated when interviewed (on CNN I think) as to why she voted for Clinton, “…because she’s a woman and a mother, and she understands…”
Understands WHAT??? How to raise a child? What it’s like to pay for college for your teenager? That’s akin to voting for Obama simply because because he’s black and he understands the struggles of a man dealing with racism, or voting for Romney simply because he’s a Mormon and he understands what it’s like to go door to door selling copies of “The Watchtower”. It has nothing to do with the election issues, and provides no indication at all as to weather the candidate will be able to have an impact on the war on terror, or can deal with the failing economy, or will have a realistic solution for health care in the US.
But the whole crying “thing” worked for the Clinton campaign because the Clinton camp plays on peoples emotions and the fact that most people are followers who won’t do their own research so they are apt to believe whatever the the Clinton pundits tell them. Doesn’t anyone question the irony behind her sudden display of emotion the day before the NH primary, when up to that point she displayed a “hard as nails” front and was trying to show she had as much “testicular fortitude” as any man on the campaign?
Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with a woman president. I had the honor of meeting Margaret Thatcher and I admire the leader she was. I feel Condi Rice is a great example of a woman leader. I worked for a number of female officers during my time in the military. But please…ANYBODY BUT HILLARY!
Set aside her emotional displays and look at how she plays the public to her advantage. OPEN YOUR EYES PEOPLE. Hillary is evil and manipulative. Obama or Edwards will be the best candidate for a Democratic President, and I’m saying this as a registered Republican.
Of course, if Hillary wins, I think we’ll see another four years for a Republican presidency, no matter who is on the Republican ticket. Hillary is a very polarizing candidate and there are still an awful LOT of people out there who won’t vote for her for the same reason many NH women voted for her, because she’s a woman…

….forgot to mention… the Repubs exit polls made sense…the Dems didn’t. Same process differnt results.
It’s easy to see which side cheats That is, if you are not blinded by the Bush/Repub hatred that has been “waterboarding” the public by the media and you are still capable of original thinking.

….forgot to mention… the Repubs exit polls made sense…the Dems didn’t. Same process differnt results.
It’s easy to see which side cheats That is, if you are not blinded by the Bush/Repub hatred that has been “waterboarding” the public by the media and you are still capable of original thinking.

Wait! Instead of being forced to vote for whoever the media feels is an “electable candidate”, why not have a “None of the Above” box on the ballot? Imagine the chaos resulting from an election where the “None of the Above” box won the election? The parties would have to offer up new candidates or allow original thinkers to have some TV time…

I think I figured it out.
The reason the polls were off is because they were poorly done. When it comes to strong cross-over candidates like Obama, the standard model fails.
I received endless calls from pollsters asking me ‘favorable/unfavorable’ for dem leaders. I always answered HC unfavorable, JE unfavorable, BO favorable. Sometimes they asked ‘whom would you vote for: HC, JE, or BO. I would answer BO.
The trouble is, while I did answer truthfully to their specific questions, I am a right leaning independent and I cast my vote for RG.
Get it?

Rick,
“You people need to develop a much higher standard of evidence for fraud. There’s nothing that makes a person look more moronic than a premature claim of voter fraud. Honestly”
As I recall Revs Jackson and Sharpton and the FEC asserted that George Bush’s evil machine managed to keep blacks from voting in Florida and therefore stole the election from the Dems worthy, Al Gore. After years of looking for even one voter who was prevented from voting, and even in the face of actual attempts to disqualify absentee votes from servicemen by the Dems clever legion of lawyers, you recommend I have a high standard for claiming election fraud.
I say when the vote differs by 10-15% from polls taken the day before – where the chances can only be explained by something other than chance, I get top ask if their was some cheating going on.
As I noted earlier, from my understanding it is perfectly legal to drive from Boston to NH and claim to be moving to NH. However, that is a vote based on a lie and is unethical even if it is difficult to prove what the intentions were of those folks on the Clinton Machine bus.

After a quick look at the NH towns w/ Diebold and paper ballots, the voting is generally very close between Obama and Hillary. The biggest difference is in the biggest cities like Salem, Manchester, and Nashua. All Diebold and all show a huge 50 -80% difference favoring Clinton!

THERE IS A VERY SIMPLE EXPLANATION TO THIS.
ATTENTION MEDIA ELITES:
Stop trying to create the news and start reporting the news and you may get it right. My suggestion is a radical one and may be tough to grasp but if you spent your time debating positions of the candidates and leave the voting up to us I have a hunch that this whole process may just work. I know, I know, it’s really hard to get our arms around this one. We don’t vote based on your hype we vote based on the issues.
So admit your awful handicappers, stop the hype machine, be adults and admit you were wrong again and lets move along and let the adults decide this one.

has anyone even considered the possibility that the polls were right and election tallying was wrong? has anyone seen this level of discrepancy outside of rigged third-world country elections?

Too many pollsters and media talking heads are swooning over Obama and this tainted their polls & opinions. The sour grape faces of Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC, looked like they just heard their best friend died–so much for unbiased reporting.
Clinton won because people felt she was more experienced – which she is. For Democrats to demonize her & Bill is not only divisive but disgusting. Obama is a fabulous orator but he was not born in Bethlehem so let’s stop treating him like he was —and start to ask serious and pointed questions on his experience and platform.
I for one have not decided for whom I will vote for but I do have alot of questions that will need satisfactory answers before I go to the polls.

Many post already address this fact – but I personally feel that polls are of little use to anyone except the pundits or those lemmings who only follow popular optionion rather than actually formulating one themselfs, and so the polls them selfs tend to slant the voting one way or the other. So I tend to actually lie when / if asked by an exit poller. I dont really feel as if it is anyones business who plan to or actually do vote for until my vote is counted.

It so turned me off with the press phoniness that I won’t even watch for future polling.
Cris Matthews etc are phonies.

GUESS WE SHOULDN’T BE SURPRISED THAT THERE IS MORE SCANDAL INVOLVING THE CLINTON GANG OF TWO. STARTED IN ARKANSAS, CONTINUED IN WASHINGTON, MORE IN NEW YORK WITH THE HOUSES AND “BOOK DEALS” AND NOW`TO NEW HAMPSHIRE. THROWBACK TO THE DALEY ERA IN CHICAGO, AND LOUISIANA SINCE THE WORD “ELECTION” WAS COINED.

When exit polls don’t match the announced vote results, it means something is off and it isn’t necessarily the polling. Frankly, I would like the United Nations to start monitoring our elections.

George:
It’s the Democrats that refuse voter identification. It’s only the Democrats that gain by Fraud.

Will we ever get rid of the Clintons?! I am so sick of them. No wonder Obama seems like a breath of fresh air.

A lot of people in NH are second-home residents like myself. My phone rang constantly all weekend asking who I support…not asking me if I was going to vote..BIG DIFFERENCE!! I did not vote in the primary as I was in CT so WHO I was supporting really didn’t count. Was it counted in the polls?

All you people on this board need to direct your angst to the female baby boomers of N.H. The boomers are completely worthless and braindead, most likely due to all the dope they smoked in the 60′s. The good news is that they will be dying off over the next 20 yrs.

Concerned Citizen,
We had the same experience in ’04.The returns, and exit polls were showing a definite win by our candidate…then around 11pm west coast time, there was a sudden flip in the numbers. It seemed astonishing and left us wondering…The paperless machines with the vulnerable memory chips have gotta go! Republican or Democrat-we can’t be passive about this if we are to ever again have a comparitively honest election.

Every minute the media spend on polling data is a minute stolen from their proper (and vital) job of reporting on the candidates’ records and platforms.

How much truth to the rumor: Massachusetts Democrat voters coming to NH, saying they’re (or even ‘thinking of’) moving to NH and wanted to register at the polls to vote yesterday during our Primary? I believe IDs and utility bills, as a minimum, are required at voter registration. Rumor has it that the Dems did away w/ this requirement a couple of years ago.
Might this possibility explain, in whole or in part, Clinton’s ‘upset’ over Obama?

I don’t know why people would say polls aren’t correct. They’re always dead on. She won because of the tears.

here’s my two cents:
1) Get rid of the polls.
2) check driverlicense/birth c ertificates for each voter for residency/eligiblity in voting district
3) hold one primary w/all the candidates for both parties in May of election year
4) Put a “none of the above” on the primary ballots
6) “if none of the above” wins in May, that party gets one more chance with a new field of candidates in September
7) “Winners” of the primary must take a compentency test of the US Constitution of its powers and limitations in October of election year with published results by October 15.
7) Have general elections in November of election year.
8) Put a “none of the above” selection on the November ballots as a final stopgap in case one of them manages to cheat the system.
It’s a start.

Actually, you need to ask the NH Secretary of State why the ballot design was changed to give Clinton an unfair advantage. In 2006, the NH Secretary of State testified under oath before the NH Supreme Court that “studies showed that the primacy effect can confer as much as a six to ten percent advantage upon candidates whose names appear on lists as long as twelve candidates.” As a result of this sworn testimony, the NH Supreme Court ordered all future ballots to randomly place candidates’ names on ballots going to different precincts. But that ballot design was changed for this primary and Clinton’s name was placed first on almost all of the ballots. I called the NH Secretary of State (603-271-3242) to ask why the ballot was changed, and I was told they didn’t know why the design was changed and wouldn’t tell me who was responsible for the decision. THERE’S A STORY HERE. I wish a reporter would jump on it. I think I know the answer: the Clinton’s well-oiled machine worked in concert with the NH Secretary of State to give Clinton an unfair advantage, however slight. In this instance, however, a 6-10% advantage due to the primacy effect accounts for the discrepancy in the polling. (And one example of how being the first name on the ballot helps a candidate: the voter doesn’t have to worry about making a mistake in selecting the candidate of his choice because the first name on the ballot also has the first chad, hole or selection or otherwise marking.) Someone needs to find out who changed the ballot design (against a NH Supreme Court ruling) and whether the Clintons were active in the decision making.

Perhaps the result of Caller I.D.? As a New Hampshire resident, we grew weary of the 8-10 political phone calls per day. Fortunately Caller I.D. allowed us to only answer those phone calls from people we knew. We specifically did not answer political and pollster calls. Neither did our neighbors. Hence, our opinions were not captured by pollsters. No conspiracy; just the happy utilization of existing technology.

here’s my two cents:
(i need to count these better!!!)
1) Get rid of the polls.
2) check driverlicense/birth c ertificates for each voter for residency/eligiblity in voting district
3) hold one primary w/all the candidates for both parties in May of election year
4) Put a “none of the above” on the primary ballots
5) “if none of the above” wins in May, that party gets one more chance with a new field of candidates in September
6) “Winners” of the primary must take a compentency test of the US Constitution of its powers and limitations in October of election year with published results by October 15.
7) Have general elections in November of election year.
8) Put a “none of the above” selection on the November ballots as a final stopgap in case one of them manages to cheat the system.
It’s a start.

Get rid of polls (propaganda) and identify every voter by picture i.d. and/or birth cert. (especially when dealing with a candidate from the Illinois’ machine & the Clinton machine) get rid of these caucus’s & let’s have national elections for the electoral reps of each state at THE SAME time – no more news “shows” that go on for a year before the elections

Or maybe you should go to the root of the problem and do away with the hackable electronic voting machines which have no paper trail and go back to they tried and true ballots we had before.
I heard the divergence in votes were at the precincts with electronic ballot machines but in the precincts which still use paper ballots there was no divergence.

The “starting point” should be determining what percentage of registered Independents who voted, voted in each primary, Democratic and Republican.

Susan in Texas
Please do not disseminate lies: NH Secretary of Elections did change the design of the ballot to list candidates alphabetically starting with a RANDOM letter. He did not choose the RANDOM letter. it was selected RANDOMLY. It turned out to be “Z”. Which meant, the order was as follows:
Biden – Clinton – Dodd – Edwards – Kucinich – Obama – Richardson.
Had the letter picked been “N”, guess what, the order would have been Obama – Richardson – Biden – Clinton – Dodd – Edwards – Kucinich.
Did the change help Hillary – I guess so. Was it done purposefully to help her – no.

I’m a NH voter. We have 4 voters in the household. Toward the end we were getting several phone polls a day and many political calls. My theory is that a large number of NH women with family responsibilities stopped answering the huge number of political phone calls we were receiving, especially during dinner time, and as a result Hillary’s perceived support slipped during those days of overload.

How is everone missing the theory of independent voters? The blog right below this one mentions that Obama and McCain were the top choices among independents (45% of voters in NH). If I’m a NH independent who wants Obama in the White House and I see he has an 8% lead, whereas McCain is neck-and-neck, I vote for McCain instead (he needs my vote more). Enough independents do this and all of a sudden McCain wins handily and Obama is in a tight race. This is what I think happened.

Um……………….DUH!
All you sheeple out there trying to explain why the polls were so wrong.????
THEY WERE NOT WRONG!
ITS CALLED VOTE FRAUD!
Lori price’s post shows the prof.
Wake up all you sheeple
before its to late

It’s called the Harvey Gnatt effect, same thing happened North Carolina. Where people acted cowardly and lie about who they would they cast there vote, and telling the pollsters the politically correct answer. All the while knowing they feared an African-American being in charge. Same thing for Harvey Gnatt and Jesse Helms, “Jesse” never did anything for the advancement of North Carolina, yet people where afraid of change. Let’s face it “old white men” have been in charge of this country for hundreds of years and look where we are at. I don’t care if its a woman, minority, or a liberal, but a change is needed.

Lori Price…why do you suspect Democrats?
Republicans would be more motivated to see Clinton win. They’re shaking in there boots over Obama!

Polling is vitally important to keep the elections honest.
The elections in both Georgia (the country, not the state) and the Ukraine in their last presidential election cycles were questioned and overturned due to discrepancies between exit polls and the ballot box results.
If only we had that happen here, Bush wouldn’t have been president for two terms since the exit polls for both 2000 and 2004 were vastly different than the ballot box results.
Our election system is like a cheap Chinese toy coated with GHB. ROTTEN AND BAD FOR US.

Obama has been treated like a rockstar. Thats why people are accusing Hillary of being fraudulent. People just cant stand that Hillary Clinton was able to beat their rockstar. He won Iowa, she won NH. Still 48 states people.

Wake up you fools. The polls were accurate. The vote was stolen. (Said by James at 5:38:32 PM)
Obviously another Obama or republican voter who cant believe that the rockstar lost.

With all the blogs I have read for several articles I am surprised one point has not come up. In fact I didn’t get to in my other blogs for columns. Maybe it is because I am an old guy that I remember this. I was a “Teenager for Taft” back in the dark ages and frankly looked upon Eisenhower about the way many conservatives look at McCain. Ike was not a conservative, he swayed from liberal to conservative. As like from appointing Earl Warren chief justice and at the same time drawing a line in the sand against what Reagan later called “the evil empire”. He could be either right or left based on the categories we use today. It wasn’t because he was a flip flopper because when he took a position he stuck to it. He just did what he believed was right. Ike made mistakes it is true, but for the most part he was a good president. By the way, he was at the bottom of his class at West Point and had a record number of discipline demerits because he was a true individual. Ike proved to be a master at management both as a general and as a president and showed an intellectual ability that only came out when his papers were read years later. (That has happened with Reagan too.) What I am saying is that while some of you are supporting Mitt or Mike or Rudy or like me had hopes for Fred you have to remember that we have to win. We cannot let a fiasco like Clinton get in or a socialist like Obama, no matter how nice a guy he seems. Republicans turned to Ike during the 1952 GOP convention because they felt he could win. At that time age was also against Ike. If McCain shows the stuff that he has recently there is no way a Democrat will beat him in November. That’s the name of the game. We want a winner. MaCain may or may not be that man. I haven’t seen that in any of the others.

Wake up people – this is Diebold, yet again, in action. The discrepancies match up with diebold precincts in far too convenient a pattern. Do the research – you’ll find it if you look for it. Diebold is a GOP outfit. The GOP wants Hillary on the Democrats’ side because a) she is a corporatist, and b) she give them the best chance of winning in their opinion.
We know they stole 2004, and we know 2002 had issues and 2000 was a travesty of justice (the SC had no constitutional right to involve itself in Florida’s electoral process).
If we don’t scream bloody murder and get this dealt with right here and now, Diebold will again make a mockery of what’s left of our democratic tradition.

The NH Primary votes were counted by a private company in secret using an optical scanner, lets put all those conspiracy theories to bed now… lets have an open and supervised hand recount.

7News Suffolk University Tracking Poll
Date: 1/5-6/08
New Hampshire
Added: 1/7/08
Est. MoE = 4.2% [?]
Barack Obama 35%
Hillary Clinton 34%
John Edwards 15%
Bill Richardson 3%
Unsure 12%
Did nobody see this poll??? She won well within this margin of error.

America is undemocratic, not because of the Clintons or McCains etc. but because of the childish behaviour of the voters. The question is not if I like someone or not, or if someone cries, the only question is, what will they probabely do as president. I don’t see anyone is concerned about this question. The cynical truth is, you all will get the president you deserve.

Folks, at what point do people allow themselves to understand the concept of voter fraud. You can pass it off as ‘conspiracy theory’ ideology, but it’s real. The problem is, it’s just to tough to believe that our votes might actually be manipulated. Do a search for voter fraud in Google, see the specific of votes that were left out of the New Hampshire results, how a family in a district voted for candidate then found that the results showed 0 votes in their precinct. Upon check, they found 31 votes in that precinct for the candidate in question. This is fraud. The election is decided long before you and I get to vote. Look into it, talk about it, expose it and save our country. Please.

Timing is important. Say if the Diebold surge was not there,she would have lost by 4.5%. Picture we are seeing now would have been different. We do not want another cheated election like 2000&2004. There is time still to correct a heartache. Or we need to carry another 4 years countdown for the last of presidency. Kerry did not appeal for recount at the wee hours of that night.Shred the Diebold and corrupt insiders. Now.

There is a difference between voter fraud and election fraud. Some politicians/businesses are trying to blur the lines. Voter fraud would include people voting under false identities, multiple locations, etc. and is why some claim to want picture i.d.s. This is a time-consuming and hard way to really steal an election, and there is not evidence that this is widespread enough to affect elections. Election fraud is when elections are manipulated through preventing large groups of people from being able to vote, such as having too few voting booths, scaring people away from voting, wiping people off of voting lists “erroneously”, or by using electronic voting machines that steal and change votes. The optical scanners used in New Hampshire have been proven to be hackable and allow tampering with votes and vote totals. How peculiar that the polls were accurate for everyone except Obama and Clinton. We need paper ballots so recounts can be done when elections are in doubt.

Tony from Ohio writes: “The pollsters call people out of the phone book. The cell phone numbers are not on any pollsters list. There is no way to get a true poll.”
I worked on phone polls 25 years ago, even then we did not rely on phone books. You simply know the exchange numbers (the first three digits) for the locations you want, and then use random numbers to get a random 4-digit ending. Back when I did it people were sometimes angry beacuse they had “unlisted” numbers but still got our calls. Calling random numbers leads to a few numbers that are not active, or that are businesses, but those are quickly bypassed by the poller. I haven’t been involved since cellphones came into wide use, but I imagine similar techniques are possible.

Hey, if the Republicans stole the last two elections via hacking the vote (which they did), why is it so inconceivable that they hacked the vote (with Diebold’s help) to enable the person they most want to run against win a primary she actually didn’t?

Recount them, by hand.
I could believe the polls were wrong, if not for the reports that exit polling roughed match the earlier projections. And then combine that with the reports that Obama’s numbers looked as expected from the polling places where Diebold machines weren’t used.
There may well be other reasons for the “surprise,” but without a manual recount, done with a fair amount of transparency, there will be a lot of us wondering. If for no other reason, do it so we can all discount any thoughts of voter fraud.

Unverifiable, electronic voting machines, controlled by private companies is what is undermining the psyche of the American people. Why do we allow this to happen to ourselves? Why can’t voting machines have a paper trail (just make it from post-consumer recyclables)?

why didn’t langer mention anything about votes for ron paul not being counted in sutton, NH and other counties/precincts? mass media is a sham, the best way to learn about something is to do it yourself

Clear Evidence Of Widespread Vote Fraud In New Hampshire.
Paul and Obama cheated out of 3rd and 1st by electronic voting machines and hand count fraud.

Hillary’s savvy little crying episode made the difference. She should win an academy award for that. She repulses me in a visceral way, and even I felt a little sorry for her after seeing the fake crying, even when I knew it was planned.

The real losers were white men…
Simple math demonstrates that the N.H. democratic primary result is not an example of the “Bradley Effect” or hidden racism. Pollster.com tracks national polls and creates standard estimates based on the results of many different poles. Their standard estimates leading up to the vote were 36.7% for Obama, 30.4% for Clinton, 18.4% for Edwards, 5.6% for Richardson, 2.5% for Biden, and apparently 6.4% undecided or voting for minor candidates. The actual results were 37% for Obama (almost exactly correct), 40% for Clinton, 17% for Edwards, 5% for Richardson, and 1% for Kucinich.
Now do the math. The only candidates that actually lost ground on Clinton were white males (Edwards and Biden). She obviously also gained some support from people who were undecided. More than likely, the massive media attention focused on her heart felt explanation for why she is running and her debate performance helped her capture a slight lead among undecided voters, and also take votes away from other candidates in the race. There is really no evidence of a “Bradley Effect” since the only candidates that actually lost votes to Clinton were white.

I don’t know what happened. Once again Diebold voting machines are involved in questionable results. Both the pre-election and exist poll contridict the final count. The media isn’t talking about the questionable voing machines but it needs to be investigated!
Some complained about hanging chads. Give a few hanging chads over hackable voting machines any day.
Hillary has the highest negative ratings of all the Democratic canidates. This in my opinion makes her the least electable come November.

Why not hand recount and hold SOMEONE accountable for the numbers?
If it is accurate, I will eat my hat. I am a fan of technology, however even I with my half witted knowledge of computer programming, realizes it isn’t hard to corrupt data.

My OPINION is with all of the people saying that the polls themselves are useless, off-based and pretty much wrong a lot of the times. All polls depend on what questions were asked, how they were asked, how they were framed, and how the answers were available. By that I mean, did you have to pick an already made up answer, or were you able to give your answer in your own words. Also as anybody who works with numbers and/or is good with numbers knows, you can take the exact same numbers/answers/whatever in polls and pretty much make them to say whatever you want them to. I’m also with the people who say the the pollsters themselves are only in this for the tons of money they make, and we would do well to get rid of a majority of polls anyway.

Gee, we can’t trust the CLINTONS…. AGAIN????
Is it any wonder the Democrat sice of the ELECTION IN N.H. is NOT TO BE TRUSTED, EITHER????
BE STILL MY HEART!
FRAUD?
LIES??
CLINTON ????
COMON, LET’S CHECK IT OUT.
DARE YA!!!!!

My God, NO VOTER FRAUD TOOK PLACE YOU MORONS! No candidate would ever risk harming their own campaign (and their party at that!), and sabotage a candidate of the same party, for so little. It’s just ONE PRIMARY. ONE STATE. And Obama still only lost by a couple points.
Why is everyone on the internet such a conspiracy theorist nut? No wonder Ron Paul has such a big internet following! No one on the internet lives in the real world!
You notice something special about Obama and Hillary? Maybe the reason THEY were the only ones that the polls were wrong about…IS BECAUSE THEY AREN’T WHITE MEN!!!!!!
The polls were wrong because of discrimination issues, plain and simple, combined with Hillary’s emotional moment (which seemed genuine and was not forced tears like everyone makes it out to be) and the fact that Hillary was listed first.
The Iowa vote was out in the open and not secret. This vote was. So a bunch of people that said they would vote for Obama didn’t actually behind closed doors. Hillary also pulled in more of the woman vote than expected, 10 points more!
Again, what is special about Obama and Hillary is that they are the only two “first ever” candidates, and everyone else is the status quo white male.
And what is with all the hate for the Clintons? Bill was one of the best presidents this nation has ever had, and he was worlds above Bush.
But I forgot…every president is evil and part of a mass conspiracy.

I spent most of today perusing the final vote tallies, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. It is CLEAR by any study of the statistics that the DIEBOLD machines in the vote-rich areas (mostly urban, and more inclined toward Obama) were rigged. In virtually all the jurisdictions where the ballots were counted by hand, the totals reflected what the tracking and exit polls showed. (Yes, there were a handful of exceptions where Hillary had lop-sided margins; one area had Richardson triumphing with 75%, and some areas where Hillary was 0%, but these were the exceptions to the rule.) What is unnatural are the urban areas in the multiple-thousands where Hillary suddenly shows 40+% to Obama’s 20%; but this ONLY shows up in select areas of the largest towns. Virtually NONE of the counts in the rural, small, and medium-sized towns show anything but corroboration of the tracking and exit polls. I urge Gary Langer, ABC News, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc. to NOT sweep this under the rug the way they felt compelled to do in 2004, but to show a serious study of the statistics and the anomalous nature of it, and if necessary start calls for a RE-VOTE if necessary. Another stolen election is an abomination.
p.s. The ‘tearing up’ moment is a clue; that had more to do with ego than a super-ego concern for the nation. After all, the implication is that no-one else can ‘save America’, an egotistical concept if ever there was one.

We live in perilous times. A strict constitutionalist being called nutcase and worse, Socialists/Stalinists running for office, Neo-con fascists wanting to re-invent the world in their image, loss of control by the people of their election process, etc. etc. And to top it off, an electorate being numbed by a duplicitous media. Be very careful this election cycle. This country may depend on your due diligence.

You people saying it’s not voter fraud have no more proof of that than the people that saying there is. Why is your stance somehow stronger?
Recently almost every challenge about voter fraud has shown BIG cases of voter fraud. In NH, there have already been admissions of incorrect totals – perhaps not fraud, but a vote is the kind of thing you want correct.
What have you got to lose by auditing? Other countries are the ones that don’t audit because they know it’s rigged. We shouldn’t fear having audits by 10 or 20 separate entities.
Personally, I expect it is possible that interest groups that have thrown millions at the candidates might throw a few million at the vote counters to get the counts they want (so that their other millions dumped into a candidate aren’t wasted), and the candidate would not be directly (or maybe even indirectly) responsible. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that happened.
Why are you so opposed to having a double check? It doesn’t make sense that you won’t want to – you know, just to be safe.

I am 55 I LOVE Hillary. I do not respond to telephone polls. I am on a DO NOT CALL List because I DO NOT want to answer endless questions. I DO NOT like pollsters trying to influence my vote. I hope the news people continue to pick on Hillary and say negative things about her then more women like me who do NOT respond to polls will come to her defense !

People that say Hillary represents the Status quo are CRAZY. There has NEVER been a woman president! When Bill was in office there was a republican congress that was not cooperative to change.
Hopefully after Hillary is elected we will also have a democratic congress full of women that will care about our seniors, our poor, and our sick. Congress people that will represent ALL of those that are working as hard as they can and still losing their homes and going without adequate medical care. A congress that will regulate predatory lenders and mandate affordable basic health care for our citizens that is equal to that of our congressmen and women.

Hillary DOES represent the status quo. So many reasons. But this should be enough:
Hillary goes back to the White House: Does this look like change to you?
Bush
Bush
Bush
Clinton
Clinton
Bush
Bush
Clinton
Clinton
If that doesn’t say status quo and The Past, I don’t know what does.

Ditto on the comments for someone in the media to start doing some investigation. So many people at work and my friends are talking about this, I can’t believe it hasn’t been picked up yet by the media.
My guess is no one will have the courage to do so. Olbermann mentioned it not by name, but then went on to say the polls got Obama’s percentages marginally correct (so the only person’s that was incredibly skewed was Clinton’s) which whether he knew it or not he was actually making a case for some sort of election fraud (which wasn’t his intention).
I think there’s such relief by so many old-timers/Clinton backers that no one right now wants to be the one to raise an issue or they run the risk of being called a sore loser, right winger, conspiracy theorist, or any of the other names people on this board are calling others to stifle an intelligent debate.
Even Gary Langer has added a disqualifier as of Wed. afternoon shooting down the late decider theory. So that voids about 1/4 of the arguments being made on this board.
Where conspiracy comes in is in trying to figure out who COULD (emphasis on could) have bribed programmers or assisted in the fraud. That’s conjecture that none of us will know unless there is a call for transparency and accountability in who counts our votes and who loads the memory cards that are brought to the station.
I’ll say it again, if publicly traded companies have to be audited and give account for every penny, why do we not do the same for our own democracy when so much more is at stake?

Hey it’s about time we bring in the international observers to monitor the US elections. The last two were jokes which outcome was determined by our present dictator et Al. How come non Europeans get to have their elections monitored and make believed US elections get to pass as the real deal. We should also ask the software company to just punch in the candidate the establishment wants to keep the genocide, wars and aggression on tap. We don’t need to go to the poll anymore.
To talk about Mugabe, Idi Amin, Duvalier, Hitler and Stalin is pure arrogance when hegemony and tyranny rule.

While I reject the nonsense about the stolen elections in 2000 and 2004, and the allegations of Diebold being a republican tool, I do agree with him on one point. We have to be willing to look into the possibility of voter fraud in putting Hillary over the top in NH. All the polling was accurate except for Hillary’s numbers. Every explanation in the world seems to be considered by the talking heads except for fraud. Why?

This is such obvious vote fraud against Obama, and I was a voter for Hillary Clinton in New York in 2000! It’s not just the pre-election polls.
(a) About 1/4 of the votes in NH were recorded by easily verifiable, trackable paper ballot, and those went massively for Obama (39% for Obama to 34-35% for Clinton). And the paper ballot precincts were strewn throughout the state– rural and urban districts. Yet somehow, the very unverifiable, unaudited electronic votes on the Diebold machines show the opposite? Sorry, but that dog ain’t hunting.
(b) The *exit polls* raw data (not the pre-voting polls) which assess the decisions of actual primary voters, show a clear Obama advantage — and those exit polls (not to mention the pre-primary polls) correlate almost exactly with the ultimate results on the Republican side. The exit polls are one of the best checks we have about accuracy of the voting results, since they’re an independent measurement done in a manner that coincides with the vote itself. Yet these raw data exit polls were somehow totally wrong for Obama, with the Diebold vote counts throwing it off?
I’m sorry, but the New Hampshire primary was riddled with fraud. I’m not saying the Clintons were responsible for it– and I’m not even saying Diebold itself was responsible, though the Clintons’ pro-corporatist stance has undoubtedly made them a more comfortable choice than someone like Obama would be– but there was some manipulation going on.
There has never been a case in a prior US election, when *all* the verifying data, not just the pre-election polls but the exit polls *and* the paper ballot, hand-counted results, were reversed by unauditable, non-transparent results tabulated in an electronic data collection system that’s easily hacked. Check out that HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy, to see how easy it is to hack the vote totals. Harri Hursti showed you could do it with an entry-level course in programming!
How can our democracy survive the next election, let alone another decade, when we can’t even trust the mechanisms by which we tally results in an election?

When Obama wins, all is well but when he Obama looses, it’s fraud.This is a nation which has one key mission to spread democracy all over the world.It’s so pathetic.Get over it, Clinton won in NH.

Why is almost everyone assuming that the proven-hackable Diebold voting machines in New Hampshire are more reliable than the polls?

The day of the Iowa caucus-5 days before the New Hampshire vote- Clinton held a 7% lead over Obama in New Hampshire. How do you explain a blimp up of 17% for Obama to accoubt for the supposed double digit lead? If there was such a lead, how many included in that percentage had been considering a vote for Mccain before their inclusion in the blip up? Where was all this vote analysis in 2000 and 2004?

Tuesday night’s election outcome in New Hampshire surprised many Americans, but it didn’t shock me one bit. Why? Because I’m one of those unseen individuals the polling firms should blame for the discrepancies between election-day forecasts and the results that followed the first-in-the-nation Democratic Primary. I’m a political opinion poll dancer, driven to do my utmost to prevent pollsters and their accomplices in the news media from exerting undue influence over the populace on election day.
As a political opinion poll dancer, I take great joy in receiving phone calls from professional polling firm employees and amateur campaign volunteers alike. It matters little to me whether the caller is working for pay or for donuts. And it makes no difference to me whether he dials for a candidate, a political party, a special interest group or someone else altogether. Heck, I even enjoy receiving calls from auto-dial systems that pepper me — albeit in rhythmic-mechanical tones — with opportunities to skew their numbers. When I receive a call from a pollster, I eagerly provide answers — none reflecting my own opinion, of course — as I work my way through what I call “dancing” with the pollster.
My goal as a political opinion poll dancer is to take up as much of his time as possible by giving misleading, long-winded and totally inaccurate answers to survey questions in hopes of one day producing an outcome — not a Hillary Clinton victory, per se, just a result that defies the pollsters — like the one produced last night in the “Live Free or Die” state. And, while I would like to take sole credit for the results in New Hampshire, I know I must share credit with others like me.
So, now, I extend a sincere “Thank you” to each and every political opinion poll dancer across the country who helped make our collective dream come true. Keep doing what you’re doing and, possibly, we can produce similar results in future elections.

Why don’t we impeach Hillary even before she is elected,then we will save the country a lot of money and the REPUBICANS the time and effort they could use to help the middle class get ahead and be able to raise their children and get a college education folks that think the election in N.H. was rigged are reaching out for something they can’t find within their own candidates i.e. the truth about the economy,the war,global warming etc.Why don’t they think about putting forth a candidate that has some real ideas about caring for the folks that live in this country and stop worring about saving the world and making the world in there image so that they may become even richer that they are now.

Judging from the overnight radio talk shows (WBZ in particular), a large number of registered Independants, who decided to support a Republican candidate, picked up Dem ballots in order to vote for the most-beatable candidate. The whole primary/caucus excercise is garbage, anyhow. Popular vote should determine the presidency – it shouldn’t matter how many names are on the ballot. Maybe that way, we would get a President with honest, uncompromised good intentions – someone who would listen to the People instead of pandering to the party who saw fit to put them forward as ‘their’ candidate. As you can probably tell, I’m not a big fan of the Electoral College process either…

“On the other hand, the pre-election polls in the New Hampshire Republican race were accurate. The problem was isolated to the Democratic side”
How can anyone say that. In case were “Other” were way out of wack. ~22.5% and a couple over 10% areas voted for other. Who thinks that is real? Do we have that many write-ins? In the case of the 22%, whoever it was got 2nd place, where can I send the congratulations card? No where except Ron Paul, because the systematically shuffled votes in the the other category. It was very obvious that Mr Gulianni AKA Mr 9-11 got 9.11% in THREE districts!!
And we know that in Sutton there were 0 votes with 100% precincts in, after a complaint, the “found” 31 votes for Ron Paul. Oh, we must have lost those.
Also the hand-counts were all much higher than computer counts for Dr. Paul. Statistically that is impossible! We want Justice!
Just polls, Just reporting! Just the truth!

Again as I posted last night if this can happen to Ron Paul, what makes us think that it is not happening to ALL of the candidates.
The head clerk of the New Hampshire town of Sutton has been forced to admit that Ron Paul received 31 votes yet when the final amount was transferred to a summary sheet and sent out to the media, the total was listed as zero. The fiasco throws the entire primary into doubt and could lead to a re-count.
As we reported earlier today, an entire family voted for Ron Paul in Sutton, yet when the voting map on the Politico website was posted, the total votes for Ron Paul were zero.
Vote fraud expert Bev Harris contacted the head clerk in Sutton, Jennifer Call, who was forced to admit that the 31 votes Ron Paul received were completely omitted from the final report sheet, claiming “human error” was responsible for the mistake.
Two or three votes not counted could be a plausible mistake – but 31 votes for one candidate?

Thanks for pointing that out, Joe. In that same jurisdiction, a “hand-counted” balloting process, 5 additional votes were ‘added’ to Hillary’s numbers, and deducted from Obama’s. Now, I have to say I was/am an Edwards supporter, but like all of us I want a clean fight….and this was not clean. The key precincts in which the theft occurred were in Manchester, which given the demographics was more Obama territory than Hillary. There were tens of thousands of votes there which enabled the theft of more than 3,000 (which coincidentally was the spread difference through most of the night); this was borne out in the upending of the exit polls in that area. One pundit was heard claiming that the “exit pollsters” were young and supposedly “careless”, as if to put the blame on those that were conducting the exit polls. Having a background in sociology and statistics, I know that there is something wrong when the ONLY areas with totals that belied the exit polls just happened to be the vote-rich precincts where DIEBOLD machines were used, and in which Obama was “exit-polled” to win with even larger margins than the state-wide average. Yes, there’s something rotten in the state of New Hampshire, and if the media doesn’t start discussing it, we need to figure out a method of civil disobedience that shows definitively we “won’t get fooled again” and we’re tired of having our intelligence (and our votes) insulted. It’s not about Obama, it’s about our democracy and whether it’s being rigged. (To the woman who doesn’t answer phone polls: I understand what you’re saying, but that has nothing to do with exit polling.)

This polling fiasco is a great thing.
Finally these narrow focussed techniques are showing that they discount a large portion of voters.
A couple obvious reasons:
1. New voters. The youth vote and those who have “dropped out” of the process are now getting into the mix again. Thank goodness. The apathy in this country has been nothing short of pathetic.
2. Cellphones are now many people’s primary phone, not landlines. These people are now off the radar to the pollsters.
3. Diebold counting vs. hand counting.
It’s amazing the difference in the percentages that come from each.
4. Push polling and corrupt polls.
The Paul campaign has been completely
abused in Iowa. There is too much evidence of fixed polling. I’m not a Paul supporter, but the evidence is clear that his supporters were not
represented when the polled.
As far as the necessity for polling,
even with all the problems, it’s very
important to the candidates for determining if their campaigns are
effective.
One thing is certain, there’s either not enough polling or the integrity of the polls current in use are questionable.
Either way, it’s all pretty much irrelevant. I believe that the majority of Americans feel it’s all rigged.
And of course, it is…

Voter fraud is serious and should be discussed and addressed by MSM but they choose to ignore. WHY?
Narrow minded populous to not recognize when hoodwinked by the influencial MSM. This republic is in DANGER and requires BIG changes to recover it. War is unjust, costly and we are broke. Economic collapse very possible as fed injects more money only means hyperinflation. And only 1 candidate wants to TRULY address economic issues and foreign policy issues both of which are miserably failing. Take an oath to protect the constitution and ignore it at all cost except 1 candidate.
Politicians pay nothing but lip service to the constitution and create UNJUST laws by the thousands and the POTUS claims none of them apply to him in his signing statements. The absolute rarest thing in our world is an honest and trustworthy politician and I get the opportunity to VOTE FOR ONE!!!!! And what is even more unique about this candidate for POTUS is that I do not have to mention his name for others to know who I spoke about!!!!
BUT WHEN I DO VOTE I DO NOT KNOW IF MY VOTE WILL COUNT AND THAT SUC**!

Yes, I believe they were almost all optical scan machines, so there is definitely a paper trail to follow.
Okay I guess Kucinich’s recount only applies to the Democratic side, but minority candidate Albert Howard of Ann Arbor, MI (who recieved a whopping 44 votes) has also requested one for the Republicans.

Sorry, by fringe I was referencing the Republican candidate you mentioned who got 44 votes. Not sure people will take him very seriously. Plus Kucinich is also made fun of a lot for his UFO claims, but I really think people are going to learn more of what he’s about as he stands up for the integrity of our voting systems.

The truth can be found in the numbers (Machine vs. Hand):
OVERALL
Machine Votes:
Clinton: 91,600 (52.88%)
Obama: 81,633 (47.12%)
Total: 173,233 (100%)
Hand Votes:
Clinton: 20,529 (47.22%)
Obama: 22,944 (52.78%)
Total: 43,473 (100%)
Coincidence?

Without question, these so called polls, are merely political agendas, as was the case in New Hampshire, to advance a concerted effort by the media to influence voting and “knock” Senator Clinton out of the race. To add insult upon insult, the media attempted while hiding, in futile desperation, to present a baseless and laughable assessment by a Stanford University professor, whose overindulgence in the world of make-believe was obvious, to “justify” what otherwise was a deliberate move to influence an election. Rather than admit its wrong, the media thrusts, through NBC news, Meet the Press’s Tim Russert upon us in order to further its agenda of destroying the candidacy of Senator Clinton while Senator Obama takes refuge in the media’s “game” of hide and seek.

I am always expressing my opinion about why people should vote, especially people around my age group, 18-25. The response I get the most is,”Why? My vote doesn’t count!”
Can we really trust the people running the show at the polls? Seems like a big fat NO!
I hope this doesn’t come out as a misconclusion of the media. The media is just about as bad as the freakin’ paparazzi in Hollywood. Instead of Paris Hilton and Brittney Spears, we have Obama and Clinton.

Obama ends up winning. :)