I pray this is not true!

“There’s Something Rotten in New Hampshire”

In several on-line reports released since the New Hampshire Primary, it seems there was a serious discrepancy between the Diebold machine tally and the physical hand count of ballots in the Democratic side of that election. The machine count showed Hillary Clinton beating Barack Obama by 39% to 36%, but the hand tally of the ballots showed that Senator Obama actually defeated Senator Clinton by a margin of 42& to 35%!

If true this would explain how the pollsters got it so wrong in New Hampshire, where one day before the primary they had Obama eight to thirteen points ahead of Clinton. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the Diebold voting machines have been called into account as to their accuracy and the apparent ease with which they can be tampered with. When I campaigned for John Kerry in Ohio in 2004, we all went to bed election eve believing that he would carry that state with ease. The exit polls the next day confirmed that Kerry would win, and yet, the Diebold machines, without any paper trail, told a very different story. We believe that a program was written that changed every sixth or seventh Kerry vote into a Bush vote. A year after that election Bobby Kennedy Jr. published an article claiming very much the same thing.

We have known for some time that we need to overhaul our voting system and that we should always have in place a method to recount votes by hand, especially in tight contests. I pray that Senator Clinton’s victory over Obama was legitimate, not because I support her, but because after seven years of George W. Bush I need something I can still believe in. Our precious right to vote, which is the foundation of our Democracy, cannot be even slightly tainted. Whoever wins in the primaries or in the general election, let them win fairly and squarely on the basis of how many votes they receive, not on who manipulated the system.





By:

Henry A Lowenstein

The writer is a distant cousin of the late Congressman Allard Lowenstein