The New Hampshire Recount

THE NEW HAMPSHIRE RECOUNT....I've been following the New Hampshire recount story with one eye, and Marc Danziger reports today that it's 75% complete. Result: a little less than 1% of the votes have been changed, resulting in a net +25 votes for Hillary Clinton and +10 votes for Barack Obama. There were also several reports shortly after the election suggesting that Hillary did unaccountably better in precincts that used Diebold optical scanners vs. precincts that did hand counting, but so far I haven't seen any evidence that, on average, the optical precincts have turned out to have an error rate any greater than the hand precincts. If that changes, I'll let you know.

Needless to say, none of this would have been a big problem in the first place if states routinely performed spot checks of ballots cast both by machine and by hand. Maybe somebody should ask the leading presidential candidates if they support a federal law to require proper audit trails for all voting machines and independent spot checks after every election. Democracy promotion starts at home, after all.