Votes cast in New Hampshire’s Democratic and Republican presidential primaries will undergo a hand recount, after two candidates who garnered little support here questioned the results. By law, the recounts will start Wednesday. This process will most likely take a few weeks according to Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan.
The Democratic recount was requested by Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich. In a letter to Secretary of State Bill Gardner, Kucinich cited “unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots” and pointed to the divergence between opinion polls leading up to the primary – which showed Barack Obama ahead by a wide margin – and the final outcome. Hillary Clinton narrowly won the Democratic contest.
On the Republican side, a presidential candidate named Albert Howard joined forces with supporters of Rep. Ron Paul yesterday to request a full recount of the Republican ballots from Tuesday’s primary.
Key points to remember
- The town of Sutton reported zero, but had 31 votes; the town of Greenville reported zero, but had 25 votes. The two towns had misreported results affecting exactly the same candidate in exactly the same way.
- Results in many locations arrived up to four hours late on Election Night, surprisingly, from machine-counted locations, not hand count locations
- Ken Hajjar, a key employee of a sole source private entity, LHS Associates, has a criminal record for narcotics trafficking. The state of New Hampshire knew of this conviction but approved the contractor anyway. According to a complaint filed with the New Hampshire Attorney General, Hajjar had called the Dan Pierce radio show in 1999 and threatened to rig an election. This entity had control over coding for every memory card in New Hampshire. They also service the machines, maintain the machines and handle repairs, replacements and troubleshooting on Election Day.
Stay tuned to AmericaWideOpen for information as it becomes available.
