Among the wickedest recent examples of possible computerized vote fraud, of the sort that has disillusioned millions of Americans, is the 1988 New Hampshire primary that saved George Bush from getting knocked out of the race to the White House. – James M. Collier, Kenneth F. Collier

 ‘Comeback’ what? --

The authors of the little book Votescam, the Collier brothers, discussed the 1988 Republican New Hampshire primary at some length. The upset by George H. W. Bush in New Hampshire, confounding every poll before the tallies, was pivotal in Bush’s winning the 1988 election and becoming president:

 “The Bush campaign of 1988, as historians have since recollected it, was filled with CIA-type disinformation operations and deceptions of the sort that America used in Viet Nam, Chile and the Soviet Union. Since George Bush was one of the most admired CIA directors in the history of the organization, this was not so surprising.

            Yet George Bush . . . had suffered a terrible political wound when Dole won big by a show of hands in an unriggable Iowa caucus. Bush came to New Hampshire with all the earmarks of a loser whom the press had come to identify as a ‘wimp.’

            Political observers were downbeat in their observations of Bush’s chances in the face of Dole’s Iowa momentum. Virtually every television and newspaper poll had Bush losing by up to eight points just hours before the balloting.

             . . . When election day was over the following headline appeared in the Washington Post: “NEW HAMPSHIRE CONFOUNDED MOST POLLSTERS; Voters Were a Step Ahead of Tracking Measurements.”

 Here is the lead of WP reporter Lloyd Grove’s article after the primary:

 “For Vice President Bush and his supporters, Tuesday’s 9-percentage-point victory over Sen. Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) in New Hampshire was a delightful surprise; for Andrew Kohut, it was a horror story.

            Kohut is president of the Gallup poll, whose final New Hampshire survey was wrong by 17 points: it had put Dole ahead by 8; Bush won by 9. “I was dismayed,” Kohut acknowledged yesterday.

            This New Hampshire primary was perhaps the most polled primary election in American history, and in the end, the Republican voters in the state confounded the predictions of nearly every published survey of voter opinion.”

 The Collier brother authors go on,

“There are those who believe that such a wild reversal of form would have been subject to an immediate inquiry by the stewards if it had happened in the Kentucky Derby . . .

            Yet in New Hampshire, . . . There was no rechecking of the computerized voting machines, no inquiry into the path of the vote from the voting machines to the central tallying place, no public scrutiny of the mechanisms . . .

            Nothing was said in the press about the secretly programmed computer chips inside the “Shouptronic” Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines in Manchester, the state’s largest city.”

    
It would be premature to jump to conclusions about the 2008 New Hampshire primary. As Bill Schneider pointed out on CNN, the polls do not all make the same mistake, so something must have happened. Whatever happened, it benefited the candidacy of Hillary Clinton at the expense of every other Democrat. All the others on the Democratic side, even those in single digits, received less percentage in the final vote tally than had been predicted by polls going in.

One valid point can be made, however. The only good way to check and to confirm the published vote tallies, short of a recount, is exit polls. Exit polls are by any measure the most accurate form of polling.

For what it is worth, Fox News exit polls on primary day put Obama ahead among independents, along with John McCain.

The NPR piece on exit polls, the LATimes, and CNN, give a breakdown by candidate attributes etc but do not provide numbers on win-loss from exit polling.

The Huffington Post piece on exit polls in New Hampshire put Clinton’s favorability rating at 73 percent, in the exit polling, and Obama’s favorability rating at 84 percent.

MarcAmbinder on the exit polls includes this item:

“STUNNER: 47% say Obama is most likely to beat Republicans, compared to 33% for Clinton.”

 
If the Democrats want to survive the 2008 election, they need to move fast for transparency, accuracy and verifiability in the vote-counting process. And they need to start with New Hampshire, by pushing for public release of all exit polls.

 
They need to do that for the rest of us.