If the fix is in, it doesn’t matter whether Barack Obama really deserves to be the Democratic nominee, he’ll never get a fair chance to compete for the presidency. Debates about whether the Junior Senator from Illinois is black enough or whether whites will be willing to vote for an African-American are moot so long as the sanctity of the ballot box can’t be guaranteed.

 The problem is that the Diebold Corporation is at it again, and the voting machine company appears to be already in the process of quietly perpetrating the mother of all vote frauds. In case you forgot, Diebold is the manufacturer of the electronic tabulator which counted the majority of the votes in the last two U.S. presidential elections.

I first called for the United Nations to monitor polling places all across the country after Diebold’s wholesale disenfranchisement of blacks in Florida decided the controversial 2000 race. And I reiterated that demand in 2004 after irregularities in Ohio put Bush back in office for another four years.

Now, judging by what went down virtually unnoticed in New Hampshire on January 8th, we’re again in dire need of U.N. observers during the 2008 primary season, just to give the democratic process a chance to unfold untainted by fraud. For, while the punditocracy has been busy dubbing Hillary Clinton the Comeback Kid and attributing her surprise victory to women rallying to her support in the wake of her eyes welling up on camera, no one’s looking for a more plausible explanation than that overly-publicized Muskie moment.

 The cold hard truth is that on the night of the New Hampshire primary, all the scientifically-conducted exit polls had predicted an Obama two-digit win. Given the +/-4.5% margin of error, this means it wasn’t a question of whether Barack would win, only by how much. However, everybody forgot that Diebold would be counting the votes electronically in 81% of the state’s precincts, while the other 19% were being tallied by hand.

And wouldn’t you know, when the results were announced, there was a statistically-significant difference between the tallies based on a paper trail and those recorded by Diebold’s machines? As reported by a watchdog organization called CheckTheVotes.com (see below), Obama garnered 38% of the votes counted by hand, followed by Clinton with 34%, Edwards with 17% Richardson with 5% and Kucinich with almost 2%. By contrast, Diebold’s tabulations had Clinton finishing first with a whopping 40%, while every other candidate had lower percentages than in the hand-counted districts.  The computers had Obama dropping to 35%, Edwards to 16%, Richardson to 4% and Kucinich to 1%.  

Does it seem suspicious to you that all the candidates but Clinton did worse when the votes weren’t verified, especially in the wake of the precedent of the prior Diebold debacles? Unless an outcry is raised, and steps are taken immediately to monitor the electronic tallies in the upcoming primaries, it is readily apparent that the only Democratic machine Hillary will need to prevail is the one programmed by Diebold.

Lloyd Kam Williams is a film and book critic, and an attorney and a member of the NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court bars.

*   *   *   *   *

TOTAL VOTES FOR DEMOCRATS: 287,849

Compare All Machine vs Hand Counts

 Chart courtesy of Check the Votes

*   *   *   *   *

The Race and Gender Debate—Well, not only was I in New Hampshire, I was also in Illinois. I taught at the University of Chicago for years before coming to Princeton. So Barack Obama was my state senator. He was my US senator. So every time I hear people say he doesn’t have much experience, I find it extremely irritating, because it means that somehow representing me in my government meant very little experience. So I actually was there in Chicago and in Illinois when Senator Obama took those stands against the war, and I can tell you, it was not an easy thing to do. So I’m appreciative of having been represented by someone like him who had those kinds of positions.

I mean, what happened in New Hampshire, clearly Barack Obama brought in the percentage in the polls that he was expected to bring in. But a whole new group of voters showed up to vote for Hillary Clinton. It doesn’t look as though Barack Obama’s poll voters actually abandoned him. It looked as though they actually came and sincerely voted their interest, which I think is a great sign for the capacity of this campaign to move forward. But there was a whole new group of voters, mostly women of Hillary Clinton’s own generation, white women of Hillary Clinton’s own generation, who did show up at the polls and vote—cast a vote for Hillary Clinton. And that’s what put her over the top.

And I do believe that much of that had to do with this intersection of race and gender, the ways in which Hillary Clinton became discernible, understandable and recognizable to these voters in her moment of anxiety and stress, in a way that Barack Obama, as an African American man, remains alien to many white women. In other words, it’s just very difficult for them to see themselves in him. But again, 36% of that vote who claimed that they were going to vote for Barack did in fact show up and do so. So I think it’s good news for the Obama campaign, although it does continue to indicate the ways in which white women’s particular race and gender position can be of major benefit to them when running against an African American man. . . .

Yeah, I—in fact, I’ve regularly said that I don’t think that naked racism explains this. He could not have gotten the kind of support that he got in New Hampshire. Again, what I’m suggesting—and this goes again to this question of complexity—is that our understanding and expectation of who white women are and how we respond to their suffering is quite different historically than how we respond to the suffering, anxiety and stress of African American men and women. So the people who said they were going to vote for Barack Obama apparently voted for him, that 36% . But a whole new group felt motivated to come out and vote for Hillary Clinton, and that seems to be related to her particular sort of performance on the Monday before the election. And that does seem to me to be indicated in questions of race and gender, without saying that these people are naked racists.

I’m incredibly impressed by the voters of New Hampshire, who take very seriously the trust in which the rest of us as citizens put into them to make a decision, because so often we are disenfranchised from the process, because the early primary system allows just a few voters to make these critical choices. And over and over again, the people of New Hampshire were very serious in how they were trying to gather information and make decisions. I would not disparage them by claiming they are racist. I would, however, say they’re part of the American historical system that responds to white women suffering in very particular ways, and it cannot see African American suffering in the same ways.—Melissa Harris-Lacewell

*   *   *   *   *

posted 14 January 2008