He submitted just such a bill last session of Congress for hand-counting paper ballots in Presidential elections.
Rep. Kucinich announced HR 6200 at the
9/06 “We Count” Conference in Cleveland
http://www.petitiononline.com/hndcount/
H.R. 6200, "The Paper Ballot Act of 2006"
Well, what about other elections? Don't they matter? Why not paper, and only paper ballots with handcounts everywhere?
That would never pass muster. Hand-counting is historically prone to human error. Also, hand-counting is susceptible to tampering and falsification of reports.
After the New Hampshire Primary, Kucinich calls for a recount of paper ballots, but paper ballots which were tabulated by optical scan.
Like nobody made any errors counting the paper ballots in those precincts which reportedly "hand-count" the ballots.
Kucinich seeks NH Dem vote recount
Kucinich alluded to online reports alleging disparities around the state between hand-counted ballots, which tended to favor Sen. Barack Obama, and machine-counted ones that tended to favor Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. He also noted the difference between pre-election polls, which indicated Obama would win, and Clinton's triumph by a 39 percent to 37 percent margin.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080111/ap_po/kucinich_nh_recount_3
Kucinich Calls for New Hampshire Recount
Associated Press
Friday, January 11, 2008; Page A08
CONCORD, N.H., Jan. 10 -- Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio), who captured less than 2 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, called Thursday for a recount to ensure that all ballots in the Democratic contest were counted.
Kucinich cited "serious and credible reports, allegations and rumors" about the integrity of Tuesday's results. He said he wants assurance that "100 percent of the voters had 100 percent of their votes counted," and he alluded to online reports alleging disparities around the state between hand-counted ballots, which tended to favor Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), and machine-counted ones, which tended to favor Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.).
Kucinich is entitled to a statewide recount, although he will have to pay for it, Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan said. Scanlan said he has "every confidence" the results are accurate.
Scanlan said his office received several phone calls questioning the results, mostly from outside the state. "I think people from out of state don't completely understand how our process works, and they compare it to the system that might exist in Florida or Ohio, where they have had serious problems," he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/10/AR2008011004311.html
http://www.inform.com/Dennis+Kucinich
Related
Alternet site
Experts Question Clinton's New Hampshire Primary Win
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted January 11, 2008.
As activists crunch vote totals seeking signs of fraud, Dennis Kucinich’s campaign requests a recount. Tools
Election integrity activists parsing the precinct-level results from New Hampshire's Democratic Primary say their early analyses have found anomalies suggesting vote totals may have been altered to deliver a Hillary Clinton victory.
The activists, led by the Election Defense Alliance, a nonprofit formed after the 2004 election when exit polls also predicted a victory by a candidate other then the eventual winner, point to a series of discrepancies when comparing the official results from hand-counted and machine-counted paper ballots. Computer scanners, much like a standardized test, counted 80 percent of the ballots.
They begin by noting that Barack Obama won in hand-counted precincts, which tend to be more rural with fewer voters. In contrast, Clinton won in the precincts where computers tallied results, which are larger towns, cities and Boston suburbs. That discrepancy suggested that had the computer-counted ballots been tallied by hand, Clinton might not have won a victory defying pre-election polls, the activists said.
Anthony Stevens, New Hampshire's assistant secretary of state, said on Thursday that the hand count-computer count discrepancy was not unusual. He noted that in 2004 Democrat Howard Dean largely carried the hand-count precincts while John Kerry won most of the computer-count locales.
http://www.alternet.org/story/73551/
Experts skeptical of N.H. ballot-count conspiracy theory
By Beverley Wang
Associated Press Writer / January 11, 2008
CONCORD, N.H.—Hillary Rodham Clinton did better in New Hampshire precincts where presidential primary ballots were counted by machine and Barack Obama did better where ballots were counted by hand.
more stories like thisThose results have prompted speculation, spread on blogs, of ballot-machine tampering in Tuesday's primary and led presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich -- who got less than 2 percent of the vote in Tuesday's Democratic primary -- to ask for a re-count.
Kucinich said he doesn't expect to benefit personally, but the integrity of the election will be questioned until the discrepancy is explained. Meanwhile election analysts say the pattern goes back at least two primaries and can be attributed to many factors, but fraud is not one of them.
An analysis by The Associated Press' Election Research and Quality Control service found that Clinton led Obama by about 6 percentage points in machine-counted towns, where she earned 53 percent of the vote and Obama earned 47 percent. Obama led Clinton by about 8 percentage points in hand-counted towns, where he earned 54 percent of the vote and Clinton earned 46 percent.
Joe Lenski, executive vice president of Edison Media Research, one of two firms that conduct election exit polling for The AP and television networks, said those numbers fit the pattern.
"Since Florida 2000 there've been all sorts of theories out there, about Florida in 2000 and of course about Ohio in 2004. And I think certain people who are dissatisfied with the results are going to jump to this conclusion in any race that they're not satisfied with," Lenski said Friday. "And they're looking for one piece of evidence that's going to be convincing."
"If you do a little more statistical digging, you find out that this isn't proving what they think it's proving. It's a pattern that's been around for years," he said.
In 2008, 2004 and 2000, towns and cities using ballot-counting machines skewed toward Democratic primary winners Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore, while those where ballots are hand-counted went to second-place finishers Obama, Howard Dean and Bill Bradley.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/new_hampshire/articles/2008/01/11/experts_skeptical_of_nh_ballot_count_conspiracy_theory/
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