The Diebold Effect

Following up on some links provided in the comments by Kurt L., I looked at some oddities in the New Hampshire vote count. All the NH ballots are paper ballots, but about 80% are counted by Diebold optical scanners, while the rest are counted by hand. Now here is the oddity: percentagewise, obama does much better on the hand counted ballots and Hillary does much better on the machine counted ballots. The percentage discrepancies for other candidates are all smaller. Similarly, on the Republican side, Romney does much better on the machine counted ballots, while Huckabee, McCain, and Paul all do better on the hand counted ballots.

Is it just coincidence that the two machine candidates, Hillary and Mitt, got a little boost from the machine counters? The referenced links have detailed data by candidate, town, and counting method.

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