Voting Technology and the 2008 New Hampshire Primary
Michael C. Herron, Walter R. Mebane, Jonathan N. Wand · The William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository (William & Mary) · 2008
Using a subset of New Hampshire wards that have similar demographic features and voting histories but differ in their vote-tabulating technologies, we find no significant relationship between a ward's use of vote-tabulating technology and the votes or vote shares received by most of the leading candidates who competed in the 2008 New Hampshire presidential primaries.Among Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson in the Democratic primary and among Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney in the Republican primary, we observe a significant difference only in the votes counted for Edwards, and that difference is small (a deficit of between 0.6% and 3.4% in the hand-counted votes)." With respect to Hillary Clinton's surprise victory in the Democratic primary and the differences across vote-tabulating technologies in Clinton's and others' votes, our results are consistent with these differences being due entirely to the fact that New Hampshire wards that use Accuvote optical scan machines have voters with different political preferences than wards that use hand-counted paper ballots.' See id. 4 N.H.REv.STAT.