Americans that get all their news from mainstream media may not even realize that there was also a Democratic primary held on the same day as the Republican primary in New Hampshire on January 10, 2012.
There were actually 14 candidates on the Democratic primary ballot including Barack Obama. It should be noted that there was also significant support for several write-in candidates.
In the AP/Huffington Post report, readers will see that Barack Obama had a clear victory but there was no mention of who came in second or third. They also reported on the Republican side that Mitt Romney came in first and Ron Paul took second place. There is a link to the New Hampshire Secretary of State's website which I was unable to bring up at the time of this writing after several attempts to do so.
On the CNN Election Center page, the New Hampshire primary results are listed with the full list of results for the Republican race and then along side it the Democratic primary results only showing results for the winner, Barack Obama. Under Obama, we find just a total write-in count of 5,908 votes. No mention from that source either on who came in second and third place.
On the Boston Globe we find a page titled, "Primaries/New Hampshire Democratic results" with a breakdown of votes listed for each city/town. Here again, we find the same problem though. Even on this complete city/town list of votes, we find there are only 3 categories: Obama, Other and Write-ins. The mysterious phenomenon continues.
While normally it is best to use the Secretary of State's website to get the complete and official picture but since I was not able to access it from the link provided in the first story above, I was forced to search for other sources that are known to usually be reliable.
In this scavenger hunt, I will admit that I already knew the outcome of the missing results but wanted to find a record of it somewhere. Finally decided to consult the trusty and true "The Green Papers" which has been a good source for election-related information for many years. Ahhh.......Bingo! The full results are finally found. Note that write-in votes would most likely have to be hand-counted and therefore not at the mercy of electronic calculations that can easily be programmed to manipulate the results. Here are the top 4 finishers, 3 of them were achieved through write-in.
Barack Obama 49,080
Ron Paul 2,289
Mitt Romney 1,814
Jon Huntsman 1,238
This article now becomes the unsung headline of the New Hampshire primaries. Congressman Ron Paul ends up with a 2fer on the night with a 2nd place finish in New Hampshire in both the Democratic primary and the Republican primary.
To my regular readers that know I do not condone the use of electronic machines counting our votes in secret, please note that it is interesting that in this Democratic primary where the top Republican candidates' votes were most likely hand-counted that Ron Paul actually beat Mitt Romney in New Hampshire among Democrats. That tends to show a small validation that the current polling data suggesting that Ron Paul is a stronger candidate when it comes to pulling in Democrats' votes. It also lends some credibility to the head-to-head polls matching Obama to Paul that have been largely unreported for months showing that Ron Paul either does the best of all the Republicans against Obama or at the least has been a statistical tie with the Obama/Romney contest.
This story is a perfect example of why we all must be more vigilant in demanding that news organizations report all the news and do it in a fair manner. It is also critical that we work together across our nation to insist that if election results are being counted and/or centrally tabulated outside of public view which is the case across our nation, that this serious issue needs to be rectified immediately. To accept anything other than hand-counting of all our votes in public view at the precinct level is utterly ignorant and truly un-American. To have major news organizations not even report the full results of such an important primary election is just plain insanity on steroids.
A quote that has been widely attributed to Josef Stalin seems sadly appropriate given the current state of our election systems. "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
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