Nader Takes New Hampshire (Well, Kinda)

So Ralph Nader had a press conference at 1 pm in DC to announce that they're going forward with a hand recount in New Hampshire. Here's the press release. The highlight:

Nader/Camejo has requested a hand recount of the vote in New Hampshire because of reports of anomalies favoring President Bush in towns that used the Diebold AccuVote optical scan machines. A hand recount will either rule out the possibility of machine error or show a discrepancy in the Diebold machine and the actual vote-either way voters need to know. To review the request for a hand recount in New Hampshire visit www.VoteNader.org. Similar inexplicable results have been found in other states, including Ohio. Nader has called on John Kerry to demand that every vote be counted accurately. His campaign has remained strangely silent on the matter.

New Hampshire is a very interesting, and shrewd, place for Nader to demand a recount.

Why shrewd? Because the election doesn't hang in the balance as to what happened in New Hampshire -- in that Kerry won that state. But it was also a state where the midday exit polls and final results varied enormously, even though there is not a large evangelical population in NH. Plus, its use of the Optical Scan machines, unlike the Touchscreen, means that there's a paper trail, but one that could have been then manipulated by the Diebold-manufactured optical-scan machines. Maybe. I'm just saying. (Mopping brow.) A hand recount can reveal any aberrations or anomalies... or worse. Smart play.