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The Secretary of State for New Hampshire, William M. Gardner, has given the bad news to Albert Howard (Republican) and Dennis Kucinich (Democrat) regarding approximately how much it is going to cost them to recount their respective partys' presidential primaries votes that were held last week. Mr. Gardner says that it will cost about 24 cents to count each ballot that was cast. Democrats cast around 290,000 ballots and Republicans cast around 240,000 ballots.

So, that translates to $57,600 for Mr. Howard, who received a whopping 44 votes in the primary and $69,600 for Mr. Kucinich who got around 3,900 votes. Both have already paid out a $2,000 refundable deposit and as mentioned in the intro, have until 3 pm today to come up with the remainder.

If they actually do come up with the cash, Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan says that the recount will begin on Wednesday, January 16th. However, the recount could take "weeks" to complete and Mr. Scanlan is also saying that If the candidates want the count to begin in a particular voting precinct, his office would "attempt to honor" that request. The recount can also be stopped at any time by either candidate. Well, this begs the question, if they stop it, do they get any of their money back?

As of 10:00 p.m. last night (Monday, January 14th), Granny Warriors had raised over $40,000 for the Republican recount but were still looking for another $25,000. How they came up with a $65,000 cost is still a bit confusing to me but perhaps addition is just not a strong point for them.

For a really interesting look at why people are getting all hot and bothered over the result in New Hampshire, I'd suggest you go and take a look at CheckTheVotes.com, a website set up by a (you guessed it) Ron Paul supporter. There is a chart provided that shows a breakdown of the hand counted and machine counted votes. The overall final vote gave 38.99% to Clinton versus 36.39% for Obama. To make a long story short, the hand counted votes give Senator Obama 39.65% of the vote and Senator Clinton 33.77% of the vote. FYI, the pre-election polls projected that Obama would win the New Hampshire Democratic primary election with 38.8 percent of the vote while 30 percent would go to Clinton.