By and large, the New Hampshire recount is playing out as expected it would. Numerous little problems have been brought to light and they should be fixed. But there has been no major swing from one candidate to another. Hillary Clinton won in New Hampshire not because of fraud, but because she has spent giant scads of money (and time) there over the last year. Not that shocking. The polls before New Hampshire showed Obama leading due to a considerable afterglow from Iowa, but afterglows fade.

But I do have one question for New Hampshire's Secretary of State: What the heck happened in Manchester's fifth ward?

We only have numbers for the democratic side of things so far, but it looks a bit weird. Many precincts have slightly different numbers between the original count and the recount and some of that is to be expected. But Manchester's fifth ward shows an 11% overcount (in the original tally) across the board.

The original numbers show 1466 votes in the democratic primary. The recount number is only 1312 votes. The difference is spread nicely across the candidates. Clinton dropped from 683 to 619, Obama from 404 to 365, Edwards 255 to 217. Heck, even Richardson dropped from 46 to 39 and Kucinich from 23 to 20.

So, we really need to ask one of two questions, but we don't know which. If the original count is to be believed, how have 11% of the votes disappeared? If the recount is to be believed, where did the 154 phantom votes come from in the first place?