The 2008 elections may not have been as animated as the 2016 ones, but they did have their fair share of scandals, one example being the Granny Warriors’ campaign. The fact that the small town of Sutton, New Hampshire did not grant the other candidate, Ron Paul, any votes due to human error, led to a ChipIn campaign backed by Republican candidate Albert Howard and the “Granny Warriors” Ron Paul support group.
The voter fraud in Sutton came to light after entire families claimed to have voted for Ron Paul in that city, despite the candidate being given 0 votes. This led to the most vocal and dedicated group of Ron Paul supporters, the “Granny Warriors”, creating a ChipIn crowdfunding campaign, with the money intended to go towards a primary vote recount.
According to certain Ron Paul forums, the Granny Warriors were so dedicated to meet their goal that they were travelling throughout the country in an RV in order to ask people for donations.
The defunct Granny Warriors Recount site had the following message displayed:
“With all the strange events going on in the primary and with solid statements of actual fraud in NH everyone is calling for a recount which should be take care of by the Campaign staff but that isn’t going to happen it seems.
Therefore… we the Grassroots will fund our own recount for Dr. Paul.
Every cent will be put toward the recounting and we will just see if we can stir up enough attention to really get a good count now. Perhaps it will also give notice to other states not to mess with the counts.
Lets get this done before it is too late and facts and figures can be altered.”
This crowdfunding campaign came after Ron Paul had already raised 6 million dollars in 24 hours for his campaign, using online donations, marking the most successful online crowdfunding campaign at the time.
The monetary goal of the Granny Warriors Recount campaign was to get 65000 dollars, promising that every single cent would go into making sure that a primary vote recount would take place.
However, as ambitious as the campaign was, it did not have a happy ending. Ron Paul supporters managed to pool up over 55000 dollars, being only 10000 dollars short of their goal with one day remaining. To everyone’s surprise, that’s where the donations stopped abruptly, not one additional dollar coming. The reason for the sudden freeze? PayPal had mysteriously frozen the account, possibly because of the sudden influx of money coming into it.
Unfortunately for the Granny Warriors, the issue was not resolved on time, and the crowdfunding campaign ended unsuccessfully, therefore meaning that no primary recount took place.