It's a golden rule of public relations sometimes attributed to P.T. Barnum: Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.

The rule fits political circuses, too. Campaigns, like Barnum, could be tempted to inflate the size of events. After enough politicos warned us that bamboozling was afoot, we've set out to do our own head counts.

Last Saturday, a Monitor reporter counted 150 heads at a White Park event for Sen. John Edwards. Edwards's people pounced, saying they had signed in three times that number.

The next day, our reporter received two phone messages from Edwards endorser Rob Werner and an e-mail from Edwards spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield.

"I was frustrated to see an inaccurate crowd number in your story this morning," Bedingfield wrote. "There were 300 chairs set out and 450 folks signed in. . . . Your story made our event seem much smaller than it was."

The reporter told Bedingfield that she would run a crowd-count correction if the campaign showed us the sign-in sheet. She has not replied.

We happened to be at Portsmouth's Prescott Park during another Edwards rally last Sunday. It was a big crowd, enough to fill the chairs and then some. We thought it was a few hundred people. We were surprised to read press accounts that said 1,000.

So we double-checked with the Portsmouth Police Department, who were on hand at the rally. Deputy Chief Len DiSesa put it bluntly.

"They estimated around 1,000. We estimated around 300 to 400," he said. "Maybe they were counting shadows."

Bedingfield said the campaign had actually signed in more than 1,000 people - and that's a lowball, she said, because some people refuse to sign in. "The numbers that we have are usually even lower than the actual number," she said.

We can attest that the Edwards campaign was very assertive with the sign-in sheets: 90 minutes before the candidate rolled in, they were on the sidewalk outside the park as well as at a couple of tables inside the park gathering signatures. Walking into the park an hour before the rally was supposed to begin, we were chased down by staffers at two tables. So maybe, just maybe, passers-by put down their names without attending.

Edwards's campaign isn't the only one whose counts have struck us - and other reporters - as high.

When Hillary Clinton toured the state with her husband, Bill Clinton, in July, the campaign said a total of about 7,000 people were drawn to events in Keene, Nashua and Manchester.

Using Monitor and Associated Press estimates, the total for the day's three events was closer to 4,000. The AP pegged the Manchester crowd at 2,000, and we counted closer to 1,000 at the Keene and Nashua events, figures that were similar to the AP's. (The Clinton campaign says sign-in sheets show 4,000 people in Manchester.)

This may surprise you, but reporters aren't all-knowing. When Barack Obama had a town hall meeting Conway's Kennett High School over Memorial Day weekend, a line snaked a few hundred feet out the door to the parking lot. How do you count that? We reported the event as drawing 1,500; the the AP called it 1,200; the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette went with "thousands of people."

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