There’s a vote audit going on in Windham, NH
The town of Windham, NH is undergoing a voting audit. It involves a local contest that had been decided by 24 votes. But when officials performed a recount requested by the loser, they discovered not a slight change in votes but some large discrepancies (large in terms of the smallness of the town, that is). And strangely enough, all the corrections involved the Republicans gaining votes in the recount. And so a forensic audit is now going on to see why this may have occurred.
NH is somewhat unusual in its voting procedures. For one thing, NH has a small population. For another, the state uses all paper ballots although this year there were more mail-in ballots than usual. It also uses counting machines in which voters place the ballots themselves. Therefore there are always paper ballots that can be hand-counted and examined visually, if necessary.
The vote-counting machines used in Windham and about 85% of cities and towns in New Hampshire are one of the oldest models in circulation, with a memory chip that dates back to 1981, Hursti said.
“This device is predating the internet,” he said.
Later he added, “The technology is so old that the modern computer is unable to read it.”
While it’s outdated, Hursti said, the machine is harder to hack than more modern vote-counting machines because the paper ballots it counts provide backup.
This is the theory at the moment about what may have happened in Windham, and it could affect the whole state:
The work of closely examining each of Windham’s 10,000 ballots from the November 2020 election is expected to last three days, but auditors and volunteers at the secure audit facility in Pembroke could be inching closer to an explanation for the discrepancies.
“Something we strongly suspect at this juncture, based on various evidence, is that in some cases, fold lines are being interpreted by the scanners as valid votes,” said independent auditor Mark Lindeman.
Auditors said the scanners could be interpreting the fold lines as a vote when they go through a “vote target,” or a candidate’s name on the ballot. They said a lot of Windham’s ballots appear to have fold lines across the target of a Democratic state representative candidate.
“Wherever the fold happened to be was, I guess, most commonly through my name,” said the candidate, Kristi St. Laurent.
Auditors said that could explain why St. Laurent [who had requested the recount because of the closeness of the vote] lost 99 votes in the hand recount last year, while Republican candidates gained votes.
“Because if someone voted for all four Republican candidates and the ballot happened to have its fold line going through St. Laurent’s target, then that might be interpreted by the machines as an overvote, which would then subtract votes from each of those four Republican candidates,” said auditor Philip Stark. “Conversely, if there were not four votes already in that contest by the voter, a fold line through that target could have caused the machine to interpret it as a vote for St. Laurent.”
A discussion of the NH machines, in an article written before the election, can be found here. It’s really a very simple system and seemingly a trustworthy one – till now. It also has the advantage of going straight from voter to counter with no middleman involved:
The AccuVote optical reader has been part of Granite State elections since the early 1990s, when it was first accepted by the Secretary of State’s office.
It’s a 14-pound box that looks like an oversized laptop computer sitting on top of a collection bin. As each voter leaves the polling place, poll workers slip their ballot into the AccuVote slot and the machine bounces light off the paper. Sensors tally filled-in circles next to candidates’ names and then the ballot falls into the bin below the reader.
After polls close, the reader prints out the results, with all the paper ballots available for a recount.
Other technologies have come and gone over the years but AccuVote has remained, and today is still the state’s only legal ballot-counting technology…
The AccuVote readers have been involved in thousands of elections, giving polling officials experience in its operation, and in hundreds of recounts, giving experience in its reliability.
It’s also disconnected from the internet or other networks, making it very difficult to hack…
But old technology can be worrisome, too. The software for the AccuVote reader runs on WindowsXP, an operating system that hasn’t been supported by Microsoft since 2014, making it vulnerable to crashes. The machines themselves aren’t made anymore, so the provider has to buy old ones and cannibalize them for parts when repairs are needed…
“The more software that is contained, the more suspicious people become of their ability to properly count ballots,” Scanlan said. “We would probably have to come up with some kind of system to audit ballots after the fact.”
Regular audits after elections is a hot topic in New Hampshire. The Secretary of State’s office has long opposed them as an unnecessary expense but some advocates say they can help instill confidence in the election system. A bill before the House would allow voters in any AccuVote community to request a post-election audit, a request currently limited to when results are very close or somehow contested.
As I said, that was written before the 2020 election and all its woes.
Other states use the same system, but I haven’t been able to get a list of which ones. My guess is that they are small states such as New Hampshire.
In 2016 in New Hampshire, Republican Senator Kelley Ayotte was defeated for re-election to the US Senate by Maggie Hassan, who won narrowly by 1,017 votes. It’s not clear whether that year the ballot folds were placed in such a way that it would have affected that election (and I’m pretty sure that folds only affected mail-in ballots anyway, and I imagine that in 2016 there were fewer of those than in 2020). I certainly haven’t seen any discussion of the 2016 NH election of Hassan in light of what happened in Windham in 2020, nor of how many mail-in ballots were received that year. So it’s certainly possible there is no way such a problem would have affected that election, even with such a small margin. But I’d certainly like to know – because in 2020, the Senate was won so narrowly by the Democrats that an Ayotte win in 2016 would have given the Republicans the majority in the Senate right now.
I haven’t seen any discussion of whether the Windham audit involves any re-counting of presidential votes for 2020, but I doubt it. I wonder whether the fold went through any of the presidential candidates’ names; haven’t read anything about that, either. At any rate, in NH this year Biden won by 7 points and Shaheen (the other Democratic senator in NH) won by 15, so it’s unlikely this fold problem affected those races in that particular state – although who knows?
Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it? Not that we had much confidence left.
My small city likely uses the same system. It’s an OCR reader and the ballot is printed on a heavy, index card like, paper. It comes in a security sleeve which covers all but the top of the ballot where a ballot number is.
When done you go to the machine which has a slot at the top and a counter. A poll worker tears off the ballot number from the top and you slide the top of the ballot into the slot where the machine grabs it, counts the marks you made, indexes the counter, and deposits the ballot in a lock box at the bottom of the machine for safe keeping if a recount is done. You then hand the security sleeve to the poll worker for reuse.
I wrote about this at length on one of neo’s early posts on November 2020’s voting. Audit checks are needed at every step of the way. There should be a pre-check showing how your vote is about to be registered; sort of like when you check out in the grocery line. You see what your purchases and corresponding prices on the screen after the cashier scans your items. If something is wrong, you clear it up then. If it looks good to you then your card is scanned and the purchases become official.
Pretty sure that’s what we have in Fairbanks AK as well.
We use something similar in Wake County, NC (Raleigh), but it can’t be AccuVote per se, because we had new machines recently. Voters fill out a ballot printed on paper of consistency similar to a manila folder, and the voter feeds the ballot into the counting machine. Displays pop up if there appear to be “overvotes” for any race, and the voter can decide whether to ignore the problem or have the ballot spit back out to take to the ballot table for a replacement (the original is spoiled).
I don’t think folded ballots are ever processed.
This system allowed for a reliable recount, both machine and a select hand recount, of the race for Supreme Court Chief Justice, which was won by 400 votes out of 5 million cast.
According to Howie Carr, the WRKO talk show host, the 2016 election was swung to Maggie Hassan by the college students from MA who were bussed in and voted for her using same day registration, another abomination designed to corrupt the vote
Now let’s have some fun: Going back to the first election after these machines were put into use, how many times have the ballots featured a Democratic candidate’s name at the fold line? And what is the correlation to the resultant tally, over time?
Paul in Boston’s comment leads me to ask: just how many days, weeks, or months prior to an election (including any allowed early voting via physical or mailed in methods) should be the interval for registering to vote?
You move into a new locale, but perhaps you need a period of time to “know the candidates” and “know the issues”, etc. Is the end of September good enough? Middle of October or end of October?? Seems most places require at least two weeks or more, but I am not sure exactly why that period of time was specified. Clearly only a few days prior to the election is an invitation for fraudulent practice, but are there other reasons for a longer period?
This web site: https://stacker.com/stories/4484/voting-laws-every-state shows 19 states & DC allowed in person registration on voting day (11/3/20), and most of them, but not all, seem to be blue venues. CA is included, NY is not. The others mostly have in person registration between 10/5/20 and 10/20/20, with a few at 10/31/20. On-line registration (where available) and mail-in registration are usually still limited to some day in October, even when a state allows the 11/3/20 date for in person registration.
Blast from the past – because this post also mentions New Hampshire elections.
(picked it up after reading the Bowling Alone post) .
The whole thing is…interesting… and a new speculation to me, but I’ll only excerpt the relevant section.
https://ammo.com/articles/pete-buttigieg-mayor-pete-cia-asset-naval-intelligence-officer
They will let us keep playing with the gestures of “democracy” and “elections” and “voting” to no avail.
But it doesn’t seem likely that we are ever going to be able to vote ourselves out of this one.
This one won’t be fixed, if it ever is, by “nice” of any kind.
Interesting how the errors with ballots only seem to affect one party negatively.
Same day registration and bussing of voters from out of area seems standard. I remember some Chicago operative bragging about that:
Found it – another project Veritas sting:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-video-sting-democratic-operatives-james-okeefe-20161019-story.html