Inside, New Hampshire's top election officials presided over a presentation of three new devices being considered for tallying votes in 2024 elections.
Town officials, legislators, members of the state's Ballot Law Commission and the public got a chance to try the machines made by Dominion Voting Systems, Election Systems & Software and VotingWorks.
N.H. Secretary of State David Scanlan said a couple dozen people had sent him letters in recent days, questioning the accuracy of voting machines and the wisdom of using them. Most New Hampshire votes are counted by machine, but some small towns still tally votes by hand.
One way to instill public confidence in elections is through increased transparency, which was one of the goals of Wednesday's demonstration, Scanlan said.
People lined up to cast pretend ballots with the names of politicians from the past such as Josiah Bartlett, John Langdon and Daniel Webster.
The machines, which cost $6,000 to $7,000, have much in common with the aging AccuVote devices that are now used throughout New Hampshire.
Ultimately, the state Ballot Law Commission will authorize one or two new brands of machines for use in future elections.
The new devices, have some of the features of the old ones, which have been in use for about three decades. Voters will fill out ballots by hand and feed them into the devices, which will tabulate the vote and produce a hard copy of the results after the polls close.
Also unchanged is the fact that the new devices are stand-alone units not connected to the Internet.
But unlike the current machines, the new ones retain a digital image of the ballot, which can be useful in audits of election results.
Scanlan said the AccuVote machines have been very reliable, but are nearing the end of their useful life. They haven't been manufactured since 2007, parts are no longer made and the machines have become harder to maintain.
The Dominion Voting Systems device was demonstrated by Brenda L'Italien, director of business development at LHS Associates, the Salem company that is the exclusive dealer for Dominion products in New England.
L'Italien said hand counting of votes would likely cause more errors than a machine count.
"You're asking people at the end of a 12- or 15-hour day to go through ballots and do a hand tally — people are human and they get tired, so I think for the most part that's when errors happen," she said.
Dominion is the Colorado company that sued Fox News over phony claims that its equipment switched votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Fox News agreed in April to pay nearly $800 million to Dominion to avert a trial.
L'Italien said all the attention and scrutiny on Dominion voting machines is a positive.
"If anything, it has allowed us to be able to let people know that this machine has actually been audited and vetted more than any machine in the marketplace," she said.
Jessica Myers is the director of certification and voter access for San Francisco-based VotingWorks.
She explained that the machine she was demonstrating, like the others being considered, will not accept a ballot in which the voter has selected too many candidates. In such cases, an election official will help the voter, who would then have the opportunity to amend the ballot to make their choice clear.
Myers said her company, unlike the others whose machines are being considered, uses open-source software that is available for public review.
"We do our best to maintain transparency," she said. "Our code is available. Our documentation is available."
Tucker Omel, senior sales engineer for Omaha, Neb.-based Election Systems & Software was demonstrating the company's device. It, like the other machines, accepts ballots that have undervotes, instances where voters did not fill out all races.
The machine, and the others, produce a tape of paper at the end of the night with vote totals for the election moderator.
"Whatever their local procedure is, they don't have to change a thing," he said.
A bill to require all votes in New Hampshire to be counted by hand did not advance this year in the N.H. Legislature. The protesters outside the Legislative Office Building favored a different outcome.
Brenda Towne, of East Wakefield, was one of the protesters.
She contended that voting machines can be hacked.
"Do we think any voting machine in New Hampshire is safe?" she asked. "I don't care what you're going to tell me as far as security goes. The average town clerk, who is now responsible along with the selectmen for managing these machines, has no security experience."
Another protester, Al Brandano, of Kensington, said that many countries count votes by hand and that it should be done in the U.S. as well. He said this could bring people from competing political parties together.
"What a great way for the republic to come together," he said. "If you are a Democrat, Republican, independent, imagine if we all sit down at a table and we bring people together — that's what hand counting will do."
© 2023 The Keene Sentinel (Keene, N.H.), Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
