Those who oppose this change to the way election results are counted have called it a ruse to undermine voter confidence in the election system by solving a problem that doesn’t exist.
Greenland will hold a special town election Saturday, Dec. 18, on the citizen petition filed by Douglas Wilson and 51 registered voters calling on the town to revert back to the hand counting of all paper ballot votes. The petition in Greenland required only 50 signatures to call the special vote because the town’s population is less than 10,000 (it’s 4,067, according to 2020 Census).
“I believe there is merit to consider banning the machines we use solely in the interest of caution,” Wilson explained at the town’s Nov. 13 deliberative session on why he filed the petition. “I have full confidence in the town of Greenland and the poll watchers ... When it comes to the machines, I don’t know.”
The vote on the petition will take place from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Greenland Central School.
Similar attempts to ban the voting machines are under way in Hampton and Kensington. There is also a statewide bill to do away with voting machines filed by state Rep. Mark Alliegro, R-Campton.
Republican Gov. Chris Sununu said in response to recent petitions that the elections in New Hampshire last year were “safe, secure, and reliable.”
“Over 800,000 votes were cast in New Hampshire last November,” he said in a prepared statement provided to Seacoastonline. “There were 16 recounts, and all verified the winners. New Hampshire’s election process continues to be a model for the rest of the country.”
NH ELECTION OFFICIAL CALLS MACHINES ‘STRONG WORKHORSES’
David Scanlan, New Hampshire’s deputy secretary of state, said it is left up to the cities and towns whether they want to use voting machines.
He said more than half of the cities and towns do and use AccuVote-OS PC (Optical Scan Precinct Count) machines, which are the only vote counting machines currently allowed in the state.
Scanlan said in the more than 30 years the machines have been in use, there have been no major issues with their reliability, calling them “strong workhorses.”
“As long as the voter properly marks the oval on the ballot, the machine will accurately read them,” Scanlan said. “Where there have been issues in the past with large discrepancies, it’s usually the result of human error.”
And if there is ever a question, he said, that is why the state requires paper ballots. Under state law, the ballots are hand-counted when there is a recount.
“So we will always have that as backup,” he said.
He said the AccuVote machines are completely disconnected from the Internet. In 2010, the state required all modems in the machines to be disconnected and all ports permanently disabled and sealed.
“The only cord that comes out of it, that is of any use, is the power cord,” Scanlan said.
While the state has confidence in the AccuVote machines, the state Ballot Law Commission is currently looking at approving two new machines, one manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems and another by Election Systems & Software.
Scanlan said the main reason new machines are being considered is AccuVote machines are no longer being manufactured.
“They’re aging and they are not making parts for them anymore,” Scanlan said.
The movement to ban the machines is being promoted by so-called “non-partisan” political groups such as the Marigold Coffee Club as part of its “Remove the Machines” campaign and members of the NH Voter Integrity Group, who are behind a statewide effort to convince legislators to order a full forensic audit of the 2020 election.
Doubt in the elections has been fueled by former President Donald Trump, who maintains without evidence a claim there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, including in New Hampshire, and conspiracy theories that voting machines are susceptible to hacks.
State Rep. Joan Hamblet, a Democrat who represents Greenland, Newington, North Hampton and Portsmouth Ward 3, said she believes the recent petitions are nothing more than an attempt to cast doubt on elections.
As the moderator for Portsmouth Ward 3, she has no concerns with the reliability of the machines.
“The AccuVote machines are accurate and reliable,” she said. “We can follow up on the voting with paper ballots. That’s our security.
“There is a whole myth about fraud. It’s a myth, there is no fraud in New Hampshire elections.”
In Hampton, those behind the petition to ban the voting machines point to what occurred in the Nov. 3, 2020, election in Windham, New Hampshire, as a reason to return to hand-counting.
A hand-counted recount of an eight-person race for four state representative seats showed winning Republican candidates getting hundreds more votes than were originally counted by the machine.
“That was a human factor that came into play,” said Scanlan on the discrepancy.
A state-approved audit on Windham’s ballot-counting machines and hand tabulations released in July 2021 revealed the cause of the discrepancy was not the AccuVote machine but a separate letter-folding device used to send out absentee ballots.
The folding device, the auditors Harri Hursti, Mark Lindeman and Philip Stark wrote, folded the ballots in the wrong place. Instead of folding the ballots on the score lines between vote targets as intended, it folded through vote bubbles in the state representative contest causing miscalculations when they were fed into the voting machines.
Linda McGrath, of Hampton, said if the ballots were hand-counted in the first place there wouldn't have been an issue.
“The machines are unreliable,” she said in October.
In Greenland, the only person to speak in favor of banning the machines at the town’s deliberative session was the petitioner Douglas Wilson.
Wilson expressed concern with the “chain of custody” of the machines and that cities and towns rely on an outside third party, LHS Associates of Salem, to maintain and service them.
LHS Associates is responsible for programming the memory cards for each machine for each election (including contests, candidates, voting rules and vote target locations) and provides the paper ballots.
“They are a third-party provider and they’re the guardians of our sovereignty in this town,” he said at the meeting. “I don’t know who they are. I don’t know a lot about them.”
LHS Associates President and CEO Jeffrey Silvestro addressed a number of concerns residents had regarding their safety protocols during a public hearing in Windham in March 2021.
“We have more than 25 years of supporting elections, and we have done so accurately and securely, and there are hundreds and hundreds of recounts. There are audits and all kinds of systems in place to prove the accuracy of these elections,” said Silvestro.
He said their building in Salem is locked down 24/7 and everything is monitored with security cameras. All employees, he said, undergo a CORI, or criminal background check, as well as annual training in cybersecurity.
“Every single programing terminal [for the memory cards] is disconnected from the Internet,” he said. “Nothing is connected to any network, their stand-alone systems. Our systems are also [subjected] to a post-election audit in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, and we push for those random audits because we feel it’s important to the integrity of the system.”
The reason why there is no post-election audit in New Hampshire is because there is no legislation directing one to occur. A bill is currently being considered that would allow voters in any AccuVote community to request a post-election audit.
Greenland Town Moderator Dean Bouffard said towns and cities that use voter machines follow strict procedures established by the secretary of state’s office and state law to ensure voter confidence in the results.
He said all the machines Greenland uses are locked in a safe at Town Hall when not in use.
The only thing removed from the machines is the memory card, which is sent to LHS Associates to be reprogrammed prior to the election.
“That’s the only thing that leaves town hall,” he said. “ ”The machine itself is in the town’s vault all the time. If it needs service, an LHS mechanic will come to the town hall and perform the work there [in front of a representative from the town clerk’s office].”
The town clerk, he said, keeps a log detailing every time the machine receives service or if one of the numbered seals on the machine is removed and replaced. Similar logs are kept for the memory cards.
Prior to each election, Bouffard said, Greenland like other cities and towns tests the machines in a session open to the public. The reprogrammed memory card is inserted and the machines are tested to ensure they are counting properly.
“We never had anyone attend the ballot tests until this year,” he said. “Once we insert a program card into the machine there is a strict command of custody from the initial ballot testing that we do right up to the end of the election,” Bouffard said.
Greenland Selectman Chairman Steven Smith said the board decided not to take a position on the article.
“My personal take is that it’s not a worthwhile endeavor to even consider the petition,” said Smith, who estimates the special town election is costing taxpayers between $8,000 and $10,000.
He called the issue a “polarizing” topic that has to do more with the national political sphere than what is happening in Greenland.
“We never had any issues with the machines,” Smith said.
Numerous letters to the editor from Greenland residents in support of keeping voting machines have been sent by residents of the town to Seacoastonline and the Portsmouth Herald.
Bouffard said in his time as moderator there has only been one hand recount and it “basically confirmed the results of the machine.”
He said if the town decided to revert back to hand-counting it would “add hours to the process” and election results would be delayed.
“In order to hand-count all the ballots, we would need a lot more people than we currently need,” Bouffard said.
Bouffard expects a good showing at the polls, noting there were over 100 in attendance at the deliberative session.
At the session, a resident asked if there was evidence or data to suggest the machines were malfunctioning, to which the reply was no.
“So why are we here?” he said to a round of applause.
©2021 Portsmouth Herald, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
