City clerk takes voting machines for a spin ahead of primary day

LACONIA — With the Presidential Primary election now two weeks away, Laconia City Clerk Cheryl Hebert spent Monday morning testing the voting machines that will count the votes cast in the First-in-the-Nation electoral contest.

The process of testing the seven machines for accuracy took place in the City Clerk’s Office and lasted about three hours. Six of the machines will be disbursed to the polling places on Feb. 11 — one in each ward. A seventh will remain in City Hall, ready to be pressed into service if one of the other machines breaks down.

Like most voting precincts in the state, Laconia uses optical scanning machines which read marked paper ballots to tally the results. Voters mark their choice by filling in an oval next to the name of the candidate of their choice. About 85 percent of the state’s voters cast their ballots using this system, according to New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner.

Gardner noted that the move to optical scanning voting machines began in the Lakes Region more than 30 years ago, and was spearheaded by then-Laconia City Clerk Ann Dearborn.

They were first used in the 1988 election, Gardner said. Today only 65 Granite State communities continue to use hand-counted paper ballots, he said.

With 33 candidates on this year’s Democratic Presidential Primary ballot and 17 on the Republican ballot, Hebert marked 50 ballots — each with a different candidate’s name selected — and then fed them into the machine. Other ballots in the test contained write-in votes, while others had either marks next to more than one candidate’s name, or none, in order to check the feature that is supposed to place those ballots in a separate bin for ballots that would need to be hand-checked by poll workers after voting closes.

All the ballots used in the test are marked with a handwritten letter “T” at the top so they cannot be mistakenly counted as actual ballots on Primary Election Day.

In another test for machine accuracy, the ballots are fed in using four different orientations — front-side up, top-first; front-side up, bottom-first; and both ways for back-side up.

Each machine is tested twice, once for each of the computer cards assigned to the machine. One of the cards is held as a backup should the machine malfunction. The second card is locked into the machine at the conclusion of the second test run, Hebert explained.

At the conclusion of each test the machine printed the vote tally to ensure the ballots were counted properly.

Once the test ballots have been run through and the tally is verified, the machine is sealed.

It’s a process that every voting precinct is legally required to perform on its machines. The law requires testing take place where it can be viewed by the public.

The test is one of many steps which city and town clerks do through in preparation for any election.

Clerks’ officers have been sending out absentee ballots. The number of absentee ballots requested is lower than in previous presidential primaries, according to Hebert, as well as Gilford Town Clerk Danielle LaFond and Belmont Town Clerk Cynthia DeRoy. But Meredith Town Clerk Kerri Parker said the requests were “on a par” with prior years.

None was willing to make a prediction about voter turnout based on the absentee ballot requests.

Gardner said he expected that more than 500,000 of the state’s approximately 980,000 registered voters would be voting in the primary.

He said trying to forecast the turnout was impossible so many days before the primary itself. He said events leading up to next Monday’s Iowa Caucus would influence some New Hampshire voters. In addition, with seven days separating the caucus and the primary “the candidates’ campaigns will be building to a great crescendo here” in a last-minute press to persuade voters.