COLUMBIA — A stray pen mark on the handwritten election night returns sent to the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office is the apparent culprit behind a misreporting of election results in the U.S. Senate race in this small northern town.
Secretary of State David Scanlan’s office recorded that Columbia — a town of 790 residents — tallied 1,106 votes for U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan and 193 for Republican rival, Donald Bolduc.
Columbia Town Clerk Marcia Parkhurst told the Sun the total vote count for Hassan was actually 106, adding she reported the total vote to the state. “I don’t really understand how this could have happened because it said on the sheet we only had 309 ballots cast,” she said.
Parkhurst said the mistake was simply “a slip of the pen” made at the end of a long day of overseeing the voting in town. “It was an error. It was 106 for Maggie Hassan. The (results) I sent to the Secretary of State had another little mark that the Secretary of State took as a ‘1’.”
The Secretary of State’s office sent out a corrected total on Monday.
While the new tally does not change the Senate race’s outcome — Hassan still won — the incident was also the catalyst for a bit of conservative haymaking around the idea of election fraud that made news as far away as Boston over the weekend.
In addition to the votes for Hassan and Bolduc, Parkhurst said, there were four votes for Libertarian Jeremy Kauffman and six undervotes (the elections term for when no candidate was chosen).
Hassan’s adjusted vote total for Coos County was 6,059 while Bolduc received a total of 6,491 votes, meaning he also was the top vote-getter in Coos County. Hassan remains the winner of the race, with 332,193 votes statewide to Bolduc’s 275,928.
The mistake came to light Sunday in a post on Granite Grok, a conservative-Libertarian website and podcast. The post, written by managing editor Stephen MacDonald, is titled “How Did Maggie Hassan Get 1100 Votes in NH Town With a Population Under 700?” and can be found at tinyurl.com/4y2vs3dj.
Parkhurst spent her day Monday reassuring voters and reporters on the phone and in emails that there was no conspiracy to inflate the votes for Hassan.
“I’ve been doing this for 35 years. I’ve never had anything like this happen,” Parkhurst said, adding, “It wasn’t fraud or anything.”
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These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.
(1) comment
A stray pen mark. That's one theory...[wink]
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