Jennifer Watson: Issues exposed by Windham voting audit also happened in Laconia

To The Daily Sun,

The audit into the irregularities that occurred last year in the Windham Nov. 3, election is over. Although the official audit report isn’t expected for over a month, we do know the preliminary conclusion of the team of auditors. They say that so far no intentional fraud was uncovered by their audit. (They still have to digest some of the information).

They have concluded that a borrowed machine used to fold and mail the absentee ballots folded them in the wrong place, causing the voting machines to “read” the fold as a vote for a candidate. This error gave some votes to Democratic candidate Kristie St. Laurent in the New Hampshire Representatives race when the voters “undervoted” which means they didn’t vote for the maximum allowable candidates (in this Windham race, four).

It also deprived some Republican candidates of votes intended for them when residents did vote for all four Republicans. It interpreted the fold on Ms. St. Laurent’s name as a fifth vote, creating an “overvote.” This resulted in a high percentage of legitimate Republican votes being tossed out.

Windham’s high percentage of overvotes is not an isolated problem. Similar patterns can be observed in other communities. Take Laconia. There is a high percentage of “blanks” in the New Hampshire reps race here as well. In Laconia “blanks” is a general category that includes actual blanks (undervotes) plus overvotes that were thrown out. In Laconia it constitutes a range of 16.3 to 22.5 percent of all of the votes in that race depending on the ward. So about one-fifth of the votes in the NH House race didn’t count. This seems to me to be enough to call for an audit in Laconia and any NH communities that use these voting machines and have similar results. There are a lot.

There’s more, though, that the audit has exposed. During the audit, all of the ballots were scanned through all four of Windham’s machines and not one machine agreed with another. All were different. ALL. While the differences vary and aren’t as large as the original discrepancy, this still does not inspire confidence in the reliability of the machines.

While I doubt we’ve heard the last about the Windham audit, it has so far revealed at least one thing: the AccuVote voting machines should be scrapped and we should revert back to hand counting our votes. When votes are hand counted, several people are involved in checking and rechecking the votes. During an election tabulated by a machine, no one checks to verify that the machine counts are accurate.

Perhaps NH election officials several decades ago felt they needed help counting votes and consequently adopted the machines. Now that we’ve seen how inaccurate our voting machines can be, I predict there will be no trouble getting volunteers to count ballots.

Let’s ditch the machines. After all, NH citizens deserve to have their votes count.

Jennifer Watson

Laconia