Activists Call For Full Audit Of 2020 Election In New Hampshire

CONCORD, NH — More than 100 New Hampshire activists were at the Statehouse on Friday calling for a statewide forensic audit of the 2020 election.

The attendees, who are calling for a full audit of all voting machines and ballots in the state after the Windham audit found that folds in the ballots led to a shifting of the results wildly for eight state representative candidates, signed affidavits that they intended to deliver to the governor's office after the event. Some of the activists, including Marylyn Todd of the New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group, want the AccuVote optical scanning voting machines that are used to count most of the paper ballots in the state removed and, instead, want a return to hand-counted paper ballots.

Todd, who lives in Nashua but also owns property in Windham, has become an unexpected activist, questioning the results of the election. She said the audit was about freedom. The Windham audit did not tell Granite Staters the truth, Todd added.

In the Windham case, after the election, one state representative candidate, a Democrat, fell 24 votes short of winning one of the four seats that Republicans won. She asked for a hand recount and it found that she received 99 votes more than she actually earned — while Republicans were shorted close to 300 votes each.

State officials then approved a law for an audit of the community as well as AccuVote optical scanning machines and hand recounts of the rep race, governor, and U.S. Senate races but many activists did not approve of the forensic team since some were critical of other recounts.

During the audit, ballots were run through the four machines used in Windham and were found to be wildly off — in the state rep race, one machine shorted Republicans between 274 to 281 votes while another shorted the same four candidates by 221 to 226 votes each. All four machines also gave the Democrat who placed fifth between 88 and 106 votes she did not actually receive. No reasons were given for the shifts in votes.

The auditors did find that folds in the ballots had created hundreds of overvotes that were not counted and the major headline that came out of the audit was the declaration by the audit team that there was no fraud detected after no special or rogue program was found in the Windham machine cards — although one of the cards differed from the others.

Even though many of the attendees signing affidavits were supporters of President Donald Trump or Republicans, Todd said the event and her group were nonpartisan. Because there were many overvotes from potentially uncounted votes that were cast in a number of communities as well as so many close races, a statewide audit might find that Democrats actually won some down-ballot races that they lost in 2020, which flipped the House and state Senate from red to blue.

Todd said the groups, which also included a number of state representatives, including Al Baldasaro, a Republican from Londonderry, members of ReopenNH, and vloggers who were tracking anomalies, strangeness, and fraud in the 2020 election, think they are going to get the audit. If they don't, they will put pressure on cities and towns, and also float ballot questions at next year's Town Meetings, to call for an end to voting machines in New Hampshire.

Baldasaro, a co-sponsor of SB 43, the law which led to the Windham audit, said the overvotes and folds in the ballots were problems in many towns.

"I'm not saying there was fraud going on but there was questionable stuff," he said. "Maybe we need to just take a look to keep the honest person is kept honest."

Other calls for audit efforts are underway in Alaska, Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, as well as Arizona and Georgia.

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