Hundreds Of Votes Shift At Windham Recount — For Reasons Unknown

WINDHAM, NH — Unusual vote count anomalies have been discovered during the recount of a state representative race in Windham that shorted votes to four Republican and three Democrat candidates while a fourth Democrat candidate received votes they did not actually earn — and officials cannot explain the discrepancies of the vote counts.

After more than 10,000 residents in Windham voted Nov. 3, four Republican candidates for state representative appeared to win all four Rockingham District 7 seats to represent the town in Concord during the next two years. The top three finishers — incumbent state Reps. Mary Griffin and Charles McMahon as well as a new candidate, Bob Lynn, all won their seats easily by wide margins. However, the fourth-place finisher, Julius Soti, bested fifth-place finisher Kristi St. Laurent, a Democrat, by just 24 votes.

St. Laurent, like 16 other candidates this year, requested a recount of the ballots to see if there were mistakes, anomalies, or other issues that might help make up ground and win the seat. However, when the recount was completed, state officials and witnesses from both political parties found several huge mistakes with the machine count — and no one can explain why the counts were so far off.

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According to the hand recount of the paper ballots, Soti was shorted 297 votes — while McMahon was shorted 298, Griffin was shorted 299, and Lynn was shorted 303. Three other Democrats were also shorted votes: Valerie Roman, who placed sixth, was missing 28 votes from people who supported her. Henri Azibert, who was seventh, was shorted 21 votes and Ioana Singureanu was shorted 18 votes. The machine count, however, also gave St. Laurent 99 more votes than she actually received, according to the paper ballot recount.

The final separation between Soti and St. Laurent was 420 votes not 24.

Election officials Thursday, after the recount, were puzzled by the wild discrepancy of the machine count — something that has not occurred before in state recounts.

In the past, according to Bill Gardner, the country's longest serving Secretary of State, a handful of votes, here and there, would shift, and nearly always due to human error. Some of the problems include ovals not properly filled in, voters circling both the oval under a name and a write-in oval, or using a check mark or an "X" instead of filling in the oval. Voter intent is then decided by the recounters in front of witnesses.

There have also been transcription problems in the past and there were some of those, too, this year in other races. Some state representative races in New Hampshire have been decided by a single vote or a handful of votes.

Gardner, according to Christopher Maidment, a contributor at NH Journal who was watching the Rockingham 7 recount Thursday, chocked up the anomaly to human error in the tally sheets on election night or when the results were transcribed to the Secretary of State's Office. Another source, according to the Granite Grok political website, suggested maybe the missing 300 votes for the Republican candidates were due to the voters not wanting to wear masks who were forced to vote in another area of the school and maybe their votes were not scanned altogether.

However, Nicole Bottai, Windham's town clerk, said neither speculation was correct and she stood by her team's handling of the election. She, too, was bewildered by the wildly wrong numbers.

"It is strange," she said Monday.

Bottai said voters who did not want to wear masks were allowed to fill their ballots in another section of Windham High School. But those voters had their names crossed off the checklist and their ballots were scanned, just like any other voter.

"We had to provide another area for people who chose not to wear the masks and people wanted to (not wear them)," she said. "It was completely acceptable."

Throughout the day, the moderator would announce the transfer of those ballots from the non-mask voting area to where the machines were, she said.

"All those ballots were scanned," Bottai said.

Absentee ballots in town, she said, were also handled following state procedures and transparency. Staffers accounted for every ballot and poll workers announced and tabulated each ballot, and marked them off the checklist, in front of witnesses.

While she was not at the recount, another Windham employee was, Bottai said. She wondered if there were problems with the recount because the machine count printouts, tally sheets, and voter checklists all match the unofficial voting data released on Nov. 4, Bottai said.

David Scanlan, the assistant secretary of state, said Monday officials had "no explanation" for the discrepancy in ballot counts between the machine count and the hand count either. State law, however, does not allow for a second recount. The boxes have been resealed, he said.

When asked if the department or anyone in the state could double-check other races in Windham to see if the counts were off by 303 or 99 votes anywhere, Scanlan said, No. The only way to require a second recount or counts of other races, just to double-check another result, would be by court order or the Legislature requesting officials take another look at the ballots.

The deadline for anyone to request a recount was Nov. 6.

Windham, like most communities in New Hampshire that do not hand count their paper ballots, use AccuVote optical scanning machines with Global Election Management System software. The AccuVote devices were originally manufactured by Unisys, then by Global Elections Systems Inc., which are no longer in business. Dominion Voting Systems, whose machines have reported glitches in swing states around the country, owns the intellectual property of the AccuVote machines and its related election management system but does not manufacture the device.

While AccuVote machines can be hooked up to the Internet, that function is disarmed in New Hampshire. The machines are standalone scanners and not connected to the Internet by hard line, wi-fi, or by telephone line to a central computer, Bottai confirmed. Election results, like most other communities in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts, are printed out after the polls close, in front of officials and witnesses, and then manually submitted to press outlets like Patch, the Associated Press, Edison Research, or any other outlet that would like them. The returns were also posted on the town's website.

Bottai said town officials ran tests on the scanners before the election after its vendor, LHS Associates, which handles optical scanning machines and software for hundreds of towns around New England and New York and has for two decades, cleared the data from the September primary. There were no issues with the tests, she said. Bottai planned on meeting with the company to discuss the discrepancies.

The differing amounts, with seven candidates being shorted, some by hundreds and others by a dozen or so, with another receiving nearly 100 more votes they did not earn, is strange. It does not reflect a single overvote or undervote anomaly between a candidate or two; it does not appear to reflect a human error but maybe shows multiple human errors; and appears to reflect multiple problems, with additions and subtractions of varying amounts, with all the candidates, either by multiple human, scanner, or software errors. These anomalies though are not like anything else that has occurred during a recount in New Hampshire.

It is unknown if any lawsuits have been filed to have the Windham ballots recounted. Maidment noted Monday that with 13 recounts performed, no races have been overturned while more than 132,000 ballots have been reexamined. The Windham is still the outlier — with officials attempting to figure out the cause of the disparity. Patch has requested pictures of the poll tapes as well as tally sheets and under vote data but had not received the information at post time.

Editor's note: This post has been corrected to reflect that Dominion Voting Systems does own the intellectual property of AccuVote machines and its related election management system.

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