NH Governor Says He'll Sign Windham Voting Machine Audit Bill

CONCORD, NH — Gov. Chris Sununu said on Thursday he will sign a bill that will allow for an extensive recount and forensic analysis of votes counted by AccuVote optical scanning machines in Windham during the 2020 election after a state representative race hand recount found a massive discrepancy in voting results compared to the machine counts.

In November 2020, eight candidates ran for four Rockingham District 7 state representative seats to represent the town at the Statehouse. About 10,000 people voted in the election and when the votes were counted, Democrat Kristi St. Laurent, running in her sixth campaign for public office, fell 24 votes short of winning the fourth place seat.

The tight outcome allowed for an automatic recount and St. Laurent, like 16 other candidates in 2020, requested one to see if she could gain votes to make up the difference. After a hand recount though, she lost 99 votes. The four Republicans who won the seats gained between 297 and 303 votes each. Three other Democrats, who were all unsuccessful, too, gained between 18 and 28 votes.

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Since New Hampshire law only allows for a single recount, a second recount was not held. The optical scanning machines were also not analyzed. Everyone was left wondering, bewildered, actually, how such a "bizarre and massive discrepancy" of votes, as St. Laurent described it, could occur because it was statically and mathematically impossible for such a shift to happen.

St. Laurent petitioned the state's Ballot Law Commission saying, "Either the machines were programmed to reflect unwarranted adjustments in multiples of 100 to the totals of all Republicans and the top voter receiver among Democrats or a significant number of ballots were double-counted during the (recount) process." That double-counting, she added, "doesn't explain to any degree why my count would drop by 99."

The AccuVote machines in New Hampshire have been in use for more than a quarter of a century. They use Global Election Management software and were originally manufactured by Unisys and then by Global Elections Systems Inc., which are no longer in business. Dominion Voting Systems, whose machines reported glitches in swing states around the country and is now involved in a number of defamation lawsuits, owns the intellectual property of the AccuVote machines and its related election management system.

The Ballot Law Commission requested the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office look into the matter. In January, Nicholas Chong Yen, an assistant attorney general who heads up the election unit, requested a number of investigatory materials from town officials but was limited in his capacity and reading of state law on what he could actually do.

Activists in Windham, like Ken Eyring, a conservative, wanted a bit more though and began working with Secretary of State Bill Gardner on a resolution. State Sen. Regina Birdsell, along with seven other Republican co-sponsors, crafted SB 43 to address the situation.

The bill allows for a direct audit of the machines, their memory cards, and hand tabulations of the ballots. An audit team will look at the initial results and recounts and then, another hand recount of the state representative race, the U.S. Senate race, and the governor's race will be held to see if those numbers match the machine count. The audit and recounts will be live-streamed and recorded and be done outside of Windham and outside of the state archives building where the hand recount was held. A report will be due from the audit team within 45 days of the end of the auditing process.

On Wednesday, the bill was approved by the House via voice vote with a motion to reconsider that failed. On Thursday, the state Senate approved the bill unanimously.

Eyring said he was pleased with the outcome and looked forward to it because he and others believed the discrepancy warranted further review.

"I have had many conversations with NH Secretary of State Bill Gardner over the past month regarding the importance of validating the integrity of NH elections," Eyring said. "Both of us agree there are unanswered questions that must be resolved — and that it is important to leave no stone unturned in seeking the truth. That goal can only be achieved if the right forensic analysts are chosen to perform the forensic audit on Windham's machines and ballots."

In the interest of avoiding the perception of impropriety, he added, Eyring hoped Sununu would continue "to remain at arm's length away from this process and support whatever forensic audit team Secretary Gardner chooses."

In mid-February, when the legislation first surfaced and began to gain traction, Sununu said he would not let the issue slip by despite his feeling that there were no problems in the 2020 election in New Hampshire beyond Windham. Sununu, at Thursday's news conference, reconfirmed he would sign the bill.

"Yeah," he said, "I think they designed the bill really well and I intend on signing it and moving that forward as soon as we can."

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