Third Windham 2020 Election Auditor Chosen

WINDHAM, NH — The third member of the Windham 2020 election forensic auditing team has been chosen while state officials have also released details about where the audit will take place.

Philip Stark, a professor of statistics and associate dean at the University of California, has been picked by the two other members, Mark Lindeman of Verified Voting and Harri Hursti, a computer programmer.

The audit will be investigating how and why four Republican candidates for the Rockingham District 7 race were shorted hundreds of votes by AccuVote optical scanning voting machines after a hand recount of ballots. Three Democrats were also shorted dozens of votes and a fourth Democrat candidate received 99 too many votes. The auditors will be recounting the state representative race, the governor's race, and the U.S. Senate race, to see if the paper ballots match the results of the voting machines in all three races, as part of state law, SB 43. They will also be auditing the AccuVote optical scanning machines and memory cards themselves.

Stark has been involved in election integrity issues for a number of years and his bio online, while focusing on a number of different topics, listed several states that have used auditing processes in their laws that he was active in developing. He has been an opponent of DRE — direct-recording electronic voting machines that do not have a paper trail. In 2019, he participated in a report that stated those machines may have failed to record votes in the 2018 Georgia election. About a month after that report, he resigned from the board of Verified Voting writing that the org had "lost its way" because it had been "providing cover for inherently untrustworthy voting systems" while embracing "risk-limiting audits."

Stark has previously stated, not unlike Hursti, that he believes voting machines are hackable — even when they aren't connected to the Internet, according to previous interviews and information online.

Stark declined to be interviewed on Wednesday saying his appointment was not official and he did not have a signed agreement to be a member of the team.

A start date for the audit has not been set yet but it will be soon. The audit is scheduled to be completed by May 27.

The New Hampshire Attorney General's Office stated that the audit will be held at the Edward Cross Training Center, 722 Riverwood Drive in Pembroke. Space at the facility is limited but a live stream of the audit will be active on the department's website located here.

ALSO READ:

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• Computer Programmer Named To Windham 2020 Election Audit
• Concerns Raised About Pick To Work On Windham 2020 Election Audit
• SB 43, The Windham Voting Machine Audit Bill, Is Now NH Law
• NH Governor Says He'll Sign Windham Voting Machine Audit Bill
• Agreement Proposed To Investigate Windham Vote Discrepancies
• Giuda: Election Integrity Matters, Windham Must Be Investigated
• Sununu: State Won't Let Windham Voting Irregularity 'Slip By'
• Review Of Windham Voting Irregularities 'Beginning To Look Like Malfeasance': Senator
• Investigators Eye Voting Devices, Cards After Windham Recount
• Windham Democrat Raises Questions About NH's AccuVote Machines
• Hundreds Of Votes Shift At Windham Recount — For Reasons Unknown

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