Windham 2020 Election Audit Will Take Weeks: Team Members

WINDHAM, NH — An audit team will begin the process of finding out what happened in the Windham 2020 election that led to what has been described as a "massive, bizarre discrepancy" between what voting machines said the outcome of a state representative race was and a hand recount that showed seven candidates shorted votes and one receiving too many.

During the next few weeks, Harri Hursti, Mark Lindeman, and Philip Stark, the Windham 2020 Forensic Election Audit Team, along with dozens of volunteers and state officials, will be meeting in a secure National Guard facility in Pembroke to conduct a full-scale audit of the election including an electronic voting machine recount of all political races in the town and a hand recount of the Rockingham District 7 state representative race as well as the votes for governor and U.S. Senate. The team will also be analyzing all of the paper ballots, the ink and paper used to create the ballots, all of the absentee ballot envelopes, the scanners themselves, the computer memory cards and data in them, and any extra ballots that were not used.

At issue is how a hand recount was so wildly off compared to what the AccuVote optical scanning machines produced for results in the state rep. race.

Four Republican candidates were shorted between 297 to 303 votes each while three Democrats were also shorted between 18 and 28 votes each. The fifth-place finisher in the race, Kristi St. Laurent, another Democrat, was 24 votes behind according to the machines and requested a recount. The recount, however, showed the machines giving her 99 too many votes, creating a 400-plus vote separation.

St. Laurent called the results and recount a "massive, bizarre discrepancy" and petitioned the Ballot Law Commission to investigate — since New Hampshire law only allows for a single recount. The commission sustained the outcome of the recount but requested the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office to investigate the matter. Since state law allows for a limited investigation of voting machines by the attorney general's election division, SB 43 was written to create a team to conduct a forensic audit.

On Tuesday, Windham's four optical scanning machines, their ballot bins, as well as memory cards, were all delivered from the town, via state police escort, all while being live-streamed online.

While waiting for the ballots to show up from the state archives building, Hursti and Lindeman spoke about the multi-phase process that will take place during the next few weeks and took questions from witnesses and the press. Stark was on his way to New Hampshire from California.

It will be slow, Hursti warned, "we will not be moving with speed and expediency in mind," but, instead, "we will be thorough and as transparent as possible" to find out exactly what happened in Windham, with the voting machines, and Concord, at the recount, in November 2020.

The first phase will take inventory of the number of ballots, images of all the ballots, and scan them through all four voting machines. The second phase will be a physical audit of the ballots. In the third phase, the team will audit the optical scanners, memory cards, and equipment. The fourth phase will tackle the type of paper used for the ballots, ink, marks, envelopes, and "all of the supporting material."

On Wednesday, all of the ballot boxes will be opened and moved to four tables with microphones and video cameras to allow for transparency and recording, of both audio and visually, to record what people are saying and doing, Hursti said.

"We don't know what is inside of each box before we opened," he said. "Some boxes only have marked ballots; some boxes have a mixture of accepted ballots and other materials whether they are envelopes or excess ballots that have never been used before."

Hursti said each ballot would be marked with a "unique marking," something that is not allowed in other states but is in New Hampshire, in order to confirm an exact count of ballots. The ballots will then be "imaged," in order to have a backup of the ballots, and then, all of the Windham ballots will all be recounted individually through each of the voting machines. This process is expected to take two days, he said.

By Friday, the auditing process is expected to start — two people will eye each ballot while two people manually record votes for the state representative, governor, and Senate races, in batches of 25, with each ballot marked. A fifth person will oversee the auditing by the other four. After that, the ballots will be re-boxed with two separate tally sheets and entered into a computer and witnesses will see the information broadcast in real-time.

Lindeman said all the forms will be on different colored paper and pens will not be blue or black because the scanners do not pick up other ink colors.

The machine audits will come next. That will first involve imaging all of the data and memory of each card and scanner.

Hursti, who has hacked into the AccuVote optical scanning machines but did not get deep into that process, said New Hampshire's machines offered "very old technology." The chip on the machines was a Chinese version of the first IBM personal computer chip, the 5150 model, from 1981. The microchip in the machines was phased out in 2003, he said. The machines, Hursti added, "pre-dated (the) Internet … they are older than net addresses," addressing a request made online to get the net addresses of all the machines. He added, "these machines are so old they don't have network capability … they don't have ethernet; they don't have wireless. They don't have the horsepower to do so. They don't have hard drives; they don't have flash memory … they don't have storage."

The memory cards, however, do have a small amount of data storage. These machines use EPROM chips, he said, adding that the only way to remove data from them is to shine an ultraviolet light on them. To do that, the chip must be removed from the machine.

"The machine itself is incapable of altering its own programming no matter what you do," he said.

The memory cards are also older technology, about 128 kilobytes, "tiny, tiny storage units, compared to anything today," and have battery backup. But, they can be exploited, he said, as was shown by his team during his hacking experiments.

The programming of all four machines will be imaged for backup and eyed to ensure it is all the same. They will also be looking for "artifacts" in the programming with everything being documented and shown.

The last process will look at the ballots and markings themselves to see if any are suspicious.

Hursti was asked about other audits that were as extensive as this one and he said California regularly holds audits of its voting machines. Connecticut has also studied its machines, too. When asked if they had ever seen any case like the Windham case, both Hursti and Lindeman said, they hadn't although Hursti said in one audit, they found a glitch in the memory card. Both men also stated they felt that there was more than one problem going on in the Windham incident.

Hursti said there will be forms, in case witnesses or the press have questions or suggestions and the team would try to address them during the process.

"If there is something we can do, we will try to do (it)," Hursti said.

Ken Eyring, a Windham voter who was involved in the process of creating SB 43, filed both right-to-know requests and a temporary injunction on Monday to preserve all of the data from the memory cards.

The lawsuit and right-to-know request were done, he said, in an effort to back up the original data before the audit team begins their work to allow "an independent team" that is "outside of the umbrella of one organization (Verified Voting)."

He wrote in a blog post on GraniteGrok.com, "I filed the request because I'm concerned with the lack of checks and balances of the auditors, as well as the volatility of the forensic machine data that needs to be preserved. It is important to forensically image all of the data for each of Windham's four AccuVote machines and I do not believe any of the current forensic teams have the necessary skill sets to adequately perform that specialized task."

In the video below, St. Laurent, the woman who started it all by requesting a recount of her race, talks about what she is looking forward to with the audit.

ALSO READ:

• Windham 2020 Forensic Election Audit Begins Tuesday
• Trump's Claims Of 'Massive Fraud' In NH Elections Puts Local Republicans In A Bind
• Third Windham 2020 Election Auditor Chosen
• Tempers Flare At Windham Meeting About 2020 Election Audit: Watch
• 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 Unknow

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