Large discrepancies between the election night totals and hand counts in the state representative race in Windham, New Hampshire, were due to “unforseen consequences and misfortune” relating to ballot folds, a 2020 audit found.
Released to the public on Tuesday, the findings and recommendations from the Windham audit came more than six weeks after it concluded on May 27. One of the auditors, Harri Hursti, confirmed to the Washington Examiner on Monday that his team submitted its findings to the state a day before.
The three-person audit team, made up of Hursti, Mark Lindeman, and Philip Stark, found that “harried election officials borrowed a folding machine to send out thousands of absentee ballots more quickly, and votes on roughly 400 ballots were miscounted as a result.”
WINDHAM ELECTION AUDIT TEAM SUBMITS REPORT TO NEW HAMPSHIRE OFFICIALS
Despite the miscounts, the auditors do not believe the machine was altered to achieve the result on purpose, nor that town officials could have been expected to anticipate the problem. The team also did not find any basis “to believe that the miscounts found in Windham indicate a pattern of partisan bias or a failed election.”
The results of the audit cannot alter the results of the Rockingham County District 7 House of Representatives race, according to S.B. 43, and it must uphold the recount. The hand tally of ballots also looked at the contests for governor and U.S. senator.
“Even this near-perfect storm was not enough to alter the reported outcome in the State Representative contest (although under different circumstances, it might have). All counts agree that Republicans swept Windham’s four seats in the state house of representatives. Nevertheless, the error – along with the smaller discrepancies in the landslide Governor’s contest — expose some vulnerabilities that warrant further attention,” the auditors wrote in their findings.
Auditors also compared AccuVote report tapes from two other towns in New Hampshire and found that recounts in nine other state representative races using AccuVote did not have similar discrepancies, leading them to believe the overall impact of ballot folds in the 2020 election was “marginal.”
“It is not impossible that folds affected the outcome of some contest in the 400-seat New Hampshire House of Representatives, but we can conclude that Windham was not the tip of a massive miscount iceberg,” they said.
While the audit team found other small discrepancies and irregularities in their results, not all could be “confidently attributed.”
Among their recommendations to prevent similar problems from happening in future elections, the auditors suggested officials consider not folding ballots at all, clearly instruct officials to fold absentee ballots along the score lines and double-check fold locations, check fold locations when opening absentee ballots, add process controls to ensure that all accepted absentee ballots are counted, enable overvote notification on the AccuVotes, improve machine maintenance, conduct routine risk-limiting audits of all election results, keep ballots from different scanners or counting methods separate, on Election Day and thereafter, and during recounts, track ballots, write-in votes, undervotes, and overvotes.
“Nobody should be surprised or appalled that this close review of the election in Windham — as our close review of audit documentation found some clear errors in the audit itself, such as redundant ballot IDs,” the auditors wrote. “People conduct elections, and people make mistakes. Discovering these mistakes provides an opportunity to improve procedures in future elections.”
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The final report from the forensic election audit team was due 45 days from the completion of the forensic audit. The New Hampshire secretary of state, attorney general, and the Ballot Law Commission are expected to issue additional reports within 45 days of receiving the audit team’s findings.
A joint news release obtained by the Washington Examiner revealed that the secretary of state’s and attorney general’s offices “are reviewing the report and will prepare a report of the results of the audit and any resulting recommendations.”
“The offices will not have an official response on the Forensic Election Audit Team’s report until after the offices’ joint report is submitted to the Legislature and the Town of Windham Board of Selectmen,” the release added.
