Republicans in Windham, New Hampshire, won all four seats in the legislative election on Nov. 3. A Democrat, who thought she only lost by 24 voters, Kristi St. Lauren, asked for a recount.
The recount showed she lost by a lot more and that led to an audit. It seems the folds and the machine caused the problem.
“We now have experimental confirmation that if the contest is undervoted, a fold through a vote target can create a vote. None of the 65 ballots was marked for St. Laurent, but the machines interpreted 25 of the folds as votes for her,” wrote the Twitter account, WindhamNHAuditors, which is operated by auditors Harri Hursti, Mark Lindeman, and Phillip Stark. It later clarified that it was 75 votes, not 65 votes.
In other words, the scanner machine thought the folds were valid votes for her.
“Something we strongly suspect at this juncture, based on various evidence, is that in some cases, fold lines are being interpreted by the scanners as valid votes,” one of the auditors, told WMUR-TV.
The auditors, in another tweet, found that another machine had an “even more dramatic problem” and counted only 28 percent of the 75 votes for each Republican candidate in the contest.
“Because if someone voted for all four Republican candidates and the ballot happened to have its fold line going through St. Laurent’s target, then that might be interpreted by the machines as an overvote, which would then subtract votes from each of those four Republican candidates,” Stark, an auditor, told the station.
“Conversely, if there were not four votes already in that contest by the voter, a fold line through that target could have caused the machine to interpret it as a vote for St. Laurent.”
AccuVote is the company responsible. Maybe they should change their name to Inaccuvote.
2020 Election Integrity: New Hampshire – Windham – Voting Machine Testing In Town of 14,000 People Is Turning Up Inconsistencies.
Apparently folded ballots & unfolded ballots produce differentiated results on this type of machine. WaPo says it’s an AccuVote system. https://t.co/fv61GGbklC
— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) May 23, 2021
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