Elections are 'extremely safe': Seacoast clerks assure NH Voter Confidence committee

PORTSMOUTH — Lorrie Pitt describes Durham’s town elections as “extremely safe from my perspective and my work in the clerk’s office.”

Pitt, who is the town clerk/tax collector, acknowledged working in Durham — home to the University of New Hampshire — brings “a lot of challenges, as most of you might be aware.”

Pitt’s comments came Tuesday during a meeting of the New Hampshire Special Committee on Voter Confidence at Portsmouth City Hall.

She told committee members Tuesday “the process is working and that we have not experienced issues of fraud.”

Pitt, who has been town clerk since 2004, said she’s “been part of elections for a really long time and watched a lot of changes over time.”

She credited the work done on Election Days by the town’s many volunteers.

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Town and UNH officials work closely to deal with college students who are voting in Durham, Pitt said.

“In 2020, we had a number of different items where we actually worked with them to set times on campus to register folks,” she said. “The university over the years has been very helpful working with us.”

During a presidential Election Day, as many as 3,000 people sometimes register to vote, Pitt said.

“We have to recruit many volunteers to help throughout the day,” she said. “So we have to do a lot of training and a lot of organizing.”

Pitt stated that during the 2020 election, “we had a number of people who questioned” officials about the number of absentee ballots they issued.

“Normally we might have maybe 800 on a general election, but we had over 4,000,” she said. “Because we were able to process early we had a number of people that questioned the process, and was it correct and were we doing it right.”

The number of absentee voters increased to about 43% nationally in the 2020 election amid the coronavirus pandemic, about double the 2016 election, the Associated Press reported.

People with concerns were invited to watch the process, Pitt told the committee, “and they were very happy with the results and watching how professional and how well-run the process really was.”

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Portsmouth City Clerk Kelli Barnaby told the committee “voter confidence” is something “that I as city clerk take very seriously.”

“I want to ensure the voters have confidence in the process and procedures followed here in the city of Portsmouth and the state of New Hampshire,” Barnaby said.

Like Pitt, Barnaby also stressed the importance of training and education.

It’s something, she said, that helps ensure “a positive voter experience for voters.”

How NH Voter Confidence committee sees its job

During an interview after the meeting, Committee Co-chair Dick Swett, a former New Hampshire 2nd District U.S. congressman, stressed the importance of instilling “in our young people and our citizenry the importance of the election process.”

“It’s always been the case and it always will be the case and it’s fundamental to democracy that that be a strong and trusted process,” Swett said.

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The committee’s job, Swett said, “is to listen to what people are telling us” and “our recommendations will come from what we hear people tell us. ... It’s not what we think, it’s what we hear from people."

Committee members have heard about many topics from the public, including “their concerns about student voting, their concerns about how the affidavit process is used versus passports or other IDs,” Swett said.

“At the end of the day, we’re going to bring this all forward and figure out the best ideas on how do we incorporate this so the most people can get the most confidence out of it,” Swett said.

Jim Splaine, a former longtime state lawmaker and Portsmouth assistant mayor, also serves on the Special Committee.

“We’re supposed to be trying to identify ways in which we can suggest to improve voter confidence in the state of New Hampshire,” Splaine said about the committee’s duties, after Tuesday’s meeting.

“We have to come up with ideas like better education and improved dialogue with city clerks and town clerks,” he added.

During Tuesday’s meeting, Regina Barnes, a former Hampton selectwoman, said the ballot counting machines that municipalities use in New Hampshire should be regularly audited.

“We cannot make any conclusions whether there is or is not voter fraud until we do some type of reconciliation and audit of what machine tallies are saying and comparing them to the paper documents, which is the paper ballots,” she said.

Paper ballots are used in New Hampshire elections and most communties use AccuVote machines to count them. The paper ballots are counted by hand when there's a call for a recount in close elections.

Republican Gov. Chris Sununu has said elections in New Hampshire in 2020 were "safe, secure, and reliable." In 2020, in the town of Windham, New Hampshire, a discrepancy in the vote count for a state legislative race drew the attention of former President Donald Trump and his supporters seeking to bolster unproven claims of election fraud, the Associated Press reported. There was an audit of the Windham vote and it showed the cause of the discrepancy was not a vote-counting machine, but a separate machine used to fold absentee ballots. The audit found no evidence of fraud or political bias.

Efforts to eliminate the use of vote-counting machines by those who raised concerns about fraud were defeated by town voters in Greenland, Rye and numerous Seacoast communities and others around New Hampshire this year. Rochester city leaders also rejected requests from a group of residents to eliminate use of the machines. Republican state Sen. Jim Gray, who is also a city councilor, was among those who supported the continued use of the vote-counting machines, saying, "I don't believe voter fraud is happening in New Hampshire."

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Elections are safe, Seacoast clerks assure NH Voter Confidence panel