Folded ballots appear to be cause of Windham vote change
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May 24—PEMBROKE — As many as 60% of ballots with hand or machine-made folds were improperly read by the four AccuVote optical scanning machines used in Windham in the 2020 election cycle, a forensic audit team member said Monday.
"The error rate was way higher than we expected," said Harri Hursti, one of the three auditors.
Hursti said analysis has shown automated voting machines misread these ballots and this could explain why the count was inaccurate for both Republican and Democratic candidates for state representative.
Critics have pointed to the discrepancy as evidence to back up claims the presidential election was tainted by inaccurate automated vote tallying.
On Election Day, Republican Julius Soti finished fourth to take the last of four seats for state representative by 24 votes over Democrat Kristi St. Laurent. But Soti's win grew to 420 votes after a Nov. 12 hand recount.
The average of the votes tabulated from the four machines after the audit put Soti ahead of St. Laurent by 377 votes, 4,706 to 4,329.
Hursti said the audit team has a theory for how the folds inflated St. Laurent's total and undercounted the GOP votes that were actually cast.
If the folds went right through St. Laurent's name on a ballot, the machine would read that as a vote. Should a voter then select all four Republican House candidates, the machine would consider the ballot an "over-vote" and would disqualify it from being counted.
St. Laurent could have gotten more votes from the machines if the fold went through her name and the person casting the ballot did not choose all four Republicans.
"When a voter under-voted — didn't vote for all four candidates, and didn't vote for Kristi — then it (the fold) was able to create a phantom vote for Kristi," Hursti said.
Folds by machine or hand
The audit team explained the automated machines can cause a fold in the ballots as they flip over inside and are deposited in a bin. Voters also must fold their absentee ballots to get them inside an envelope to send to the city or town clerk to be counted.
At the onset of the audit, the audit team and local election volunteers re-fed all 10,000 ballots through the Windham voting machines, and the outcome was much closer to the recount total than what had been reported on Election night.
The four Republican candidates for state representative in Windham each got roughly 220 more votes through that audit of automated vote counting machines than reported on Election Day.
Meanwhile, St. Laurent, the top-finishing Democrat, got about 125 fewer votes from the audit than announced Nov. 3.
Hursti said this change was likely because all of these ballots had "been sitting flat" since the November election, which caused most of the folds to become less pronounced.
Mark Lindeman, the town of Windham's appointee to the audit, said the project is on track to finish its work as required under the state law (SB 43) by Thursday.
The vote-counting machines used in Windham and about 85% of cities and towns in New Hampshire are one of the oldest models in circulation, with a memory chip that dates back to 1981, Hursti said.
While it's outdated, Hursti said, the machine is harder to hack than more modern vote-counting machines because the paper ballots it counts provide backup.
All proceedings of the audit are live-streamed on the web at www.doj.nh.gov/sb43/index.htm.
