The Secretary of State’s office has now completed 13 recounts in various races across the state. In total, exactly 132,423 ballots have been re-examined across 12 of these races, excluding the Senate 9 recount which was canceled.
And not a single race’s outcome has changed as a result of these recounts.
The Windham state representative race is still the outlier in the process, where the vote total changed by a net of 1,165 out of a possible 40,024 votes, or nearly 3 percent. Several investigations are underway into the cause of the vast vote disparity there. Windham voters cast 10,006 ballots total, according to their report to the Secretary of State, but has four State Representatives.
With Windham excluded, 122,417 ballots were re-examined and a total of 586 votes were changed. These votes are primarily changed from ‘blank,’ as registered by the machine, to an affirmative vote for a candidate.
Ballots not properly filled out by voters will not be counted by the Diebold machines New Hampshire uses. In order for the machine to properly scan a vote, the circle next to the candidate must be filled in, and no more than the allowed number of votes can be cast for each race.
Handfuls of voters used an “x” or checkmark instead. The machine will not register these votes.
And sometimes voters will fill in the ‘write-in’ bubble in addition to the candidates for whom they cast an affirmative vote. The machine will treat these ballots as ‘over-votes.’
Then there are cases where the machine will read a vote, but markings will negate that ballot. For example, voters in multiple state representative districts sometimes cross-out one of their choices. The machine will count this as a vote since the bubble is filled in, but in a hand-recount, the vote will be negated.
All told, there were a possible 185,136 votes inspected on these 132,423 ballots. 1,751 votes have changed, amounting to 0.946 percent. Excluding Windham, the anomaly, 586 votes out of a possible 145,112 have changed. Only 0.404 percent. That’s an accuracy rate of 99.596 percent.
If extrapolated to the presidential contest in New Hampshire, roughly 3,300 votes would change.
Three recounts remain:
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
9:00 a.m. – State Representative – Hillsborough District 4
2:00 p.m. – State Representative – Sullivan District 2
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
9:00 a.m. – Executive Council District 5
