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Windham’s streak of questionable election conduct continues. On Tuesday, officials held a vote reconciliation without informing the New Hampshire secretary of state or the public to double-check the totals from the March 12 town elections.

Town residents began contacting NHJournal Tuesday morning when a posting appeared claiming to be a “legal notice” that the town of Windham “will perform an election reconciliation [sic] the March 12, 2024 Election.”

“The public is encouraged to observe this process,” the notice added. To do that, several residents groused, they would have to know about it in advance.

Windham’s municipal elections were already under stress after both the Town Clerk Nicole Merrill and Deputy Town Clerk Hannah Davis announced two weeks before they were vacating their posts as of Election Day, March 12. Merrill cited health concerns for her departure, and Davis blamed pressure and a lack of support from superiors as driving her exit.

NHJournal contacted the town clerk’s office Tuesday and was told the decision to hold the reconciliation was made the night before. A source in the Secretary of State’s office, which oversees the state’s election, said they were unaware a reconciliation was being conducted.

The last election official left in town, Town Moderator Peter Griffin, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Vote reconciliations are typically conducted immediately after election polls close, votes are counted, and official results are reported. Officials compare votes, voters, and ballots cast to ensure accurate totals are reported.

Tom Murray, co-founder of the far-right Government Integrity Project, says there are concerns about Windham’s handling of the election. He says the results reported on election night were inaccurate, for example.

“The school moderator, Betty Dunn, who was on the ballot seeking reelection, was handling ballots that she appears on as a candidate during election night,” Murray said. He also claimed Dunn “has been involved in multiple unofficial recount/reconciliation efforts outside of the public.” Plus, he pointed out that the town’s notice for the reconciliation “did not meet the 24-hour requirement.”

And, Murray said, he will be asking for a recount of the March 12 election.

Murray told NHJournal that nobody is arguing that any election’s outcome will be changed. Instead, he said, it’s time for the town to finally admit—after five troubled election cycles in a row—that there’s a fundamental problem with its elections.

“It’s just incompetence,” Murray said. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

Perhaps unrelated, Windham’s Board of Selectmen is meeting Wednesday evening in a non-public session. The board’s meeting notice cites RSA 91-A:3 II (a) as the legal justification for the non-public meeting. That section of the state’s Right to Know law allows public bodies to meet behind closed doors to discuss “the dismissal, promotion, or compensation of any public employee or the disciplining of such employee, or the investigation of any charges against him or her.”

Windham is no stranger to election issues. Unusual results in the 2020 election fed into national election conspiracies, and the state issued multiple warnings, including a rebuke for sloppy practices in the 2022 state primary.

When Windham became part of former President Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election being stolen, an expansive and controversial audit of the Windham ballots found human error to blame. The 2020 audit report stated several hundred absentee ballots had been machine-folded as part of the mailing process. “That folding machine, leased by the town for other purposes, did not fold ballots along the score lines between vote targets, where the ballots were designed to be folded,” according to the audit. “Instead, it often folded ballots through vote targets in the state representative contest, which the scanners interpreted as vote attempts a substantial fraction of the time.”

Windham got in trouble again after the 2022 September state-wide primary when numerous errors by election day officials and corner-cutting on standard election procedure meant the primary election totals could not be reconciled on the night of the election, according to a letter from the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office.

And in January, Windham was required to conduct the First in the Nation presidential primary in the town under the watchful eye of two outside observers, per instructions from the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office and the Secretary of State’s Office.

“It was the second time we had to have an observer for our elections,” Murray sighed. “We’re on our way to a third.”

There is a Granite State connection to the latest story of then-President Trump trying to pressure election officials into rejecting the outcome of the 2020 election.l

One of the Michigan election officials who reportedly gave in to pressure from Trump to not certify his election loss in 2020 became the victim of a New Hampshire woman’s violent threats as a result.

Monica Palmer, one of the two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers called by Trump Nov. 17, initially refused to sign the certification that President Joe Biden won. In the firestorm that followed her decision, Palmer became the target of deranged and violent text threats from Katelyn Jones.

Jones, 26, was arrested at her mother’s home in Epsom and she pleaded guilty this year to threatening Palmer.

According to new reporting by the Detroit News, Trump and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel called Palmer and GOP canvasser William Hartmann on Nov. 17, 2020 in a bid to stop them from signing off on the election results. A recording of that call came to light last week.

“We’ve got to fight for our country,” Trump is heard saying. “We can’t let these people take our country away from us.” 

Trump and McDaniel are also heard assuring Palmer and Hartmann that attorneys would be provided if they did as Trump wanted. After voting to certify the election, Palmer and Hartmann then refused to sign off on the results, and they tried unsuccessfully to rescind their votes.

Wayne County was eventually certified for Biden, despite the attempt.

Soon after Palmer tried to rescind her vote to certify the results for Biden, she began getting violent online threats, including bloody photographs of nude women along with threats against her daughter. These threats would later be traced to Jones.

“F**king with our election is TERRORISM, and us Americans clearly don’t tolerate terrorists so yes you should be afraid, your daughter should be afraid, and so should (name of the victim’s husband,)” Jones allegedly wrote in one of the messages.

Jones allegedly did not appreciate Palmer’s move to not certify the results for Biden sent her violent texts via cell phone and Instagram accounts. Jones used to live in Michigan, but allegedly created the accounts she used for the threats at her mother’s house in New Hampshire where she was living at the time, according to the court records.

When confronted at her mother’s house, Jones reportedly acknowledged to FBI agents that she had sent the messages. The threats include violent photos as well as threats against Palmer’s daughter.

“Hmmmm I’d be a shame if something happened to your daughter at school,” Jones wrote to Palmer via Instagram.

Jones reportedly told the agents she made the threats and called Palmer a terrorist and a racist because she was upset with Palmer because of the election certification, according to the affidavit.

Trump’s alleged efforts to prevent Michigan’s 2020 election results from being certified are part of one of the many criminal investigations the former president is now facing. Trump is indicted on four counts of criminal conspiracy to defraud the cited States, in part for trying to stop the Michigan certification. Biden won the state by 154,000 votes.

Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, told the Detroit News Trump did nothing wrong when he called Palmer and Hartmann.

According to Cheung, Trump’s actions “were taken in furtherance of his duty as president of the United States to faithfully take care of the laws and ensure election integrity, including investigating the rigged and stolen 2020 presidential election.”

There is no evidence to support Trump’s repeated claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Terese Bastarache (formerly known as Terese Grinnell) is having a good week — despite the vast global conspiracy working against her.

Monday night, on the eve of Bastarache’s criminal trial over charges of disrupting a state meeting, the state of New Hampshire dropped its case.

On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump’s campaign announced Bastarache, an outspoken anti-vaccination activist and conspiracy theory proponent, will be its Trump 2024 “town captain” in Loudon.

“Today, President Donald J. Trump announced his initial New Hampshire Grassroots Leadership Team with over 150 dedicated activists and organizers throughout the Granite State’s ten counties,” the campaign said in a press release. “These supporters represent the overwhelming strength of the MAGA Movement and will again propel President Trump to win the First-in-the-Nation primary.”

The campaign released an impressive list of 14 county and city/town chairs, featuring respected names in the party like longtime Republican activist Augusta Petrone. They also released the names of more than 100 town and ward captains, including Bastarache.

Bastarache is one of the self-declared “Noble 9,” a group of anti-vaccination activists charged with disrupting the October 2021 Executive Council Meeting. Their goal was to stop New Hampshire from accepting federal funding for COVID-19 vaccines. (The Executive Council voted 4-1 to reject the funding.)

A month earlier, Bastarache and fellow activist Frank Staples shouted down the September meeting so aggressively the Executive Council canceled it, citing security concerns.

“This is bigger than my case,” Bastarache said Tuesday after the charges were dropped. “This is about the corruption, collusion, and entrapment of civilians. This was a violation of every New Hampshire constituent’s constitutional rights.”

Bastarache, a registered nurse, has made her views on the COVID vaccine, government mandates, and public health policy very public since the pandemic began. She has likened the federal government’s COVID policies to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.

“It will take away our Live Free or Die; it will make us unsafe,” Bastarache said at the September 2021 protest. “People are dying from the injections, this is Numenberg [sic] trials!”

The Nazi comparisons did not stop there. In an October 2021 appearance at Christian Revolution in Manchester, Bastarache denounced COVID protocols tied to federal vaccine funding.

“It’s the Holocaust,” she said.

And in an interview with Free State Project leader Carla Gericke, her COVID protests started her down a “rabbit hole” of research, bringing her to believe in the Agenda 2030 conspiracy. That is the theory that a World Economic Forum cabal intends to institute a one-world government through depopulation. Included in the conspiracy claims are the Sununu family, New Hampshire inventor of the Segway scooter Dean Kamen, the Chinese Communist government, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Gates, Harvard University, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Lloyd’s of London, and WalMart.

“Then I find out [Sununu’s] brother works for the World Economic Forum, and they’re being very bold and brazen about accelerating Agenda 2030,” Bastarache said. “I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is truly happening.’”

Bastarache’s Truth Social feed is full of conspiracy memes linking Sununu to Agenda 2030 and links to groups like Grazing The Surface, which purport to uncover the New Hampshire ties to the nefarious world domination plot.

Bastarache also believes the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent, and she is part of the ‘We the People’ organization, along with election denier Marilyn Todd, pushing that oft-disproven theory.

It’s becoming an Election Day tradition in the town of Windham, N.H.

Another election, another round of questionable election reporting, and another review in store for Windham election officials by the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s Office. 

Windham’s reported results from the Sept. 13 primary raised eyebrows when the reported results changed between election night and then later when results were given to the Secretary of State’s Office. At one point on Tuesday, Windham was “reporting” three different totals for the same elections: one from election night, one on the town’s website, and one from the hand recounts.

Republican state Rep. Julius Soti saw his total vote count in Windham drop by about 20 votes, from 1,080 on election night, to 1,063 during the week. “It’s a little bit odd they kept revising the numbers,” Soti said. “I’m not sure what happened.”  

The final tally? Soti edged Roger Filio in the GOP primary by eight votes, 2117 to 2109.

In the end, the final reported results were nearly identical to those reported on election night, with just a couple of votes net difference. So, why the moving-target tally? Town officials struggled to offer a cogent explanation.

“Any changes between the two sets of numbers can be accounted for by the continuation of the reconciliation process which involves the review of the marked checklist, hand tally sheets, write-in tally sheets, new voter registration, and checking the absentee ballot report along with various supporting spreadsheets,” said Windham’s Town Clerk Nancy Merrill in the statement. “The reconciliation process is a common, complex process that is performed not only in Windham, but all New Hampshire communities.”

But no other community had multiple results reported for the same election, critics noted.

“The votes they need to count are the ones that elected these [expletives] who run their elections,” one frustrated GOP state legislator told NHJournal. “They’ve got to go.”

Town Administrator Brian McCarthy downplayed the issue when contacted. He said the reconciliation process is in place to make sure the accurate totals are recorded, though that does not always happen the night of the vote. More time can be necessary to get all of the votes counted and the totals reconciled.

“Those reconciled numbers are the correct numbers,” McCarthy said.

That contradicts both the New Hampshire state constitution, which says all the votes will be counted on Election Day and the results from Windham where the reconciled numbers remained incorrect for part of the day Tuesday.

Not surprisingly, the state’s top election official is curious about Windham’s wandering results as well.

Secretary of State David Scanlan’s spokesperson Anna Fay said the election night counts were confirmed on Tuesday during the recount. The discrepancies in the totals will be investigated.

“The office is looking into issues related to the additional reporting that occurred after the election,” Fay said.

Windham became the epicenter for New Hampshire election conspiracy theories after the 2020 election when vote totals changed drastically in several races after the initial election night count. The months-long controversy ended with the outside audit that found the way town election officials folded the ballots caused the problems.

The folds in the paper ballots made it difficult for optical scan vote counters, AccuVote machines, to record the votes properly, hence the counting errors.

A subsequent state review also faulted local officials for compounding the errors by cutting corners ahead of the 2020 election according to a January letter from New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella and Secretary of State William Gardner to Windham town officials. Windham officials reportedly used an uncalibrated machine to tabulate the votes and skimped on a practice run that would have likely caught the issue before the election.

“(S)imply put, town election officials cut corners. Some of those shortcuts created errors—such as using an uncalibrated folding machine—which were unintentional and perhaps unforeseeable, but ultimately resulted in ballots not being accurately counted,” the letter states.

So far, no other major voting errors or discrepancies have been reported in other communities, though there were several recounts due to the high number of close elections.

Soti said the entire incident shows more oversight is still needed in Windham.

“We’re going to investigate this a little further,” Soti said. “I’m sure the secretary of state is going to ask a few questions.”