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Trump Campaign Taps NH Activist Touting Fringe Conspiracies

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.

Windham Elections Under Review – Again – After Discrepancies

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.”