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With control of the State House down to a razor-thin margin, Secretary of State Dave Scanlan announced Thursday he plans to look again at one of the already recounted races, potentially returning a seat to the GOP.

On Monday, Democratic hopes of winning control of the House of Representatives were boosted when a recount of Hillsborough District 16, Manchester’s Ward 6, appeared to show incumbent Republican Larry Gagne lost 22 votes, handing a one-vote victory to challenger Maxine Mosley.

Almost immediately, however, Republicans suspected an error had occurred. Vote changes of more than a handful of ballots are rare. Rarer still are candidates losing votes in a recount. Scanlan, a veteran of many recounts, also took note of the unusual numbers.

“It’s unusual if it changes by more than 10 or 11 votes,” he told NHJournal.

Thanks to an audit of the district, it became clear that some 20 to 25 ballots were missed during Monday’s recount, bringing into question the results. Scanlan released a letter Thursday explaining the situation.

“Ballot counting will be continued in Hillsborough County state representative District 16 recount. The routine reconciliation process indicated that reconciliation and recount number were not equivalent,” the statement read. “The total number of ballots cast and counted for the office of governor in this district is greater than the total accounted for so far for the [Gagne v. Mosley] race. This indicates some ballots have not yet been counted in the recount.

“As a result, the process of recounting the ballots cast in that race will now continue on Monday, November 21, at 4 p.m.”

Republican House members told NHJournal they are pleased, but not surprised, by the decision. And they are very confident Gagne will ultimately hold the seat based on his original 1,820 to 1,797 margin.

“Every vote matters and should be counted. Anyone afraid to finish the recount should be questioned as to what they are afraid of finding,” said Rep. Ross Berry (R-Manchester). “This is a direct result of Republicans demanding transparency in our elections, and I look forward to bringing more sunshine into our voting process. The voters I represent in Ward 6 have a right to know all of their votes will be counted.”

There have been 17 recounts thus far, with a total of 29 currently scheduled, in the wake of last week’s midterms. Scanlan said it was a difficult decision to reopen the recount given the heightened scrutiny of the election process. But his office has more data available this year than in past years thanks to increased efforts to make sure the election results are accurate.

“It’s important that we get everything right,” Scanlan said.

The secretary of state has also created the Special Committee on Voter Confidence to examine concerns about election integrity in the state. While the committee has not found any evidence of widespread voter fraud, its final report has yet to be released.

Republicans currently have a one-seat majority in the House. A race in Rochester is tied. As a result, a Gagne win would be a significant development in determining control of the lower chamber.

Some candidates, mostly Republicans, requested recounts in races where they trailed by more than 100 votes, and it is extremely unlikely those outcomes will change during a recount. 

Manchester’s Ward 6 race isn’t the only one getting another look. Scanlan also announced 27 absentee ballots found in the Rockingham District 6 race could change the results. Democrat Eric Turer beat Republican Melissa Litchfield 1,213 to 1,198, a difference of 15 votes. However, an audit of that race found 27 absentee ballots were not counted on election night or during the recount this week.

Scanlan is asking the New Hampshire Ballot Law Commission to order the 27 absentee ballots be counted and made part of the total.

It is a situation that echoes the 2020 election fiasco in Bedford, where election officials failed to count 190 absentee ballots and then attempted to hide their mistake from the general public.

All the hullaballoo over West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s steadfast opposition to the Democrats’ so-called “Build Back Better” spending bill distracted from a broader point with more far-reaching implications: it never had to get this far.

Because the U.S. Senate is evenly divided 50-50, any one of the Democratic senators in Washington could have put the brakes on this disastrous spending boondoggle at any point in time, including New Hampshire’s own Maggie Hassan.

Make no mistake, this is all political. Maggie Hassan doesn’t have the will to stand up to the left-wing progressives in her party like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Granite Staters will be left holding the bag, again.

During her first five years in the Senate, Hassan has been a reliable and loyal Democratic rubberstamp. This year alone she has voted for 100 percent of the Biden agenda. Think about that for a second; failing to reign in a pandemic he promised to crush, soaring energy prices, supply chain challenges with no end in sight, a surrender in Afghanistan that turned us into a global laughingstock. Sen. Hassan has been behind Joe Biden every single step of the way.  There is not a shred of independence in her political constitution.

In doing so, Hassan has broken the promise she made to Granite State voters during her 2016 campaign. Back then, she declared, “I will never fail to stand up to leaders in my own party as I have.”

If only those words had been more than campaign rhetoric. Hassan knew what she was doing when she said them. She is well aware New Hampshire’s electorate is nowhere near as left-wing as her voting record in office. To win statewide as a Democrat you must cloak your true liberal worldview until after the votes are cast, and then hope that flashy campaign ads will help voters forget by the next election.

Last week Hassan turned heads when she came out in favor of eliminating the Senate filibuster, long a priority of her party’s restless left flank. But no one should have been surprised. After all, in her heart of hearts, Sen. Hassan is a left-wing ideologue. But above all else, she is a politician who will say or do anything to get re-elected.

That is not – nor has it ever been – my style. I am not a polished politician; I am a public servant. I spent 33 years in the military, rising to the rank of brigadier general. I served 10 tours in Afghanistan. I love this country and it saddens me our state is represented by someone who lacks political courage. These times call for it and unfortunately, Sen. Hassan has failed us as a leader.

It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to recognize Joe Biden is not only out to lunch, but he’s wildly out of step with New Hampshire. Next year there is a reckoning brewing for anyone who has aided and abetted Biden’s many failures. The political tab is coming due, and Sen. Hassan is in big trouble.

Maggie Hassan is a political insider and career politician. To send her packing, Republicans need a non-establishment outsider. I’m hopeful New Hampshire voters will offer me the opportunity to be that change vessel because the status quo and the Biden-Hassan agenda isn’t working for any of us.

Documents obtained by New Hampshire Journal confirm Bedford town officials discovered still more mishandled ballots in September 2021 and, like the 190 uncounted ballots from November, are attempting to hide their discovery from the public.

Meanwhile, an attorney with the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office has told NHJournal it is preparing to begin an investigation into the matter.

Bedford Town Manager Rick Sawyer sent members of the Town Council an email on Tuesday informing them more ballots from the 2020 election were discovered by town staff, who kept their existence secret until this week.

“I am making you aware that the Town Clerk (Sally Kellar) just walked into my office with an envelope that she says contains cast ballots from the November 2020 election and that were found in a voting box in the September 2021 Special Election and handed to her,” Sawyer wrote. “I advised her immediately to contact the town attorney and the appropriate state officials. If it is as described, these ballots were counted in the election but would not have been available for the recount. I don’t know why notification was not made immediately in September.”

Sources tell NHJournal town election officials have no plan to reveal this information to the public. It’s still not clear how many ballots were discovered in this second incident, and they refused to answer questions about the ballots, or even acknowledge their existence to NHJournal.

The 2020 state Senate election in Bedford was close enough for a recount between incumbent Democrat Jeanne Dietsch and Republican Denise Ricciardi. Dietsch called off the recount halfway through, leaving Ricciardi with a 409-vote margin.

Town officials say the 190 uncast absentee ballots they discovered last November and hid from the public for nearly a year would not have changed any election results.

Kellar hung up when asked questions about the ballots on Tuesday, after saying that no ‘uncast ballots’ were found, an apparent attempt to mislead the reporter. Sawyer, Town Moderator Bill Klein, and Town Council Chair David Gilbert, and Vice-Chair Bill Carter were all contacted for this story. They all failed to respond.

Senior Assistant Attorney General Anne Edwards said Wednesday her office is aware of the latest ballot problem in Bedford and is looking into the matter.

“Yesterday, we were made aware of an issue regarding ballots in Bedford. At this time, we do not have detailed information. We will be investigating this situation,” Edwards said. 

Senior Assistant Town Moderator Brian Shaughnessy played a leadership role in the November 2020 general election and now admits that he — and not the Attorney General’s Office — is the source of the decision to keep the mishandled ballots secret from the public and town council. But on Wednesday, he told NHJournal he was completely unaware of the discovery of any additional ballots or a second snafu.

“I’m a volunteer that gets appointed at the election,” he said. “I would not normally be kept in the loop.”

The town enacted a series of election reforms after the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office investigated, Shaughnessy said. He blamed the issues from 2020 on the unprecedented number of absentee ballots cast during the pandemic election. 

“It was a unique situation with 7,700 absentee ballots,” he said. “We generally don’t need 50 volunteers to open envelopes.”

At last week’s Town Council meeting, Shaughnessy insisted he and the other election officials “did the right thing” by keeping the story about the 190 ballots a secret for nearly a year. 

“We don’t work for you,” was Shaughnessy’s answer when councilors asked why elected representatives of Bedford’s citizens were left in the dark. Klein acknowledged those voters “were disenfranchised,” but he stood by the decision not to inform them.

Developing….

A year after the election that swept President Donald Trump out of office and New Hampshire Republicans into power, some 190 ballots cast by Bedford voters remain uncounted, NHJournal has learned.

The misplaced absentee ballots, which were discovered just days after the November 3, 2020 election, were kept secret from Town Council and the voters impacted for a year.

Town officials claim in a letter sent to the disenfranchised voters they kept the blunder secret under orders from the state Attorney General’s office, then headed by AG Gordon MacDonald.

The AG’s office disputes that claim.

“In reviewing this matter, this Office concludes that these 190 absentee ballots would not have impacted the outcome of any of the races on the ballot in Bedford during the 2020 general election,” Myles Matteson of the Attorney General’s office wrote Bedford town officials in a letter dated October 21, 2021. A copy of that letter is being sent to the 190 or so residents who cast votes last November by Bedford Town Clerk Sally Kellar and Town Moderator William Klein.

Those ballots remain unopened and uncounted.

According to Matteson, the existence of the uncast absentee ballots was discovered soon after the election.

“Deputy Clerk [Gloria] Mac Vane was reconciling the number of ballots distributed with the number of ballots cast. During this process, she discovered that there was a difference of approximately 190 fewer ballots cast than the number distributed. The amount of absentee ballots recorded received was 7,917. The total number of absentee ballots recorded cast was 7,727,” Matteson wrote.

“On November 8, 2020, Deputy Clerk MacVane attributed the cause of this discrepancy to a mistake made during the processing of absentee ballots on election day [sic].”

Because the ballots were kept secret, they were also kept out of the Bedford recount in the state Senate District 9 race between then-incumbent Jeanne Dietsch and newly-elected Republican Denise Ricciardi. That recount was held on November 1o, after the uncast ballots were discovered.

Dietsch called off the recount when the results began to benefit Ricciardi. Ricciardi’s official victory as reported by the Secretary of State’s office was 17,920 to 17,511, but that doesn’t include changes discovered in the uncompleted recount.

Why weren’t the ballots simply counted on November 8? Why was their existence kept secret? Why weren’t they used in the recount?

Kellar and Klein point the finger at the Secretary of State and Attorney General.

“When we discovered [the uncast ballots], we immediately reported it to the New Hampshire Secretary of State,” they wrote in their letter to the impacted Bedford voters. “We were advised to keep these ballots secure and to wait further instructions before taking any further action. The following week, we were informed that the matter had been referred to the NH Attorney General’s office for investigation. The Attorney General requested some information from us and we submitted it on November 19, 2020.

“We were told not to discuss this with anyone, not even the town council because it was a pending investigation,” Kellar and Klein said.

Officials in the AG’s office say they never instructed the town to keep the incident secret from either the Town Council or the general public.

This story is unfolding with the ongoing debate over the legitimacy of the 2020 election in the background. Political insiders with knowledge of the events speculate that decisions made by the Attorney General’s Office may have been influenced by events in Windham when voting machine error caused a significant error in the first results reported. Supporters of Trump’s frequently-repeated (and frequently debunked) claims the election was stolen due to widespread election fraud have used the Windham incident to support their calls for a statewide election audit in New Hampshire.

“The Attorney General’s Office saw this unfolding and they didn’t want to add fuel to the fire,” one source suggested.

MacDonald is currently serving as Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court.

NOTE: This story has been updated to include new information revealed by the Attorney General’s office, and later confirmed by town officials.