A New Hampshire town will hold a special election on whether to ban the use of voting machines in local, state and federal elections and return to counting ballots by hand.
The election, scheduled for Saturday, will be held in Greenland on a citizen petition filed earlier this year. Similar attempts to ban voting machines are under way in Hampton and Kensington, and a bill calling for a statewide ban was filed in the Legislature, Seacoastonline.com reported.
“I believe there is merit to consider banning the machines we use solely in the interest of caution,” Douglas Wilson, who led the petition, said at the town’s Nov. 13 deliberative session. “I have full confidence in the town of Greenland and the poll watchers. ... When it comes to the machines, I don’t know.”
Greenland has a little over 4,000 residents, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.
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Interest in banning the machines grew following an audit of a legislative race in Windham. The audit was requested after a losing Democratic candidate asked for a recount, which showed that Republican candidates got hundreds more votes than were originally counted.
The discrepancy drew the attention of former President Donald Trump and his supporters in their effort to find evidence of his wider unfounded claim of election fraud from 2020.
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The audit showed the cause of the discrepancy was not the AccuVote machine, but a separate letter folding machine used to send out absentee ballots. The machine folded the ballots through vote bubbles in the legislative race, causing miscalculations when they were fed into the voting machines.
Republican Gov. Chris Sununu told Seacoastonline.com that over 800,000 votes were cast in New Hampshire last November.
“There were 16 recounts, and all verified the winners. New Hampshire’s election process continues to be a model for the rest of the country,” he said.
