Summary
- Our elections are not secure
- No guarantees with ballot-counting machines
- Securing Elections
- Storing Ballots
- Chain of custody
- Solutions and conclusion
New Hampshire’s elections are not safe, clean, or well managed. And I’m not talking about the continuing problem of out-of-staters who have more voting rights than you; but as a reminder, anyone who can legally vote in another state should not be voting in ours. We can’t vote there; they can’t vote here, but let’s try to stay on target.
Two years of trying to fix the problem of securing completed stored ballots has produced what seemed like wins but turned into losses. We may be in worse shape today than we were two years ago, despite the passage of HB 1541, which requires the Secretary of State (SoS) to provide secure containers, tamper-evident seals, and sealable/lockable containers.
Another NH law with no teeth or consequences for failure to comply, and we’re there.
As a primer, if you haven’t read ballot-counting-device issues articles by Al Brandano and Brenda Towne, you should. The state has a legal obligation to open, check, and test the devices used to count our paper ballots. And they don’t just make mistakes because of folds or scatter. The law has been ignored, and the “oh shucks, it’ll be fine” attitude is a problem.
To emphasize the problem and the need, here is your very own Secretary of State, Dave Scanlan, saying something critical to the debate and the need.
“We have never said that those devices are foolproof and that electronic ballot counting devices cannot be hacked”
In other words, it’s possible, and while state law has minimum inspection requirements to improve the odds that they are not or cannot be hacked, no one but a handful of citizens seems to care enough to follow them or enforce them.
But fear not. We have a letter reminding us that the guy in charge, whom we don’t think is doing the job well enough, is convinced we are. The machines are safe, and no one is or can cheat with them… because we have paper ballots.
About that.
Regardless of what the machine does or the results it generates, the paper ballots are the physical record of the actual election. Securing them and their chain of custody is the most important part, and New Hampshire has been dropping this ball repeatedly for longer than I’ve been writing about politics.
Towns are ultimately responsible, but the Secretary of State decides how they must do it. The Voter Integrity Group (VIG) and organizations like the Government Integrity Project (GIP), CNHT when Ed Naile was the chairman, Rich Girard, and websites like this one are the only real forces exposing fraud and working to secure your elections.
HB1541 was a valiant effort and maybe the best they could do at the time, but we have an election in three days, and that’s not where we landed. [Related: NH Not That Interested in Securing Ballot Chain of Custody After All]
The 2026 elections will be the first time we deploy the plastic reusable ballot storage boxes featured in the video above. Get caught up here, including the bait-and-switch. The original “new” containers weren’t perfect; they were better. The ones we are actually using are not the ones shown to the Ballot Law Commission, and the rule changes regarding them solve none of the old problems and create new ones.
One old problem was not using tamperproof tape; it was solved, but then it wasn’t. Another old problem was poorly packed cartons of completed ballots, mislabeled, mistaped, or mishandled, such that the potential for malfeasance was possible.
We got new tape, but last I heard, they are not requiring it.
We got new boxes, but they are not the ones the SoS demonstrated to the Election Law Committee.
The new boxes are reusable and more durable than cardboard, but that is their only redeeming quality. The design isn’t conducive to tamper-proof tape security, and as of this writing, none is required, not even on the label that identifies the box’s serial number and contents.
It is secured with one zip tie/tag (watch the SoS video on how to make and secure the box),
…but that does not prevent access!.
And anyone with access to the same sort of “security tag” (yellow in this video) can cut it, get access, meddle at will, and then resecure it.
Note: New details on this problem added below.
The box label doesn’t have to be tamper-proof taped, per the SoS, so it could be removed and replaced with new totals if anything was added or removed.
If that doesn’t make you uncomfortable, as we reported in October 2024 and reiterated this past week, the SoS changed the chain-of-custody docs before the 2024 elections. Boxed ballots have a time, date, and witness signature at pickup, but nothing after that. They show up at the archive when they show up, and no record of transit time is required to be kept with your ballots.
Left town x at 12:35 pm, and the only reason anyone knows they made it to the archive is if someone goes looking for them and doesn’t discover they are missing.
The legislature needs to address these issues, and the Secretary of State’s office has said as much.
When challenged about the custody document change, the SoS said (paraphrasing), “Well, you can ask the legislature to make a new law to change it back.”
The legislature needs to make laws regarding chain-of-custody documentation, as well as consequences with teeth if the Town, the courier, the archivist, or the SoS fail to ensure the process is followed, audited, enforced, and that your votes have not been tampered with.
We can obsess about machines that count paper ballots all day, but we know machines make mistakes. If we don’t secure paper ballots that can be hand-counted, then we can never ensure election integrity or the published results.
As for Tuesday’s Election. Get out and vote in numbers. Bring people; volunteer to drive people. We need victories that make meddling too dangerous because the gap is too large – in every election, not just this one.
New Details: I learned, in time to add this before publication, that at least one NH State Senator and the State DOJ have been introduced to the problem with the new containers (in front of SoS staff, so they know). And since this is a federal election, they can’t ignore federal law or rely on a lax interpretation of state law.
I’m not sure what that will look like. These are the containers we’re using for the midterm ballots, and someone needs to decide how to secure them to prevent anyone from getting their hands into them before Tuesday. If I had to guess, Frankenstein tape monsters again.
