Yesterday, voters in the tiny town of Greenland, New Hampshire, had an opportunity to vote for change. The ballot measure was to move from AccuVote machine counted elections to hand-counting ballots.
Nearly 1200 people turned out to vote (in a town of 4000), but only 120 of those votes favored hand counting.
Only 120 people, or 10 percent of those casting ballots, voted in favor of the measure to ban the use of Accuvote machines and require all ballots be counted by hand. 1,077, or 90 percent, voted against it.
The measure was put on the ballot after a petition was filed with the signatures of 52 registered voters, according to Marguerite Morgan, Greenland’s town clerk and tax collector.
The AccuVote machines have been at the center of several controversies, including the now-infamous Windham Incident. That little disaster resulted in the discovery of hundreds of votes that appeared when a hand count was performed. The audit blamed a folding machine used for vote by mail ballots.
Not everyone is convinced that was the issue.
Voters in Greenland, however, seem content with the results.
