Much has been written about my petition (warrant article 23) to ban voting machines in the town of Rye. After researching election guidelines, RSA’s, and responsibilities for elections in our town and state, my concerns are ever-increasing and justifiably so.
Research into the auditors selected by the Town of Windham and the Secretary of State substantiated many of my concerns.
Right-to-know requests verified that not all procedures mandated by New Hampshire RSA’s are being followed, and the NH Department of Justice confirmed that ownership and oversight responsibility of Electronic Ballot Counting Devices (voting machines) and programming oversight of the machines rests with the towns or jurisdiction for which they are being used.
Auditor, Harri Hursti, Verified Voting Board of Advisors, in a signed affidavit in 2016 acknowledged developing ‘Hursti’s Hacks’, a series of four tests demonstrating how voting results produced by Diebold Election Systems voting machines could be altered. He further stated “Optical scan machines can be hacked in a manner that changes election outcomes…” and “Optical scan voting machines can be manipulated by attackers who are able to modify election-specific settings on the memory card.”
Hursti concludes that “optical scan votes face a serious threat of being hacked in ways that can alter the outcome of an election… The only way to reliably detect such attacks on the election results is to recount ballots manually, without reliance on potentially hacked election equipment.” Hursti’s Affidavit is readily available in the public domain and I encourage all to read it.
Andrew Appel, Verified Voting Board of Advisors, published in 2018, “Ten Ways to Make Voting Machines Cheat with Plausible Deniability.” Appel concluded that “No method is perfect. Any way you mark a paper ballot for optical scan, there’s a way to cheat. But the attempted cheating on hand-marked optical scan ballots is detected and corrected by Risk Limiting Audits (RLA’s). Many of these ways to cheat cannot be detected by so-called ‘digital’ audits…
You cannot check whether a computer is cheating if you’re relying on the computer to tell you what’s on the paper.”
Auditors Mark Lindeman, Verified Voting CO- Chairman, and Philip Stark published in 2012, A Gentle Introduction to Risk Limiting Audits, in which they acknowledged the “ limitations and vulnerabilities of voting technology, including the accuracy of algorithms used to infer voter intent, configuration, and programming errors and malicious subversion.”
Given that Lindeman, Hursti, and Stark performed the New Hampshire (Windham) audit and given that the audit revealed significant and disturbing flaws, though intentional cheating was dispelled, perhaps election officials should pay attention when these very same auditors tell you our elections are not secure without appropriate measures in place. Risk Limiting Audits are in the foreground of those measures and the State of New Hampshire does not perform RLA’s.
Subsequent to familiarizing myself with election referenced RSA’s, I filed a 91A- Right to Know request with the Town of Rye for which I wished to see the paper trail of oversight relative to our voting machines and LHS Associates of Salem New Hampshire, a foreign-owned entity responsible for selling, maintaining and programming our voting machines in Rye.
The findings concerning the activity logs documenting machine oversight further justified my concern and raised more questions about our election integrity than they answered. Further, the January 7, 2022 response issued by the Secretary of State and Department of Justice admonishing town election officials in Windham for failure to follow procedures coupled with Andrew Appel’s “New Hampshire Audit part 1&2” reviews exposed the very liabilities every city, town, and voting jurisdiction using Optical Scan voting machines in the State of New Hampshire faces.
Finally, it has been confirmed by the NH DOJ, that neither the Secretary of State nor the Department of Justice has responsibility for the LHS Associates programming or oversight of the programming of “memory cards” used in our Optical Scan machines. Responsibility for the “memory Cards” rests with the individual communities and jurisdictions which own and utilize the machines.
Let that settle in.
The foreign entity, LHS Associates, alone, writes the memory card program code which is then inserted in the very machines that determine 100% of our election outcomes. Yes, the machine’s tape is printed after each election declares the winner.
Further, highly regarded auditors cited above have substantiated these cards can be misprogrammed or configured with nefarious algorithms, undetectable and undiscoverable without RLA’s.
New Hampshire performs NO Risk Limiting Audits. In short, most people believe in the old adage, “Trust but Verify.”
We in the Town of Rye and across the state are being asked to trust with no possible way to verify short of hand-counting ballots.
Personally, I am not opposed to the use of Optical Scan machines accompanied with paper ballots, when the proper preventative measures are being taken, RSA’s are being followed, proper oversight is being applied to programming by LHS Associates, and proper Risk Limiting Audits are in place. Without these necessary safeguards, please do not ask the citizens of Rye to just vote and hope for the best.
