I spent yesterday morning through mid-afternoon at the NH Division of Archives and Records Management for the recount for Gargiulo and Altschiller. She’s one of the “Assault Twins” who [allegedly, cough, cough] hip-checked Second Amendment supporter Susan Olsen hard into a table after a gun control hearing in the NH House.
GraniteGrok was (once again) asked to come to record at least some of the activity, and with ten recount stations rolling and activists from the Democrat, Republican, and Conservative NH groups, a LOT was going on. And no, not everyone was happy about it, with four cameras and a lot of moving around. (reformatted, emphasis mine):
State Senate recount not popular
After performing recounts of 28 races for seats in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, the one-state Senate recount was less popular. Republican Lou Gargiulo of Hampton Falls lost by more than 3,600 votes to state Rep. Debra Altschiller of Stratham for the District 24 Senate seat that Democrat Dr. Tom Sherman of Rye left to run for governor. Since it’s not close enough, Gargiulo will pay for the cost of the recount.
The unpopular part came Wednesday when Gargiulo’s team challenged every single absentee ballot cast, whether it be a vote for Gargiulo, Altschiller, or nobody at all in that race. Dan Richard, a conservative activist, said Gargiulo authorized him to challenge the ballots on the grounds that none of them have the attending affidavit someone must fill out to cast an absentee ballot.
“None of these are valid,” said Richard, who has filed a constitutional lawsuit against the state’s use of electronic ballot counting machines and other ballot practices.
State election officials point out the absentee affidavits are routinely separated once the absentee ballots are taken out of their envelopes.Secretary of State David Scanlan had to bring state staff and volunteers back Saturday after the Thanksgiving holiday in hopes of completing this recount.
In the first 10 House recounts, three changed, two flipping from a GOP winner to a Democrat and a third going from a one-vote Republican win to a tie. Those three races and others go before the Ballot Law Commission Monday. The last 18 House recounts all confirmed the original winner.
No, not everyone was happy – as I was setting up my Mevo camera at a “table end” station, one of the ladies, after I had gracefully said good morning as I was setting up my small Mevo camera to overlook her and her work partner’s goings on for the day, snapped at me “What is that thing – a microphone?” (many people think it is just that).
I replied, “No, it’s a camera.” She glared at me and responded to my earlier “How are you” with:
“I was a lot better before this thing arrived!”.
Heh!
So, I have 24 odd hours of video to process (4 cameras X 6 hours) – most of it is quite boring. But there will be more “blog fodder” arriving on this in the next few weeks. Having never been at an official recount before, I learned a lot, at least at the superficial level. I will tell you that I will be asking to learn quite a bit more.
It’s clear, however, I’m going to need a bigger pool of cameras if GraniteGrok is asked to do something like this again and do a better planning job. But hey, it’s part of our citizen journalism mission, right?
I will dryly note that at no time did I see Kevin Landrigan on-site. Not that it matters, and I may have missed him if he slipped in and out, but my eyes never fell upon his visage.
(H/T:UL)
