With just over 4100 residents, give or take, Greenland New Hampshire is small, even by New Hampshire Standards. Not as small as Dixville Notch (population 4) or the teeming metropolis of Harts Location (about 68), but it’s not large, which makes it a good candidate for manually-counting ballots, and that’s the issue at hand.
A petitioned warrant article is up for a special election vote this Saturday to determine if the town will, henceforth, count ballots at every election by hand. None of those dreaded, maligned, Dominion (Diebold) AccuVote voting machines.
The little beasties that scan ballots (badly by many accounts – here’s NH’s most famous, btw, The Windham Incident) and whose operators have something of a monopoly interesting vote-counting in the Granite State. Hundreds of towns use them, and in 2020 there were more than a few examples of miscounts and foolishness. But nothing – as the governor will attest – that changed any results, but that’s like saying I got the COVID vaccine and didn’t get myocarditis.
Sure, but tens of thousands of others did, and more than a few thousand of them died. So, hey, let’s not worry about that, no big deal. And that’s the tack of those opposed to the special election in Greenland to remove the machines.
Related: Let’s Go Back to Punch-Cards and Butterfly Ballots
It’s a non-problem from where they sit, so why fix it?
Okay, but why not fix it?
Voting rights are meaningless without voting integrity, and AccuVote and Dominion (and all the tentacles) have developed a reputation for distrust. Hand counting is a New England Townhall tradition. Lots of places actually get together in one building every year and talk about town business and then vote in person with their “hands,” which are counted.
But wait, there’s more!
Guess what they do when the machine vote is too close, or a candidate wants to challenge it? They hand count the ballots, no matter how many there are, and that seems to work great for whoever gets their way.
And when they don’t well, you can vote on that too, which is what this plucky little Portsmouth “suburb” is doing. And if that’s still a concern to the pro-machine counted elections faction, the vote this Saturday to remove the machines … will be calculated on the machines.
If the vote result is against hand-counting, you’ll be pleased, and if the vote is for scrapping the machines, you’ll be vindicated.
If your machines counted their demise, you could hardly complain about their accuracy.
Hey, you could always ask for a hand recount.
