You might ask why you’d care whether Wyoming, a state with less than half the population of New Hampshire and ten times the land mass, banned electronic voting machines in favor of hand-counting paper ballots. That’s the plan if House Bill 215 survives the legislative process to become law.
The House Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee is considering a bill that would make Wyoming the first state in the nation to ban election voting machines.
The committee heard a vocal appeal Friday from those in support of House Bill 215, which if it becomes law would make all elections in the state have ballots counted by hand. The committee did not vote on the 43-page bill and will continue hearing testimony Monday.
New Hampshire already has over 100 towns that hand count ballots, but every initiative to lose the machines in towns that use them – of which I’m aware – goes down in flames at the local ballot box. And it’s an odd thing. Nothing the voter does would change. They are already filling out a paper ballot by hand, placing it in the hand-count bin, or sliding it into the machine.
What gives?
These failures are likely no more than the typical issues with local voting. The pro-government union townies show up, but no one else does. Local turnout in non-mid-term or non-presidential years is about 20-25% of the registered voters if you’re lucky. A problem, but you’d also think – an opportunity. If you can get a few hundred people who never vote in a local election to show up and vote your way, you can win any warrant, elect any candidate, and reject spending or bloated budgets.
And it’s still hard to do because most people who don’t vote to keep taxes lower or local government more responsive don’t give a flying frik about voting machines they hardly ever use.
At the state level, there are a number of bills to address eligibility to vote and election data chain of custody, but I could not find any proposed measure to eliminate electronic voting machines in the cities and towns that use them.
I suspect it’s a third-rail problem. After 2020, Democrats who had serially denied the results of previous elections, and some since, turned the term into a red flag. But it’s one someone will have to carry.
Efforts to address inequities in elections have struggled in the state courts. Judges who are lawyers beholden to the oligarchy of the NH bar and its component interests can’t seem to read the constitution in any way that doesn’t appease the rhetorical five families, who have a machine-like obsession with ensuring we can’t have integrity in our elections.
Both sides and many in between, continue to protect out-of-state student voting, a problem at least as big if not greater than machine inequities. You can, after all, hand count the ballots you ran through the machine (but that will include those students who should not be voting in your elections).
New Hampshire hasn’t had a clean election in decades, a trend that will continue until students who can legally vote in another state are prohibited from voting in ours.
It shouldn’t be this difficult.