The cue to vote in Franklin’s Ward 2 lasted, for some residents, as long as 45 minutes. Over 200 ballots were cast within the first two hours of the day.
The election room, in the lower level of Franklin High School, remained full throughout the morning.
Turnout at that point in the day proved similar to past midterms, said Glen Feener, the assistant moderator. The poll workers are more than well equipped to handle the rushes that come their way, he added.
“In a busy election, the more people you have, the better off you are because you can keep that flow going and just utilize your bodies,” he said.
Just past 10 a.m., New Hampshire’s Secretary of State David Scanlan arrived at the Franklin polls and shook the hands of sign holders outside and poll workers inside. He went behind the railing, clearly marked “No Electioneering,” to see if everything was going smoothly.
Scanlan, with former U.S. Congressmen Charlie Bass and Richard Swett in tow, traveled around the state Tuesday to observe polling locations and ensure fair practices were in place amid a busy turnout.
The first location Scanlan ventured on Election Day was his own polling place in Bow, where he said there was a 30-minute long line. He said that location and the others he observed have had no issues.
“We have to give a lot of thanks to the people that are willing to step up and do these jobs because we can’t run an election without citizen participation,” he said.
Concerns around election integrity have circulated the nation since the 2020 elections, continuing to follow every election since. Last week, a group of ten lawmakers called for more inspections on the ballot machines used in state elections, eliciting a written response from Scanlan.
New Hampshire uses paper ballots that are counted by state-approved machines, manufactured by VotingWorks and Liberty Votes. The tallying machines are not connected to the Internet or to other machines, Scanlan reiterated in his letter.
“The unfortunate thing about what’s happened recently is that the group chose to do it right before the election started, which has the potential to create chaos and concern, voter confidence going down,” he said on Tuesday. “So we respond very quickly with all of the things that we have done to make sure that the machines can be trusted.”
In Franklin, ballots are checked thoroughly by poll workers scanning them in the machine in different rotations — face up, face down, backwards — to make sure it gets an accurate count each time, Feener said.
“The whole idea is to make this a fraud-proof election,” he said. “As an election worker, you need to stay impartial. I don’t care how it goes. It’s part of the process….At the end of the day, who wins and who loses, it comes down to the count, and that’s helped by voter integrity.”
Bass and Swett, a Republican and Democrat respectively, both serve as co-chairs on the Democracy Defense Foundation, which aims to restore faith in the transparency and security of the election process. A poll done by the Foundation found that 82% of likely voters felt confident in New Hampshire’s election process.
Yet doubts still circulate around election integrity across the state, something Bass chalked up to the spread of misinformation on social media.
“What we will do, to the extent that we can have an impact on the process, is support those issues when they when misinformation is disseminated, and secondly, if there is an issue, be well aware of it and be able to talk intelligently about how it will be resolved,” said Bass, who formerly served as the U.S. Representative for Congressional District 2.
Recent laws that have been challenged in the courts, such as proving U.S. citizenship and disallowing student IDs as acceptable identification, have stoked conversations about voting restrictions in the state.
On the student ID law, which was recently upheld, Scanlan said he has heard little negative feedback from students themselves and does not believe it will have “a dramatic impact” on their ability to vote.
“There’s two important things with voting: We want to make sure that everybody that’s qualified is able to exercise the right to vote in a reasonable way, but the other side of that is that every voter has the right to know who’s participating in the election and that those people are qualifying,” he said. “So when people have to show some evidence of those qualifications, it just instills confidence without placing a big burden on the process.”
Swett, who also previously served in the U.S. House of Representatives, said the public’s trust in government is the lowest he’s ever seen since his political career started in the 1980s. He said he wants to work across the aisle to find solutions and regain trust.
“I’m trying to find any way I can with anyone like Charlie [Bass] that I can to build that confidence and remind people that we are the greatest country in the world. We have the best system of government in the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, and we need to continue to improve upon what we have,” Swett said.
