Open the hood on voting machines
The Ballot Law Commission meets Thursday, Sept. 17, at 1:00 p.m. at the State Archives, 9 Ratification Way, Concord. Go. The Commission approves the machines that count our paper ballots. Those machines are not finished.
In 2023, the Commission conditionally approved VotingWorks and Dominion/Liberty if they finished the highest federal certification — EAC VVSG 2.0 — by Dec. 31, 2026. Neither has. VotingWorks is still under test. Liberty’s Dominion-line certificates are VVSG 1.0, a 2005 standard. The state lists 113 towns and wards on Dominion/Liberty and 96 on VotingWorks.
Neither vendor publishes a full list of hardware and software in the field. Neither does the state. An EAC sticker is a lab test of what the vendor mailed in, not a field test of the unit in your town hall. Dominion/Liberty code is proprietary. Yet the Secretary of State’s office oversees programming those devices, is treated as the verifier, selects the post-election audit under RSA 660:35, and under RSA 665:1 clerks the Commission that reviews the same machines.
Paper is only as good as the chain of custody. New Hampshire has logged tape and seals that lift without a mark, incomplete logs, missing signatures and timestamps. A recount counts whatever is in the box.
Ask the Commission for a parts list and a field test: what the vendor said is in the box versus what is in the box. Ask the Legislature to split the Secretary’s jobs. The referee should not also own the scoreboard.