This will be a little about the NH audit, but more about the difficulty of scanning ballots in general. NH is using some of the oldest equipment out there. On the order of your pre windows PC's. Windham Township had 10K ish voters in the last general election. The Audit team has taken all of those ballots and put them through each of their four machines. They got a different total each time and none of those totals matched the general election. The difference was as high as 10% in some cases. No one knows why that's happening yet, and It doesn't seem to be anything nefarious causing it. One current theory is that some of the folds on the mail in ballots were over the ovals for selections and confused the machines. The machines however did not reject the ballot or indicate there was a problem. In my view it doesn't matter. We haven't proved fraud, but we have proved that these machines are unreliable and should not be used for elections. I know this, you aren't using them to count my money.
Accurate ballot scanning is an issue in AZ too but it's much more complicated. It's so complicated that I don't have a complete grasp of the issue and I don't think more than a few people do. Maricopa county has like 150 precincts. They also did something novel where they had several centers where anyone could go vote regardless of where they were registered. That's a lot of different ballots. In those cases the poll books told a high speed printer to print your specific ballot. The failure rate in scanning those was very high. Now you have ballots that have to have some type of special handling.
The Dominion equipment has a judication ability built in that you nor I should like, but Maricopa used a different method to adjudicate those ballots. This is but one of the things not well understood. Special handling means that the system is not going to work efficiently and there's now additional opportunities for the vote to be played with among other issues. In Maricopa it seems that the adjudication may have been done at the printing contractors facility and we are unaware of any observers that were there.
In addition to the high speed printed ballots, the regularly printed ballots had issues too. This gets real fuzzy now. It appears that the further down the ticket you go, the more errors there were. AZ has lots of little jurisdictions so there's lots of down ballot races. These errors were actually noted on the AZ website and are way above Federal standards. these machines are actually flagging errors - at least some of them. Imagine that you accidentally voted for two people in the same race. You would want that to be flagged. Now the scanner doesn't read your vote in another race. It won't likely flag that. It could be that you just didn't vote in that race. If that machine flagged every ballot that lacked a vote in a race, that would be a ton of ballots. On the other hand if it didn't read your vote in that race, your vote didn't count and there's no reporting of that issue. There's a ton of other issues here and I'm not sure I understand them all.
Runbeck, the company that was printing those ballots also printed the Tarrant county mail in ballots. In person we used a touch screen to vote and it printed the ballot, but the mailed ballots had to be of a conventional type. About 30% of our mail in ballots failed to scan due to printing errors. They were hand duplicated and I don't know much else about that process other than it shouldn't have been happening. Runbeck is based in Maricopa county FWIW.
Just a little light reading to start your day. Not that I think a lot of people got this far, but I hope y'all have a great weekend.
