An election audit in New Hampshire may be the pebble that diverts the stream

By Andrea Widburg

I've shied away from reporting on events in Maricopa because it would require more hours than I have in a day to track intelligently the back-and-forth in that recount.  My touchstone there is the fact that the Democrats' and NeverTrumps' ferocious efforts to stop the count strike me as the actions of people with something to hide.  Otherwise, they'd be there helping to prove they're right.  Events in a small town in New Hampshire, though, are more interesting, because a low-key audit may reveal serious election anomalies harming Republicans.

Windham, New Hampshire, a town of 14,853 people, has long been a stalwart Republican stronghold in an otherwise Democrat state.  As was the case throughout New Hampshire, it relied on AccuVote machines to collect and tally its 2020 votes.

When the election in Windham ended, Kristi St. Laurent, the Democrat candidate, had lost by only 24 votes.  With that close a margin, she naturally demanded a hand recount.

The hand recount revealed something peculiar: St. Laurent hadn't lost by 24 votes; she'd lost by 420 votes.  In a small election, that meant that her margin of defeat wasn't 0.005% but was, instead, 9.6%, which is a significant loss.

That same recount revealed an even greater anomaly: across the board, in every Windham election, Republicans had been shortchanged, and Democrats had been overcounted:

Windham election results by Ken Eyring.

Those kinds of numbers manifestly demanded a full recount, which is what's happening now in Windham.  And as with counts and recounts elsewhere, funny things are happening — not funny-ha-ha, but funny-peculiar:

An audit team sent to conduct a forensic examination of the 2020 election results in Windham, N.H. started the process off well enough on Tuesday. But by Wednesday, they hit a major snag: The live stream cameras that had been broadcasting the audit room around the clock went offline for close to 90 minutes, potentially obscuring any problematic intervention.

The team decided Thursday morning to reinspect the ballot machines on camera in an attempt to maintain observers' faith in their process. They needed to determine whether the machines had been tampered with over night when the cameras mysteriously went down.

Even if the camera failure is nothing, the consistent Republican deficits cannot be shrugged off as a series of random errors.  When a "mistake" repeatedly runs in only one direction over a separate series of events, the hand of man becomes apparent.

New Hampshire was called for Biden, but if the "mistake" was state-wide — that is, if Republicans were undercounted and Democrats overcounted in every county — perhaps Biden didn't win New Hampshire.  And if he didn't win New Hampshire, maybe he didn't win in some other states called for him, either.

Our elections need to be tightened — and doing away with voter ID is not the way to do it.  Although I seldom look to England for anything good lately (sorry, England, I once loved you as only a true Anglophile could), its approach to voting is superb and getting better.  Funnily enough, though, that's one policy that the left — which is always anxious to show how badly America measures up to the rest of the world — doesn't want to copy.

Image: Windham Town Hall by John Phelan.  CC BY-SA 3.0.