New Hampshire’s aging ballot scanners pose challenges. Problems could prompt conspiracy theories

When New Hampshire voters cast their ballots Tuesday in the nation’s first primary, many will do so using scanners that are at least 15 years old — some of which may date back to Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Election experts say the outdated AccuVote vote tabulators used in about half of the state’s towns and cities pose no additional security risks. The concern is their age.

With a dwindling supply of replacement parts, failures on Election Day could cause headaches for local election officials, who may be forced to count ballots by hand — a process that could delay the reporting of their results. Disruptions and delays in counting ballots in other states in recent years have sometimes been used to advance conspiracy theories undermining public confidence in the vote, despite no evidence of widespread problems with voting machines.

Franklin, a small city about 20 miles north of the state capital, has no wiggle room if something goes wrong with its scanners.

“We have three machines and three polling stations. That’s it, no backup,” said Olivia Zink, a Franklin City Council member who is also executive director of the voter advocacy group Coalition for Open Democracy. “If one falls, we count by hand.”

Zink, who will work at her local polling place on Tuesday, said she is less concerned about hand counting, even though turnout is high among the 4,500 registered voters, because the ballot includes only the presidential primaries. She urged everyone to be patient as results are not forthcoming. One potential problem: When it snows or rains, damp ballots could interfere with the ballot scanner.

“When it’s a sunny, beautiful day, we’re in great shape,” Zink said.

Reducing the chance of a major disruption is the voting itself, with only a single race and a state requirement that the counting of ballots continue uninterrupted until it ends. New Hampshire will hold primaries for state and local races later this year.

All New Hampshire voters mark their ballots by hand, but how those ballots are counted depends on the city or town. Just under half choose to count manually and have done so for years, but these are among the least populous in the state. The most populous towns and cities use machine tabulation, so most ballots cast in the state are counted electronically using the AccuVote scanners.

The same type of ballot scanners are used by local voting jurisdictions in five other states, according to Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group that tracks U.S. voting equipment.

“You could say it’s primitive technology. You could say it is simple and reliable technology. Both things can be true,” says Mark Lindeman, the group’s director of policy and strategy.

He said New Hampshire’s tabulators have been kept in good condition and the biggest challenge for election officials is finding replacement parts. He sees the worst-case scenario if local election officials have to resort to hand counting because a tabulator isn’t working and they don’t have access to a backup.

“In the worst cases, that’s a pretty good situation,” Lindeman said. “The ballots are secure. This will not prevent New Hampshire voters from voting or prevent New Hampshire voters from having their votes counted.”

Still, any problems with voting machines or voting devices provide an opening for those who want to cast doubt on the outcome. Former President Donald Trump, who won the Iowa caucuses this week but faces a potentially tougher test in New Hampshire, regularly indicates that expected close elections will be “rigged.”

His false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, have spawned a tsunami of conspiracy theories about voting machines.

“If there are major failures and the results come very late, and if there is no information in advance for the public that we might have to count by hand and what that entails – in the worst case, the vacuum that is created could allow people to come up with conspiracy theories and wonder what the results are,” says McKenzie St. Germain of the voter organization America Votes NH.

In Derry, south of Manchester, councilor Tina Guilford this week tested her eight calculators to ensure they worked properly and ballots were counted correctly. It’s a process that’s being repeated across the state as local election officials prepare for primaries.

Derry’s tabulators are approximately turn-of-the-century technology — each about 20 to 22 years old, Guilford said. The city agreed to purchase replacements that officials hope will be installed by March, when new tabulators will be certified for use in the state.

Derry, with its nearly 20,000 registered voters, doesn’t need all eight AccuVote scanners at the same time, so they have options if one is taken out of service, Guilford said. It’s happened before, when hand sanitizer destroyed a machine in 2020 during the pandemic.

“I don’t foresee any problems,” she says.

Secretary of State David Scanlan, New Hampshire’s top elections official, said he has encouraged local officials to ensure they have enough staff to conduct any manual counts.

It is expected that each jurisdiction will have to count some ballots by hand, given Biden’s decision to skip the state’s primaries in favor of a revamped Democratic schedule that elevates South Carolina above Iowa and New Hampshire. This has prompted him to launch a write-in campaign, and any ballots with write-in candidates will have to be counted by hand.

In recent years, hand counting has become favored among those pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 election as they seek to ban voting machines and electronic tabulations. Although hand counting is used in some parts of the country, it is usually done in small jurisdictions where the process is manageable.

Last year, New Hampshire lawmakers rejected a proposal that would have required all votes to be counted by hand.

Experts say machines are not only faster, but studies have shown they are more accurate. Many election officials rely on some degree of hand counting as part of their post-election process to verify that the machines were working properly.

Scanlan said he has encouraged voters to understand that it is not unusual for some machines to have problems, and stressed that election officials have plans to deal with them, even if it means a delay in releasing results.

“That just happens in every election,” he said. “I would expect that this election will be no different than any other election we have held in the past.”