Key NH Officials Agree to Allow Known Fraud Possibilities in NH Communities Using the AccuVote, with no Way to Deter or Detect It
dsumneri...@gmail.com
Posted by Deborah Sumner
The opinion to allow known fraud possibilities with no way to deter or detect it is now unanimous. On July 26, the Ballot Law Commission agreed with the Secretary of State, Governor Sununu, the previous Attorney General (now NH Supreme Court Chief Justice) Gordon MacDonald, Derry town clerk and moderator, Derry state representatives and Senator, all 11 Republican members of the current House Election Law Committee, the House Republican leadership, the Executive Committee of the Town and City Clerks Association, the NH Supreme Court (specifically these judges: Gary Hicks, James Bassett, Robert Lynn (currently a state representative from Windham), Linda Dalianis, Carol Ann Conboy, Superior Court Judge John Kissinger, AND the US Department of Justice in 2018-20.
NOT their job, they say, under the US and NH Constitutions or laws, which they ALL take an oath to follow, to protect AGAINST known fraud possibilities with over voted ballots. AND, they are all complicit in choosing to hide any evidence IF the fraud occurs.
This is the June 26 request of the Ballot Law Commission, which unanimously decided it “had no jurisdiction” to ask for the US Attorney for NH to conduct the investigation the Attorney General chose not to do.
June 26, 2021
To the Ballot Law Commission,
Since the NH Attorney General has taken no action on this investigation request and your commission has authorized use of the election system NH uses, I respectfully request you ask the US Attorney for NH to investigate (see Dec. 2, 2020 request of AG enclosed), to take appropriate action and to prosecute individuals if warranted. Since there are at least four known possibilities for fraud with over voted ballots, see list below, it is essential that the US Attorney 1) determine this alarmingly high number of Derry over voted ballots shows no evidence of fraud 2) recommend how to ensure constitutional voting rights are protected in NH.
It appears the US Attorney for NH, as the state’s chief federal law enforcement officer, would be the proper department to investigate this and report its finding to you and the public. It also appears that NH has been violating RSA 659:64 for a number of years without any election official reporting that violation to the Attorney General.
RSA 656:42 gives you authority to establish rules for vote-interpreting computers so “that election laws may be complied with as far as possible.” This investigation by the US Attorney for NH will give you information you need to fulfill your responsibility to NH voters and candidates.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-nh/election-fraud
I request your response to this request within 30 days.
Thank you.
Deborah Sumner
copies: NH Voting Rights Election Integrity Group, NH Voter Integrity Group
Four KNOWN possibilities for fraud with the AccuVote Optical Scan:
A. An attack could bypass the pre-election ballot testing and, during an election: turn off under-and-over vote notification. It could selectively disable over vote notification or selectively provide false over vote notification for favored or disfavored candidates. VSTAAB, 2006 http://nob.cs.ucdavis.edu/bishop/notes/2006-inter/2006-inter.ps
B. Someone with access to ballots could add a tiny spot of invisible/ultraviolet ink to the oval for the PREFERRED candidate. The voter wouldn’t notice it. If he/she voted for ANOTHER candidate, the scanner would read it as an over vote and be it would be invalidated. A vote for the PREFERRED candidate would likely be counted as valid.
C. Prior to recounts, over vote marks could be added to ballots (also possible in locations not using the AccuVote).
D. Voters might mark malicious patterns on the ballot that could trigger a dormant Trojan horse and cause a compromised computer to start cheating. (p. 71, Source Code Review of the Diebold Voting System)
From: Deborah Sumner
Subject: Request for Investigation, high overvoted ballot rate in Derry/absentee ballots statewide
Date: December 3, 2020 at 9:48:17 AM EST
Cc: "Edwards, Anne" <Anne.E...@doj.nh.gov>, Jane....@doj.nh.gov, "ChongYen, Nicholas" <Nicholas...@doj.nh.gov>, barbara Glassman Gerhard Bedding
December 2, 2020 (sent by regular mail, emailed Dec. 3)
Re: Request for Investigation, high overvoted ballot rate in Derry/absentee ballots statewide
Dear Mr. MacDonald,
1) We ask you to use your authority under RSA 656:42 IV to investigate an alarmingly high overvoted ballot rate in Derry for the November 2020 election. Derry reported a total of 6,428 absentee ballots of 18,100 ballots cast. Some would be overseas ballots and others tallied by hand.
Enclosed is information from the eight computers used. Computer one tabulated ONLY absentee ballots (572 over voted ballots, 14.2%); other absentee ballots were counted by other computers, with a 4.7% overvoted ballot rate when totals are combined (848 ballots). Computer 5 also showed a high overvoted ballot rate, 5.8%.
You should be able to confirm the numbers with the town clerk.
In November 2018, Derry mostly tallied its absentee ballots on one computer, with an estimated 5% overvoted ballot rate for that computer.
2) Are absentee ballots statewide showing a significantly higher voter disenfranchisement rate than election-day ballots?
3) If so, why? What are your recommendations for decreasing these numbers?
As we told you in September 2017, folds in absentee ballots may be misread as overvotes, there are many instances of computers misreading valid votes as overvotes and there are fraud possibilities. One can be targeted to absentee ballots where the voter’s party affiliation is known.
Since then, we have been doing some checks of overvoted ballots in various towns, but prior to this discovery, the highest was 2.5% in Jaffrey in the Nov. 2012 election.
NH doesn’t require reporting of overvotes and neither law nor the SoS requires local officials to print that information for the general election. (Only 2 of Nashua’s 9 wards had the requested overvote information available, 143 overvoted ballots of 10,702, 1.3%). It is impossible to know why or how many NH voters are being disenfranchised compared with other states or if certain races are impacted more.
Both Vermont and Massachusetts program their computers to notify election-day voters of a computer-read overvote or completely blank ballot so they can choose to request a replacement ballot and have their votes counted. NH doesn’t.
VT reports overvotes for each contest and each locality, as you can see here.
https://sos.vermont.gov/media/heqnbco5/generalofficialresults.pdf
Overvote rate for President on election night was 278 of 370,968 ballots cast, .075%.
MA has recently completed its 3% post-election audit and found a total of 7 overvotes for all races counted on election night (100,349 ballots/over vote rate of .007%). Additional overvotes found in the audit (68 total for ALL races) were mostly attributed to 73 ballots not counted on election night.
https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/elepostelection/postelectionidx.htm
https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/elepostelection/2020-Audit-Report-Narrative.pdf
In NH, we are finding overvoted ballot rates almost always exceed 1%. Ballots may contain more than one error, thus disenfranchising voters for more than a single contest.
All three states had more absentee ballots this past election, but we see significant overvote voter disenfranchisement only in NH.
We ask that any review of Derry ballots be a transparent, public process and that your findings include recommendations to policy makers, election officials and or the Ballot Law Commission, which makes rules for the use of computers in NH. RSA 659:64 requires that NH enfranchises as many voters as possible. Appeal of McDonough, 149 N.H.105, 112 (2003).
Thank you. Please let us know if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Deborah Sumner. Barbara Glassman, Gerhard Bedding
(Note: Contact info removed)
Copies: Derry Town Moderator, Ballot Law Commission, ACLU-NH, DOJ attorneys-Anne Edwards, Jane Young, Nicholas Chong Yen