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According to a bill introduced by Republican state legislators, the election method in New Hampshire requires major changes. Many of them questioned the integrity of the last statewide vote.

Perhaps the biggest change will come under House Bill 1064, which was initiated by Congressman Mark Allegro (R-Campton), which requires that every vote must be counted manually. A total of 814,000 votes were cast in last year’s election, 80% of which were counted by optical scanners. Approximately one-third of the cities in the state are manually counted.

Other legislative proposals seek to strengthen the enforcement of election laws, change existing residence requirements, change voter identification procedures, and seek election audits.

Optical scanning equipment has been used by many states for decades and has been rated as reliable by the Secretary of State's Office. In the case of using a voting machine, voters mark the ballot and insert it into the scanner. If the ballots are recounted, the paper ballots shall be retained.

There are no reports of widespread problems with these devices, but Alliegro said that in some towns, the number of electronic vote counting has dropped by a few percentage points. He declined to provide details.

The 10 lawmakers in New Hampshire, all Republicans, are supporting the bill, which would prohibit the use of computers, scanners, or other electronic devices to count and count votes.

There is no estimate of how much it will cost to manually calculate all votes.

"What is more important, some inconvenience, a little extra cost-it is not clear that it will even cost more-or accurate voting?" Allegro said. "No American will honestly say that accurate voting is not the most important thing."

Although Republicans controlled the state Senate and House of Representatives and retained the governorship in the 2020 election, Donald Trump lost the state with 60,000 votes. He claimed that voters in many states fraudulently stole elections from him without evidence. Opinion polls show that many Republican voters believe this statement and question the integrity of the electoral system.

The financial statement of the Alliegro bill states that the requirement for hand-selected voting will result in an increase in the number of workers and the number of hours they must work on election day.

"The New Hampshire Municipal Association does not have detailed information on how the municipality will compensate its workers on election day, but it is believed that most people are compensated in some way, whether by the hour or by allowance," the note pointed out. "The increase in the number of workers and working hours will lead to an indeterminate increase in local expenditures."

Secretary of State Bill Gardner said that the AccuVote optical scanning voting machine has been used in the state for more than 30 years and replaced the older and more problematic leveraged voting or clocking machines. Optical scanners are independent and are not connected to any network. They predate Internet technology.

"The machine is working fine," Gardner said. "They have withstood the test of time. In fact, none of our communities have used this machine, but it has been returned and stopped."

Liz Tentarelli, president of the New Hampshire League of Women Voters, said that misinformation led to allegations of election fraud, which was then used as a reason for changing the voter law.

She said that requiring strict manual vote counting is not a good idea.

"If you are in a small town with less than 5,000 people, you might do this, although it will postpone the voting results until midnight or 2 am, but you can imagine if all the votes for Manchester, Nashua or Concord Must be by hand?

"Our constitution requires votes to be counted on the day of the election or early in the morning. After the polls are over, where can we find people to count thousands of votes and actually get an accurate count?

"We don't think this will promote the election. It will delay the election results. There will be a big impact during the presidential primary election. People hope that we will have immediate results in the nation's premier primary election. There is no evidence that the number of hands is more accurate than the AccuVote scanner."

Recounting votes in manual elections usually produces results similar to the total number of machines.

Sometimes it is thought that small discrepancies are caused by people filling in ballots incorrectly. At Wyndham, there were some cases of improper folding of absentee ballots last year, but the results of the election remained unchanged.

Representative Max Abramson of R-Seabrook believes that election fraud will not be punished, and is seeking legislation to require the Attorney General to prosecute such cases with clear and convincing evidence.

In an interview, he did not list specific examples of not being prosecuted.

"We heard that people voted many times, coming here from the faraway states of Delaware and Pennsylvania and voting in our elections," he said.

According to the Office of the Attorney General, two people have been convicted on criminal charges related to the 2020 election, one for improper voting and the other for criminal intrusion. Three were sentenced to civil penalties, two were convicted of removing political signs, and one was convicted of violating signs and campaign funds. The Attorney General's Office also issued 12 suspension orders.

Abramson was also one of the initiators of an attempt to require a forensic audit of the 2020 election results.

He also stated that he supports a proposal aimed at restricting the current process that allows people without proper identification to vote after signing an affidavit certifying their eligibility.

His concern is that people who voted on this matter sometimes will not return letters sent by election officials to ensure that their affidavits are true.

A bill introduced by R-Hampstead Senator Regina Birdsell would "provide that only residents of the state can vote in elections."

An assistant to Birdsell said that the wording of the proposal has not yet been finalized. It is not clear how it differs from the current residency requirements in New Hampshire’s voting law.

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