Election auditors Windham, New Hampshire, are saying that some of their latest findings are “large enough to account for discrepancies” in the Nov. 3 election results for four state representative seats.
Auditors said they found “experimental confirmation that if the contest is undervoted, a fold through a vote target can create a vote.”
Harri Hursti, another auditor, wrote on Twitter that testing proved folded ballots were misinterpreted by machines.
“Test decks proved that foldings across a vote targets is misinterpreted as additional phantom votes or subtracts votes due to false overvotes,” he wrote in a post.
AccuVote didn’t respond to a request for comment about the audit authorization. The AccuVote machines’ intellectual property is owned by Dominion Voting Systems.
Windham’s four state representative seats were all won by Republicans on Election Night. The presidential election was not an item for this audit.
An automatic recount was done, resulting in St. Laurent losing 99 more votes after a hand recount. Meanwhile, four Republicans gained about 300 votes each.
The other three Democrats gained between 18 and 28 votes.
The audit team said that more issues could be involved besides folded ballots being misinterpreted.
“The fold effect is large enough to account for discrepancies, but might not be all that’s going on,” the team said on Twitter on May 22, adding that “75 folded ballots voted straight Republican. Only 48 votes recorded for them. Folds generated overvotes. This is machine used on Election Day [for] most absentee ballots.”
Another machine was found to have “an even more dramatic problem” by the auditors, who said that only 28 percent of the votes for Republican candidates were counted.
“The work is not completed yet. While the folding seems to be a strong contributor it clearly is not the only factor,” Hursti said on Sunday. “For example: We have observed vastly different error rates on two machines processing the same ballots. Work continues.”
