The State requires no personnel background checks or oversight on LHS Associates and its practices.
Neither the Department of State nor the Legislature has implemented meaningful procedural or statutory checks on the technology. Most local election officials implement no meaningful procedural checks on the technology. In fact, most local election officials, having no guidance otherwise from the Secretary of State, misuse the technology by scanning even absentee ballots, despite a known defect that causes the technology to miscount, not count, or double count, folded and creased ballots.
A notable exception is Danville Moderator, Wally Fries, who each election conducts a parallel hand count to check against the machine count.
For many years, citizens in New Hampshire (specifically the Fair Elections Committee) have tried - unsuccessfully - to convince the Department of State and the NH Legislature to institute meaningful checks and balances to ensure the integrity of our elections given that a private corporate entity has unconditional control over the count of nearly 90% of our New Hampshire votes.
In 2006, the New Hampshire Secretary of State gave unconditional approval for known defective voting technology.
In 2007, in California, the Secretary of State decertified the same defective voting technology, allowing only conditional recertification with the implementation of procedural checks and balances. The State of New Hampshire ignored a plea from citizens for NH to respond in kind. The state not only did not schedule a rehearing, it did not respond at all to NH citizens' urging for a review and reconsideration in light of the California reports and actions. Not a word.
Defective Technology Approved for Use in NH Elections
In NH, the Ballot Law Commission is responsible for approving voting equipment. This Commission is by law (RSA 656:42) required to establish rules governing their approval process.
The Commission's own rule (Bal 608.01) states:
"The commission shall approve the request following a public hearing if the commission finds that adequate safeguards have been provided to ensure the integrity of election results and the machine or device complies with these rules and the election laws of the State of New Hampshire."
In 2006, Diebold affiliate LHS Associates submitted voting technology firmware for approval by the NH Ballot Law Commission. At the public hearing, LHS Associates President, John Silvestro, testified that the technology contained 16 critical defects, which had been identified in a report commissioned by the California Secretary of State as rendering the technology highly vulnerable and at unacceptable risk for tampering, failure, and fraud.
A transcript and video of the hearing shows the following interchange between Mr. Silvestro and Commissioner Gregory Martin:
Commissioner Martin: Do you know whether Diebold has responded to the [California] report of Feb. 14th?
John Silvestro: Yes, they have responded, and there is, they are going to address all of the concerns that are identified in there. There will be a new release of the firmware, which will address all of the concerns, with digital encoding and the arithmetic problem that's on the memory card.
The issue you have before you, and someone might, you might ask your follow up question would be why don't we wait till that, so I'm gonna give you the answer, before you ask that, I'll even answer it. Here's why you can't wait. I might actually have a product in sixty days, okay, and we may actually talk to the Secretary of State about coming back in to do this whole process again. The problem that we have is, is that we have all the machines we need to replace the firmware with. And no-one controls those independent test laboratories.
So before those fixes will be put in the field, they need to go through the independent test laboratories and all of the software and all of the source coding needs to be verified. That might take 30 days, might take 60 days, might take 90 days. We are under a timeline in that we have a November election. So we might well be back in here with a version of the firmware that Diebold has addressed all of the identified items in that report prior to November if time constraints allow for us to go out and replace the firmware. We may not be. So I think we need, to be prudent, it would be to go forward from here, and then evaluate the situation and keep in contact with the Secretary of State's office and let them know where we are in the process.
