Scanlan told the House Election Law Committee:
"...from a practical point of view, we don't want to create language that will eliminate the use of these machines."
Here is the language in that bill that the Secretary of State's office thought would "eliminate the use of these machines":
Before approving any voting machine or device, the ballot law commission shall, following a public hearing, find that there is clear and convincing evidence that the voting machine or device being examined has been designed and manufactured with adequate safeguards to insure the integrity of election results.
Other citizen-supported legislation the Department of State testified against in 2007-2008 included the following:
- HB 138: would have required full public disclosure of voting technology information. Deputy Secretary Scanlan suggested
"we can't require disclosure because the vendor won't go for it" and "we can't make drastic changes like this too quickly".
Turning his back on public observability, Scanlan suggested this bill should only be considered if it was amended to limit access to voting software code to a select group of people. - HB141: would have allowed voters to choose paper over electronics. Contradicting his own previous public statements that voting machines "don't count every ballot" and only hand counting ensures that every ballot is counted, Secretary Gardner testified in a public hearing on this bill:
"such a change might result in a ballot not being counted."
Several local election officials testified against the bill, arguing that machines count better than humans, and Deputy Secretary Scanlan, outside of the hearing made public remarks that "activists" would "sabotage" election night counts by standing outside polls and convincing people to choose hand counting. - HB192 FN: would have required election night checks and balances on voting machine counts, by requiring a parallel hand count on election night of at least one race for all machine count towns. (In 2006 the NH Fair Elections Committee had requested that this particular check and balance be included in the Secretary of State Election Procedure Manual, but the Office of the Secretary of State refused to do so.) Ignoring the astronomical and ever rising costs of electronic voting, and foreseeing discrepencies between hand and machine counts, Deputy Secretary Scanlan testified against this bill stating:
" We are concerned with the requirement to have to hand count. This will place increased costs on municipalities....And a discrepancy in the count is of concern."
- HB574 -FN-L: would have required all machine count jurisdictions to preserve electronic vote data held on the memory cards used in voting machines for the 22 months required by federal law. This would have clarified that e-vote data falls within this requirement for preservation of voting records, which Asst. Attorney General Jim Kennedy has already stated is the case. Playing up costs versus accountability, Deputy Secretary Scanlan testified against this bill, stating:
" We are concerned that each polling place must purchase multiple cards from which each costs $250. If the information can be transferred to disc, who will be responsible for that and where will it be stored? The card probably requires a special adapter to record information so do we buy one for each town or just for the Secretary of State office?"
- HB285: would have protected the public interest by forbidding any officials from entering into nondisclosure agreements having to do with electronic voting equipment or contracts. This bill was retained so that it could be gutted and replaced entirely with a completely different bill, as described below.
Minutes from the Election Law Committee note that most of the bills listed above were recommended to be killed so that they could be taken up in subcommittee later in the session.
Reports from numerous members of that committee indicate that in fact, the strategy spearheaded by Committee Chair Representative Jane Clemons (D-Nashua), in which she persuaded the committee to kill ALL proposed legislation so that subcommittees would combine the best parts of each proposed bill into one single omnibus bill, was a ruse.
Seasoned legislators have stated privately that this was a disingenuous suggestion, pointing out that history shows that once a Committee recommends killing a bill it more often than not remains dead. But Clemons prevailed, taking advantage of the large number of newly elected legislators.
The result was that the only bill passed by the NH House was HB285.
This bill, reportedly largely written to the specifications of the Office of the Secretary of State, sets up a committee to work on election technology - a committee with no citizen representation, whose members are all appointed, and which has no mandate to even consider voting rights (citizen oversight, checks and balances) but rather to simply sharpen the election focus on technology-based elections.
The Secretary of State has appointed as Chair for the committee the same man who sponsored and spearheaded the 2004 ballot redesign legislation discussed above.
And sadly, as mentioned above, the Secretary of State responded to concerns about transparency that had been raised by citizen observers during the 2008 Primary Recounts, by lobbying for amendments to existing bills, to cause the following changes in election law, which will further obstruct checks and balances and citizen oversight of elections:
RSA 660:1 Application. Allows a recount to be requested in a state general election to be requested only if the difference between the applying candidate and the candidate declared elected is less than 20 percent of the total votes cast in the district.
RSA 660:2, IV State General Election Recounts; Fees. Allows the secretary of state to require a person applying for a recount to pay any estimated costs prior to commencing the recount.
RSA 660:3 Number of Recounts. Allows a recount to be requested in a state general election to be requested only if the difference between the applying candidate and the candidate declared elected is less than 20 percent of the total votes cast in the district.
RSA 660:7 Application. Allows a recount to be requested in a state primary election to be requested only if the difference between the applying candidate and the candidate declared elected is less than 20 percent of the total votes cast in the district, and allows a recount to be requested in a presidential primary election only if a candidate received at least 9 percent of the total votes cast.
