The New Hampshire House and Senate voted overwhelmingly to agree to perform a forensic audit on Windham County voting machines after a recound found that the machines shorted every Republican candidate nearly 6 percent of their votes.
Then last week the city leaders voted for the first member of the audit team.
Bruce Breton, one of Windham’s Selectman, was the only city Selectman who did not vote for Mark Lindeman for the upcoming forensic audit. Bruce voted for computer expert Jovan Pulitzer to be Windham’s forensic analyst.
Last Monday night, the Windham Board of Selectmen held a public meeting to discuss their choice of an analyst for the forensic audit team that will investigate the largest discrepancy between machine and hand counts for any election in the history of New Hampshire. At the meeting, 3 of the 4 selectmen announced their support for the team of Dr. Andrew Appel and Mark Lindeman’s Verified Voting.
It was discovered the next morning that New Hampshire officials selected an operative who alleged the election fraud claims were fake and worked to try to get the Maricopa County audit shut down earlier in the month!
This letter denouncing the Arizona audit WAS SIGNED by Mark Lindeman from Verified Voting!
So the local officials in Windham picked Mark Lindeman who is a far-left operative who has NO RESPECT for the auditing process at all and believes it is unnecessary!
On Saturday a reader tipped us off to another indictment of Mark Lindeman and Verified Voting.
According to an article at Fast Company back in December 2019, a year before the 2020 election, two experts working with Mark Lindeman and Verified Voting quit the organization over claims it was untrustworthy and was providing cover for the companies that make and sell the voting machines.
This was public knowledge and the Windham Selectmen obviously knew about this before they picked the allegedly corrupt organization to audit the 2020 Windham election results.
Mark Lindeman has also been accused of being a toady for the voting machine companies.
Then on Monday New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner chose the second investigator for the Windham audit.
Despite calls and emails from New Hampshire residents to choose Jovan Pulitzer, Gardner disappointed his constituents and chose Harri Hursti, who has years of experience investigating voting machines.
Harri Hursti is (or was) also an Advisory Board member for Verified Voting which is also very concerning.
On Wednesday the two audit teams selected the third member for their forensic audit.
The Lindeman and Hursti teams chose another flack linked to Verified Voting.
Philip Stark was chosen as the third auditor to round out the process.
Via The New Hampshire Department of Justice:
Concord, NH – Pursuant to Senate Bill 43, the Forensic Election Audit Team announces that it has selected its third member. The following members will serve as the Senate Bill 43 Forensic Election Audit Team:
- Mark Lindeman, named by the Town of Windham;
- Harri Hursti, named by the Attorney General and Secretary of State; and
- Philip Stark, named by the two above members in accordance with SB 43.
Philip Stark is a University of California mathematician who made headlines when he resigned from Verified Voting in 2019.
Alternet reported on Stark back in 2019.
Verified Voting, the national advocacy group seeking accountable election results, has been “providing cover” for untrustworthy new voting systems and the public officials buying them, according to an esteemed academic board member who has resigned in protest.
“VV [Verified Voting] is on the wrong side,” said the resignation letter from Philip Stark, a University of California mathematician who created a vote-verification tool being adopted by growing numbers of states that has been widely promoted by Verified Voting and advocacy groups following its lead.
Verified Voting is a heavyweight in election policy circles. It relies on its academic credentials to tell public officials to trust them and to dismiss competing views. To be accused by the inventor of its “gold-standard” audit solution of selling out while states and counties are buy voting technology that will be used into the 2030s is remarkable.
That tool Stark is concerned about is called a risk-limiting audit (RLA). It uses statistics and manual examinations of a subset of hand-marked paper ballots to assess with 95 percent certainty if the election results were accurate. The problem is that vendors have been pushing new voting systems that replace hand-marked ballots with computer-printed ballot summary cards. (The cards display a voter’s choices in text and barcodes. The cards’ barcodes are used to tally results at the process’s next stage.)
Stark and other critics say that the cards produced by a so-called ballot-marking device (BMD) may not be accurate because potentially insecure software sits between a voter’s fingers and the printout. Thus, Stark contends that his audit tool cannot assess if the reported result is correct. Also, BMD systems are far more costly than hand-marked ballot systems, he and other critics have said. They note that the acquisition costs are followed by per-machine service agreements designed to generate millions in annual revenues for vendors.
Stark is the third member of the Windham audit team.
EVERY MEMBER has connections to the controversial Verified Voting organization.
There is also a petition out to remove Lindeman and Verified Voting as an auditor in the process.
We will continue to follow these developments.
