GREENLAND, N.H. (AP) — A New Hampshire town has resoundingly rejected a proposal to ban the use of voting machines and return to counting ballots by hand.
Voters in the town of Greenland on Saturday defeated a citizen petition that would have stopped the use of voting machines in all local, state and federal elections. Seacoastonline.com reportsthe vote was 1,077 against to 120 in favor of the proposal.
Town Clerk Marge Morgan told the news outlet that turnout was higher than expected and officials had to print more ballots. Greenland has a little over 4,000 residents, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.
Similar attempts to ban voting machines are under way in Hampton and Kensington, and a bill calling for a statewide ban was filed in the Legislature.
Interest in banning the machines grew following an audit of a legislative race in Windham. The audit was requested after a losing Democratic candidate asked for a recount, which showed that Republican candidates got hundreds more votes than were originally counted.
The discrepancy drew the attention of former President Donald Trump and his supporters in their effort to find evidence of his wider unfounded claim of election fraud from 2020.
But the audit showed the cause of the discrepancywas not the AccuVote machine, but a separate letter folding machine used to send out absentee ballots.
