In an interview with Chris Ryan, one of the foremost experts on computer hacking, Harri Hursti, discusses his audit of the State Representative election in Windham, NH; and responds to the rumors, speculation, and misinformation which was being reported as fact while the Wyndham audit was being conducted.
Harri Hursti is a Finnish born computer programmer and expert on computer hacking, especially the hacking of voting machines. Hursti has participated in TV documentaries which investigated the security flaws in computerized election systems—“Hacking Democracy” (2006) and “Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections” (2020).
An audit was needed in the Windham election because there was a significant difference between the hand count and the machine count of the ballots. Finding out why there was a discrepancy between these two vote counts was the first task for Harri Hursti and the other auditors and the secondary task was to prevent the problem from reoccurring in the future.
The investigation into the Windham election was focused on the discrepancy on the votes for the New Hampshire State Representative, not the presidential race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Hursti and the rest of the audit team found several possible causes for the discrepancy between the ballot totals which were done by hand and those done by machine.
The main culprit seems to be a folding machine which was used to deal with the unprecedented number of absentee ballots in the last election. When the machine folded the ballot across a candidate’s name, it affected how the voting machine counted those ballots.
A secondary factor in the miscount was that one of the voting machines hadn’t been cleaned since 2016. That particular machine had the most errors.
Harri Hursti responded to the wild speculation about voter fraud and quotes attributed to him while the audit was still being conducted.
“Unfortunately, this type of misinformation will go on even after we have submitted our report, so a big part of this job will be to communicate the true findings, true results, and true recommendations.”
Regaining the trust of the voters will be a difficult job because a false narrative of fraud will be perpetuated. Harri Hursti is committed to letting people know the true reasons for the discrepancies in individual elections. He contends that there are so many variables across the country regarding election laws, types of machines, and even types of paper used for ballots that each situation needs to be evaluated differently.