In her office across the street from the New Hampshire Capitol, Olivia Zink shuffles through papers recently to reveal a letter she’s received from an irate neighbor in Franklin who supports former President Donald Trump and was questioning the integrity of elections.
“What’s scary about this letter is that this letter says that we’re guilty of breaking the law. It says that we processed absentee ballots incorrectly because they have to be notarized. But absentee ballots do not need to be notarized. They need to be signed,’’ she said. “I think that that’s concerning when election workers receive these letters. I mean, you can see, it’s hand-addressed to me.”
Zink is the executive director at Open Democracy, a New Hampshire-based nonprofit focused on campaign finance reform and the freedom to vote. The organization was founded by Doris Haddock, better known as Granny D, who walked 3,200 miles across the United States in 1999 to champion voter rights.
Now Zink is concerned those rights are facing strong political headwinds — and people who administer elections in New Hampshire are deeply affected. Threats have grown so ominous, she says, that many poll workers have resigned or retired, leaving about 40 communities short of staff for the Nov. 5 presidential election.
Zink says while there have been shortages in the past, including election 2020, the gap has widened in 2024, based on telephone calls and surveys of local election officials around the state.
“We have seen threats and intimidation of some clerks. Some got phone calls after the last elections threatening their lives and their families,’’ she said. “That’s just really heart wrenching because these are really good people that are doing the right thing.”
People like Zink are trying to do the right thing in this New England state where Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump are in a neck-to-neck battle. Harris is leading Trump by just 2 points in New Hampshire, 47.2 to 45.2, within the margin of error, according to four combined polls published by The Hill.com.
Across the state, political tensions are high. Since Trump was defeated in 2020, he has loudly insisted that the election was stolen, despite a plethora of evidence showing he lost. The “Big Lie,” as it has been called, has motivated his supporters to not only question election processes, voting machines and absentee voting, but to cast suspicion on election workers.
In New Hampshire, doubts about election integrity also were fueled during the 2020 elections in Windham when officials found a 400-absentee vote discrepancy, feeding conspiracy theories and prompting threats against election workers. Trump cited Windham as a prominent example of election fraud. However, a state audit later found that the election was “well run under challenging circumstances, and we confirmed the number of ballots cast to within two ballots.”
But that audit hasn’t allayed concerns among doubters.
Among incidents, a town moderator was assaulted last year at a polling location during town and school elections. A 52-year-old woman was indicted and faces seven years behind bars. The case is still pending. Zink says the woman was angry when a ballot didn’t fully go into the machine.
“Sometimes a voting machine jams, but it’s not a reason to punch the election worker,” she said.
New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan, a Republican, told GBH News that state officials struggle with misinformation and confusion fueling voters’ lack of confidence in the system. For example, he said voters are worried about early voting by mail because of what they hear on national news, even though that option is limited in New Hampshire.
“We’re constantly putting out our own messaging about where voters can go to seek out a trusted source of information,’’ Scanlan said. “When it’s related to the elections process, that would be the secretary of state, the attorney general, or their local election officials.”
A recent test of voter integrity
Franklin is a 30-minute drive from Concord, up Interstate 93 and along backroads through Northfield and Tilton, where several large Trump signs mark the way.
It’s a largely conservative city, with a population of nearly 9,000. Although President Joe Biden won New Hampshire as a whole in the last presidential election, most Franklin residents voted for Trump.
Like elsewhere, many of Trump’s supporters here believe the 2020 election results were flawed. But officials in the tiny hamlet proudly point to a recent recount of a local race as an example why even the most skeptical voters should have faith in the election process and in those who carry it out.
In early October, 35 people strolled into the Franklin Elks Lodge for a hand-by-hand recount of the Ward 3 City Council race that was tied, 153-153.
After an hour of counting votes that had been originally tabulated by machine, the result was the same: 153-153. The candidates then drew numbers from a plastic Halloween pumpkin bucket to determine the winner.
“No one fought, no one argued,” said ward clerk Debbie Gibbs.
Franklin City Clerk Michelle Stanyan, who supervised the process, said the recount demonstrated the efficacy of voting machines.
“These machines are great. … They’ve checked out perfectly in the three [recounts] that I’ve done,” Stanyan said.
But Werner Horn, sitting in the audience, came to a different conclusion. The former three-term Republican state representative made national headlines in 2019 when he stated on social media that “owning slaves did not make you a racist.” He told GBH News during the October recount that he also believes that challenging the literal mechanics of elections or voting machines, does not make him undemocratic.
“If you have a paper ballot, then if there is a reason to suspect the machine may be flawed, the paper ballots would be a backup to be hand counted,” he said.
Stanyan agrees that paper backups are critical for recounts. But she still hopes that voters will not demand counting every ballot by hand in elections — as some are insisting in places where voting skepticism runs deep.
“They’re like, ‘those machines don’t work.’ And we’re like, ‘listen, they’re not connected to the internet. They basically are dinosaurs. They have to be decades old at this point. They have three buttons and an on and off switch. The screen will tell you if you get an overvote. It’s very small, very simple.’”
Statewide, there’s little evidence of voting malfeasance. The state’s Election Law Unit recorded 12 cases of wrongful voting since 2022, and 15 convictions since 2016. Among the few people found guilty of election fraud was a former Republican state representative, Troy Merner, who pleaded guilty in August to two misdemeanors for wrongfully voting.
Stanyan says she too has faced criticism from skeptical voters, but she is concentrating on doing the best job she can.
“A lot of people know that we try our hardest because no matter what an outcome of an election, it’s not worth my livelihood. It’s not worth my life,’’ she said. “I would never intend to do anything that is not perfect.”
New Hampshire’s new voting restrictions
Despite the lack of evidence of voter problems, New Hampshire Republicans have been pushing to make it more difficult for people to vote.
Last month, Gov. Chris Sununu signed into law one of the most restrictive voter ID efforts in the country — requiring that people registering to vote to produce a passport, birth certificate or naturalization documents. The law, that would go into affect after the November election, would replace a current one allowing voters to sign an affidavit saying they are citizens.
The law is one of the legal efforts in Republican-led states that purport to thwart the possibility of non-citizens voting — though such instances are extremely rare.
Speaking on GBH’s Under The Radar, New Hampshire radio host Arnie Arneson said the requirements purposefully sow confusion. Though the most recent law will not go into effect until a week after the Nov. 5 general election, Arneson said a lot of people may not know that.
“Who this ultimately was targeting were students in community towns like Durham, like Hanover, because they know that they are new to New Hampshire, and therefore, in order to create barriers to voting, they wanted to embrace this idea of creating an opportunity for a passport, a birth certificate or naturalization papers,” Arnesen said. “Anything that makes it more challenging to vote.”
Last summer, Scanlan told members of the state New Hampshire Legislature that the then proposed law was not “unreasonable.”
Last month, New Hampshire Youth Movement, a nonprofit focused on issues affecting young people, filed a federal suit against the secretary of state to block enforcement of the law, describing the restrictions as unconstitutional. The case is pending.
Scanlan told GBH News that as long as election officials carry out their assignments at polling places “fairly and efficiently,” voting will run smoothly on Nov. 5.
“We’re suggesting that local election officials be as transparent as possible through the entire Election Day process and help educate voters when they go through the polling place, because there are many checks and balances that are at play,” Scanlan said.
In 2022, Scanlan created a Special Committee on Voter Confidence to identify root causes of problems and address them.
Zink, who is a committee member, says as part of her work she has traveled across the state — some 1,000 miles — to talk to people, many who she says are misinformed.
“We heard about people stealing ballots from drop boxes and we don’t even have drop boxes in New Hampshire,’’ she said. “This makes me deeply concerned.”
Zink suspects that the drop box misinformation, which is still being circulated online, is one of the talking points promoted by Make America Great Again political activists nationwide to cast suspicion on the balloting process.
New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice found similar correspondence around the country sent to election workers questioning drop boxes, absentee voting, and the authenticity of elections.
“I know that it’s a form letter and that these are the same complaints that individual voters are submitting around the state and I assume around the nation,’’ she said. “I’m sure that they’re getting their information from bad actors that want to sow distrust into our election process.”
She says the state needs to do more to help fill vacant polling positions across the state. To offset departures, her group has posted flyers seeking new workers.
“We need to find good people willing to step up and become election workers and get trained,’’ she said.
But Zink says she and others like her are planning to keep working to make sure everybody who is legally allowed to is able to make their vote count. And she wants the public to appreciate what is required to make elections work.
“It’s important for people to really understand that election workers in New Hampshire safeguard the process for people to participate,'' she said, ”and your local moderator, your town clerk and the folks that are the ballot clerks are really doing an amazing job to ensure that our elections are safe and secure.”