CONCORD — The world is so filled with conspiracy theories about elections these days that a new commission designed to instill voter confidence in New Hampshire may have to settle for taking indirect aim at the problem.
“People who are trying to cast doubt on elections are probably not going to be refuted by the facts. The people who listen to them and believe them — (they) are our target,” Bradford Cook said during a Tuesday news conference about the new group, which he will co-chair with former U.S. Rep. Dick Swett. “Some people are incurable, but it’s the people that are listening to them that are curable.”
Over the next months the group will hold “listening sessions” around the state to hear people’s concerns. “We’ll be separating the wheat from the chaff; find out what concerns are real and what concerns are imagined,” said Cook, a New Hampshire attorney who chairs the state’s Ballot Law Commission.
One thing the group is unlikely to do, Cook said, is directly challenge false or unsupported public statements about the validity of New Hampshire elections. “If we hear something that we don’t think it’s true, I don’t think it’s our job to argue with people,” he said.
The eight-person commission will eventually make suggestions that could include recommendations for future legislation or policy changes, such as instituting random audits of ballot-counting machines.
The commission was created by Secretary of State David Scanlan, a longtime assistant secretary of state overseeing elections who moved up when Bill Gardner retired last year after 45 years in the position. Scanlan said Tuesday the commission was necessary because New Hampshire is seeing more public doubts about election results.
“New Hampshire had been bucking the national trend for some time. We could see the decline in other parts of the country in terms of confidence, but New Hampshire’s confidence remained pretty high. That trend is now hitting New Hampshire,” Scanlan said.
That trend was enflamed by problems with the last election in Windham, where several hundred improperly folded ballots were not counted by machines, and in Bedford, where 190 absentee ballots were not counted but the news was not released by officials for months.
“The problem with losing voter confidence is you start to see a drop in voter participation. If you lose voter participation, it starts to become more difficult to govern. People lose confidence not just in election but in institutions of our government. That’s what we’re facing,” Scanlan said.
Swett, a member of Congress from 1990 to 1994 and a former U.S. Ambassador to Denmark, said the problem runs deep.
“Truth is no longer truth. It’s just a story that someone holds … that has become part of their narrative,” Swett said. “What we are hoping is through transparency, through engagement, through discussion, we can begin to get the community to agree on common truths again.
“It’s not going to be easy but it’s absolutely necessary.”
Although the procedures and timetable for the commission are up in the air, Scanlan and the two co-chairs said the group’s most important function will be to educate the public about how elections work in hopes that it will allay worries born out of insufficient information.
Scanlan, who said he will “talk to anybody, anywhere,” will give a presentation about the commission at the Portsmouth Rotary Club oat 12:40 p.m. Thursday.
“If through this commission we can talk to as many citizens as we can … and together, find a way that builds back a foundation of trust, then we have an opportunity … to use New Hampshire as a shining example to the rest of the country as to how we can do these elections in a way that binds the community together, not divide it,” Swett said.