In small New Hampshire town, election still rages
Trump jumps into dispute started by state legislature race
WINDHAM, N.H. — Meetings of the Windham Board of Selectmen are usually as sleepy as they sound — a handful of residents from the New Hampshire town, a discussion of ambulance fees, maybe a drainage study.
So when a crowd of about 500 people showed up last week, some waving American flags, carrying bullhorns and lifting signs questioning the presidential election, Bruce Breton knew things were about to change.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Breton, who has served on the board for 18 years. “The groundswell from the public is unbelievable.”
The crowd at the Monday meeting had been fired up by conservative media, which in recent weeks has seized on the town’s election results for four seats in the state House as suspect. The attention, fanned by a Donald Trump adviser who happens to be a Windham resident, has helped a routine recount spiral, ultimately engulfing the town in a false theory that the national election was stolen from Trump.
It doesn’t seem to matter that Republicans won all four state House seats in question.
The dust-up shows just how far Trump’s election lies — and the search for evidence to support them — have burrowed into American politics, even the most local. Like House Republicans in Washington fighting over what some call the “Big Lie” and lawmakers in Arizona conducting a partisan “recount,” this bedroom community is still wrestling with the aftermath of 2020.
The trouble started when Kristi St. Laurent, a Democratic candidate for the state House, requested a recount after falling 24 votes short in the November election. Instead of gaining a few votes in her House race as she expected, the 53-year-old physical therapist learned that the recount showed that four of the Republicans each received an additional 300 votes. Laurent lost 99 votes.
“You expect everybody to go up a little bit so these results were pretty alarming. … These were just crazy results,” she said.
The discrepancy inspired the legislature to take up the matter. Lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a bill authorizing an audit of the town’s ballot counting machines and hand tabulations. Republican Gov. Chris Sununu signed the bill and insisted that “New Hampshire elections are safe, secure, and reliable.”
Conservative media outlets and Trump supporters saw things differently. They viewed the results in Windham, a town of 16,000 near the Massachusetts border, as a chance to prove that something more nefarious was amiss. If things were suspicious in Windham, maybe they were across the state and beyond. They just needed evidence.
On Thursday, Trump joined the fray, congratulating “the great Patriots” in Windham “for their incredible fight to seek out the truth” about fraud that he alleged, without evidence, had affected the New Hampshire races and his own reelection contest.
In 2017, he claimed that he and former Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte would have won in New Hampshire the previous year if not for voters bused in from out of state. There is no evidence to support that claim.
Corey Lewandowski, a Trump adviser who calls Windham home, said the large turnout at the board meeting showed that voters are “gravely concerned that the election system is not properly secured and that there is the potential at least for results that don’t align with what voters want.”
Sununu pushed back on Trump’s comments, calling New Hampshire a model for how to do things right.
“A discrepancy of 300 votes out of over 800,000 cast does not define massive voter fraud by any means. We passed a bill, we’re going to do an audit in Windham. If anything, I think the fact that we focus on 300 votes goes to the integrity of our system.,” he said. “We have the best system in the country, a system where will do any audit even if it’s over a couple hundred votes. And it’s not for President Trump or Chris Sununu or Joe Biden, it’s about the citizens who cast the vote. That’s why we do the audit, to make sure every vote is counted.”