November 15 – Secretary of State David Scanlan’s staff and volunteers have completed a week of legislative recounts, confirming eight consecutive victories for candidates declared winners on election night.
Two of the closest last Thursday and Friday ended in a split decision for the political parties, with five-term state Rep. Linda Tanner, D-Sunapee, abandoning her recount bid to Republican Sunapee George Grant Jr. lost by 16 votes.
On Nov. 5, Grant was declared the winner of Tanner in this district, which includes the city of Sunapee, by 14 votes.
During the recount, Grant picked up three, while Tanner received one more vote.
The other closest was in Strafford County, where Rep. Heath Howard, D-Strafford, was confirmed to win his second term, trailing former Republican Rep. Kurt Wuelper, R-Strafford, by 16 votes.
The margin remained the same, although Heath and Wuelper each received one vote during the recount.
“Thank you so much for your efforts,” Howard told a volunteer after the recount, which took nearly four hours.
The other completed recounts confirmed Democratic victories on Thursday.
In Nashua Ward 5, Democrat Sanjeev Manohar won the third seat in that district by 72 votes over Republican Paula Johnson after receiving six votes during the recount.
In the Grafton County town of Campton, Democrat Janet Marie Lucas won by 23 votes over Republican Jon Gablinske.
On election night, Lucas had won by 28; she took one during the recount, while Gablinske added six.
During an interview, Wuelper said he was surprised how many voters “balled” for one candidate in his district, who elected three to the 400-member House.
Rep. Len Turcotte, R-Barrington, topped the ticket in this district, receiving about 150 more votes than Wuelper.
Rep. Cassandra Levesque, D-Barrington, finished in second place.
“I saw one pile of 130 votes and twenty of them were removed by the bullet; that is almost one in six people who did not vote for three votes,” Wuelper said.
The state used to have a direct ballot, which allowed people to put one check mark at the top of the ballot, giving everyone who was a member of that political party a vote.
When Democrats took control of both houses of the Legislature, they eliminated the practice in 2007.
“I just wonder if this is a case of voter ignorance, or if some candidates in both parties are really making efforts to get people to vote for them alone,” Wuelper said.
The ballot papers explicitly state how many candidates will be elected per office.
Rep. Joe Alexander, R-Goffstown, said his city council pushed the message of voting for all four Republican candidates after a Republican lost to Democrat Judi Lanza by seven votes in 2022.
All four Republicans won in Goffstown on Nov. 5, with Lanza finishing in fifth place with 180 fewer votes than she needed to keep her seat.
Paul Twomey, a former New Hampshire Democratic Party legal adviser and legal observer, said on Friday he was very surprised that Vice President Kamala Harris won the state while Republicans gained more seats in the House of Representatives.
“In many other states, the reverse was true, that the political parties outperformed the Harris campaign,” Twomey said. “Here it was the exact opposite.”
In 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump in the Granite State by seven points, but the election flipped the state House majority from blue to red.
The Republican Party in the House of Representatives now has a 222-178 for the next two years, a big improvement for Republicans over the past two years when the margin between the parties was in the single digits, closest to the House of Representatives. Delegates in 150 years.
klandrigan@unionleader.com
