New Hampshire primary updates: Democrats barnstorm; Trump will rally in N.H. tonight - The Washington Post

Granite Staters aren’t facing the same quandary as their counterparts in Nevada: State officials in New Hampshire say their process bears no resemblance to the caucus system that melted down in Iowa.

“We are very confident that the election is going to go well on Tuesday and that we will report accurate results at the end of the night,” said David Scanlan, New Hampshire’s deputy secretary of state.

Two main factors distinguish voting in New Hampshire. The state holds a primary, rather than caucuses, meaning a tally of ballots is the lone figure used to declare a winner. And the primary is run by the state, rather than the state party, meaning its rules are codified in New Hampshire law.

The system is mostly analog, based on paper ballots marked by hand across the state. Individual towns or wards publish their results, which they also phone in to city or state election officials.

The machines that will be used to count ballots, meanwhile, are so old that they’re no longer manufactured. The company that services them collects machines that are taken out of use in other states and repurposes their parts to keep the surviving devices running.

Their age creates a risk of breakdown in the 75 to 80 percent of polling places that use them, Scanlan acknowledged. (Smaller towns do a hand count.)

But the old-fashioned setup actually mitigates against the risk of hostile intrusion, said Jon Morgan, a state senator and cybersecurity expert.

“Sure, the machines are not the most technologically up-to-date, but the more technologically up-to-date the machines are, my opinion is that can pose some vulnerabilities to the system,” Morgan said.

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