A week of legislative recounts confirm winners
Nov. 15—Secretary of State David Scanlan’s staff and volunteers completed a week of legislative recounts with eight straight victories confirmed for candidate who were declared winners on election night.
Two of the closest ones last Thursday and Friday ended up a split decision for the political parties with five-term state Rep. Linda Tanner, D-Sunapee, losing her recount bid to Sunapee Republican George Grant Jr. by 16 votes.
On Nov. 5, Grant had been declared the winner by 14 over Tanner in this district that also includes the town of Sunapee.
During the recount, Grant picked up three while Tanner got one more vote.
The other closer one was in Strafford County where Rep. Heath Howard, D-Strafford, was confirmed for winning his second term, edging out former GOP Rep. Kurt Wuelper, R-Strafford, by 16 votes.
The margin stayed the same, though during the recount Heath and Wuelper picked up one vote apiece.
“Thanks so much for putting in all this effort,” Howard told a volunteer after the recount that took nearly four hours to complete.
The other completed recounts Thursday confirmed Democratic victories.
In Nashua Ward 5, Democrat Sanjeev Manohar won the third seat in that district by 72 votes over Republican Paula Johnson after the latter picked up 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 picked up one during the recount while Gablinske added six to his tally.
During an interview, Wuelper said he was surprised how many voters “bulleted” for one candidate in his district that elected three to the 400-person House.
Rep. Len Turcotte, R-Barrington, topped the ticket in this ward getting about 150 votes more than Wuelper.
Rep. Cassandra Levesque, D-Barrington, was the second-place finisher.
“I saw one stack of 130 votes and 20 of them were bulleted; that’s nearly 1 in 6 people who didn’t vote for three,” Wuelper said.
The state used to have straight-ticket voting that allowed people to make a single mark at the top of the ballot that granted a vote to everyone running in that political party.
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 there really are efforts made by some candidates in either party to get people to only vote for them,” Wuelper said.
The ballots do explicitly state how many candidates will be elected for each office.
Rep. Joe Alexander, R-Goffstown, said his town committee pushed the message of voting for all four GOP candidates after a Republican lost by seven votes to Democrat Judi Lanza in 2022.
All four Republicans won in Goffstown on Nov. 5 with Lanza finishing in fifth place with 180 votes fewer than she needed to hold onto her seat.
Paul Twomey, former legal counsel for the New Hampshire Democratic Party and a legal observer last Friday, said he was most surprised that Vice President Kamala Harris won the state yet Republicans picked up more seats in the House.
“In many other states the reverse was true, namely that the political parties down-ballot outperformed the Harris campaign,” Twomey said. “Here it was exactly the opposite.”
In 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden beat President Donald Trump in the Granite State by 7 points, yet down-ballot the state House majority flipped from blue to red in that election.
The House GOP now has a 222-178 for the next two years, a major improvement for Republicans over the past two years when the margin between the parties was in single digits, the closest the House had been for 150 years.
