The White House has released documents it claims show examples of voter registration system breaches, and New Hampshire appears in the papers.
Secretary of State David Scanlan said he was surprised to see New Hampshire mentioned in those documents for something he called “old news.”
“When it occurred, we were very open about it, and it was widely reported,” Scanlan said.
Scanlan said that every couple of years, the voter registration database needs to be upgraded because of aging software. That was the case in 2023.
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The state hired a vendor to help with the coding who used a pre-built code that was designed to play the Ukrainian national anthem if the software was used on a computer in Russia.
“Once we found out, it seemed to be kind of a harmless thing, but it was totally removed from the system,” Scanlan said.
He said the state did everything right and meticulously looked at the software line by line while it was in the building phase, which is how the error was found. Scanlan said the issue was discovered before the database was launched for public use.
“When you build products that involve technology, you’re going to find bugs,” he said. “You’re going to find things that shouldn’t be there. You’re going to find things that weren’t working properly and need to be fixed. And that’s an ongoing process.”
Saint Anselm College politics professor Chris Galdieri said computer programmers putting secret code or messaging in software is nothing new, but he said there’s a difference when it’s coded for a video game versus critical national infrastructure.
“While it’s not great that they found these sorts of things in the software, the good news is that by doing their due diligence, they found the problem and solved it before anything could happen,” Galdieri said.
He said that while there are cases of people who try to influence elections, it’s important to look at the case with perspective.
“What we haven’t seen is any evidence that folks are changing votes, that vote tallying machines aren’t working, that you have large numbers of fraudulent votes being cast,” he said.