ICYMI: Washington Post - A town of 14,000 people in NH is now part of Trump’s post-election fantasia

Reporters ---

In case you missed it, yesterday The Washington Post’s Philip Bump reported on Donald Trump’s false and dangerous attacks on the integrity of the 20202 election in New Hampshire. Trump’s comments have sparked a civil war in the Republican Party, with House GOP Chair Liz Cheney tweeting that “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.” In turn, Republicans have threatened to remove her from her position in House leadership.

Yesterday, the New Hampshire Democratic Party called on Sununu to denounce Trump’s lies. But Governor Sununu has said nothing about Trump’s comments — and refused to make clear whether he stands with Liz Cheney or Donald Trump in the fight consuming his party.

Read the article below:

Washington Post: A town of 14,000 people in New Hampshire is now part of Trump’s post-election fantasia

By Philip Bump

Key Excerpts:

The last time Windham, N.H. was at the center of presidential politics, it was because it was the proving ground for Corey Lewandowski’s style of smash-mouth politics. The campaign manager for Donald Trump’s 2016 sprint through the Republican primaries earned a write-up in the New York Times for his aggressive efforts to upend politics-as-usual in the 14,000-person town.

Now Windham is central to Trump in a different way. The former president’s always-shifting efforts to prove that he didn’t lose the 2020 election, eternally encumbered by the fact that he did, have settled for the time being on an anomalous recount in Windham’s 2020 state representative race.

“You’re watching New Hampshire,” he told customers at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., during an apparently spontaneous speech there last week. “They found a lot of votes up in New Hampshire just now. You saw that.”

This, he said, was further evidence that the 2020 election was “rigged.” But the reality of the situation in Windham, perhaps predictably, is more complex than the former president suggests. [...]

Unfortunately for the town, jumping to conclusions is a favorite hobby of Trump and his allies. Particularly since, as the statement goes on to note, the counting of votes was done using an AccuVote system — a company that is part of Dominion Voting Systems. And Dominion has consistently been at the heart of allegations of rampant fraud in the 2020 election, even as those making such allegations have repeatedly and robustly been forced to retract their claims. “Dominion Voting Systems has never manufactured or programmed the devices used in New Hampshire,” the above statement notes at one point, but conspiracy theories tend to overlook such details.

The idea, it seems, is that this undercounting of votes for Republican candidates in Windham trickles up to Trump himself. The original tally reported by the town had Trump beating Joe Biden by 629 votes, making Windham an unlikely epicenter for efforts to hand the election to Biden. But if Trump’s votes were also undercounted by 300 votes? Well, then his margin of defeat in the state drops from just over 59,000 to just under 59,000. [...]

Again, it’s not clear why the tally in Windham was off. What is clear is that, even if Trump won every single vote in the town, it neither affects the results in New Hampshire nor the presidency overall — nor does it necessarily suggest any systemic problem with vote-counting. It is one weird little glitch in one small town in a small state. But for a movement looking for any glitch anywhere as evidence that the whole system is crumbling, it’ll work.