New Hampshire knows how to honestly and openly count our votes. In many of our NH towns, this happens at every election, where the votes are counted in open meeting, as required by the NH Constitution, with full public oversight.

So why don't we count our votes openly and honestly throughout the state?

In many of our cities and towns, accounting for almost 90% of our ballots, NH votes are counted in secret with no public oversight or verification that the count is honest and true.

In these cities and towns, our ballots are counted by LHS Associates. LHS is the New England affiliate of a private corporation (Diebold), which has a criminal history, partisan ties, and uses secret vote counting software developed by a convicted embezzler who used to work with Watergate plumber Egil "Bud" Krogh, and whose specialty is alteration of computer records.

I know this sounds crazy, but it's true. We have handed over our elections, the mechanism of our democracy, to a private corporation with a disturbingly shady past.

SO just how did LHS Associates gain such ground in NH, to the point where they effectively control almost 90% of our election results?

The e-voting industry has successfully (and, it would appear, with little to no resistance) wormed its way into the hearts and souls of the nation's election officials.

Heck, the National Association of Secretaries of State even has an official a corporate affiliate program. So every year we send our election officials to these meetings, where they are wined and dined by the industry, accepting all manner of "gifts" (read: lobbying, read: bribes) in exchange for access and deal making.

Our tax dollars at work.

And on the local front, it turns out, Diebold's New England affiliate, LHS Associates is a proud sponsor of the New England Town Clerks Association.

Just like on the national front, this local corporate sponsorship has become de facto corporate ownership of the majority of NH elections.

New Hampshire election officials, from the State Department on down, enjoy an overly friendly relationship with their corporate sponsors. And this has results. LHS consults on and informs NH election policy and even legislation.

Under LHS's firm guidance, for instance, New Hampshire has passed ballot redesign legislation engineered to ensure that the new ballots only work with Diebold voting machines.

(This little piece of legislation simultaneously turned New Hampshire into a Diebold-only sole source provider state while forcing the installation of highly hack-vulnerable software in NH voting machines.)

And LHS provides excellent service to NH's city and town clerks, programming the computers that "count" our votes with their trade secret software. Software, by the way, that was originally developed by convicted embezzler Jeffrey Dean.

Email correspondence between Mr. Dean and LHS Associates President John Silvestro shows a close working relationship between the two.

With these nifty software programs, Diebold-LHS computerized vote counting machines relieve our city and town clerks of their constitutional burden of actually counting our votes.

Today, nearly 90% of NH ballots are not even counted by NH election officals. LHS-Diebold takes care of that messy and inconvenient business.

And the fact that LHS Vice President Ken Hajjar is a convicted felon (drug trafficker) apparently doesn't bother anyone in the NH Department of State, which is ultimately responsible for securing our elections.

The State Department's response to a recent public records request indicates they have no documents pertaining to background checks of the people handling NH votes (neither for LHS Associates personnel nor for NH state personnel).

Wow. I don't think we'd accept such sloppy practices from our bankers handling our money. Why do we accept it from the people handling our democracy?