Pundits praised New Hampshire's paper ballot system Monday night as results coming out of Iowa remained stalled.

While the Granite State has no app and uses paper ballots, more densely populated areas use machines to count them.

No auditing system or automatic recount margins are in place, leaving a statewide recount as the only remedy.

A statewide hand recount could take around three weeks, and even went as far as five weeks among fringe candidates in 2008.

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For those hoping the New Hampshire primary will provide a tidy result next week following the debacle at the Iowa caucus Monday night, there could still be problems ahead.

With a statewide hand recount as the only recourse for any discrepancies, it could take around three weeks to finalize the results, according to N.H. Secretary of State Bill Gardner.

Proponents of the Granite State's first-in-the-nation primary say New Hampshire's old-school paper ballot system makes it more immune from any interference or tampering, and surely avoids any of the uncertainty that came with the Iowa Democrats' new system of releasing three sets of numbers through an app.

"It wouldn't happen in New Hampshire," Gardner said Tuesday. "People can't vote over the phone."

Garnder, who has been in charge of New Hampshire's elections since 1976, said he met with leaders from the Iowa Democratic Party last year to hear about the new procedures they put in place and remained skeptical.

He recalled reacting the same way when he got into a spat with the town moderator in Hanover, N.H. in the 1980s when they introduced punch card machines, with the proverbial "hanging chads" that later derailed the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida.

The worst scenario Gardner said he encountered came back in 2008, when Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich and longshot Maryland Republican Albert Howard called for statewide recounts that lasted five weeks. Despite the hubub, Gardner said, the race moved on, with Howard ultimately receiving 64 votes, only one more than he got on the first count.

Hand recounts or bust

But election security watchdogs have criticized Gardner for years over New Hampshire's election security, particularly with the lack of an audit system for precincts that use aging machines to count paper ballots and no automatic recount procedure in place for tight margins.

"The only recourse a presidential primary candidate would have is to ask for a full state recount," Deobrah Sumner, a 71-year-old retiree from Jaffrey, N.H. who is one of the leading voting security experts in the state, said Tuesday.

While many small towns across the Granite State still use conventional ballot boxes and hand count the results, the more populated towns and most cities use machines to count the paper ballots.

The most common models across New Hampshire are from AccuVote and date back to the 1990s.

A voting booth. Scott Olson/Getty Images

Sumner and her fellow citizen watchdogs have been banging the drum over how unreliable the calibration of the machines can be. The machines remain particularly susceptible to human error when voters fail to follow instructions — circling a bubble next to a candidate instead of filling it in, for example.

Town moderators and city clerks test the machines in public before elections, with local Democrat and Republican Party leaders invited to observe. By state law, only the moderators, clerks, and the machine's vendors are allowed to touch the equipment, and they must fill out a log indicating their most recent activity, such as replacing a memory card.

But for Sumner and many of her fellow activists, routine audits of the machines would instill more confidence in the electoral process.

"The point is the recount process is not enough either," she said. "You need to be doing those checks, then there need to be audits between the time the election results are announced on election night ... to make sure that the computer was acting and performing [as accurately] as possible.

"And yes, there are fraud possiblities in terms of the programming," she added.

The Guardian's prediction

Gardner, who has earned a reputation as a stickler for voting protocols — even going so far as to take a citizen to court over a selfie she took in the ballot box — said he would be open to another machine test after voting wraps up on primary night.

Ultimately, such a decision would come down to the 424 lawmakers in the state legislature.

A shrouded voting booth. Matthew Cavanaugh/Getty Images

While Garnder took a bit of a victory lap Tuesday in touting his state's paper ballot system, he stopped short of saying Iowa's first-in-the-nation status could be jeopardized after last night.

"It doesn't help," he said.

Then he made a bold prediction about the primary in New Hampshire.

"They'll be a winner declared that night [Feb. 11], and specifically around 9:30 [p.m.] or so," Gardner said. "And if there's a recount, it wouldn't begin until a week later."