Distant Dome: New Hampshire Keeps Chipping Away At Voting Rights

By GARRY RAYNO, InDepth NH

The general election is a month away and it is time to ensure you are registered to vote because it has become a lot harder to do that over the last 20 years in New Hampshire.

This year, the GOP legislature decided that college IDs were no longer valid as proof of your identity.

That will make it more difficult for college students to vote in their community if they want to claim it as their primary residence.

Students can either claim their hometown or their college town as their primary residence, but not both.

But claiming a New Hampshire community as your primary residence also means you will have to register your car in New Hampshire and will need to get a New Hampshire driver’s license.

If you’re from out-of-state, you will also qualify for in-state tuition which will not make the institutions of higher learning unhappy because they will lose money with your in-state tuition at a time when the legislature slashed the state’s contribution to the University System of New Hampshire by $35 million this biennium.

It is legal for out-of-state students to use their out-of-state driver’s license for proof of identity.

The change had nearly all Republican support in the House and Senate and was signed by GOP Gov. Kelly Ayotte.

Two years ago the House and Senate and then Gov. Chris Sununu decided a long established process of qualified voter affidavit should be eliminated under House Bill 1569, which was sponsored by former Supreme Court Chief Justice and now Rep. Bob Lynn, R-Windham.

The bill also eliminated the affidavit ballot process which separated those ballots from the others so if an affidavit was found to be invalid the votes could be eliminated in the future.

What has yet to be determined is if eliminating the qualified voter affidavit would also mean the state loses its exemption from the federal Motor Voter law that automatically registers a voter when he or she applies for a driver’s license.

The state got around the requirement with election-day voter registration, but that depends on the affidavit voter to provide a bypass for lack of documentation such as a driver’s license.

New Hampshire is one of about a dozen states that require proof of citizenship to vote, all states require citizenship to vote, but most settle for the person’s word.

Lynn’s bill, by eliminating the qualified voter affidavit, would have required a person to present a birth certificate or Passport or naturalization papers in order to meet the citizenship requirement.

There were numerous problems with that, one affecting only one gender, women who changed their name when they get married.

That requires even more documentation.

State election officials have tried to dampen the attempt to disenfranchise a whole lot of voters, by agreements to use databases at Division of Motor Vehicles, the Secretary of State’s voting database and several others, but problems can persist when it involves out-of-state documentation.

The law is considered one of the strictest voter registration laws in the country and would have tracked President Trump’s Save Act which has failed to pass muster in the US Senate to date and would have disenfranchised millions of American voters.

But a federal judge this year declared the New Hampshire law unconstitutional and required the state to reinstate the qualified voter affidavit for proof of citizenship.

“New Hampshire’s interest in election integrity cannot justify the burden on New Hampshire voters based on the evidence in this case,” said US Federal District Court Judge Samantha Elliott in a nearly 100-page ruling.

That brought protests from Republican lawmakers who claimed an unelected judge was usurping their rights to determine who votes in New Hampshire.

But the Republicans lost another ruling a few years prior before the state Supreme Court when in a 4-0 ruling found what was known as Senate Bill 3 saying it imposes a burden on voters that violates their rights under the state constitution.

The 2017 law established a new process for residents if they registered to vote within 30 days of an election or on election day without a photo ID.

The Supreme Court said the law “imposes unreasonable burdens on the right to vote,” with confusing requirements and forms that could deter people from registering and voting.

The ruling also said the law created two classes of voters, those who register within 30 days of an election or on election day, and those who register before the 30-day timeline.

Since the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore that went on for a month or more until the US Supreme Court, in a partisan decision, stopped recounting the vote in Florida, Republicans in the legislature have slowly and precisely been carving out groups of voters who are more likely to vote Democrat than Republican.

The process was accelerated after Barack Obama won over John McCain in 2008 and has been in overdrive since Trump’s defeat in 2020.

And the arguments have always been changes are needed for voter integrity, to prevent fraud and to build trust in the system.

There has never been enough fraud in an election in New Hampshire to sway a result or even close to it, but the tales of busloads of Massachusetts people coming to New Hampshire to vote have persisted as have the stories of illegal immigrants voting, all of it the figment of a delusional partisan’s imagination who can’t accept his or her party lost the election.

The restrictions began with photo ID and moved up the ladder with precision as more and more voters are targeted to make it more difficult to cast a ballot.

Nationally and in New Hampshire the targets are the same, students, first-time and young voters, the elderly and disabled, low-income and rural voters, minorities, transgender people and military members and Americans abroad.

But for much of that time, New Hampshire had Democratic governors who vetoed proposed laws that sought to make it more difficult to vote.

But once Chris Sununu moved into the corner office in 2017, all the failed attempts came back and since that time the New Hampshire legislature and its governors have put the squeeze on voting.

Last year lawmakers decided the voting rolls needed to be purged more often than the 10-year cycle that had been in place for decades. Those purges were large due to the decade long buildup.

This year 40,000 independent or undeclared voters were purged from the checklist because they have failed to vote in the last five elections.

Independents have long been the largest group of voters in the state, outnumbering both Republicans and Democrats.

In last month’s primary, 67 percent of the undeclared voters took Democratic ballots which should be a warning to Republicans in the upcoming general election.

Do you wonder why Republicans wanted more frequent purges of the checklists?

Democrats have not been proposing changes to the voting requirements that would limit participation, but they have unsuccessfully sought to undo what the GOP has done.

And in the last 20 years New Hampshire has moved from one of the easiest places to vote to one of the most restrictive.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

This story was originally published by InDepth NH.