Supreme Court Overturns Belmont, Mass., CEO's Illegal New Hampshire Voting Conviction

CONCORD, NH — The New Hampshire Supreme Court on Thursday overturned the illegal voting conviction of Richard Rosen, the 87-year-old CEO of North Country Growers of Berlin, who also lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, ruling jurors should have been allowed to hear evidence that another man confessed to casting a ballot in Rosen’s name, according to a report by InDepthNH.

Rosen was convicted in 2024 on a class B felony charge tied to allegations that he voted in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts in the 2016 general election.

According to the ruling, Grafton Superior Court Judge Lawrence MacLeod erred by excluding statements from Rosen’s Massachusetts groundskeeper, Billy Botelho. Rosen is legally blind. Associate Justice Patrick Donovan wrote in the unanimous decision, “Botelho’s statements either impliedly or expressly constitute confessions to voting in the defendant’s name during the November 2016 election — the same election for which the defendant was charged with double voting.”

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Donovan also wrote Botelho told investigators he sent an absentee ballot in Rosen’s name in 2016 and had done so before. The decision said Botelho “again admitted to voting in the defendant’s name ‘three, maybe four times.’ He stated that he first voted in the defendant’s name in the 1970s and had most recently done so in the 2020 election.”

There were absentee ballots cast in Rosen’s name in two states in 2016. The court said prosecutors also introduced evidence of multiple other alleged illegal votes for which Rosen was not charged, creating a risk of unfair prejudice.

Donovan wrote, “The danger of unfair prejudice was significant.”

Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald was recused from the case, and Donovan was joined by Associate Justices Mellisa Countway and Bryan Gould.

Read the original report at North Country Growers CEO’s Illegal Voting Conviction Overturned.