New Hampshire Republicans make voter suppression a top priority

By George Hornedo, Policy Fellow for Let America Vote

New Hampshire Republicans were hard at work this legislative session making it harder for people to vote.

Stung by elections in 2016 in which their candidates for president and the U.S. Senate narrowly lost to Democratic opponents, GOP lawmakers set out first in 2017 and again this year to punish eligible voters for their party’s political failures.  

Here’s what they’ve been up:

• House Bills 372 & 1264: Creating a poll tax for students to register to vote

Perhaps the most controversial bills of the 2018 legislative session in New Hampshire, HB 372 and HB 1264 made the legal definitions of “residence, inhabitant and domicile” the same for voting purposes — a semantic change with a big effect. The legislation, in effect, requires people to either obtain a New Hampshire state ID or register their car within 90 days of moving to the state. For college students who come to the state to pursue a higher education, it amounts to little more than a poll tax.

HB 372 ultimately failed to pass. That’s little consolation, though, since the identical HB 1624 cleared the legislature and now awaits passage or a veto from Republican Gov. Chris Sununu.

Sununu has requested that the New Hampshire Supreme Court review the constitutionality of the legislation — a procedurally unnecessary step that appears to be aimed at securing political cover for when he allows the bill to become law.

In an exchange captured on video late last year, Sununu told a young activist he “hated” the legislation, adding, “I’m hoping that the legislature kills it.” In a subsequent interview with New Hampshire Public Radio, the governor said he “will never support anything that suppresses the student vote.”

More recently, however, Sununu has said it would be “hard not to sign” the legislation if the New Hampshire Supreme Court finds it to be constitutional.

• Senate Bill 3: Requiring Documentary Proof of Domicile

The student poll tax legislation follows SB 3, a law passed in  2017 changing proof-of-residency requirements for voters. Under the new law, voters who register within 30 days of elections must provide documentary evidence of domicile such as tax forms, leases, or drivers’ licenses in order prove their residency. The changes unduly burden students, people of color, low-income residents, and those who recently moved to the state, and were immediately challenged in court by the New Hampshire Democratic Party and the League of Women Voters of New Hampshire.

• Restricting Access to the Voter Registration Database

That lawsuit challenging SB 3 prompted further legislative action in 2018, as Republicans appeared to rewrite state law to undermine the case against their bad bill.

Here’s what happened: As part of their suit, the state Democratic Party and League of Women Voters requested information from the state’s voter registration database — information they believe could prove that SB 3 imposes an unconstitutional restriction on the right to vote and represents an attempt to suppress voters who are more likely to vote for Democrats.

The data, they contend, could show who is burdened by the legislation after having an expert “perform individual voter-level analyses.”

Rather than comply with that simple and fair request, New Hampshire Attorney General Gordon MacDonald instead drafted language for the Republican legislature to rewrite state law so that information from the voter database couldn’t be disclosed in response to a subpoena or discovery request in litigation.

That is, the politician charged with defending SB 3 in court helped write a new law preventing his opponents from obtaining the proof they needed to make their case.  He changed the law to try to make it easier to win the case.

Senate Minority Leader Jeff Woodburn, a Democrat, called out those shenanigans, and refused to sign off on the bill’s passage. Republican legislators passed it anyway, arguing that it was meant to prevent voter information from being shared with President Donald Trump’s sham voting commission.

The law blocking disclosure of the database is now in effect, although the New Hampshire Supreme Court has announced that it will review whether the database should be provided to the Democratic Party and the League of Women Voters.

Let America Vote’s New Hampshire team has been working hard to push back against these bills. Together with the New Hampshire Campaign for Voting Rights, Let America Vote fought HB 1264 and HB 372 by:

• Co-hosting or participating in phonebanks throughout the legislative session, recruiting hundreds of voters to leave messages with Gov. Sununu urging him to veto the bills;
• Collecting and delivering to the Governor’s office more than 2,000 petition signatures urging the bills’ veto; and
• Recruiting dozens of Granite Staters to attend key legislative committee hearings and votes on both bills.

So long as legislators in New Hampshire politicians try to make it harder to vote, Let America Vote will make it harder for them to keep their jobs.