The New Hampshire anti-voting law struck down by a federal judge last month shares a characteristic with all too much of the legislation passed by Republican lawmakers in Concord: It was a solution in search of a problem.
The law did away with one of the ways voters could establish their citizenship status in order to register to vote. First-time voters unable to produce a passport or birth certificate were previously allowed to register by signing an affidavit swearing to their citizenship under penalty of law. A second provision that was eliminated allowed voters whose qualifications were challenged at the polls to sign a Challenged Voter Affidavit attesting to their qualifications, again under penalty of committing voter fraud.
U.S. District Judge Samantha Elliott, after a nine-day trial earlier this year, found the new law to be an unjustifiable burden on the right to vote, in violation of the First and Fourteenth amendments, and permanently enjoined the state from enforcing its provisions. The state says it will appeal.
The ostensible reason for these new restrictions, which went into effect after the 2024 presidential election, was to combat voter fraud and promote confidence in election integrity. But Elliott observed in her 98-page decision that the law’s prime sponsor, Rep. Bob Lynn, and the governor who signed it into law, Chris Sununu, had both said that they “did not believe voter fraud was an issue in the state.” The state’s top election official, Secretary of State David Scanlan, “testified that noncitizen voting is essentially non-existent in New Hampshire,” and that 90% of residents had confidence in the integrity of the state’s elections.
Of the 8.3 million ballots cast in New Hampshire elections from 1998 to 2024, only 47 cases of wrongful voting were documented; of those only eight involved people who were not citizens. “If wrongful voting is rare in New Hampshire,” Elliott wrote, “wrongful voting by noncitizens is essentially non-existent.”
Thus the state was unable to justify disenfranchising thousands of potential eligible voters who lack ready access to a passport or birth certificate. Expert witnesses testified at trial that nearly 40% of people don’t have a passport and that 60% of those registering to vote in New Hampshire were born in another state. Estimates of how many eligible voters might lack the necessary documents ranged from a low of 5,433 to as many as 59,000.
Those who were most likely to be affected by the invalidated law were young residents, college students and women who took their husband’s name when they married, because their birth certificate would bear their birth name.
So if, as it appears, combating voter fraud and ensuring election integrity were merely pretexts for enacting new voting restrictions, what was the underlying motivation? It can be reasonably inferred that the goal was to suppress voting by people who are presumed not to be in sympathy with the program of Republicans in the Legislature.
Whether this cynical calculation is correct or not, we cannot say authoritatively, nor can anyone else. For all we know, those voters now allowed again to attest their citizenship by affidavit will be dyed-in-the-wool conservatives.
What can be said authoritatively is that Republican politicians across the country, abetted by the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority, are embarked on a crusade to restrict voting rights.
In our view, the United States does not have a voting problem; it has a nonvoting problem. Many people who are eligible to register to vote do not see the point because the political system is not addressing the actual problems they face, such as access to affordable health care, day care and housing. Thus, they are effectively disenfranchised by inattention to their needs.
So when the Republicans in the New Hampshire Legislature expend endless energy chasing solutions in search of purported problems that excite their base — such as “voter fraud”; “divisive concepts” in education; “parental rights”; and transgender bathrooms — they are perpetuating public disengagement from politics as the legitimate means of promoting the most well-being for the most people.