CONCORD, NH – New Hampshire Republican lawmakers continue to push to require residents to present a birth certificate, passport or other citizenship document to register to vote. Supporters say the measures would ensure that people could vote only if they had definitively proven they were eligible.
But according to some experts, the proposed laws would also be unique to the Granite State.
No other state has a law requiring documentary proof of citizenship in order to register to vote, said Alex Tischenko, senior policy advisor at the Institute for Responsive Government, speaking against the bills at a May 24 news conference. In recent history (Kansas) it was overturned in federal court, he noted.
“All other states allow voters to register and vote by declaring under penalty of perjury their U.S. citizenship,” said Tischenko, who previously served as an attorney in the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. “And there’s a good reason for that: Requiring everyone to retrieve a rarely used document proving American citizenship is guaranteed to disenfranchise thousands of American citizens.”
Proposals to tighten voter registration requirements appeared in two separate bills this year, both of which passed the Senate last week. One addresses Gov. Chris Sununu; the other is planned for future negotiations between the House and Senate.
The first bill, House Bill 1569, would require a birth certificate, passport or other proof of citizenship to register to vote for the first time in New Hampshire, and would also eliminate any exceptions to the state’s voting law. voter identification on election day. and requiring the voter to obtain identification from her or not vote at all. That bill heads to the governor’s desk.
The second, House Bill 1370, creates similar requirements to the first bill. But it also directs the Secretary of State’s Office to create a “hotline”-style service with the Attorney General’s Office and the Division of Motor Vehicles that, in theory, would allow city election officials to ask state officials if there are state documents proving that a voter at the polls is a citizen and has the right to vote.
Waiting for a direct line
Sen. James Gray, R-Rochester and chairman of the Senate Election Law and Municipal Affairs Committee, said the hotline could be effective.
“It is estimated that using the databases we developed in meetings with the Secretary of State, the Attorney General’s Office and the DMV, there will be very, very few people who will not be able to answer the citizenship questions. , about age and domicile,” Gray said on the Senate floor on May 16.
HB 1370 won’t target Sununu directly; changes must survive “conference committee” negotiations with the House and Senate. The House has already requested a conference committee; The Senate will decide Thursday whether to accept that request and open and send negotiators.
Senate Republicans have presented the bills as an opportunity for Sununu to choose between two options: a more rigid version with no strings attached for undocumented voters, and a more flexible version aimed at allowing state officials to help voters. voters to prove their citizenship if their documents are lost.
But voting rights supporters say that even with the addition of the hotline, HB 1370 would create risks of preventing certain residents from voting due to a lack of clear documents. State databases would not help people who were born in other states and did not have a birth certificate, they said. and they say the hotline itself would likely face functional challenges, particularly in remote cities on Election Day.
In time for the elections
Both HB 1569 and HB 1370 are written to take effect immediately, meaning they would affect the state’s Sept. 10 primary and Nov. 5 general election.
When asked about them, Sununu suggested that he does not support the bills and told reporters that he sees no need for new election laws. But he has not explicitly promised to veto them.
Supporters of the bills say they will help close “loopholes” that allow people to cast their ballot and sign legally binding affidavits to attest that they are who they say they are and eligible to vote at that polling place, under penalty of perjury. Although the Attorney General’s Office can conduct an investigation and prosecute anyone found to have lied about their voting qualifications after the election, supporters of the bills say law enforcement cannot prevent votes from being counted.
But Tischenko and others say the bills as written could go too far in the other direction and prevent “thousands” of people who should be allowed to vote from doing so.
To corroborate this, Tischenko referred to the Kansas experience. The state passed a law in 2013 requiring residents to submit citizenship documentation to register to vote, and a state legal expert found that between 2013 and 2018, more than 30,000 people in the state were prevented from registering to vote, according to the KeynoteUSA. .
After the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations sued, a U.S. district court struck down the law in 2018. That decision was upheld by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2020, and the Supreme Court of the US refused to hear an appeal.
Similar proposals
Similar to the proposals in New Hampshire’s HB 1370, the state of Kansas also attempted to help residents prove their citizenship and identity in the months leading up to Election Day, Tischenko said, but those efforts did not stop thousands were prevented from voting.
Meanwhile, opponents of the bills have also been skeptical about how effective the assistance hotline could be in practice, especially on Election Day.
The state hotline would require reliable Internet service at every polling place, argued Dan Healey, Nashua city clerk and current president of the New Hampshire Municipal Clerks Association. “In the community where I came from before, where I was employed for quite a few years, one of the polling places did not have cell phone service,” he said at the May 24 press conference. “It was very irregular. “You had to go to the parking lot, to the middle of the parking lot, to get reception.”
Some residents who moved within the state may have documents held by the city or town they moved from, but accessing another municipality’s database often incurs fees, Healey said.
And the bill would require additional training for poll workers, Healey said.
“We have a lot of our voters who come in and don’t have their tests with them, but they are eligible,” Healey said. “They are citizens. “They live in Nashua, but they don’t always bring that proof.”
But supporters of the bills say they would simply require additional steps for new registrants. They argue that those who were motivated to vote would take those measures.
“Certainly this bill recognizes that it’s hard for people,” Gray said. “But remember, it is still the person who must demonstrate that they meet the criteria. and the only thing this bill does is eliminate the affidavit from the process.”
The New Hampshire Bulletin is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
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