Skip will have more inside baseball on this later but after a series of emails and back and forths – following our publication of this, a candidates night in Peterborough that had prohibited video recording will now allow it.
It turns out the League of Women Voters long-standing policy against video at their locally sponsored events does not hold up under the law.
The law, however, is very clear that at a public event–whether it’s a legislative hearing or a candidates forum–the public has the right to record. League acknowledges that. We request that there not be a camera right in a candidate’s face nor that there be a bank of microphones. For the candidates in the local forums we do, this is intimidating. We also ask that the candidates agree not to use excerpted pieces in their campaigns, such as Facebook posts of their opponents’ awkward moments. When we ask candidates not to record the event, it removes the temptation to do that. But it is not possible for us to enforce a “no recording” edict, as the law allows the public and the press to do that.
There’s a lot more there, but as I teased in the opening, I’ll leave that for Skip to fisk. While I wrote the original price meant to build momentum toward this conclusion, Skip engaged the event hosts and sponsors (as well as our legal team – yeah we have one of those) most of yesterday, which I suspect is what got us here.
Hats off to the activist community and the Peterborough Republican Committee which brought this to our attention and pushed for this desired outcome.
We would like the thank LWVNH for making the change and hope that translates across all of their public political events in the Granite State.
