HB1569, the latest New Hampshire voter ID law that dares to limit elections and ballot decisions to actual granite staters, was enrolled on June 13th. If someone was keen to make a splash and a statement, they could have gotten this to the Governor’s Desk faster than the Democrats would file lawsuits to overturn it.
The governor signed it yesterday, September 12th.
Had he had the option three months ago, the law would have applied to the state primary (Sept 10th) and the general election in November. HB1569 proposes that registrants be US citizens domiciled in New Hampshire. While that sounds like something Democrats would file a lawsuit to stop—and they will—we should consider why the state opted to dodge the opportunity to adopt these alleged protections in time for elections in 2024.
Lawsuits. The Democrats will surely file objections, and the odds that they won’t find a judge to stay the new rules until the case can proceed through the legal system are small.
The Secretary of State and any other interested parties likely didn’t want to be bothered with trying to get the clerks and poll workers in line in time to be effective. It was better to let things be and then work out the details, assuming it survives the lawsuits, in some future contest.
The Bill doesn’t do shit. The single biggest election day fraud in New Hampshire is letting out-of-state college students vote in your local election. HB1569 does nothing to prevent this. It acknowledges it rather than attempting to correct the law that allows it.
Having established domiciliary at the location of an institution of learning the applicant attends, as set forth in RSA 654:1, I-a;
654:1,I reads,
I. Every inhabitant of the state, having a single established domicile for voting purposes, being a citizen of the United States, of the age provided for in Article 11 of Part First of the Constitution of New Hampshire, shall have a right at any meeting or election, to vote in the town, ward, or unincorporated place in which he or she is domiciled. An inhabitant’s domicile for voting purposes is that one place where a person, more than any other place, has established a physical presence and manifests an intent to maintain a single continuous presence for domestic, social, and civil purposes relevant to participating in democratic self-government. A person has the right to change domicile at any time, however a mere intention to change domicile in the future does not, of itself, terminate an established domicile before the person actually moves.
I-a. A student of any institution of learning may lawfully claim domicile for voting purposes in the New Hampshire town or city in which he or she lives while attending such institution of learning if such student’s claim of domicile otherwise meets the requirements of RSA 654:1, I.
II. Any elected or appointed official for whom one of the qualifications for his or her position is eligibility to be a voter in the area represented or served shall be considered to have resigned if the official moves his or her domicile so that he or she can no longer qualify to be a voter in the area represented or served. Any vacancy so created shall be filled as prescribed by law.
Stricter ID laws that allow ID from voters who can legally vote in other states (something genuine New Hampshire voters cannot do) is not equity (or equality) under the law. Any of those students can choose to vote at the address from which they applied to the school in New Hampshire. No one in New Hampshire can vote in their elections. I will never stop bitching about this unjust bullshit.
As for the citizenship provision, it will likely drive any lawsuits. While it violates federal law for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, towns and cities in states like Vermont have passed ordinances allowing illegals and other non-eligible “residents” to vote in local elections. New Hampshire would have to pass a law allowing local municipalities to permit it, and this bill went the other way. The workaround and this has been attempted everywhere Democrats get elected to office, is to give illegals driver’s licenses.
A non-citizen with a driver’s license would be proof of ID and eligibility to vote unless it identifies them as non-citizen on the ID. Dems would probably accept the non-citizenship declaration on a driver’s license as an incremental foot in the door. Once you give them licenses, they can remove that racist, xenophobic non-citizen declaration later, and they will.
As for the new law, it’s not as controversial as they suggest, nor does it further secure elections or guarantee their integrity. Non-citizen voting has happened here, but it is not our biggest problem (yet). I appreciate the effort and foresight; perhaps that was all we could get. But no, Governor Sununu, saying we have trusted and true elections doesn’t make it so. As long as we have out-of-state student voting and the same-day registration circus, we’ll never really know who the citizens of New Hampshire chose to represent them.
HB1569 does nothing to fix that.
