A small group of residents in Hollis, NH, has been reviewing the town’s voter rolls and believes they may be overinflated. NH RSA wants voter rolls to be within 0 to 5% tolerance of error and we felt they were not based on our group doing some sampling of names.
After conducting further research, we approached our town select board in writing on several occasions, but received no response. Consequently, we decided to attend an open board meeting. To make a long story short, we presented our findings about the town voter rolls being over-inflated, and to our surprise, the select board of 5 people did not respond. We tried several other times with the same results.
We decided to talk to our State Senator, Kevin Avard, and we explained the situation to him, and he helped us to draft a bill to see if we can get some legislation changed regarding how often the voter rolls in New Hampshire are purged. Kevin Avard worked diligently, and very soon, we were able to get a bill drafted to be presented. After some time, the bill made it through the House and then made it through the Senate and was signed by the governor into law (SB221).
We don’t want to get into the details about how poorly the town responded and failed to work with us as effectively as the supervisor of the checklist (SOC). When we first discussed this with the SOCs, they were reluctant to talk about anything, and it was clear they were hiding something. But we were more shocked to find out how much they didn’t know.
When you are looking at voter rolls, there are a lot of tools to use. You can use permanent address changes from the post office, which will tell you when people permanently move out of the town of Hollis, and then those names should be taken off the voter rolls. We discussed this tool with one of the members who was not aware of it. A different member informed us that they were not sending out 30-day letters regularly. These letters are sent to verify if someone still resides at the address, and if no response is received, the name is removed from the voter roll.
Despite numerous attempts, the SOC refused to examine these issues. They were not even publishing their results from their meetings (names added, names deleted, party affiliation change, etc.), and that is a requirement from the state. They now publish them monthly on the Hollis town website, a change that only happened because we pushed hard.
One of the state requirements is that during the federal election, the voter rolls have to be signed off as clean to the SOS, and we can comfortably say that during 2016 and 2020, they were not. After the 10-year purge in 2020, we still found over 400 names that were on the voter rolls that were questionable.
At the end of 2020, the 10-year purge for New Hampshire deleted close to 250,000 names from the statewide voter roll. That’s what happens when things aren’t cleaned up for 10 years, so requiring a yearly purge of the voter rolls (SB221) is a big win for the state of New Hampshire.
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