Voting bill would make NH only state in US to require citizenship documents

New Hampshire Republican lawmakers are continuing to push to require residents to produce a birth certificate, passport, or other citizenship document to register to vote. Proponents 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 adviser for the Institute for Responsive Government, speaking against the bills at a press conference May 24. And the one state to pass one in recent history – Kansas – saw it struck down in federal court, he noted.

“Every other state allows voters to register and vote by attesting under penalty of perjury to 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 everybody to retrieve a rarely used document that proves U.S. citizenship is guaranteed to disenfranchise thousands of U.S. citizens.”

The proposals to tighten voter registration requirements have appeared in two separate bills this year, both of which passed the Senate last week. One is heading to Gov. Chris Sununu; the other is set for further negotiations between the House and Senate.

The first bill, House Bill 1569, would require a birth certificate, passport, or other proof of citizenship in order to register to vote for the first time in New Hampshire, and also eliminate any exceptions to the state’s voter ID law on Election Day, and require a voter to obtain their identification or not vote at all. That bill is heading 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 would in theory allow town election officials to ask state officials whether there are state documents proving a voter at the polls is a citizen and eligible to vote.

Sen. James Gray, a Rochester Republican and the chairman of the Senate Election Law and Municipal Affairs Committee, said the hotline could be effective.

“It is estimated that using the databases that we came up with in meetings with the Secretary of State, the Attorney General’s Office, and the DMV, that there will be very, very few people who will not be able to answer the questions about citizenship, about age, and about domicile,” Gray said on the Senate floor on May 16.

HB 1370 will not head directly to Sununu; the changes must survive “committee of conference” negotiations with the House and Senate. The House has already requested a committee of conference; the Senate will decide Thursday whether to agree to 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 without compromises for voters who don’t have documents, and a more flexible version intended to allow state officials to help voters prove their citizenship if their documents are lost.

But voting rights supporters say 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. The state databases would not help people who were born in other states and did not have a birth certificate, they noted. And they say the hotline itself would likely face functional challenges, particularly for remote towns on Election Day.

Both HB 1569 and HB 1370 are worded to take effect immediately, meaning they would affect the state primary on Sept. 10 and the general election on Nov. 5.

When asked about them, Sununu has suggested he doesn’t support the bills, telling reporters that he does not see any 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 ballots and sign legally binding affidavits to attest that they are who they say they are and eligible to vote at that polling place, on penalty of perjury. Even though the Attorney General’s Office can follow up with an investigation and prosecute anyone who lied about their voting qualifications after the election, the bills’ advocates say that enforcement can’t stop the vote from being counted.

But Tischenko and others say the bills as worded could go too far in the other direction and block “thousands” of people who should be allowed to vote from doing so.

To substantiate that, Tischenko has pointed to the experience of Kansas. The state passed a law in 2013 that required residents to submit citizenship paperwork 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 Associated Press.

After the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations filed a lawsuit, 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 U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.

Similar to the proposals in New Hampshire’s HB 1370, the state of Kansas also attempted to assist residents with proving their citizenship and identity in the months up to Election Day, Tischenko said, but those efforts did not stop thousands from being blocked from voting.

Meanwhile, opponents of the bills have also been skeptical about how effective the assistance hotline might be in practice – especially on Election Day.

The state hotline would necessitate reliable internet service at every polling place, argued Dan Healey, the Nashua city clerk and current president of the New Hampshire City and Town Clerks Association. “The community I came from prior where I was a clerk for quite a few years, one of the polling locations had no cell phone service,” he said, speaking at the May 24 press conference. “It was very spotty. You had to go into the parking lot, the middle of the parking lot, to get any reception.”

Some residents who moved within the state might have documents held by the city or town they had moved away from, but accessing another municipality’s database often incurs fees, Healey said.

And the bill would require additional training for election workers, Healey said.

“We have many of our voters that come in that don’t have their proof with them, but they are eligible,” Healey said. “They are citizens. They do live in Nashua, but they don’t always bring that proof.”

But those advocating for the bills say that they would simply require additional steps for new registrants. Those who were motivated to vote would take those steps, they argue.

“Certainly, this bill recognizes that it’s hard for people,” said Gray. “But remember, it is still the person who needs to prove that they are meeting the criteria. And all this bill does really is it takes the affidavit out of the process.”

This story was originally published by New Hampshire Bulletin.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Voting bill would make NH only state to require citizenship documents