(The Center Square) – New Hampshire’s top election official has rebuffed a request from the Trump administration to turn over a statewide voter list, citing a state law declaring the data “private and confidential” and not subject to public records requests.
In a Friday letter to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan said the state is one of six that are exempt from the National Voter Registration Act, a federal law that requires states to make voter list maintenance records available for review for at least two years.
“New Hampshire law authorizes the Secretary of State to release the statewide voter registration list in limited circumstances not applicable here,” Scanlan, a Republican, wrote in the eight-page letter. “That said, each municipality’s public checklist can be obtained from their respective supervisors or clerks.”
In June, the Justice Department wrote to Scanlan asking his office to provide a copy of New Hampshire’s statewide voter registration list. It also asked for information about election policies, such as how the state registers voters, removes deceased voters from the rolls, and identifies non-citizens attempting to register to vote.
New Hampshire is one of several states – including New York, Florida, Oklahoma and Wisconsin – targeted by the Trump administration as it investigates state election policies as part of broader efforts to prevent voter fraud.
The Department of Justice has accused Arizona election officials of not properly checking voters’ identities, in violation of Help America Vote Act. It accused Wisconsin’s elections board of failing to provide voters with a process for filing complaints about voter fraud and election law violations.
Meanwhile, conservative groups like the Public Interest Legal Foundation have filed hundreds of public records requests across the country seeking to gain access to voter files. Many of them target states led by Democrats. In most, the disputes have landed in the courts.
In New Hampshire, concerns about election integrity prompted Republican lawmakers to set a new requirement that all first-time voters in the state show proof of their U.S. citizenship in the form of a birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers at the polls when they register. That law is being challenged in court by civil liberty groups.
Last week, the state attorney general’s office charged a person it said was not an American citizen with voting in three previous elections despite being prohibited from doing so by federal and state laws.
