Changing Voter Registration

Substantial changes to New Hampshire election laws are on the table with two bills sponsored by Rep. Gregory Sorg (R-Easton). Perhaps expecting a crowd, their first public hearings, scheduled for tomorrow, will be held in the spacious Representatives Hall.

House Bill 223 would repeal the election-day voter registration law that’s been in place since 1994, while House Bill 176 would prevent most college students from voting in the town they reside. Sorg is the sole sponsor for both bills.

HB 176 would replace a 1979 provision that defines who can vote in the state. Included in the changes would be prohibiting students attending “institutions of higher learning” from acquiring domicile for voting purposes in their college community unless they lived there prior to matriculating. It would also disallow military personnel and their families, as well as federal employees, temporarily posted to New Hampshire from voting in the state.

The bill has been sharply criticized by students at colleges and universities throughout the state as discriminatory and unconstitutional. A coalition of student Republicans and Democrats at Dartmouth College have come out against the proposal.

In a January story about HB 176 in the student newspaper The Dartmouth, Rep. Joe Osgood (R-Claremont) said he supports the bill because of his concerns that college students who live in small towns for a limited amount of time could use elections to make “drastic” and “detrimental” changes to the town. He also supports the measure because it would prevent voter fraud, though he could not cite any particular cases of fraudulent voting in the state. Osgood was also quoted in the story saying that college “tends to breed liberalism” among young people, which undermines the nation’s political system and is “destroying the country.”

According to the non-partisan Fair Elections Legal Network, even if the law were to pass, it would likely be ruled unconstitutional in the courts. Citing federal court decisions in 1972 and 1979, FELN President Robert Brandon said the law is clear and “it is unconstitutional to deny someone the right to vote based solely on his or her status as a student.”

Closer to home, one court decision stemmed from a 1972 case involving a Dartmouth College student who challenged New Hampshire’s former restrictive statute on student voting eligibility. The federal court ruled for the student and struck down that state law as unconstitutional.

>> Thursday, Feb. 24, public hearings on House Bill 176 and House Bill 223, House Election Law Committee, Representative’s Hall, beginning at 1 p.m.

This Daily Dispatch was written by Michael McCord.

Posted by Hilary Niles on Feb 23 2011. Filed under elections, Government, Property, Weekly Briefing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry