New Hampshire: Recounts unlikely to change results, but get lots of attention | Union Leader

Democratic state Rep. Deborah Wheeler is no stranger to post-election recounts. She’s helped conduct many in her three terms as a representative for Northfield and parts of Franklin. But on Tuesday, she wasn’t helping to count. The 72-year-old retired tax auditor was there to watch the process in the hope that it would erase a 25-vote deficit that separated her from the winning Republican, Ryan Smith. But like most recounts, this one failed to change the result, although it did narrow Smith’s margin of victory from 25 votes to 13 (1,505-to-1,480) Smith, a 20-year-old criminal justice student at St. Anselm College, decided to run when he learned that incumbent Republican Gregory Hill was the only Republican on the ballot in a district that elects two representatives. “No one was going to fill that seat on the ticket, and I have things to say so I thought, I’ll throw my hat in the ring and see what happens,” he said as he took a step away from monitoring the counting on Wednesday at the Legislative Office Building.

New Hampshire: University of Florida-Developed Voting Machine For Disabled Used On Election Day | WUFT

A voting machine developed at the University of Florida helped voters with different disabilities to cast their ballots in this month’s elections. Prime III, or the Premier Third Generation Voting System, was used statewide in New Hampshire — the first state to certify use of the machine — on Election Day. … With Prime III, a blind person, for example, votes by putting on headphones, and following audio prompts for the various races, they vocalize their choices. Someone without arms or someone who otherwise can’t write does the same. Juan Gilbert, chair of UF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Department, came up with the idea for the voting technology after Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002. The act required every voting precinct to have one voting machine for people with disabilities. But Gilbert saw the new legislation and didn’t think of it as the best solution. “We saw that, and we thought that could be a problem because you’re creating a separate-but-equal connotation in voting. And we were right.”

New Hampshire: In a connected world, New Hampshire voting machines are isolated – by choice | Concord Monitor

With concerns being raised across the country about the possibility that hackers could interfere with electronic voting machines, it’s timely to note that in a world of smart devices, New Hampshire’s ballot-counting machines are deliberately dumb. Say what you will about rigged elections and the chance of election officials missing cases of voter fraud: When it comes to the mechanical end of the state’s voting system, it’s a tight process. Security cameras, thermostats and even some automobiles might interact online these days, but not the hundreds of ballot-counting machines stored in town halls across New Hampshire. “They cut the pins off, so you can’t put the modems back in, even if you wanted to,” said Ben Bynum, town clerk in Canterbury, as he showed the town’s single AccuVote machine, locked away in a vault until pre-election testing begins. The only way to change these machines is to insert a memory card programmed by LHS Associates in Salem, and you can’t do that unless you first cut off a metal tamper-proof seal. And if you don’t record the proper identification numbers in the proper place in the proper book with a the signature of a witness, that will raise suspicions from people like Bynum and Deputy Town Clerk Lisa Carlson.

New Hampshire: Federal appeals court strikes down ballot selfies ban | Union Leader

A federal appeals court on Wednesday soundly struck down New Hampshire’s ban on ballot selfies concluding it restricted innocent, political speech in the pursuit of what the judges called an “unsubstantiated and hypothetical danger” of vote-buying. A three-judge panel unanimously concluded that the state’s 2014 ban was unconstitutionally over broad. “The ballot selfie prohibition is like burning down the house to roast the pig,” wrote Judge Sandra Lynch in a 22-page decision. The state will now weigh its options, which include appealing this case to the U.S. Supreme Court, Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan said. “We’ll probably have a better idea later Thursday about how we proceed from here,” Scanlan said.

New Hampshire: How the ballot selfie went from a New Hampshire voting booth all the way to federal court | Boston Globe

A federal appeals court in Boston will hear arguments Tuesday on a case that junctures the contentious issues of free speech, the integrity of the voting process, and selfies. Yes, selfies—specifically, so-called ballot selfies. The state of New Hampshire is appealing a ruling last year that struck down the state’s law explicitly banning voters from taking and posting photos with or of their ballots. The law, which carries a fine up to $1,000 for violators, went into effect shortly before New Hampshire’s 2014 state primary. The act intended to protect against vote buying in the digital age; what it got was widespread protest and a two-year legal saga. Leon Rideout knew what he was doing. “It was sort of a protest photo,” the Republican state representative from Lancaster said in an interview.

New Hampshire: Appeals court skeptical of New Hampshire’s ballot-selfie ban | Reuters

Three federal appeals court judges showed skepticism on Tuesday on how a 2014 New Hampshire law banning voters from taking selfies with their ballots on election day does not violate the U.S. right to free speech. The judges repeatedly asked a New Hampshire official to explain how the law could prevent a replay of scandals that rocked many U.S. states in the late 19th century, when politicians paid for votes, in cash or alcohol. “It’s well known that in the late 1800s, buying votes was a huge problem,” Stephen LaBonte, the state’s associate attorney general, told a three-judge panel of the First Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston. “What year is it now?” Judge Sandra Lynch shot back. “In the late 1800s there was a huge problem that obviously didn’t involve ballot-selfies, which did not exist at the time.”

New Hampshire: Appeals Court to Review New Hampshire’s Ballot-Selfie Ban | Wall Street Journal

Selfie culture, long debated in the court of public opinion, will make its debut in a federal court of appeals on Tuesday, when a panel of judges is set to appraise a New Hampshire law banning voters from sharing photos of their marked ballots on social media. The case before the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston pits longstanding policies favoring ballot secrecy—generally adopted in the U.S. in the 19th century to stanch then-rampant vote buying—against a form of smartphone-enabled expression popular with young voters. Since at least 1979 it has been illegal in New Hampshire for a voter to show his ballot to someone else with the intention of disclosing how he plans to vote. In 2014, state legislators amended the law to include a ban on “taking a digital image or photograph of his or her marked ballot and distributing or sharing the image via social media.” The aim of the law: to guard against hypothetical vote-buying schemes in which ballot selfies serve as proof of performance.

New Hampshire: Court to hear Libertarian Party appeal over New Hampshire law | Associated Press

A federal appeals court is set to hear arguments in a lawsuit by the Libertarian Party seeking to strike down a New Hampshire law that it argues could prevent third-party candidates from getting on the ballot. The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire is challenging a 2014 law that requires a third party seeking to gain access to the ballot through verified signatures to collect those signatures during the same year as the election. Judge Paul Barbadoro upheld the law last year, finding that it creates reasonable restrictions that are justified by the state’s interest in requiring parties to demonstrate a sufficient level of support. The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston is set to hear the Libertarian Party’s appeal Monday.

New Hampshire: Expert says electronic pollbooks for voters need more testing | New Hampshire Union Leader

An expert on the use of electronics for elections said to date, no electronic voter registration and checklist system “is ready for prime time.” Legislation allowing Manchester, Hooksett and Durham to use “electronic poll books” during the September primary and November general elections will be decided Thursday by the Senate. Tuesday Andrew Schwarzmann, head of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Connecticut and director of the Center for voting Technology Research said every poll book system his center has tested has faults that need to be addressed and are not ready for implementation.

New Hampshire: Republican party halts controversial vote meant to limit Trump’s delegate support | The Guardian

An attempt by the New Hampshire Republican party to limit Donald Trump’s influence in a potential contested convention was halted Monday, when the state chair canceled a controversial online vote for positions on crucial committees just minutes after the voting deadline. In an email obtained by the Guardian, party chair Jennifer Horn said that although all 23 of the state’s delegates to the Republican National Convention participated in the vote, she was canceling it “in the interest of full transparency”. Instead, she summoned a delegates-only meeting in Concord on Friday, in which those unable to attend could participate via conference call. Initially, in an email sent out Saturday night, the state party’s executive director proposed a slate for the eight slots on convention committees reserved for New Hampshire delegates at the Republican gathering in Cleveland in July. The proposed slate included two supporters apiece of John Kasich, Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz and one supporter of Marco Rubio. The eighth slot was left vacant.

New Hampshire: Electronic voter checklist proposal to go before Senate | New Hampshire Union Leader

A proposal to host a pilot program of an electronic voter checklist in three New Hampshire communities next fall, including Manchester, is the subject of a public hearing before a state Senate subcommittee later this week. A hearing on proposed amendment 2016-1514s — an act relative to reports of death of voters and authorizing an electronic poll book trial program — is scheduled for Wednesday, April 27 at 10 a.m. before the Senate Public and Municipal Affairs Committee in the Legislative Office Building, Room 102. The proposed amendment would be tacked on to HB 1534, relative to reports of death of voters. If approved by committee members, the amendment would go before the full Senate on May 5.

New Hampshire: House tackles voter eligibility bills | Associated Press

Tackling a handful of bills aimed at expanding or restrict voter eligibility, the New Hampshire House on Wednesday approved a 10-day residency requirement for new voters. The bill, which now goes to the Senate, would require voters to be domiciled in the state for 10 days before an election. It also would change the definition of domicile to exclude those who are in the state temporarily or don’t intend to make it their home.

New Hampshire: How New Hampshire Used the Wrong Math and Gave One of Rubio’s Delegates to Trump | The New York Times

After the polls closed in New Hampshire on Feb. 9, the Republican primary had a clear winner: Donald J. Trump. It took nearly two weeks for the state to award its 23 delegates, and in the end it gave Mr. Trump 11, John Kasich four, Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush three each and Marco Rubio two. But there’s a small problem: It looks as if New Hampshire gave Mr. Trump a delegate that actually belongs to Mr. Rubio. To understand how this works, it helps to know that there are no national rules in the Republican Party for awarding delegates. Each state makes up its own rules. In New Hampshire, the rules seem pretty straightforward. A candidate must get at least 10 percent of the vote to be eligible to win a delegate, a threshold cleared by both Mr. Trump (who earned 35.6 percent of the vote) and Mr. Rubio (who earned 10.6 percent). Then the candidates are awarded delegates in proportion to the total vote, with the statewide winner — in this case Mr. Trump — getting any delegates left unallocated.

New Hampshire: Bill would allow jailed felons to vote | Associated Press

Convicted felons behind bars in New Hampshire could get the right to vote under a proposal that is heading for a full vote by the House. If passed, the measure would put the state in the ranks of Vermont and Maine — the only two states where felons never lose their right to vote, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. But the bill, sponsored by four Democrats, faces an uphill battle after being deemed unworkable by the House Elections Law Committee on Thursday. The Department of Corrections took no position on the bill, but spokesman Jeff Lyons raised concerns about the impact on nearly 100 New Hampshire inmates incarcerated out of state and whether it would burden corrections staff. Currently, convicted felons in the Granite State are eligible to vote once released.

New Hampshire: State relies on a mix of new and old voting systems | Los Angeles Times

After Curtis Hines marked his paper ballot for Bernie Sanders on Tuesday, he brought it to the ballot box where his father, Patrick, cranked the handle to feed it in. “Ding!” The vote was counted. This was state-of-the-art technology – in 1892. But there’s no need for anything newer in this town of 198 people, the second smallest in New Hampshire. Its 127 registered voters are casting ballots in the same 12-by-16-inch wooden box that voters used in the Granite State’s first presidential primary 100 years ago. The controversy over so-called butterfly ballots in Florida during the disputed 2000 presidential election led to a major overhaul in voting equipment in many states, prompted by an infusion of federal dollars as part of the Help Americans Vote Act, or HAVA. Many of the new voting systems featured technology that officials thought would help restore confidence in elections at a critical point. New Hampshire, though, saw little need for wholesale change.

New Hampshire: Tablet-Based Ballot System for Blind Voters to Debut During Primary | New Hampshire Public Radio

Voting may be a right for everyone, but for those with vision impairment, casting a ballot privately can be a challenge. New Hampshire election officials are hoping to change that with the rollout of a new accessible voting system, called “one4all,” during Tuesday’s primary. “I believe we’re one of the first if not the first state to fully adapt tablet-based technology,” says David Morgan, president and CEO of the New Hampshire Association for the Blind. “It’s a tablet-based system, so there’s a keyboard. There’s a voice entry which is not enabled at this point. And there’s a tablet that is both a touch screen, a voice output, and an enter button so that you can listen to the candidates be scrolled. As you hear the candidate you want, you can press enter, or later on for the fall, enter a voice command.”

New Hampshire: Sanders rules New Hampshire midnight voting | The Washington Post

In sweaters, knit hats, gloves and mittens, they came. They came in service of democracy and freedom; they came to boost tourism and media attention to worked-over New England towns that have seen better days. They came to exercise their God-given constitutional right to vote for a presidential candidate and, in theory, to be the “first” in the nation to do so. They came of a dark, inevitably frozen January evening. And they came at midnight, braving the beasts that roam the Northern wilderness to make their marks on ballots — and leave their mark on history. The results of New Hampshire midnight voting are in — and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) have won big, each taking two of three small Granite State districts that, combined, measured the opinions of 65 voters. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) each logged a victory as well. All told, Sanders won the support of 17 voters and Clinton, nine. On the Republican side, Cruz, Kasich and Donald Trump each had nine votes total. “We’re a pretty small town in an out of the way place in mountains, and live fairly quiet lives most of the time,” Mark Dindorf, a selectman from Hart’s Location, said in a telephone interview with The Washington Post shortly after midnight. “It’s interesting that we attract this degree of attention every four years.”

New Hampshire: Voters Try to Get Into the Picture | Al Jazeera

For those who hoped New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary would serve as a snapshot of the 2016 election cycle, Tuesday could prove a more literal reward than expected. The Granite State has a new voter ID law this year, and while those who arrive at the polls without the required forms of identification will still be allowed to cast a ballot, they must first sign an affidavit and also let a poll worker take their picture. Ballot-access advocates worry the process could lead to voter intimidation, as well as depress turnout due to longer lines at polling places. According to a Los Angeles Times column by Ari Berman, author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” wait times “increased by 50 percent when the [New Hampshire] voter ID law was partially implemented, without the camera requirement, during the 2012 election.”

New Hampshire: ‘Voter-Shaming’ Mailer That Made Noise in Iowa Shows Up in New Hampshire | The New York Times

A controversial voter-turnout tactic employed by Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign in Iowa is cropping up in New Hampshire, this time by way of a mysterious organization about which few public details are available. Voters in New Hampshire received envelopes in the mail this week claiming to contain “important taxpayer information,” according to Christopher Crawford, who received one of the mailers and posted pictures of it on Twitter. Mr. Crawford, who recently moved to Washington, was visiting his parents at their home in Nashua, N.H., this week when he opened an envelope addressed to him only to find a chart showing the names and voting history of several of his parents’ neighbors.

New Hampshire: The effort to save New Hampshire’s midnight vote | The Keene Sentinel

Each election cycle, political journalists make a late-night pilgrimage over icy roads to this Narnia-like region near the Canadian border, where the locals have a tradition of voting at midnight. When the clock strikes 12, a handful of voters traditionally gather at the Balsams Resort to cast ballots, giving them the bragging right of being the one of the first precincts to participate in the first-in-the-nation primary. The event is a celebration filled with food, drinks and live hook-ups for media trucks to broadcast the results around the world. (Not to mention the public relations boost for the resort.) And many presidential candidates historically made it a point to visit before the vote in hopes of securing the early-morning boost of winning the overnight vote. But last year, Dixville’s once-grand tradition appeared to be at risk. In 2011, the Balsams closed down, and employees who lost their jobs left the area. The remaining residents held a much smaller vote at the Balsams in 2012. This election cycle, only one candidate — Ohio Gov. John Kasich — has journeyed to these far northern reaches of the state.

New Hampshire: Clerks expect smooth sailing in first national election under fully-implemented voter ID law | The Keene Sentinel

City and town clerks expect smooth sailing — with maybe a rip current or two — Feb. 9 at the first national election since the full implementation of New Hampshire’s voter ID law. Larger municipalities, including Keene, are looking for volunteers to greet people at the polls to ensure they’re at the right ward and in the correct line — which is based on whether they have a legal form of photo ID and are registered to vote. The goal is efficiency, officials say. For towns, the national primary will mark the first time residents without an ID will have to fill out a voter affidavit and have their picture taken with a Polaroid camera. New Hampshire’s cities, including Keene, were primed during the municipal elections in November about the picture-taking component of the voter ID law enacted in 2012.

New Hampshire: Voter ID Law Remains Big Unknown for Presidential Primary Day | New Hampshire Public Radio

New Hampshire’s primary is just five weeks away, and state election officials are anticipating record turnout. There’s something else on their minds too—this will be the first presidential primary with the state’s new voter ID law in place. The law, which passed three and a half years ago, was part of a wave of stricter voter laws pushed by Republicans across the country. How it plays out on Primary Day is still an open question. Folks like Kerri Parker, the town clerk in Meredith, have been planning for that day for a while. Parker remembers when she and other election officials got together to learn the new state voting rules.

New Hampshire: Is an automated vote count good enough? State, parties to petition disagree | The Keene Sentinel

Not all debates have clearly drawn lines. In the matter of assuring an accurate vote count in citizen elections, the end goal is unequivocal. But the views of how this is achieved can — and in this region and in the state do — vary. Despite hopes to the contrary of 60 petitioners calling for mandatory but limited hand-count audits of votes in Keene immediately following elections, neither the city nor the Secretary of State’s Office can authorize such a thing, according to officials with the office. Only the state Legislature can, officials say — and it has failed to do so at least twice. The Keene City Council in September accepted a petition put forward by Gerhard F. Bedding, Cheshire County Commissioner Charles F. “Chuck” Weed, D-Keene, and others as informational, a move that requires no action.

New Hampshire: Federal Investigation of Concord Raises Questions About Voting Accessibility in N.H. | New Hampshire Public Radio

The federal government is investigating the City of Concord for not providing accessible voting machines for people with certain disabilities during local elections. The city may have violated federal law. Guy Woodland used his cane to find his way into a voting booth in Concord Tuesday morning. Woodland is blind. “I have a non-valid driver’s license,” he told a poll worker, “which you’re probably happy to know.” Here’s how Woodland would like to vote: on his own, with no help. As it is though, he walks into the voting booth with a poll worker. Woodland dictates his voting choices, and the poll worker, who is sworn to secrecy, fills in the bubbles. That’s despite technology – sitting on a shelf in New Hampshire – that would allow Woodland to vote without any help.

New Hampshire: Tiny communities guard midnight voting tradition | Reuters

At midnight on a yet-to-be chosen Tuesday early next year, the roughly 40 residents of New Hampshire’s smallest town will pack into a small log building off the main road to cast some of the first votes in the race for the White House. Hart’s Location is one of three tiny communities nestled in the White Mountains where people cast the first votes in the first U.S. presidential nominating primary every four years. Midnight voting is one of the quirkier traditions of New Hampshire’s 100-year-old primary, and not a terribly accurate gauge of which candidates will win their parties’ nominations. The winners of the statewide Republican and Democratic primaries have gone on to clinch the nominations in 11 of 14 races, excluding challenges to an incumbent president, over the past four decades. The success rate is just three out of seven for the top vote-getters in Hart’s Location and nine out of 14 in Dixville Notch, near the Canadian border. But for the residents of these flinty towns, the point is turnout.

New Hampshire: Shuttered resort still plans to host New Hampshire voters | Associated Press

A shuttered hotel where the nation’s first presidential primary ballots have been traditionally cast will once against host midnight voting in 2016, according to developers working to overhaul and expand the historic resort. The nearly 150-year-old Balsams resort in Dixville Notch closed in September 2011, and its new owners are still waiting for environmental permits to move ahead with extensive restoration plans, which include a new hotel and conference center and a larger ski area. That has raised questions about the fate of the primary voting tradition, but project spokesman Scott Tranchemontagne said the goal is to have a portion of the resort’s Dix House ready for the February primary.

New Hampshire: Dixville Notch and the midnight vote will not die without a fight | The Washington Post

Tom Tillotson lives beside a closed-down ski mountain in a town that doesn’t exist. He doesn’t miss the chairlift that used to be out back. He has strong legs and likes hiking the slopes. And he doesn’t really miss the people who used to vacation at his late father’s hotel — the now-crumbling Balsams Resort. His three Labradors and his wife are company enough. He does, however, miss the visits from presidential candidates. “They don’t call anymore,” Tillotson said in the reclaimed barn he calls his home. He’s stocky, with a strawberry-shaped nose and flat light brown hair that rests like an A-frame house atop his head. “They used to come by all the time, but that’s just not happening now.”

New Hampshire: Selfies — yes, selfies — just won a big political and legal victory | The Washington Post

Like most good stories, this one starts with a dog. During the 2014 New Hampshire Republican primary, a voter decided he didn’t like his options. So he wrote in the name of his recently deceased dog, snapped a pic of his ballot, and then posted it to social media. Andrew Langlois got a notice a few days later from the New Hampshire secretary of state saying he was being investigated for breaking a law — the ballot selfie law. Up until Tuesday, it was illegal in New Hampshire to take a photo of a ballot in the voting booth. But on Tuesday, a federal judge struck down the state’s 2014 ballot selfie law on the grounds it limited free political speech. “What this law ignored, and what the court recognized, is that displaying a photograph of a marked ballot on the Internet is a powerful form of political speech that conveys various constitutionally protected messages,” said Gilles Bissonnette, legal director of New Hampshire’s ACLU branch, which sued on behalf of the dog’s owner and a few other ballot selfie takers in the state.

New Hampshire: A federal judge just struck down New Hampshire’s ban on ballot selfies | Boston Globe

New Hampshire primary voters rejoice! You may once again take “ballot selfies.” A federal judge Monday repealed the Granite State’s law banning photos of filled-out election ballots, ruling that it violated the First Amendment. U.S. District Court Judge Paul Barbadoro said the law was unconstitutional, because it did not meet the standards necessary for the state to restrict political free speech. “Here, the law at issue is a content-based restriction on speech that deprives voters of one of their most powerful means of letting the world know how they voted,” Barbadoro wrote in his decision.

New Hampshire: Hassan vetoes 30-day wait to vote in New Hampshire | New Hampshire Union Leader

A bill that would require a 30-day waiting period to vote was vetoed Friday by Gov. Maggie Hassan who said the bill places unreasonable restrictions on citizens’ voting rights. The bill also attempts to better define domicile for voting as the primary residence or abode. The change would more closely align domicile with a person’s residency. “The constitutional right of all citizens to vote is the most fundamental right of our democracy, and we must always be working to ensure that people who are legally domiciled in New Hampshire are not blocked from voting,” Hassan said in her veto statement. “Senate Bill 179 places unreasonable restrictions upon all New Hampshire citizens’ right to vote in this state with an arbitrary timeline that will prevent lawful residents from taking part in the robust citizen democracy that we are so proud of in the Granite State.”