(CN) — The Democratic National Committee and New Hampshire Democrats are suing state officials over a Republican-backed law that they claim “imposes undue burdens” on Granite Staters’ right to vote.
In a 27-page complaint filed Friday in New Hampshire Superior Court, the Democrats argue that Senate Bill 418 unjustly complicates statewide elections by requiring those who register to vote on Election Day without photo ID to send in verifying documentation to the New Hampshire Secretary of State.
Those voters will submit an “affidavit ballot” on Election Day, which “will be excluded from the final vote count unless the person complies with a burdensome identity-verification process within seven days of the election,” the Democrats claim in the lawsuit.
Should those voters miss the seven-day deadline, not only will their votes be tossed under the law, but the secretary of state would be required to turn over their names to the state attorney general’s office for possible criminal investigation.
The law “does not require that these individuals be informed that their votes will not be counted or that they have been referred for potential prosecution,” the Democrats claim.
When signing the bill into law last year, Republican Governor Chris Sununu assured voters that New Hampshire’s elections “have been, and will continue to be safe, reliable and accurate — and this bill won’t change these facts.”
But the Democrats contend that this is merely the GOP’s latest attempt to preclude the state’s marginalized, and often left-leaning, voters from casting their ballots.
“In the 2020 general election, the New Hampshire precincts with the highest number of election-day registrations tended to be areas with the highest number of young, non-white, and/or low-income voters,” the Democrats claim in the suit. “Most of these precincts also voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates.”
The state’s Republican-controlled legislature knew this when they enacted the law, and are merely trying to give themselves an advantage come the 2024 election cycle, the plaintiffs say. They add that SB 418 threatens New Hampshire’s historically high turnout, especially considering the law is fueled by overstated concerns about statewide voter fraud.
“There is no evidence that New Hampshire elections have been meaningfully affected (if at all) by attempts to vote fraudulently, or even that there have been a significant number of such attempts,” the Democrats claim.
They assert that the law “serves no legitimate purpose” as a result.
“The state has no basis for asserting that New Hampshire has a voter-fraud problem, much less that the problem is tied to the lack of a proof-of-identification requirement for election-day voter registration, or that the affidavit-ballot process would address voter fraud if it existed,” they add.
According to the Democratic Party plaintiffs, the law violates two articles of the New Hampshire Constitution: the Return-of-Votes Clause and Procedural Due Process.
President Joe Biden’s campaign is backing Friday’s action, calling the lawsuit “just the beginning” in the fight for voting rights in 2024.
“President Biden and Vice President Harris believe that we should be making it easier, not harder, for every eligible American voter to participate in our democracy,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement. “New Hampshire’s law flies in the face of that belief, and is a chilling and unacceptable embrace of the election fraud hysteria championed by Donald Trump.”
In a statement to Courthouse News, DNC Chair Jaime Harrison and NHDP Chair Ray Buckley called the law “another shameless attempt to undermine democracy” by “today’s extreme MAGA GOP.”
“We’re witnessing extreme Republicans like Governor Sununu try to erode democracy and rip away Americans’ hardwon freedoms, making it harder for young people and working families to vote in the name of baseless conspiracy theories pushed by Donald Trump and his cronies,” Harrison and Buckley said.
The Democrats list acting New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan and New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella — both Republicans — as defendants in their suit.
Scanlan downplayed the effects of the law in a statement to Courthouse News, claiming that “very few voters” in the state will be affected by it since most do carry an acceptable ID on Election Day.
“Virtually every other state in the country has a form of provisional ballot to address situations when a voter’s qualifications have not been established on Election Day,” Scanlan added. “Until this law passed, New Hampshire did not.”
Formella did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday.
New Hampshire’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the law last year in state court over similar constitutionality concerns, but that suit was dismissed last month for lack of standing.
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