House passes bill allowing New Hampshire voters to request their ballot be hand-counted
The New Hampshire House passed a bill Wednesday allowing voters to request that their ballot be hand-counted by cities and towns, even if their polling place uses machine counting.
House Bill 154 would allow any voter to make that request to a poll worker; if they did so, town election officials would be required to deposit the ballot in an 'auxiliary compartment' of the ballot-counting machine to be hand-counted after the polls closed.
The legislation comes amid a conservative movement against the use of voting tabulators in recent years. It also comes months after the state Supreme Court ruled that New Hampshire voters do not have a right to have their ballots counted by hand in towns that use machines.
The plaintiff in that case, Daniel Richard, had argued that towns did not have the authority to require voting machines under the New Hampshire Constitution and that it created an unequal voting process when compared to towns that hand count. The court ruled that the state constitution does not require hand-counting, but remanded the case down to Rockingham County Superior Court.
HB 154 passed on the House floor in a contested voice vote with no discussion. But during a vote in the House Election Law Committee, Republicans said the vote was meant to give voters the ability to cast their ballots the way they wanted to.
Some opponents, who included Democrats, said the bill could slow down the voting process on election day.
'More people are going to ask for it, it's going to delay the counting of votes, and hand-counting has been shown to be less accurate than machine counting,' said Rep. Connie Lane, a Concord Democrat, during the committee's executive session.
Others, including House Election Law Committee Chairman Ross Berry, a Weare Republican, said they supported giving voters the choice but advised voters to consider whether they wanted their ballots hand-counted in the first place.
'I will issue a word of caution: When you do this, when you exercise this … you're saying, I want somebody who's been up for 16 hours straight to pull out my ballot and read it amongst other ballots that are either put in that bin or had errors,' Berry said. 'My experience in the recounts shows that the machines are far more accurate than the people.'
Berry added that he hoped the bill, if it became law, would discourage a recent trend in which anti-voting machine advocates force towns to count their ballots by hand by intentionally overvoting — filling in too many bubbles for a specific race — so that the machine rejects the ballot and it must be hand-counted anyway.
The House also killed a number of election-related bills proposed by Democrats Thursday.
One, House Bill 600, would have enabled cities to choose to hold elections using ranked-choice voting, a process in which voters list candidates in order of preference, and second and third choices are factored in if a candidate does not receive at least 50 percent of the vote. Advocates for that system say it eliminates the potential for politicians to be elected with a plurality of votes and encourages candidates to court their opponent's voters, discouraging partisanship. But Republicans said the system is confusing, can be time consuming for election officials, and is not needed.
The House rejected a constitutional amendment, CACR 2, which would have barred the Legislature from drawing districts every 10 years in a way 'that favors or disfavors any political party or candidate.' Republicans said the addition would just allow the redistricting process to fall into the hands of courts, and that the current process is inherently political.
And the House voted down House Bill 175, a proposed campaign finance law that would have barred candidates from coordinating their campaign's expenditures with the expenditures of political action committees. That practice is prohibited in federal elections by federal law, but is possible in state law.
Rep. Travis Toner, a Belmont Republican, said the law could unfairly punish political action committees that simply share the same messaging goals as candidates, and noted it would not prevent coordination with unions. And he defended the increasing prominence of political action committees in state elections, including the gubernatorial race.
'The majority of the committee believes that political action committees (PACs) who collect money from everyday citizens of New Hampshire along with large and small businesses enable the voices of the state to be heard on a larger scale,' Toner wrote in an explanation in the House calendar ahead of the vote.
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