The State of Michigan recently was rightfully sued for an unconstitutional campaign gaming law remarkably similar to a law passed by the NH legislature this year. The law in both states gives the two major political parties unfair advantage to voter information databases.

In NH, the voter information is housed in the newly built statewide voter registration database, mandated by the 2002 federal "Help America Vote Act," built and implemented in NH in 2006, and paid for by the citizens of New Hampshire and the rest of the nation.

This database allows the State of NH, for the first time, to collate voter information from every municipal voter registration roll into a centrally managed database held by the Secretary of State.

Paid for by the citizens, the information actually belongs to We the People.

Nonetheless, the NH legislature passed, and Governor Lynch signed, a clearly unconstitutional law this year, which allows the NH Secretary of State to sell, at reasonable cost, this publicly owned information only to either the Republican or Democratic Parties, effectively leaving everyone else at a distinct disadvantage in running their political campaigns. Additionally, the parties sell the information to political candidates at huge financial profits. Sources indicate that the New Hampshire Democratic Party is allowed by the law to purchase the voter information from the State for roughly $400, and the Party then turns around to sell it for up to $60,000 to Democratic candidate campaigns.

NH Secretary of State Bill Gardner is an outspoken opponent of the bill, and despite being named as a defendent in the case, he has submitted his own testimony in defense of striking the law as "unconscionable".

After the legislature passed the bill, Secretary Gardner had, in fact, requested from the Governor that it be vetoed. Governor Lynch declined to accomodate, apparently giving Party loyalty more weight than democratic fairness in elections.

As a result, the State is now being sued by the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union on the grounds that the bill is unconstitutional.

The State of Michigan tried the same game, passing almost identical legislation this year too. In Michigan, the greediness and power hungriness of the political parties that led them to pass their legislation has lost Michigan its January 15th Primary.

New Hampshire always holds itself as a paragon of democratic virtue. This is the "primary" reason we hold on to our Primary so tightly. We believe we give everyone a fair shot.

But this year, the year of Blue Hampshire, the New Hampshire legislative majority passed this bill, after years of minority status, apparently seeing a golden goose too good to pass up. Have they so quickly forgotten their years of minority status and the impact of weilding power in ways that so calculatedly undermine the democratic process?

The NH courts will undoubtedly cancel out the egregious error made by the legislation and strike down the law. But the bitter taste of the Majority Party that attempted to use their own legislative power to usurp democracy remains.

Let's hope our esteemed legislators will learn a thing or two from this experience. It is time to place people over party, and issues over politics.

That is the true New Hampshire way.

Read about Michigan's case and New Hampshire's lawsuit below.

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SOURCE: Concord Monitor

Article published Nov 16, 2007
Judge doubts basis of voter data law
State: Privacy justifies blocking small parties, By LAUREN R. DORGAN
Monitor staff
Nov 16, 2007

A Merrimack County judge said yesterday that she is "struggling" to understand the basis for a new law that allows the state to sell detailed voter data only to the major political parties. The Libertarian Party has filed suit asking the court to strike down the law as unconstitutional.

The attorney general's office argued at a hearing yesterday that the state's interest in protecting voter privacy allows it to limit who can buy the data. The file includes a voter's party registration history and year of birth.

"I have to tell you, I'm having trouble understanding how that really goes to protecting voter privacy," Judge Carol Ann Conboy said. Later, she added: "I'm struggling. My understanding of what my responsibility is to do is to ascertain whether this was a justifiable state interest. . . . You're telling me that the interest was privacy, but I don't see that under the circumstances."

Conboy said she will rule on the law's constitutionality as quickly as possible. In return, she secured a promise from a Democratic Party representative at the hearing that the party would not further spread or sell the state data until she rules on the law.

Some of the data in the file, such as voter registration history, has always been available on a town-by-town basis; parties and candidates traditionally had to scour the state to gather it. The new statewide file also includes voter age, a statistic never before released at any level. The information is supposed to include sex as well, but that is not actually available, because it isn't collected on voter registration forms, said James Kennedy of the attorney general's office.
Only major parties can buy the voter file, which became available to them in July after legislation passed last year. Under recently updated state law, to be considered "major," a party must have won at least 4 percent of the vote in a previous election. Only the Democrats and Republicans meet that criterion. Both parties have bought the information for about $450, according to the secretary of state's office.

The named defendant in the suit is Secretary of State Bill Gardner, an outspoken opponent of the law who has called it "unconscionable." Gardner said in an interview that he thinks the law is unfair both to small parties and to voters, who he said expect privacy when they register to vote. Yesterday, Conboy received a questionnaire from Gardner in which he discussed his personal opposition, lawyers in the case said.

Two attorneys from the Democratic Party spoke for the legislation. Former party chairwoman Kathy Sullivan contended that the law actually balances two different state interests: Voter education and privacy.

"I think the state recognizes that it is important for voters to receive information," she said. But, Sullivan argued, if anyone could obtain the voter data, she said, an unscrupulous group might be able to tap into it and use the data to target vulnerable populations.

"I believe there are competing interests here," she said.

But Rep. Neal Kurk, a Weare Republican and staunch privacy advocate, argued that the Legislature had passed a fundamentally unfair law. "They tilted the playing field - and not in favor of the little guy, but in favor of the rich and the powerful major parties," Kurk said.

The Democratic Party has sold its voter information - including the new data bought from the state - to five presidential candidates, charging them $65,000 each. The party has sold the list to Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Chris Dodd; New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson; and former senator John Edwards.

The party's attorneys have argued that it now has a contractual obligation to allow those candidates to use the voter data.

Conboy asked everyone involved in the lawsuit to weigh in on what should happen if she finds the law unconstitutional, asking them if she could require a party to give it back.

In response, attorney Barbara Keshen of the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union said the judge could order the party not to disseminate the list any further and to return it to the secretary of state's office.

"You can't unring a bell," Keshen said. "On the other hand, you can stop hitting it."

Sullivan argued that it would be an extremely heavy burden for the party to sift through its voter information and figure out which pieces of data it already had and which parts it bought from the state.

But Kurk said the creation of a state voter file was essentially an improper use of state dollars to benefit a political party. The Republican Party had worked for decades to build a "voter vault" full of data for its candidates, Kurk said. His Democratic colleagues have told him that they've had to gather that information on their own, he said.

"If that's the case, what the legislation did . . . was they put the power of the state to gather this information in the service of a private organization, in this case the Democratic Party, to do for them with state resources what they hadn't done for themselves with private resources," Kurk said.

Sullivan disputed that. The state party had worked for eight or nine years and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to build its own voter data file, she said.

------ End of article

By LAUREN R. DORGAN

Monitor staff

----------------MICHIGAN's CASE--------------

washingtonpost.com....

Court Rejects Early Michigan Primary

By KATHY BARKS HOFFMAN
The Associated Press
Friday, November 16, 2007; 11:40 PM

LANSING, Mich. -- A state appeals court on Friday dealt a blow to Michigan political leaders' hopes of holding a presidential primary on Jan. 15.

In a 2-1 ruling, Judges Patrick Meter and Donald Owens objected that a law recently passed by the Legislature setting up the primary would let the state political parties keep track of voters' names and whether they took Democratic or GOP primary ballots but give no public access to that information.

Michigan had at one time tentatively scheduled Democratic caucuses for Feb. 9, but state officials and Gov. Jennifer Granholm have tried to push up the date to Jan. 15. If no primary is held, Republicans will make their choices at a Jan. 25-26 party convention. Democrats also could move up their caucuses, although no date has been set.

The weeks-long logjam involving the courts has delayed scheduling of the nation's first primary. New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner says he won't set the date of his state's primary until it's clear what's going to happen with Michigan. New Hampshire law says it must go first in the nation.

A spokesman for Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox said no decision had been reached on whether to take the case to the state Supreme Court.

"We're disappointed with the court's decision," Matt Frendewey said.

Michigan lawmakers could change the law so it would pass legal muster, but so far they have failed to do so and they don't have much time left. Clerks need to start sending absentee ballots to overseas Michigan voters by Dec. 1, so a new primary election law would have to be approved in the next two weeks.