Valley News editorial published 4/27/08:

Self-Service In Concord
Restricting the Voter List

Democrats and Republicans in the New Hampshire Legislature don't agree on much, but the spirit of bipartisanship is alive and well when it comes to securing privileges for themselves at the expense of the public.Witness the hijacking of the statewide voter list that unfolded recently in Concord, where everyone seems to agree that political parties, committees and candidates are entitled to information that is denied to ordinary citizens. This is self-service, if not public service, at its finest.

The House and Senate have now agreed on legislation that seeks to remedy the defects in an earlier attempt to expropriate this data for partisan purposes. That earlier version provided access to the centralized voter registration database only to major political parties -- that is, Republicans and Democrats. Libertarians took exception, and in November a Merrimack County Superior Court judge agreed that it was unconstitutional, although not before the state Democratic Party had resold the list to presidential candidates for $65,000 each.

The new legislation broadens access to include any political party, political committee or candidate for county, state or federal office. In short, everybody with an interest in politics would be able to obtain the list, except for the folks in whose name legislators are supposed to be acting -- the ordinary citizens of the state.

Moreover, the legislation sets a fee for every 1,000 names on the list, which would come to about $8,000 for the complete list of 867,000 names. How this fee relates to any rational calculation of the cost of providing a copy of the database is unclear, although it may have a hidden but desired effect of restricting the ability of minor parties to obtain it.

This statewide voter database is drawn from public records on file in towns and was originally compiled for the use of election officials and for court officials to use in drawing up jury lists. It contains the names of registered voters, their party, and both their physical and mailing addresses. This centralized database originally was deemed private and confidential, and exempt from the state's Right-to-Know law -- as it still is under the new legislation.

The net effect is that the ordinary citizen (or enterprising reporter) wanting to look into, say, allegations of voter fraud, would be barred from obtaining the database, while any party hack and PAC-man could make whatever use of it he liked -- so long as he didn't sell it for commercial purposes. In other words, instead of discriminating against some political parties, this bill proposes to merely discriminate against all residents as individuals by requiring them to go town by town to obtain the same information that is centrally compiled by the state. It further creates a quasi-public form of information, available to certain individuals who make up a political party or political action committee, but not to other individuals who have no such ties.

As its bungling of the school funding issue has amply demonstrated over the years, the New Hampshire Legislature has a bad habit of enacting legislation that will almost surely end up back in court for constitutional review. It is regrettable that before they sanctioned this particular piece of handiwork, legislators failed to ask themselves how it squares with the state constitution's requirement that “the public's right of access to governmental proceedings and records shall not be unreasonably restricted.”