SB 418 is no longer in effect: Another voting law, House Bill 1569, took effect Nov. 11, six days after the election. (Will Steinfeld | New Hampshire Bulletin)
New Hampshire town officials must remove and discard 24 ballots cast in the 2024 election after those voters failed to return proper documentation, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
A law passed in 2022, Senate Bill 418, required people registering to vote on Election Day to present a valid ID and proof that they lived in that town or polling ward; those who didn’t had the option to vote with an “affidavit ballot.”
If voters chose to vote with affidavit ballots, SB 418 required them to mail in copies of their identification and proof of residency to the Secretary of State’s Office in Concord within seven days of Election Day. If those voters failed to do that, town officials were required to remove that ballot and report the final results back to the Secretary of State’s Office.
SB 418 is no longer in effect: Another voting law, House Bill 1569, took effect Nov. 11, six days after the election. That law requires people who have never registered in the state to produce a hard copy of their birth certificate, passport, naturalization papers, or other document proving their U.S. citizenship to a town official, with no exceptions, and it requires all voters to produce an ID to vote on Election Day. The new law eliminates affidavit ballots and negates the requirement to mail in documents after voting; under HB 1569, voters will simply be turned away if they don’t have those documents.
According to the Secretary of State’s Office, 27 people voted by affidavit ballot, but only three of those 27 mailed in their documents properly after the fact. In total, 832,549 people voted in New Hampshire on Nov. 5, with 99,375 voting absentee and 733,174 voting on Election Day.