Attorney General Investigating Thousands of NH Voter Affidavits

The New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office in conjunction with the Secretary of State’s Office is investigating thousands of voter affidavit mailers sent to voters that did not offer proper identification while voting or registering to vote during the 2012 election cycle that were postmarked as returned as undeliverable or unanswered by the recipients.

Both Stephen LaBonte, the new elections investigator with the NH AG, and Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan, confirmed that their offices were involved in the massive undertaking of checking more than 20,000 voters who were allowed to register to vote and cast ballots last year while not being able to prove where they lived or who they are, as part of the state’s new voter ID law.

The mailers were sent out on schedule, 60 days after the September and November 2012 elections, and now officials are wading through most of the rejects and returns to find any vote fraud.

Three separate mailers

The Voter ID law in New Hampshire, required three separate mailers be sent out to voters who didn’t have the proper identification during the voting and/or registration process: Qualified voter affidavits, domicile affidavits, and challenged voter affidavits.

According to Scanlan, the qualified voter affidavits mailers were sent to people who registered to vote but couldn’t prove identity, age, or citizenship. The state required these voters to send back a postcard confirming their information. In 2012, there were more than 2,600 of these voters statewide but about 1,300 failed to return the postcards with 210 letters coming back from the post office as undeliverable.

There were nearly 14,000 domicile affidavits – voters that couldn’t document where they lived but were allowed to vote. Mailers were sent out to those voters without a postcard. According to Scanlan, 1,132 were returned by the post office.

Challenged voter affidavits didn’t have identification at the polls on Election Day but were allowed to vote. More than 5,600 were mailed out postcards with an April 7, return deadline. So far, as of Feb. 28, a little less than 2,000 had not been returned with 355 postmarked as undeliverable.

“The attorney general is responsible for following up with those voters,” Scanlan said.

Scanlan said there weren’t any anomalies or unusual patterns in any of the data and officials had a limited breakdown of community, region, or other information that could be eyed at this point in the mailing process. He did note, however, there was an issue in Plymouth where about 400 mailers were returned. The issue was how the mail was handled, he said, when students returned home from school during winter break.

“In terms of getting the mailings out, and the administrative process, it’s working as we expected,” Scanlan said. “I think it’s too early to tell how it is actually playing out, as the Legislature envisioned.”

Were fraudulent votes cast?

At this early stage in the investigation, it is completely unknown whether or not fraudulent votes were cast in the 2012 election or if they were cast, whether or not they affected the outcome of any election.

Some presumptions though can be instantly made: Based on the data, the outcomes of the major statewide races and congressional races were not affected by fraud based on not having the proper identification. The spreads between the major candidates were anywhere from two to four times the number of mailers sent out. The spreads in the congressional races were close to the total number of mailers sent out, too.

If it turns out, however, that there were thousands or hundreds of fraudulent votes cast, based on the returned and unanswered mailers, then the results of some of the House and Senate races could have been affected, due to the razor-thin victory margins in some of those races.

Neither LeBonte nor Scanlan would comment specifically on the issue of vote fraud right now, since not all the mailers were returned, there were still deadlines to be met, and investigatory outreach to those voters had not been completed, with Scanlan adding that “there is nothing that is jumping out … but it’s still early yet in this process.”

That process though, he said, was a meaningful one, while noting that it was “a big workload” in terms of the thousands of investigations needed to complete the process and prove that everyone voted appropriately.

LeBonte agreed that the undertaking has been overwhelming with a single investigator in the office assigned to the mailers. He said the department hadn’t looked for outside resources to assist but that might be considered in the future.

“There is a group of (mailers) now that we have an investigator (working on),” LeBonte said. “He will do the bulk of the investigation. We’re throwing around ideas of how we can effectively complete these investigations in a reasonable amount of time.”

According to Scanlan, the law requires a number of updates over a period of time but officials would like to be completed by July so that they can then start working on Town Meeting elections across the state that just took place or will take place soon. But the long, drawn-out investigatory process will be worth it, he said.

“To the extent that it that they are able to complete (the investigation) in a timely manner, we could get some really useful information from this exercise,” Scanlan said, adding that both departments would act on any fraudulent information they find during the investigation process.

The voter ID bill the New Hampshire House plans to take up Wednesday–or Thursday–is House Bill 595. The House Election Law Committee is recommending the bill pass with an amendment designed to maintain current law with respect to photo identification of voters but eliminate provisions of the law that have yet to go into effect.

It was described as a compromise between those who would repeal all forms of photo ID, and those who would require election officials to photograph voters who do not present a photo ID and further limit the acceptable identifications.

Rep. Gary Richardson (D-Hopkinton), in a report to the House, wrote that the committee majority does not believe that "the inability to deliver mail proves voter fraud."

Rep. Shawn Jasper (R-Hudson) countered in the minority report: “The claim has been made for years that there is no voter fraud in New Hampshire; the simple fact of the matter is that until now we have never actively looked for it,” Jasper writes. “It is clear to the minority that it is too soon to say that there was no voter fraud in 2012.”