Former Speaker: Out-of-State Voters Helped to Elect Some Reps

At a news conference against changes to New Hampshire’s Voter ID law, Granite State Taxpayers assembled a number of current and former Republican representatives against changes to the state’s Voter ID law.

Provisions of the law have been slowly going into effect since passage in 2012, including various processes to ensure that only residents are voting and that claims of potential fraud are investigated. The New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office and the Secretary of State’s Office are in the process of investigating voters without identification who were allowed to vote.

In recent weeks, some have suggested that the law is being weakened by a conference committee that seeks to change the law adding provisions like allowing college students to vote with just a school ID.

On Tuesday, former House Speaker William O’Brien, a Republican from Mont Vernon who is exploring a run for Congress, commended the current law and said it was yielding proof of fraud, pointing to 1,700 voters that “have just disappeared” and another 2,500 that “won’t even take the time to verify who they are.”

On two occasions, O’Brien suggested that there might be state representatives who were elected by fraud by these voters, due to the margin of error in some of the races.

“If you look at the margin of difference in a number of state representative races and you apply those unknown voters to those districts,” he said, “you’re going to find that it’s fairly reasonable to conclude that there are representatives up here in Concord who are not voted by the residents of New Hampshire in their districts.”

O’Brien said now that the law was showing results, there was no reason to walk away from it, especially just because “some people were uncomfortable, it would seem, with that evidence coming forth.”

When asked about an America Votes NH report showing that nearly $11 million could potentially be spent during the next four years to implement the law, O’Brien called the group’s numbers “fiction” and added that the law showed that there were people outside of New Hampshire voting in 2012. When asked if he had any evidence proving that any representative was elected by fraud, O’Brien called the question "leading" and that it assumed something he didn’t say.

“We legislate because there’s a reason to legislate not because there’s no reason (to legislate),” he said. “There is evidence of fraud that now has been brought to us by the bill that we’ve passed. Let us follow up on that and make sure that New Hampshire residents are represented by those who they elected."

Concord NH Patch will have another post about the state of Voter ID on June 26.