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Senator proposes official tracking of voters turned away for documentation; secretary of state urges caution
Summary
Senate hearing on SB 437 focused on adding an official return-line to count voters denied registration for lack of documentation. Clerks and advocates supported measurement; Secretary of State David Scanlon warned the official returns are the wrong vehicle and said the data may be nebulous.
Senator Rebecca Perkins Quoca introduced SB 437 to the Senate Election Law and Municipal Affairs Committee, proposing that official election returns include a field to record the number of prospective voters denied registration for lack of required documentation. "We want to make sure that we have information to make sound decisions around our voting rights," Perkins Quoca said.
Supporters at the hearing said objective tracking is needed to evaluate the real-world effects of recent registration rule changes. Dan Healy, Nashua city clerk, described a local pilot to collect turnaway data and recommended simple reconciliation procedures so that people who return are not double-counted. "If we don't know how many people are turned away, we don't know if voter outreach is working," Healy said.
Advocacy groups that ran nonpartisan poll-observer programs urged the panel to require statewide reporting. "We identified well over 200 folks who were turned away" during recent municipal elections, Sarah Chouinard of the New Hampshire Campaign for Voting Rights testified, while acknowledging some observers could not determine whether the turned-away voters later returned.
Secretary of State David Scanlon said he opposed placing a general data-collection requirement on the official return form, arguing the return's purpose is to record votes and certified election totals. He warned that many turnaway incidents stem from temporary or easily remedied issues (left wallet, forgotten documents) and said informal past tracking showed the scale of the problem can be much smaller than some outside counts suggest. "This sets a precedent where we are now using the official record reported by the election officials as a data collection tool," Scanlon said.
Committee members questioned how to avoid inflated counts (for example, a person who walks between wards) and whether e-poll book updates or a small appropriation would be needed to implement the measure. Several clerks and observers recommended collecting a minimal set of reconciliation info (a name or identifier) or adding an additional line to the bill to capture name/address to allow later reconciliation, while acknowledging privacy and workload trade-offs.
The committee closed public testimony on SB 437 after broad discussion of implementation, data veracity and alternatives. Members signaled interest in exploring amendments and other mechanisms for obtaining the same information without converting the official return into a broad data-collection tool.
