On May 28, U.S. District Court Judge Samanta Elliott, a Biden appointee, struck down a 2024 New Hampshire law that made it more difficult for some voters to register to vote. New Hampshire Youth Movement v Scanlon, 1:24cv-291. Here is the 98-page decision.
New Hampshire requires proof of citizenship in order to register to vote, but until 3035, an applicant who didn’t have the documents was permitted to satisfy the requirement by certifying under penalty of perjury that the applicant is a citizen. In 2024 that alternative was eliminated. But the decision says that it was a necessary component of the law, and the system is unconstitutional without it.
The decision says that only 6 non-citizen voters voted in New Hampshire between 1998 and 2024. It also outlaines difficulties and costs for individuals born outside New Hampshire to obtain a copy of a birth certificate, and points out tha 80% of women change their surname when they marry.
Hopefully to be overruled by the US Supreme Court, and it’s completely absurd that federal courts have anything to say about it at all.
“…3035….”
Did you mean 2025? If not, what calendar system is that in, or what year did you mean?
Whatever year it was passed, the law was both necessary and long overdue.
Stating something that extremely rarely gets caught or verified under penalty of perjury is not even close to being good enough.
For the same reason, it’s past ridiculous to believe that just because only six non Citizens were proven to have voted within a given time period it’s rare. It’s an extremely difficult and unlikely thing to catch in practice.
The victims – the legitimate voters of the state whose votes are diluted by ineligible people voting – are dispersed, and don’t gain much personal benefit from catching and reporting a given ineligible voter.
In many cases they have no way of knowing whether a voter is ineligible.
And if that wasn’t true, widespread absentee / mail voting makes it virtually impossible for a citizen to catch and report.
Law enforcement has plenty to do with real crimes with real victims, paperwork, court time, warning stops, suspicious persons, etc. The court system is overloaded. The chances of a report being followed through to conviction or legal finding are extremely low.
The costs and risks to voters to prove they are eligible have to be weighed against the cumulative impact of ineligible voters changing election outcomes, both because the number thereof is unknown and unknowable and because that cost is impossible to calculate even if that part was known.
Something tells me no such weighing took place. Am I wrong?
Whatever reasoning they used to say something is unconstitutional has to be because of prior court decisions, because it’s definitely not in the plain language or intent of the constitution, even counting improperly adopted amendments.
Long ago the U.S. Supreme Court struck down poll taxes, using the 14th amendment equal protection clause. Poll taxes had an unequal effect on poor voters, relative to rich voters.
The U.S.Supreme Court also struck down laws that said a voter had to have lived in the state a year before being allowed to register to vote. That decision, which came out in 1972, was also based on the 14th amendment. That decision had the effect of invalidating laws in all 50 states.
I did mean 2024. The lawsuit was filed in 2024. One can tell that from the case number.
The 14th amendment was never properly adopted, and Marbury v Madison (and thus everything that emanated from it) was wrongly decided. Those two things have turned election law into a children’s game of telephone with real world adult consequences – overwhelmingly negative ones – for everyone.
As I suspected, but don’t know for sure – no, I will not be downloading pdf files or reading legalese – Mr. Winger’s reply suggests that this foolish/malicious/most likely both and dangerous decision emanates from those two facts.
Pq 1asoll taxes were not in any way unconstitutional under the improperly adopted 14th amendment. Here it is for reference:
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/
I’ll explain why in the next round.