Kris Kobach has seized on a report from the New Hampshire Secretary of State that reports that people with out-of-state driver’s licenses voted in last fall’s elections:
In November 2016, 6,540 voters had registered to vote on Election Day. As of Aug. 30, just 1,014 of those voters had obtained a New Hampshire drivers license. A few hundred voters did not obtain state licenses but had registered cars in the state.
That was enough for Jasper to allege thousands of fraudulent votes — and for Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice chairman of the commission, to flatly allege that fraudulent voters might have stolen the state’s four electoral votes and a U.S. Senate seat away from Republicans.
OMG!
Except, in New Hampshire, that’s absolutely legal:
II. College Student Voting
New Hampshire election law provides college students with a special privilege when determining where they register to vote. A college student in New Hampshire may choose as his/her voting domicile, either the domicile he/she held before entering college or the domicile he/she has established while attending college. New Hampshire law provides the following definition of domicile:
An inhabitant's domicile for voting purposes is that one place where a person, more than any other place, has established a physical presence and manifests an intent to maintain a single continuous presence for domestic, social, and civil purposes relevant to participating in democratic self-government. A person has the right to change domicile at any time, however a mere intention to change domicile in the future does not, of itself, terminate an established domicile before the person actually moves.
Under no circumstances may college students retain two voting domiciles. Like any other citizen, college students have only one voting domicile and may only cast one vote in any election. A student of any institution may lawfully claim domicile for voting purposes in the New Hampshire town or city in which he or she lives while attending such institution of learning if such student’s claim of domicile otherwise meets the requirements of the paragraph above.
New Hampshire Public Radio reported on this all the way back in February.
Overall, the towns that see the highest rates of out-of-state IDs used at the polls are all home to college campuses: the University of New Hampshire (Durham, with some spillover in Dover and Portsmouth), Dartmouth (Hanover and Lebanon), Keene State University (Keene), Franklin Pierce University (Rindge), Plymouth State University (Plymouth), Saint Anselm University (near the border of Goffstown and Manchester), New England College (Henniker) and Southern New Hampshire University (Hooksett).
And provided a helpful map that even Kris Kobach might understand (check the link).
Repeat after me: Kris Kobach is a royal putz. Let’s hope when he comes to New Hampshire next week, the participants on his panel give him a good thrashing.
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