by Ed Naile
Last year, a court case was brought in Strafford County Superior Court which altered our NH elections in favor of illegal non-resident voting. The Coalition of NH Taxpayers has been ringing the bell since 2000 about voter fraud in our state and in that effort we have created a short primer about what happened in this particular instance.
Here it is:
The opening paragraph of Hanna Rivers v. State of New Hampshire:
1. In clear violation of federal and state constitutional principles, the State has sought to freeze out certain eligible voters from participating in the upcoming federal and state elections. A new law, enacted by Chapter 285:2 of the 2012 Session Laws, targets students and other mobile domiciliaries who are unable to declare that they intend to become permanent or indefinite residents of the State of New Hampshire. (Case cited here: http://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/Petition-2.pdf)
And here we have it, the phony argument Superior Court Judge John Lewis used to invent a new category of New Hampshire voter – right before the 2012 Election.
This paragraph sums up the scheme behind theft of all legal NH voters’ right to fair and Constitutional elections by the NH ACLU, NH League of Women Voters, Hanna Rivers et al, and NH Court System who were players in this case.
There is no such thing as a “mobile domicile” mentioned above. It was a creation of an activist Superior Court Judge.
Now let’s look at what the NH State Supreme Court said in 1972 about student voters (“mobile domiciliaries”) in the “Frank NEWBURGER, III, et al., Plaintiffs, v. Walter PETERSON, Governor of the State of New Hampshire” case.
Here is what the NEWBURGER case was about, summed up the very first sentence:
“This case presents a challenge to the constitutionality of New Hampshire’s law disqualifying a citizen from voting in a town if he has a firm intention of leaving that town at a fixed time in the future.”
As you can see, the Dartmouth student was asked to promise to stay in NH to vote in NH, which is like a test, or promise of something to vote. That is not at issue regarding a fixed legal residence such as the legal term, domicile.
And here is the equally important last sentence of the same Supreme Court ruling:
“We are sensitive to the compelling need ‘to preserve the basic conception of a political community’. Dunn v. Blumstein, supra, 92 S. Ct. at 1004. But the challenged New Hampshire law forces persons who are in every meaningful sense members of New Hampshire political communities to vote in communities elsewhere which they have long departed and with whose affairs they are no longer concerned, if indeed the former community still recognizes the right.”
The “October Surprise” Judge Lewis delivered to the Obama campaign in 2012 creating “mobile domiciles” for non-resident voters, who intend to keep their former residence, driver’s license, etc., flies in the face of the 1972 ruling that establishes the right of students to choose NH as their domicile and deliberately leaves out the equally important part of – abandoning their former domicile.
And what does the NH Constitution say about domiciles:
[Art.] 11. [Elections and Elective Franchises.] All elections are to be free, and every inhabitant of the state of 18 years of age and upwards shall have an equal right to vote in any election. Every person shall be considered an inhabitant for the purposes of voting in the town, ward, or unincorporated place where he has his domicile.
Of course you can not make a person pledge to stay in a place for a period of time in order to vote (Newburger). But you have to ask them to abandon the previous place they voted in because the NH Constitution, no legal dictionary, or any other law recognizes mobile domiciles. They are the creation of a single, activist, NH judge.