Plaintiffs argue NH voter citizenship law an unlawful burden, in first day of two-week trial

The trial at the U.S. District Court, District of New Hampshire, is expected to last two weeks. (Photo by Ethan DeWitt/New Hampshire Bulletin)

For the Coalition for Open Democracy, helping New Hampshire residents register to vote is part of the mission statement. 

But by the end of last year, Executive Director Olivia Zink noticed a development. Despite growing its volunteers, the organization helped register far fewer voters at its in-person events in 2025 than it did in 2023 — from more than 190 in 2023 to 50 in 2025.

To Zink, there is one primary culprit: New Hampshire’s new voter registration requirements. A state law that took effect just after the presidential election in November 2024 requires new registrants in the state to provide hard-copy proof of their citizenship with no exceptions.

Those extra requirements are now discouraging some registrations, Zink believes. 

“People didn’t realize that not one document proves everything,” Zink said, referring to her conversations with aspiring voters. 

This month, that assertion is at the heart of a two-week trial in federal court, in which Open Democracy and a group of other organizations are suing the state and arguing the new registration law, House Bill 1569, is unconstitutional. Backed by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire, the national American Civil Liberties Union, McClane Middleton of Manchester, Ropes & Gray of Boston, and the Elias Law Group of Washington, D.C., the parties entered a jury-free “bench trial” overseen by Judge Samantha Elliott. 

On Monday, Zink took the stand as the plaintiffs’ first witness as they seek to prove the law unlawfully burdens the right to vote for people without easy access to citizenship documents.

The New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office, which is defending the law, has pushed back at those concerns and said the law was enacted in the legitimate interest of election security. As for Open Democracy’s voter registrations, the state suggested Monday the disparity between 2023 and 2025 signups could have been influenced by interest in the 2024 presidential election. 

The courtroom battle to define the law’s impact comes at a crucial moment. If it stays law, HB 1569 will face its biggest tests during New Hampshire’s primary elections in September and general midterm elections in November. Supporters of the law say it is crucial to stop noncitizens from voting in those elections; opponents say it will turn away legitimate voters who arrive without the correct documents. 

Any federal court injunction could freeze the law through those elections, pausing its effect, and raising the stakes for the February bench trial. 

HB 1569 requires that those registering to vote who are not currently on the state’s voter rolls bring a copy of their passport, birth certificate, naturalization papers, or other document proving citizenship. Without that hard proof, the person must be turned away by election workers. 

The bill ended two waivers that made it easier to vote: qualified voter affidavits, which allowed registrants to attest to their U.S. citizenship on penalty of perjury; and challenged voter affidavits, which allowed voters whose ballots were challenged on Election Day by an officially designated challenger from each party to cast their vote anyway while the challenge was pending. 

Now, plaintiffs say the law violates the First and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution by placing severe and unjustified burdens on the right to vote. 

In its opening argument, the Attorney General’s Office contended that the new law is more effective at blocking fraudulent voting than the previous affidavit system. 

The affidavit system relied on the Attorney General’s Office and Secretary of State’s Office investigating and verifying voters’ claims of citizenship after they had already registered, but that process was hampered by a “several year” backlog before HB 1569 became law, argued Assistant Attorney General Catherine Denney. And due to the difficulty in determining a person’s citizenship status in person at a town or city clerk’s office, those cases might be unreported and un-investigated, Denney said. 

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Meanwhile, Denney argued the law does not create the hardship for new voters that its opponents claim. She pointed to a bill that took effect this year, House Bill 464, that empowers local election workers to access records from the Division of Motor Vehicles, the Division of Vital Records to allow them to confirm a voter’s citizenship even if they don’t have the documents — as long as the voter was born in New Hampshire. 

Denney also argued that most New Hampshire residents already have easy access to the required citizenship documents. She said that at some point in the trial, the state will present a survey it had commissioned that demonstrates this statistic. 

The plaintiffs argue the attempted workarounds will not stop a basic reality: Some voters do not possess citizenship documents and will not be able to obtain those documents in time to vote. 

That includes those who were born out of state and can’t be quickly confirmed by the Secretary of State’s database; those who changed their name after marriage but have not yet updated their birth certificate; those who are unhoused; and those who recently lost their documents in a house fire or other disaster. Even if they attempt to plan ahead and recover their documents and register in advance, the people in those categories might not succeed, the plaintiffs say, which could lead to their effective disenfranchisement.

The plaintiffs called one witness Monday to underline that potential. SangYeob Kim, an immigration lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire, completed his naturalization ceremony in summer 2025, renouncing his South Korean citizenship in the process. But Kim noticed his certificate of naturalization contained a clerical error, and he sent it back for a correction. In October, when he attempted to register to vote using his passport in his hometown of Stratham, Kim was turned away, after being told by his clerk that he needed to show both a passport and naturalization papers. 

The clerk was incorrect; HB 1569 requires that only one form of proof of citizenship be presented. But the damage was done and Kim left without registering. He returned again to do so in January and this time was not blocked. 

Kim, an immigration attorney who knew the law was on his side, still felt a sting, he testified. 

“I felt like I was treated like another class of citizen,” Kim said. 

Some of the plaintiffs in the case include individuals who say the new law has impaired their ability to register to vote.

But others are voting advocacy organizations themselves, like the New Hampshire Youth Movement, the League of Women Voters of New Hampshire, and Open Democracy. They say the new law has required them to divert resources away from their usual voter registration drives and toward more extensive efforts to educate voters and pollworkers on how the new law works.

For Zink and Open Democracy that has meant changing the posters, mail information sheets, and how-to documents the organization uses to get residents — particularly high school seniors — registered to vote under the new law. 

During his cross examination of Zink, Assistant Attorney General Michael DeGrandis questioned whether those changes were really a unique burden, given the need to update election guidance whenever the laws change. 

Zink argued HB 1569 created a bigger challenge. “We had to review every document in our toolkit,” she said.

To highlight the point, Geoffrey Atkins, a lawyer from Ropes & Gray representing the New Hampshire Youth Movement, showed a split screen of two versions of a poster.

“Registering to vote? Here’s what to bring,” both posters read, as they highlighted what is needed to show domicile, residency, age, and citizenship. 

The first poster, deployed before HB 1569 took effect, included a footnote: “Don’t have all your proof? That’s okay.”

In the second poster, the footnote was gone.