New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan on Friday released an eight-page letter with detailed responses to the Trump administration’s 15 questions about the state’s voter registration process, including why the state rejected the request to disclose the statewide voter list.
“New Hampshire law authorizes the Secretary of State to release the statewide voter registration list in limited circumstances not applicable here,” Scanlan wrote.
The Trump administration is seeking millions of names from targeted states ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Scanlan explained that state law permits his office to, “upon request, provide a political party, political committee, or candidate for county, state, or federal office, ‘a list of the name, domicile address, mailing address, town or city, voter history, and party affiliation, if any, of every registered voter in the state.’” Scanlan told Trump administration officials they were free to go community by community to get voter lists from each clerk or supervisors of the checklist, and he shared a website link to city and town clerk contacts.
Before answering the Trump administration’s questions, Scanlan provided three paragraphs of “prefatory remarks” as a primer on what information he could or couldn’t share.
“Regardless of the fact that election systems and assets are critical infrastructure, divulging any cybersecurity information could harm the integrity of the systems. Therefore, our responses to questions regarding database infrastructure may be limited depending on the nature of the question,” Scanlan wrote.
Scanlan’s letter also included a sample voter registration form and Memorandum of Understanding for Help America Vote Act implementation and enhanced data exchange for database accuracy.
Trump’s inquiry
Questions from the Trump administration ranged from basic information for how voter registration works in New Hampshire to specific ways in which the information is confirmed, shared and managed.
Here are some examples of the questions:
* Describe how the statewide voter registration list is coordinated with the databases of other state agencies. And provide the name of each state database used for coordination and describe the procedures used for the coordination as well as how often the databases are coordinated with the statewide voter registration list.
* Describe the process by which registrants who are ineligible to vote due to non-citizenship are identified and removed from the statewide voter registration list.
* Describe the state’s requirement for an individual to vote if the individual registered to vote by mail and has not previously voted in an election for federal office in the state.
* Describe the verification process that election officials perform to verify the required information supplied by the registrant. And describe what happens to the registration application if the information cannot be verified.
* Describe the process by which deceased registrants are identified and removed from the statewide voter registration list.
Other questions asked for how the state handles voters convicted of a felony, duplicate voter registrations, security measures and how the state removes registered voters who have moved to another state.
Scanlan’s answers
The Secretary of State’s Office outlined the step-by-step processes that are used in each aspect of voter registration, providing detail at the state level all the way down to how communities manage their checklists.
In terms of New Hampshire’s citizen requirement, he described the new law that went into effect this year.
“The statute lays out several types of acceptable documents to prove citizenship: ‘the applicant’s birth certificate, passport, naturalization papers if the applicant is a naturalized citizen, or any other reasonable documentation which indicates the applicant is a United States citizen,’” Scanlan wrote.
For voters who have died, Scanlan described how the communities across the state remove voters from the rolls if they died here or elsewhere. The process involves comparing official death records and how municipal clerks receive official notice of a voter’s death and then remove the names locally.
Most of Scanlan’s answers read like a textbook or quoted New Hampshire law directly. He provided each specific statute number, leaving it up to federal officials to read further on their own. He also provided contact information for the Division of Motor Vehicles and website links for further information.
To read Scanlan’s letter, visit unionleader.com.