A federal judge late Thursday overturned a New Hampshire law that required unregistered voters to show a birth certificate or valid U.S. passport before casting a ballot, ruling the citizenship-verification requirement unconstitutional and ordering the state to let voters use a sworn affidavit instead.
U.S. District Court Judge Samantha Elliott issued a 98-page ruling siding with the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups that challenged the 2024 law, which former Gov. Chris Sununu signed. The decision takes effect immediately, meaning New Hampshire voters heading to the polls this fall for midterm elections can register on Election Day without documentary proof of citizenship, so long as they sign a "legally-binding" affidavit attesting they are citizens.
The ruling is the latest in a string of federal court decisions chipping away at state-level election integrity measures, and it lands at a moment when the broader national debate over who should vote, and how states verify it, shows no sign of cooling.
The struck-down law, designated HB 1569, required anyone registering to vote in New Hampshire for the first time on Election Day to present a birth certificate or valid U.S. passport within seven days of casting a ballot. Supporters said the requirement was a straightforward safeguard: prove you are a citizen, then vote.
Judge Elliott saw it differently. In her ruling, she wrote that the state Attorney General's office "didn't provide 'conclusive proof' that non-citizens were regularly voting in New Hampshire elections." She pointed to the state's own record: only one person in 26 years has been charged with voter fraud in New Hampshire. A handful of permanent residents were allowed to vote, she noted, but that happened because of "confusion by local clerks", not a systemic problem.
The Center Square reported Elliott's central conclusion:
"New Hampshire's interest in election integrity cannot justify the burden on New Hampshire voters based on the evidence in this case."
She added that "such miniscule numbers strongly undercut any legitimate concern about election integrity vis-à-vis noncitizen voting and, consequently, the state's interest in addressing it."
The judge did clarify one point that her critics may overlook. As AP News reported, Elliott emphasized that New Hampshire voters are still required to prove their citizenship. The ruling did not eliminate that obligation. Instead, it restored a previously available method, the sworn affidavit, that the 2024 law had removed. Elliott framed the question narrowly: whether the state can constitutionally strip away one method of proving citizenship when the evidence of fraud is negligible.
AP News provided additional detail on the scale of the problem, or the lack of one. Between 1998 and 2024, roughly 8.3 million votes were cast in New Hampshire. Of those, only eight noncitizens may have cast ballots. Eight out of 8.3 million.
Elliott wrote that "if wrongful voting is rare in New Hampshire, wrongful voting by noncitizens is essentially non-existent."
On the other side of the ledger, a 2025 University of Maryland study estimated that 21.3 million eligible American voters nationwide lack easy access to citizenship documentation. That figure, cited in the AP's coverage, suggests the law's practical effect would fall hardest not on illegal immigrants trying to sneak onto the rolls, but on lawful citizens who simply don't have a passport or can't quickly locate a birth certificate.
That tension sits at the heart of the debate. Election integrity advocates argue that even a small number of fraudulent votes can swing close races, especially in a state like New Hampshire where margins are often razor-thin. The counterargument, which Judge Elliott adopted, is that a law must be proportionate to the problem it addresses, and one prosecution in a quarter-century doesn't justify a documentation hurdle that could sideline thousands of eligible voters.
This is not the first time New Hampshire's voter-verification efforts have run into judicial resistance. In 2017, the state passed a law requiring voters to show additional proof of identity if they registered within 30 days of an election. Democrats passed a repeal in 2019, but Sununu vetoed it. The New Hampshire Supreme Court ultimately struck down the 2017 law in 2021, ruling it imposed unreasonable burdens on the right to vote.
The 2024 law was, in effect, the legislature's second attempt. And it met the same fate, this time in federal court.
New Hampshire occupies an unusual position in American election law. It is one of a handful of states that do not use provisional ballots, which federal law otherwise requires. The state received a waiver from that requirement in the 1990s in exchange for offering same-day voter registration. That arrangement means voters who show up on Election Day without prior registration can cast a regular ballot immediately, a system that places extra weight on whatever verification happens at the point of registration.
The question of how states verify citizenship at the ballot box has drawn national attention, with congressional Republicans pushing broader federal requirements and the courts weighing in state by state.
Henry Klementowicz, the ACLU of New Hampshire's deputy legal director, wasted no time framing the ruling as a vindication. He said in a statement:
"New Hampshire's elections have always been safe, secure, and accurate, and this law could have unconstitutionally and needlessly prevented thousands of eligible voters from casting a ballot. Making it harder to vote is a clear attack on one of our most fundamental of rights, and this law is consigned to the dustbin of history where it belongs."
That language, "consigned to the dustbin of history", carries a certain triumphalism. But it also reveals the ACLU's operating assumption: that any additional verification step is, by definition, a barrier rather than a safeguard. That assumption deserves scrutiny.
Requiring a birth certificate or passport is not an exotic demand. Millions of Americans produce these documents routinely, to board a plane, start a job, open a bank account. The notion that the same documentation is an unconstitutional burden when applied to voting, but perfectly acceptable for everything else, strikes many voters as incoherent.
Still, Newsmax noted the ruling's practical impact: voters in New Hampshire's fall midterms can now register and vote with nothing more than a signed affidavit. Whether that affidavit carries real teeth, whether anyone who lies on one faces meaningful prosecution, remains an open question. The state's track record of one voter fraud charge in 26 years does not inspire confidence that enforcement will be aggressive.
The New Hampshire ruling arrives against a backdrop of escalating legal battles over who gets to vote and how states confirm it. Courts across the country have been asked to weigh voter-ID laws, citizenship checks, and registration requirements, and the outcomes have been mixed.
In North Carolina, for instance, a federal judge upheld that state's voter ID law after a seven-year legal fight, finding the requirement constitutional. The contrast with the New Hampshire decision is instructive: different judges, different records, different results.
Meanwhile, the federal government has pursued its own citizenship-verification measures. A separate federal court recently rejected a Democratic challenge to Trump administration voter citizenship checks, suggesting the legal landscape is far from settled.
And the underlying concern is not imaginary. In Minnesota, a noncitizen faced felony charges for voting in the 2024 election, a case that undercuts the claim that noncitizen voting simply does not happen.
Judge Elliott's ruling rests heavily on the specific evidentiary record in New Hampshire. One prosecution in 26 years. Eight possible noncitizen votes out of 8.3 million. Those are the numbers she weighed, and she found the state's interest wanting. But the question of whether those numbers reflect the true scope of the problem, or simply the state's failure to detect and prosecute it, is one her 98-page opinion does not fully resolve.
The ruling takes effect immediately, and New Hampshire's Attorney General's office has not yet indicated whether it will appeal. If the state does appeal, the case could reach the First Circuit Court of Appeals and potentially set precedent for the region.
For now, New Hampshire heads into its fall midterms with a voter registration system that accepts a sworn statement in place of a birth certificate or passport. Supporters of the ruling call that a restoration of voting rights. Critics call it an invitation to exploit a system that already lacks provisional ballots and relies on the honor system at a level most states abandoned years ago.
The state's voters will have to decide for themselves whether a signed affidavit is a meaningful check, or just a piece of paper.
When the only enforcement mechanism is a promise not to lie, and the state has prosecuted exactly one person for breaking that promise in a quarter-century, the system is not verifying citizenship. It is assuming it.
