Behind the Democrats’ push for their federal takeover of congressional elections is their insistence that it will sweep away “racist” voting laws and increase voter turnout. No wonder they had no interest this week in hearing from a Democratic legend who knows—and can prove—that they are full of it.
That Democrat is Bill Gardner, New Hampshire’s secretary of state. Mr. Gardner has been overseeing Granite State voting since Dec. 2, 1976, a week before Stacey Abrams’s 3rd birthday. In December, a bipartisan vote of the New Hampshire Legislature elected him to a 23rd two-year term. The longest-serving secretary of state in U.S. history, he’s an institution, famous for his apolitical commitment to the state’s constitution and its first-in-the-nation primary.
Mr. Gardner was invited (by Republicans) to testify at Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, which the Democratic majority titled “Jim Crow 2021: The Latest Assault on the Right to Vote.” Ms. Abrams got most of the headlines; the media and Senate Democrats barely acknowledged Mr. Gardner’s presence. And no wonder. It isn’t only that Mr. Gardner vehemently opposes his party’s H.R.1 bill, which would federally impose procedures such as early and absentee voting on the states. He also has incontrovertible evidence that the narrative behind it is a crock.
“Just because you make voting easier, it does not raise turnout automatically,” Mr. Gardner told the committee. It can have the opposite result by undermining “the trust and confidence voters have in the process.” He called it a “fine balance.” The New Hampshire evidence makes the case.
By Democrats’ definition, New Hampshire has some of the most “suppressive” voter laws anywhere. In the hearing and in a subsequent interview with me, Mr. Gardner explained that some of these rules are part of the state’s constitution. That document requires that residents show up to vote in person unless they are physically disabled or out of town. That means no mail-in voting. The state constitution requires that the final vote tally for each candidate be publicly declared at each polling place the night of the election after the polls close. This is one reason New Hampshire doesn’t allow early voting, which can cause the counting to stretch for days.
New Hampshire is one of four states that don’t allow provisional ballots—again, because it would derail the public reading of tallies. The state requires voter identification. It also requires in-person registration at a town hall or at a polling place on Election Day; it went out of its way to become exempt from the 1993 federal “motor voter” law that allows registration by motor-vehicle offices and other bureaucracies.
Racist? Suppressive? Onerous? Hardly. For the past five presidential elections, New Hampshire has been in the top five states for voter turnout. It’s been third in the past four presidential elections, last year pulling 72.2% of its voting age population to the polls. That exceeded U.S. turnout by nearly 11 points; in 2016 the figure was 14.5 points.
New Hampshire’s experience aside, Mr. Gardner offered the committee a contrasting (and more honest) history of voting in Oregon, the first state to shift to voting by mail. He recalled that in the early 1990s Oregon’s secretary of state pitched him on joining him in that move. Mr. Gardner declined. Before Oregon introduced all-mail voting in 1996, it had routinely been in the top 11 states for voter turnout in presidential elections, and often beat New Hampshire. It has never topped New Hampshire since, and in 2012 fell as low as 17th.
The Granite Stater says he believes deeply in making voting straightforward and accessible, and New Hampshire does that in many ways, including same-day registration. “But I’ve seen what ways to make it easier actually work and what ways don’t work,” he says. They aren’t all equal, and H.R.1’s provisions would likely do the opposite of what Democrats claim.
Mr. Gardner also provided the committee a chart showing U.S. voter turnout in presidential elections since 1952. He tells me he doesn’t think it is an accident that five of the six highest-turnout years were in the 1950s and ’60s, before the beginning of federal efforts to meddle in state elections with laws like the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act. People lose trust, and even pride in their unique state systems. (Another factor might be the 26th Amendment, ratified in 1971, which lowered the voting age to 18.)
Mr. Gardner has also issued a statement blasting Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats for their “attack” on his state and pointing out that the California system she wants to impose on the country has resulted in her state being ranked 46th, 49th, 49th and 43rd for turnout in the past four presidential elections. “There are 435 members of Congress; New Hampshire has two of them,” he tells me. Just five or six big states “have about half of all the members, and they’ll be writing our voting laws. I’m not telling them how to vote. Why are they telling us in New Hampshire how to vote? Especially given our record.”
And that’s the real question. Democrats’ “Jim Crow” claims are completely at odds with the evidence. If they are going to continue with H.R.1, they should at least be honest that the goal is to rig the system.
Write to kim@wsj.com.
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Appeared in the April 23, 2021, print edition.
