More than 100 protesters were on hand as the session kicked off Tuesday at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm College, but inside the meeting, the fireworks never materialized. | Holly Ramer/AP Photo
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Despite the intense furor over President Donald Trump’s voter-fraud commission, New Hampshire’s trademark civility reigned Tuesday as the panel gathered for its first public meeting outside the protected confines of the White House complex.
More than 100 protesters were on hand as the session kicked off, heckling some panelists and VIPs as they were escorted into the parking lot by police. But inside the not-quite-full, 300-person-capacity meeting room at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm College, the fireworks never materialized.
Despite the spirited start outside, the mood inside the hall remained largely subdued as wonky panels vetted the security of open source data, issues around USB device vulnerabilities, and the nuts and bolts of matching exhaustive voter-data files in the search for fraud.
Panelists were also treated to a demonstration of some of the historic New Hampshire voting machines that have been in use in the state since 1892.
Those protesting Tuesday’s event zeroed in on the assertion by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, vice chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, that driver’s license data suggest that out-of-state voters could have swung last year’s U.S. Senate race in New Hampshire to Democrat Maggie Hassan and away from Sen. Kelly Ayotte. One resident of neighboring Massachusetts carried a sign reading: “From MA, here to protest, not vote.”
By the time the commission broke for lunch, the passel of protesters had departed, leaving two “Stop Trump Sham Commission” signs abandoned on the lawn outside the building.
The closest thing to drama at Tuesday’s session came after lunch, as New Hampshire’s soft-spoken secretary of state, Bill Gardner, firmly but politely dressed down Kobach for impugning the integrity of the Senate election last year.
“That driver’s license issue is not an issue,” Gardner said, sitting immediately to Kobach’s left on the stage at the commission meeting. “The problem that has occurred because of what you wrote is that the question of whether our election as we have recorded it is real and valid. And it is real and valid.”
With that came the only outburst of Tuesday’s meeting: a forceful but brief round of applause from members of the panel’s critics sitting in the audience.
Although some Democrats inside and outside the Granite State have called for Gardner to quit the panel in protest, he sounded more disappointed than angry. “I hope we all learn from this,” he said.
Kobach seemed a bit chagrined by the criticism, speculating aloud on whether he may have miscalculated by trying to condense the nuances of the out-of-state voting situation into an 800-word Breitbart News column. In that piece, he asserted that of roughly 6,000 people who took part in same-day registration in the New Hampshire in 2016, about 5,000 failed to apply for state driver’s licenses within 60 days.
However, Kobach didn’t completely back down from his claim that fraud may have been prevalent enough to have tipped the election.
“Until further research is done … we will never know the answer regarding the legitimacy of that particular election,” said Kobach, now a candidate for Kansas governor.
The audience hardly reacted when one panelist, John Lott, author of the book “More Guns, Less Crime” and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, called for the system that is used to vet potential gun owners, known as NCIS, to be used to check out potential voters.
“Think about applying the background check system that we use for purchasing guns, the NCIS system, for voting,” Lott said. “Democrats have long been concerned about voter suppression, but they have also long lauded the background check system on guns. It’s simple, accurate and in complete harmony with the right of people to go defend themselves.”
Later, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap questioned Lott, asking whether he was calling for the background check system to be used in elections.
“I don’t see why not,” Lott said. “There may be alternatives, but here you have something that many people … are on the record saying this is a good system.”
Dunlap, a commission member, replied that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms would have “some concerns” about such a system. “We’d witness a startling example of laws of unintended consequences,” he said. “NCIS wasn’t designed for elections.”
Civil rights advocates reacted to the proposal with a combination of alarm and derision.
“To basically say to voters, we’re going to use the standards for registering to vote that are used for having somebody eligible to purchase a gun, is just crazy to me,” said one attendee, Jon Greenbaum of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “People in the voting rights community are flabbergasted. … It’s problematic if he’s being serious about it and it’s problematic if he’s not.”
The strongest language uttered inside the hall was Dunlap’s response to Kobach’s claim that fraud may have tipped the 2016 Senate race in New Hampshire, based on the fact that some newly registered voters did not apply for driver’s licenses.
“I think it’s a reckless statement to make,” the Maine official said.
Some of the commission’s critics said the absence of contention Tuesday should not be seen as evidence that the proposals under discussion are mainstream or reasonable.
“There was decorum … but you’re not going to get much dissent when everybody agrees. The commission is slated a certain way and the panels are slanted a certain way,” Greenbaum said. “People don’t have to yell at each other to disagree, but you haven’t set it up as a truth-seeking exercise. It’s really kind of the opposite of that.”
After the daylong meeting wrapped up, Gardner defended his continued participation, predicting that the commission would eventually be able to propose lasting reforms despite the early tumult.
“I’d much rather have a rough time at the beginning, and then at the end have something that everybody feels good about and will have lasting effects,” Gardner told POLITICO. “It’s not a bad thing to be tested at the beginning. It’s a good thing.”
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