In the Lasky litigation on August 7, the Secretary of State’s Office informed the Court and the public that no confidential information was contained on the hand-marked checklists that the Secretary planned on submitting to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. These hand-marked checklists are available to the public by the Secretary of State’s Office at the State Archives. This representation appears to have been incorrect, as some of these hand-marked checklists actually contain confidential and non-public information written by poll workers, including information concerning victims of domestic abuse whose information is private under New Hampshire law. On Friday, August 25, the ACLU-NH became aware of this issue and the fact that the Secretary of State was orally discussing this issue with municipalities. That day, the ACLU-NH immediately informed the Attorney General’s Office of its concerns.
We are troubled that this confidential voter information had been publicly available at the State Archives maintained by the Secretary of State’s Office until this issue was discovered. A victim of domestic violence should never risk further abuse as a condition of exercising her right to vote.
We appreciate the efforts of the Attorney General’s Office to take immediate steps to remedy this issue, including a manual review of every page of every hand-marked checklist that the Secretary of State intends to send to the Commission. This will help ensure that no private information is further disclosed. We also call for all the hand-marked checklists at the State Archives to be removed from public view until they are manually screened to ensure that they contain no confidential or non-public information.