A federal judge on Tuesday struck down a New Hampshire regulation barring voters from sharing photos of their crammed-out ballots on-line, saying the statute violated constitutional free speech legal guidelines. During proceedings, however, state lawyers admitted that vote-buying isn’t exactly rampant – in fact, there are no known cases of it.
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Barbados also noted that cell phone cameras have been in use for more than 15 years and that Gardner, New Hampshire’s secretary of state, has “failed to identify a single instance anywhere in the United States in which a credible claim has been made that digital or photographic images of completed ballots have been used to facilitate vote buying or voter coercion”. “‘I’m a proud seller of my vote! I just sold my vote for $25!’ At some level, you have to use common sense”.
The regulation took impact final September and was punishable by a wonderful as much as $1,000.
Bill Gardner, who has been New Hampshire’s top election official for almost four decades, is a supporter of the ban.
Three individuals have been investigated in New Hampshire by the workplace of the secretary of state for violating the regulation, together with a person who posted an image of his ballot on Facebook.
“Today’s choice is a victory for the First Amendment”, Gilles Bissonnette, the authorized director of the ACLU-NH, stated in a press release. He said the law “encroached on pure political speech done on social media”. “The First Amendment does not allow the state to, as it was doing here, broadly ban innocent political speech with the hope that such a sweeping ban would address underlying criminal conduct”.
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LaBonte said he was still reviewing the order so would not immediately comment.
