While national or statewide candidates get lots of coverage, and voters likely know their stances on the issues, local candidates are often unfamiliar to voters. But local politics directly touches our daily lives and families. Who is making policies and how do we choose them? In New Hampshire, that can be a daunting process, thanks to the large citizen legislature. However, there are tools out there to help research the candidates and decide who meets your needs and priorities. On this episode of “The State We’re In,” Anna Brown, executive director of Citizens Count, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization dedicated to educating voters about the political process, as well as executive director of the Warren B. Rudman Center for Justice, Leadership and Public Service at the University of New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce School of Law, discusses these tools.
By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew
This article has been edited for length and clarity.
Melanie Plenda:
Anna, with elections on the horizon, can you tell us about some of the tools Citizens Count offers to voters?
Anna Brown:
There are 400 state representatives, which means there's roughly 900 candidates that are going to be on your ballot. So probably the tool we're best known for is our candidate profiles, where we provide background, issue positions, and so on. We offer other tools for voters as well. If you look up your town, we can show your polling location and your clerk info. We have a section called “Prepare to Vote” under our advocacy toolkit that offers information about what to bring to the polls, registering, and absentee ballots. We also have other tutorials on what to do after the election. How do I contact an elected official? How do I advocate for my cause? Then finally, we also offer a candidate comparison tool that lets voters see, “OK just for the candidates on my ballot, where do they stand on certain issues?”
Melanie Plenda:
Why are these tools necessary?
Anna Brown:
I've been covering New Hampshire elections for a while now, and every single election I have seen there are races that come down to less than half a dozen votes. There are multiple recounts, and when you're talking about a recount in New Hampshire, it's literally paper ballots, the secretary of state's office inspecting them one by one, with observers in place. In the primaries, when there's a tie it’s not uncommon enough that they actually have official dice to help settle ties.
So I always tell voters in New Hampshire that your vote counts. It isn't just a feel-good statement. There's all these candidates, roughly 900. It can be really hard to find information about those folks. Some of them don't have email addresses or websites, so that's where Citizens Count comes in, and we're trying to fill that gap. Because the other thing that's true, they don't always fall on party lines. In New Hampshire, you will find Democrats who are against gun laws. You will find Republicans who favor more lenient laws related to abortion than what is currently on the books. So I always encourage people to check out those individual candidates and don't just rely on the “D” or the
“R” next to someone's name.
Melanie Plenda:
How do you compile this information? Can you describe the process?
Anna Brown:
Our best tool is our candidate survey. We will contact them by email, snail mail, phone, follow up again for the folks that we can't find. I reach out to local parties and county parties sometimes, and we do get over half of candidates to respond to our survey. So most of our background information and issue positions are straight from their own mouth, and that's very important to us. We don't want to have any spin on our issue positions.
Melanie Plenda:
How much work does that take to put all this together?
Anna Brown:
There's three of us full time, some part time, and every election we also get an elections intern. Shout out to our current elections intern, Anna Steele, who has been incredible this year. It is a lot of hounding candidates, a lot of phone calls, a lot of stuffing envelopes. We also really are trying to hold each other to that rigorous standard of staying nonpartisan and engaging with candidates. When candidates come back to us and they say, “I don't like how that question was worded, or it was biased, or I just want to submit a statement,” we want to work with them. If anybody ever comes to us, including many candidates, and says, “Where are you getting your money from? What is your real agenda? Who's on your board?” These are all questions that we want to be completely transparent about, and so we do a lot of engagement there as well.
Melanie Plenda:
There’s also a constitutional amendment on the ballot related to the ages of judges in the state. Can you tell us about that?
Anna Brown:
Many people may not know that the New Hampshire Constitution requires judges and sheriffs to retire at the age of 70. This is a huge contrast to the U.S. Supreme Court, where we have seen, on many occasions, people simply pass away before they retire, and it can have a huge impact on rulings.
New Hampshire originally included this in the Constitution because they were concerned about the cognitive abilities, potentially, of judges and sheriffs. But that being said, when the Constitution was written, age expectancy was different. So now there is a proposal on the ballot, an amendment to our Constitution, that would raise the age of retirement to 75. This was actually sponsored by a member of the N.H. Supreme Court who was forced to retire at age 70 and is now serving in the House of Representatives. So that is going to be one of the questions on the ballot that you will see. It does require a super majority of voters, in order to change our Constitution. That's a kind of high threshold, but every now and then we do pass constitutional amendments. For example, in 2018 there was a new constitutional amendment that creates a right to privacy. If you do want to dig more into this, we do also have a link on our elections page, again, on https://www.citizenscount.org/ that includes a brief article on the pros and cons on that amendment.
Melanie Plenda:
Can you share a few of those pros and cons with this?
Anna Brown:
We do have some concern about what is going on with people as they are getting older. Is there perhaps some cognitive decline? That's a huge conversation that has happened with President Biden, with former President Trump, and it continues to this day. Another pro is that it actually ensures that you have sort of that fresh issue perspective coming onto the courts. So it's not so much as whether they're cognitively there, but also are they in tune with your average voter? Certainly, we know that demographics change based on what age group you're in, how you feel about certain issues. For example, we think about generational changes, things such as interracial marriage and gay marriage — there were sometimes very big gaps in terms of how younger people felt and how older people felt about the same issue.
We also have that higher age that people are living, thriving, even working, and especially in New Hampshire we have one of the oldest states on average in the nation. And we're seeing folks who may be past traditional retirement age, say Social Security retirement age, who are still interested in working, are still vibrant, and indeed bring a lot of experience and knowledge to their jobs. The same thing is very much true for judges. The more experience you have on the bench, the more connections you have with lawyers and prosecutors and defenders, and so on. You might be able to have a more efficient court, a more knowledgeable court, as opposed to constantly bringing in new people and just giving up all of that knowledge and experience when there really isn't a reason to boot it out. I will say five years is not a huge change. We're not getting rid of the age limit entirely with this proposal. We're just saying, instead of 70 it’s 75. This also would not affect sheriffs, because there are some arguments, of course, that a law enforcement position is a little bit different. This part of the amendment would only impact the age limit for judges.
Melanie Plenda:
And, as awesome as Citizens Count is, there are also other ways to scope out the candidates. What do you recommend Anna?
Anna Brown:
Definitely, if you can find some local candidate events, parades, at town hall forums, public libraries, sometimes at your local school. There are going to be these events where the candidates are on hand. The audience is probably similar to what you might see at your town meeting. And they'll interact with you. You can get a really good sense of a person, what they'll be like as a legislator, if you have that conversation with them.
I talked about how we call a lot of these candidates and have conversations with them. The vast, vast majority are interested in engaging in that conversation. Because, realistically, these people are volunteers. They get paid $100 a year plus mileage. They're doing this because they are deeply passionate about it. Every now and then you are going to find someone who is contrary and doesn't like to talk to people. But in a House full of 400 representatives, there's always going to be that small margin. Overall, I have such positive experiences, and I hear that from other people too. However, if you're an introvert and you don't want to go out and talk to candidates, your local newspaper is often a wonderful resource in terms of finding these issue positions. They’ll do candidate profiles, have interviews. That's not something you're going to get from national news coverage, and that's one reason why local news sources are so important. You can also go directly to the candidate websites or other interest groups. Just be aware that how certain issue positions are phrased may be intended to lead you in a certain direction, or may be a little general. So if someone says, “I support veterans,” try to dig a little deeper and say, “What does that really mean?”
Melanie Plenda:
Anna Brown is the executive director of Citizens Count, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization dedicated to educating voters about the political process. She is also the executive director of the Warren B. Rudman Center for Justice, Leadership, and Public Service at the University of New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce School of Law. Thank you for joining us.
“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communications. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.