Election officials across New Hampshire are getting ready for the state primaries on Tuesday.
Recent years have seen a handful of changes to statewide election laws. For Durham town clerk Rachel Deane, that means communication — with the Secretary of State’s office, with her staff and volunteers, and with the voters in her community — has been one of her top priorities.
Days away from the primaries, NHPR’s Julia Barnett checked in with Deane to see how she’s been preparing and what she’s been hearing from voters this election season.
Transcript
So what have you been doing to prepare for Tuesday's election?
Oh, boy. So the town of Durham has been doing a lot of pre-work ahead of election day, trying to make sure that all of our staff and volunteers are familiar with all the many election law changes that happened in 2025 and 2026. The main ones that impact our community are the identifications that we can now accept for voter registration, absentee ballots and, identifying yourself for the purposes of election.
So, Rachel, just the super-short, bullet point version of it: What are the most recent voting law changes that voters need to know before Tuesday?
The state of New Hampshire will no longer accept a student ID as a form of identification, whether that's for voter registration or absentee voting. The other thing that folks need to know is if they can't make it in to vote and they have to vote by absentee, they have to show a government-issued photo ID.
Amid all of these changes, what outreach did you do in the community to make sure that people knew what was going on?
We have a key group of people that are very active. So they would reach out to us, the election officials, and we would provide them with the information. This year in particular, we did an additional voter registration drive at our public library. Then we had a senior assisted living facility come to us to help those folks register to vote.
The community is home to the University of New Hampshire's main campus so we tend to see a larger voter turnout for voters that also attend the university. We had a group that worked on disseminating that information to leadership at the University of New Hampshire. And then we also had our own supervisors of the voter checklist working directly with UNH to set up — we haven't officially done the [voter registration] drives there yet because the students have just gotten back to campus, but we plan to do more drives for them after the state primary.
So you've been a town clerk and deputy clerk for 10 years or so now. How does the preparation for this primary compare to all the other elections you've been involved in?
What I've been seeing with the elections that are happening now [is that] no election is similar to the last. So because there's so many changes happening and voter behavior around elections has shifted in terms of how interested voters are, how passionate they are, who shows up, they don't tend to be the same at all.
And with the new laws, we're going to be experiencing some of those changes for the first time. So we don't know what to expect. Will we see a lot of voter turnout? Will we not? Will we see a lot of challenges? What I will say is the new consistency is: we have to be ready for anything.
What have you been hearing from voters? What are some of the common concerns or questions that they're coming to you with?
Voters are really worried about absentee ballots, in my office at least. When they see headlines at the national level, you know, things coming down from the federal government on mail-in votes, that creates a lot of confusion and concern. So we will get lots of calls from voters worried that when they mail their ballots in, that the town isn't going to receive it. We don't anticipate that impacting us in New Hampshire for this primary election.
Anything else you want voters to know before they head to the polls on Tuesday? Tips, tricks?
The number one thing I want voters to know is that we absolutely want to see them on Election Day. If there is a problem or an issue, a lot of times, election officials can help. Just know that election officials in the state of New Hampshire are very dedicated to making sure that the votes that should be counted are counted. So we really want to encourage people to come out and vote.
