More than 80 New Hampshire Republican elected officials, including Senate President Jeb Bradley and House Speaker Sherman Packard, have signed onto a letter calling for Donald Trump to be granted ballot access during next year's state presidential primary. The letter, released by the Trump campaign Thursday, calls potential legal efforts to bar the former president from the ballot “an absurd conspiracy theory” and “fraud against the will of the people.”
“President Donald J. Trump is once again at the forefront of political attacks, this time by those who are attempting to disqualify the former President from appearing on New Hampshire’s primary ballot by weaponizing Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment against him,” the legislators wrote in a letter to New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan.
The letter is a response to arguments made by some legal scholars and Trump critics, including former New Hampshire Republican Senate nominee Corky Messner, that state election officials could disqualify Trump from the ballot because of his actions on Jan. 6, 2021.
Specifically, the critics point to the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states that no person can hold elected office who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”
Messner met with Scanlan last month to discuss whether Trump could be disqualified on those grounds, and he has said he could file suit to force the issue.
Scanlan has sought the advice of New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella. In a joint statement issued last month, they stressed they were “carefully reviewing” the issue.
Scanlan is expected to announce the candidate filing period for the presidential primary Wednesday. He will also weigh in on Trump’s qualifications to get on the ballot, according to a press release this week from his office.
State Republican Chairman Chris Ager has already said he would fight any effort to keep Trump, or any other candidate, off the New Hampshire primary ballot.
New Hampshire Democrats meanwhile, are keeping an eye on Washington this week, where the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws committee meets on Thursday.
The committee is slated to review the party’s 2024 delegate selection plans — which will almost certainly touch on the party’s efforts to move New Hampshire from its traditional spot at the top of the presidential primary calendar.
Under the proposed calendar adopted by the DNC in February, South Carolina would hold the party's first primary. New Hampshire, which is mandated by state law to hold the first presidential primary in the nation, would vote second under the DNC plan, but only if it changed certain election laws, including expanding absentee balloting, and repealing the requirement that New Hampshire vote first.
Democrats here have long argued that the DNC’s demands on absentee balloting and early voting were impossible to meet because Republicans control the governor’s office and both chambers of the Legislature.
They also rejected from the start the idea New Hampshire would undo the state law, dating back almost 50 years, dictating it hold the leadoff primary.
