Bill Gardner

 It's not out of the ordinary to see a New Hampshire politician skip across the state's southern border to raise money in Boston. What is unusual — really, unheard of until this year — is to see that from someone running for Secretary of State.

Nearly three months after President Donald Trump disbanded his controversial voter fraud commission, the public can get a peek at the voter data New Hampshire was prepared to turn over.

Dissatisfied with both the incumbent and his well-financed challenger, another Democrat is putting himself forward as an alternative to longtime Secretary of State Bill Gardner.

Former Manchester Representative and Alderman Peter Sullivan says he respects Gardner’s 42 years years of service in the position but believes it’s time to put someone more forward-thinking in the role.

It was a scene you'd expect at your average campaign launch: dozens of supporters gathered at a press conference just steps from the State House, top party officials waiting to offer endorsements and a well-endowed fundraising committee waiting behind the scenes.

An average campaign launch — except for the fact that any kind of campaign for this particular office, New Hampshire’s Secretary of State, was all but unprecedented.

Secretary of State Bill Gardner says he was "surprised" and disappointed to find out that the presidential advisory commission he was tapped to serve on last May had been abruptly dissolved. While the announcement was made Wednesday night, Gardner said he didn’t learn of the news until Thursday morning.

The Trump administration’s election commission has gone largely silent since its September meeting in Manchester. But one of its members, Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap, says even he is having trouble finding out basic information about the commission’s work — and he’s now filing a lawsuit seeking more transparency.

Bud Fitch is a familiar face around New Hampshire’s Statehouse and its broader political circles. He’s served as deputy attorney general, as Gov. John Lynch’s so-called "stimulus czar" and as a top staffer for former Sen. Kelly Ayotte.

Since August, Fitch has been working under Secretary of State Bill Gardner in a newly created position as a dedicated attorney focusing on election law.

Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan called on Secretary of State Bill Gardner to resign from President Trump’s voting commission, after the chair of that same commission wrote a Breitbart column casting doubt on the outcome of last November’s election results in New Hampshire.

A federal oversight agency’s review of how New Hampshire is spending $18 million in federal election money finds that the state, for the most part, follows the rules. But the back-and-forth within the audit illuminates a larger and long-running tension between the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office and the federal elections officials.

A pair of lawsuits were filed Wednesday challenging a controversial new voting law, SB3, just weeks before the law is set to take effect.

One legal challenge comes from the New Hampshire Democratic Party. The other is filed on behalf of the League of Women Voters of New Hampshire and three individual would-be voters.

A lawsuit that sought to restrict New Hampshire's ability to share voter information with the Trump administration’s election integrity commission was resolved in court Monday. 

Both sides compromised on a plan to allow Secretary of State Bill Gardner to share scanned, unsearchable copies of local voter checklists from all wards across the state— not the larger, digitized version of that information that is collected in the central statewide voter database.

A New Hampshire lawsuit seeking to block the state from complying with a request for voter data from the Trump administration's "Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity" is back on, after a renewed request from that commission was sent out Wednesday.

Secretary of State Bill Gardner returned to New Hampshire Thursday after traveling to Washington earlier this week for his first meeting as a member of the Trump administration's election commission.

Secretary of State Bill Gardner used his opening remarks at the inaugural meeting of the Trump administration’s voting integrity commission to call for closer examination of the value of photo ID laws and other measures that, he says, improve public confidence in elections.

Update: The hearing was postponed Tuesday morning at the request of the New Hampshire ACLU, pending further legal action at the federal level.

One of the first legal challenges related to the Trump administration’s request for state voter files will go before a judge in Nashua Tuesday, as part of a lawsuit filed last week by the New Hampshire ACLU and two state lawmakers.

When New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner said he intended to share information from the state’s public voter checklists with a newly launched Trump administration commission, plenty of people were quick to decry the move as an “invasion of privacy.”

Governor Sununu says New Hampshire should turn over public information on voters to a Trump administration voter fraud commission, a view shared by the state's top election official, Secretary of State Bill Gardner. But Gardner says the matter is under review by the Attorney General.

  New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner says he has heard almost nothing from the White House in the two weeks since he agreed to join President Donald Trump's election integrity commission.

Gardner told the Concord Monitor he got a call May 10 letting him know that the commission's creation was going public but he doesn't know when it will start meeting, how much time it will take or what his role includes.

New Hampshire residents can continue to safely snap photos inside the voting booth, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up the state’s request for an appeal in a years-long battle over so-called “ballot selfies.”

Still, even after multiple judges have ruled the ban unconstitutional, Secretary of State Bill Gardner says he’s still not giving up on finding a way to wall off the practice. 

Lawmakers heard input Tuesday on a bill that, if left unchanged, could drastically expand the power of the Secretary of State’s office.

When New Hampshire voters walk into the polls Tuesday, they’ll be greeted by a process that has remained largely unchanged for decades: paper ballots, filled out by hand, with voter rolls monitored by pencil-wielding clerks. And the way the state’s top election official sees it, there’s little reason to mess with a good thing.