By Lloyd Jones
THE CONWAY DAILY SUN
CONWAY — New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan is predicting a record voter turnout for a midterm general election Tuesday.
“I’m predicting 591,000 votes will be cast,” Scanlan said by phone Friday. “This will surpass the previous record of four years ago when we had 580,000 (ballots counted).”
He added: “Setting a new voter record is always a good thing.”
Is a red wave coming?
In 2018, Democrats rode a blue wave to victory and took control of the House and Senate. GOP officials believe this is their year and their election to win on Tuesday. They believe voters are more concerned about “heating and eating” than “election deniers” and stances on abortion.
NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd interviewed Gov. Chris Sununu on Sunday and asked him about his support of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Don Bolduc.
“Why are you supporting an election denialist?” Todd asked. “And do you think the inflation issue is enough to sort of rationalize support for somebody who thinks school buses of voters are going to show up in New Hampshire?”
“You are in a bubble if you think anybody’s talking about what happened in 2020 or talking about Mar-a-Lago and all that,” Sununu replied. “I know the press loves to talk about it. People are talking about what is happening in their pocketbooks every single day when they have to buy groceries or fill up gas tanks right now.”
The latest polls show the Republicans more interested in this election than the Democrats.
A poll Saint Anselm College Survey Center at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics released Tuesday said “Republican voters are now more energized than Democratic voters, with 84 percent of Republican voters saying they are paying a lot of attention to the election, compared to 77 percent of Democratic voters. This represents a 10-point improvement for Republicans, and a 2-point decline for Democrats on this question since the Survey Center’s last poll in late September.”
However, this year, there are more registered Democrats statewide than Republicans in New Hampshire. According to the Secretary of State’s Office, as of Thursday, there were 278,681 registered Democrats, 276,034 Republicans and 328,320 undeclared voters.
After 2020 (and before the checklist verification in 2021), there were 347,828 registered Democrats and 333,165 registered Republicans.
If Scanlan’s prediction comes true, it would represent roughly 66 percent voter participation, but he cautioned against putting a percentage on turnout since this is the year New Hampshire went through “the statutorily required 10-year checklist verification (RSA 654:39) where voters who had been inactive for two full election cycles (four years) were removed from the checklist. As a result, a large number of election-day voter registrations should be expected.”
“The bottom line is a lot of names were removed from (from town checklists), and a number of voters will have to re-register if they want to vote Tuesday,” said Scanlan.
Louise Inkell, town clerk for Conway, said supervisors of the checklist “purged” thousands of voters from the checklist. There were 8,500 voters on the checklist in 2020, but that figure was down to 6,537 last month.
While the state now has an overall blue tint when it comes to politics, Conway has been a blue town for more than a decade. There were 2,124 registered Democrats, 1,844 Republicans and 2,546 independents on the checklist as of Oct. 12.
Conway voters will again be casting ballots at the town garage in Center Conway, behind the Center Conway Fire Station, from 8 a.m.-7 p.m.
The good news, according to Inkell, is a slew of citizens have signed up to help work at the polls.
“We are in very good shape for volunteers,” she said. “The big push will be in 2024 when we’ll need every volunteer we can find.”
Looking ahead, there are four planned elections in 2024: the New Hampshire First-in-the-Nation Presidential Primary, the town and school election in April, the primary election in September; and the General Election in November.
Inkell said there has been a larger than a normal request for absentee ballots for this election.
In the early days of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, Conway’s town and school elections were postponed three times, and more than 1,045 absentee ballots were requested.
By contrast, in 2021, only 150 absentee ballots were requested through Inkell’s office.
As of Thursday, there were 633 requests and 521 have already been returned. “This is definitely higher than what we’ve received before,” she said. “People are finding their votes count and can make a difference.”
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