New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan — the official who runs the state's elections — is under criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division for refusing to hand over the state's unredacted voter registration list, according to letters obtained and reported on November 11 by InDepthNH. The September letter, from Eric Neff, acting chief of the division's Voting Section, told Scanlan he was under criminal investigation for withholding the data, directed him to preserve evidence, and warned that a failure to preserve relevant data could be treated as spoliation, carrying civil and criminal sanctions, InDepthNH reported.
Source: Granite State Report, reporting InDepthNH (Damien Fisher), Nov. 11, 2026
Scanlan's public answer was short. Asked about the investigation by an InDepthNH reporter at the New Hampshire Veterans Home on Veterans Day, he said: "No, I'm not worried." No charge has been filed against him: a review of the public record found no grand jury subpoena, indictment or criminal complaint naming Scanlan, and InDepthNH reported that neither Neff nor the Voting Section answered its questions.
Source: Granite State Report / InDepthNH, Nov. 11, 2026
The letters, and the official who signed the first one
The criminal warning did not arrive out of nowhere. In July 2026, Harmeet Dhillon, then the head of the Civil Rights Division, wrote to Scanlan laying out the criminal laws she said were in play and noting that the division could seek court injunctions and was also authorized to prosecute criminal violations, according to InDepthNH's account of the letters. Neff's September letter then named the investigation directly. Dhillon no longer runs the division: the Associated Press and NPR reported that she resigned on November 5, 2026, and the AP reported that Attorney General Todd Blanche announced he had accepted the resignation.
Source: Granite State Report, citing InDepthNH, AP and NPR
Seventeen months over one voter file
The fight began on June 25, 2025, when a deputy assistant attorney general asked Scanlan questions about how New Hampshire maintains its voter rolls and requested the statewide voter registration list, active and inactive voters alike. Scanlan answered the questions on July 25, 2025, and declined to send the list, writing that state law allows its release only in limited circumstances that did not apply, and that each town's public checklist could be obtained from local clerks and supervisors. The department returned on August 18, 2025, demanding every field, and Scanlan refused again on August 28, writing after consulting counsel that the letter cited no federal provision overriding New Hampshire's privacy law. The Justice Department sued on September 25, 2025, and four New Hampshire voters joined the case on the state's side.
A federal judge already ruled — for Scanlan
On June 29, 2026, U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante dismissed the government's suit in a 26-page order. His first holding turned on the text of Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which covers records that "come into" an election officer's possession: LaPlante read that to mean records received from outside, such as voter forms, while the statewide list is, in his words, "a continuously maintained, state-generated compilation of data" that the state builds itself — so it falls outside the law. His second, independent holding was that the government's August 2025 demand letter failed the law's own requirement to state both the basis and the purpose of a demand: it named a purpose and cited legal authority, but offered no fact about New Hampshire's rolls, no complaint and no pattern of error. The department's separate claim under the Help America Vote Act was found abandoned in its own briefing, and the act contains no disclosure provision in any case. LaPlante counted nine earlier federal courts that had dismissed the same kind of suit, with none granting the government the order it wanted; the Associated Press counted New Hampshire as the tenth state where the department lost. The Justice Department appealed to the First Circuit on July 6, 2026, and on September 1 the state asked the appeals court to dismiss the appeal without full briefing; no ruling on that motion had appeared in the filings reviewed.
Source: Granite State Report analysis of LaPlante order; League of Women Voters case page
Where a crime would have to be found in the statute
Title III's criminal penalties, at 52 U.S.C. sections 20701 and 20702, attach to keeping records: an election officer who willfully fails to retain federal election records for 22 months faces up to a $1,000 fine and a year in prison, and the same penalty applies to anyone who willfully steals, destroys, conceals, mutilates or alters a covered record. Sections 20703 and 20705 govern a written demand and give a federal court — not a prosecutor — the power to compel production when a demand is refused. On preservation, the public record runs the other way: after a September 4, 2026 Justice Department letter ordering 2024 ballots and records kept, Scanlan emailed local election officials telling them to keep all 2024 ballots and other records, Vermont Public reported. The one word a prosecutor could reach for is "conceals" — whether refusing a demand on state-privacy-law grounds can count as concealing is a question the reviewed filings do not answer, and LaPlante's holding that the list is not a covered record makes it harder for the government if it holds on appeal.
Source: Granite State Report statute analysis of 52 U.S.C. §§ 20701–20705
Under RSA 654:45, VI, New Hampshire's centralized voter database is private and confidential, exempt from the Right-to-Know Law, and may not be disclosed through a subpoena or civil discovery; anyone who discloses it in a way the statute does not authorize is guilty of a misdemeanour. A federal records demand is not on the statute's list of allowed disclosures — so the same act the Justice Department is investigating, handing over the file, is the act state law appears to criminalize.
Why the timing matters: Dec. 2
New Hampshire's secretary of state never appears on a voter's ballot: the office is filled by the Legislature — 400 representatives and 24 senators voting together — and the next vote is set for December 2, 2026, by custom a ballot whose individual votes are not recorded. Scanlan, a Republican, will face a Legislature that Democrats control after the November 3 elections, the same voters whose election his office oversaw. The investigation disclosure lands three weeks before that vote. When the civil ruling came down in June, Scanlan stated his position in one line: he is "committed to protecting the private information of New Hampshire voters" to the fullest extent the law requires. The public portion of the rolls — names, addresses and party affiliation — is already available town by town, NHPR reported; what the federal government wants on top of that is dates of birth, partial Social Security numbers and driver's licence numbers for every registered voter in the state.
Source: Granite State Report, Dec. 2 vote report; NHPR via GSR
What happens next
Three developments will show whether the investigation has substance: a First Circuit ruling on the state's request to dismiss the government's appeal, or a schedule for full briefing; any filing in a federal court naming Scanlan as a criminal defendant — none has appeared; and the letters themselves, which are governmental records under New Hampshire's RSA 91-A and can be requested, subject to any exemptions the Department of State claims in writing. For voters everywhere, including immigrant and diaspora families whose names, birth dates and licence numbers sit in state voter databases across the country, the case is a live test of how much of that file the federal government can demand — and what happens to a state official who, backed by a judge's ruling, says no.