SE4E3: Navigating New Proof of Citizenship Requirements with New Hampshire’s Tina Guilford

In this episode, hosts Eric Fey and Brianna Lennon speak with Tina Guilford. She’s the Town Clerk in Derry, New Hampshire – home to the largest polling place in the United States (One polling location for 21,000 voters).

They spoke about a newer law in New Hampshire that requires all people to provide proof of United States citizenship to register to vote, as well as how this new law has impacted the administration of elections in the state.

High Turnout, Wide Margins Credits
Managing Editor: Rebecca Smith
Managing Producer: Aaron Hay
Associate Producer: Katie Quinn
Digital Producer: Mark Johnson

Transcription of the episode is as follows:

Tina Guilford: Fourteen of those were Election Day voters. Six of them had to go home to get additional paperwork, and yes, all of mine came back. We did have one woman who, as they were trying to explain to her that she needed proof of citizenship – she just kind of jumped up and kind of ran out and went home and grabbed her birth certificate and came back, and then she’s married, so she had to go home again to get her marriage license, you know. So, it took her two tries, but she got it done, which is a positive.

[High Turnout Wide Margins Introduction]

Eric Fey: Hey everybody. It’s another exciting episode of High Turnout Wide Margins. I’m your co-host. Eric Fey, Director of Elections in St Louis County, Missouri. I’m joined by my partner-in-crime –

Brianna Lennon: Brianna Lennon. I am the County Clerk in Boone County, Missouri,

Eric Fey: And our guest today is – Tina, want to go ahead and introduce yourself?

Tina Guilford: My name is Tina Guilford, and I’m the Town Clerk in Derry, New Hampshire.

Eric Fey: So Tina, you’re our first New Hampshire guest on the podcast. We’ve had 100 episodes, and I don’t know why we haven’t had a – what are you called? New Hampshire-ans? New Hampshire-ites?

Tina Guilford: New Hampshire-rites.

Eric Fey: So, Town Clerk in Derry, we’re going to get into that, but our first question, always, every episode is – how did you get involved in running elections?

Tina Guilford: Back in 2015, we were having some budgetary issues in our town, and our town council – we have lots of different forms of government here in New Hampshire. So, here in Derry, we have a town council form of government, and they decided to close a fire station, lay off some police officers, and shut down our transfer station for certain hours, and residents kind of got involved. I was one of them. We were filling the meeting hall, standing room only. If you Google it, WMUR has plenty of videos of residents throwing the finger at the governing body and then being gaveled out and and it was, it was a very, very stressful time, and I honestly had not really been involved in politics at that point. Long and the short of it, the residents filed a petition to bring the fire station and those employee positions back. The Council denied it. We forced a vote, a special vote, and we actually voted to raise our own taxes. I mean, you hear a lot of conversation about lowering taxes, lowering taxes, lowering taxes. No, we voted to raise our own taxes. And that was a special election that happened in October of 2015, and they were desperate for poll workers, and I worked the polls for a couple hours that day, and then I got on a list, and I worked in 2016, the presidential primary, the town election, and I kept working elections, and I started from working a couple of hours to working half the day to, “Oh, dear Lord, I’m here open to close.” And then in 2020, March of 2020 I actually ran and was elected to the town moderator position. So, the town moderator is kind of the one who sorts and counts the votes and kind of does the election day counting, and I did that, and I was elected to that twice. Also elected once on the school district side, and then our town clerk resigned for better pastures, and the town council appointed me to take that spot, and I’ve been the town clerk since 2022.

Brianna Lennon: I’m curious what you did before you were like a concerned citizen fighting for good representation in local government.

Tina Guilford: So, I actually, when I became town clerk – town clerk is full time – prior to that, none of the positions were full time. They were, you know, volunteer, $150 an election stipend type thing, and I did in-store merchandising.

Brianna Lennon: I feel like that has a lot of crossover between things. I mean, there’s a lot of inventory, there’s a lot of logistics involved in elections –

Tina Guilford: There’s a lot of planning: planning your route, planning your day, planning your schedule, planning your route going into a store. I mean, nobody wants to walk from one side of the store to the other side of the store five times before you leave. Walmarts are pretty big stores, so, no, you start and you go around until you leave.

Brianna Lennon: So, can you talk a little bit about Derry? How many voters you have, kind of like, where you’re located, and your population size?

Tina Guilford: So, we’re about 45 minutes north of Boston – everybody seems to know where Boston, Massachusetts is. We’re about 15 minutes from Manchester, which is the largest city in New Hampshire. We’re about 30 minutes from Concord, which is the capital. So, we’re south of Manchester and Concord, and we’re north of Boston. We are the largest town in the state. We have 35,000 residents, so we have just over 21,000 voters, and we all vote in one polling place, and we are the largest polling place in the United States.

New Hampshire: the home of the largest polling place and the smallest polling place.

Eric Fey: Well, we can’t just move past that. How – probably a lot of folks have heard about the smallest polling place. I’m guessing you’re talking about Dixville Notch?

Tina Guilford: I am.

Eric Fey: How did Derry become the home of the largest polling place in the country? That’s got to be a good story.

Tina Guilford: Well, it comes from us not being a city, because we’re a town, right? So, in a town, polling places are different. Whereas in cities, you have wards – some states call them precincts. So, for example, Nashua has about 55,000. So, it’s the second largest city. They have about 55,000 voters total, but they divide them over nine locations. So, it’s probably more like what you guys do at a county level versus what I do, you know, Manchester has 12 voting locations, and they’ve got about 70,000 voters.

Eric Fey: So, since your town, do you have to use just one polling location? Or could you use more if you wanted to?

Tina Guilford: We could technically use an additional polling location. The problem is, when you’re a city, you elect ward moderators and ward clerks to run those polling places. When you’re a town, you only elect one town clerk, and you only elect one town moderator, and you don’t have those additional people, and you start having unelected people running polling places, and that is very frowned upon in New Hampshire.

Brianna Lennon: That’s really fascinating.

Tina Guildford: I mean, we still have towns that have traditional town meeting for their local form of government, and they actually meet on, say, a Saturday morning, and they literally yell at each other about the budget until it passes. I mean, there are still towns governing that way in New Hampshire.

Brianna Lennon: So, how big, like, what building do you have for your polling place to deal with all of that, and I feel like that’s especially helpful since you’ve done merchandising, things like that – you can make a nice flow of it for that many people?

Tina Guilford: So, in November, we had 18,148 voters voting at Pinkerton Academy. We vote at, it’s a local high school in Derry. We have two entrances and one exit. So, we have one entrance that’s handicap accessible. It’s also where we send the new voters in, and then we have another entrance that does have one step that is for existing voters. We do use poll pads, and so, when you go into the gym, there’s kind of a, like, you can come in from either side, but once you’re checked in and you’re actually in – you go to the booth, you vote, and then you walk towards the exit, which is where the machine is for you to put your ballot in, and then everybody kind of exits through that center.

In November, we used 22 poll pads. We had six – we call them ballot counting devices here in New Hampshire. If, Brianna, if you’ve been here a long time, you’ve probably heard of something called the AccuVote machine. Well, I’m very proud to say that in March, we retired our AccuVotes, and we finally got a new machine because they finally approved new ones in New Hampshire. So, we are now using the ImageCast Precinct two. We we used it at our March election for the first time – our local election.

We have a requirement in New Hampshire – you need one voting booth for every 100 voters you have on the checklist. We had, I think it was, I think we had 220 voting booths set up. A combination of, we have some of the – I call them the four way pop ups, the Franklin booth. We still have five rows of the old Garrison booth, the metal ones that stand up with the little red, white and blue striped flags. By statute, we still have to have some tables with the screen on them for voters that wish to sit, and we have any handicap accessible.

Brianna Lennon: I love how detailed everything has to be for your polling places. Ours are just kind of like, “Make a polling place.” We don’t have any –

Tina Guilford: Oh no. We have to have an American flag, we have to have a clock, we have to have light, and we have to have heat, and we have to have – there are rules about how much parking you need to have, all that kind of stuff. It’s all laid out in a statute.

Brianna Lennon: I’m going to make the transition into other requirements that you now have in New Hampshire. You know, being the first state that had a documentation of citizenship requirements. Can you talk a little bit, I know that there’s been some press coverage of it, but can you talk a little bit about how – I guess what the requirements are, and how that has affected what you’ve been doing at the local level?

Tina Guilford: Okay, so when registering to vote, we’ve always had an ID requirement. We’ve been a voter ID state for a very long time. We had a requirement for proof of domicile, proof of citizenship, and then we have age and identity, right? So those are the four things, but we had affidavits for citizenship and domicile, and we no longer have those.

So now, when you bring in a photo ID, and we have a list of the photo IDs we’ll accept – we accept government issued photo IDs from any state, from the federal government. We do accept IDs from accredited colleges in New Hampshire. We accept IDs from our local high school for those that don’t have them, and we also have something in the state for a free voter ID from the state, which we will accept as well. We accept passports, that kind of thing.

And then proof of domicile, that can be a lot of different things – your deed, you just purchased the house. It can be a utility bill. It can be your driver’s license, if you have the correct address on your driver’s license. It can be a letter, you know, from the person who owns the property saying that you have the right to live there, and that has to be notarized. For a nursing home facility, the facility can give you residency in the nursing home. Same thing with some of the assisted living and the elderly housing. If you’re homeless, there is a residency requirement, as well for that, and there is a way to get a letter – you do have to basically have somewhere that is assisting you where you can get mail. So, there are carve outs in the statute for all these different ways that you can prove where you live. There’s even more that I may have just forgotten to mention.

But citizenship is where it’s hard because there’s really only a couple documents. So, it’s a birth certificate, it’s a passport, it’s a passport card or naturalization papers, and everything has to match. So, if the name on your birth certificate is not the same as the name on your driver’s license, because, for example, you got married – then you need to provide your marriage license. Much like the whole real ID. Sadly, New Hampshire did not take advantage of the fact of putting citizenship on their real IDs because we can’t use a Real ID as proof of citizenship.

So, it has been difficult, and, you know, we do have same day voter registration. So, in March, we had an election. It’s a very poor turnout, as usual for our local elections. Unless people are very upset, riled up or angry, elections are quiet at the local level. We had 1975 voters. Now, you have to remember, I still have to prepare a polling place for 21,000. So, a lot of people kind of standing around doing nothing, but that’s the way it works, you know? And we had in – 14 of those were Election Day voters. Six of them had to go home to get additional paperwork, and yes, all of mine came back. We did have one woman who, as they were trying to explain to her that she needed proof of citizenship – she just kind of jumped up and kind of ran out and went home and grabbed her birth certificate and came back and then she’s married, so she had to go home again to get her marriage license, you know. So, it took her two tries, but she got it done, which is a positive.

It has seriously affected our office. So, another thing that I know, New Hampshire is kind of different than a lot of other states – I don’t know about your state. You register your vehicle in your town. So, you only go to the state DMV for your driver’s license. Your vehicle registration happens at the local level, and you’re allowed to register your vehicle once with an out-of-state license. So, if you just moved here from another state, you can come in and you can register your vehicle, and then they’ll give you the information to go get your New Hampshire driver’s license and all that stuff. One of the things that they used to do as soon as the vehicle was registered was like, “Oh, do you have a dog you need to license? Do you need to register to vote?” And a lot of people would register to vote at the same time, and what it was, is they had proof of citizenship. They didn’t have proof of citizenship. They don’t have it. They would fill out an affidavit. But they would have proof of their domicile because to register a car you have to prove that you live in this town because vehicle registration is tied to the town. So, people would come in and they’d have their utility bills and what have you, and they’d register their vehicle, and now they have a nice, shiny, brand new, New Hampshire vehicle registration, and they would just come over to our window and say, “Okay, now I want to register to vote.” And now they’ve got a photo ID – because they couldn’t register a car without the photo ID. They’ve got proof of domicile in their vehicle registration. They’d fill out an affidavit and they’d register to vote, and what’s happening now is we are not catching those people. Some of them come back, but more than not – don’t. So, what’s going to happen is that the next big election, we’re going to have a lot of people coming in to register on Election Day, you know, and a lot of them also like, it’s like, you tell them things, but it doesn’t register. We are not a motor voter state. So, they can go get their driver’s license, but they will not be registered to vote, and some of them come from motor voter states because I’m surrounded by them. So, they move here, and they think it’s the same and it’s not.

Eric Fey: Do you have online registration in New Hampshire?

Tina Guilford: No.

Eric Fey: No, okay, so it didn’t affect that. Yeah, that’s interesting. And same day registrations on Election Day at the polling place are – then you’re probably thinking about needing more workers, more equipment or poll books or whatever.

Tina Guilford: Okay. So, for 2024 we registered 2,237 people on election day. We had 28 voter registration stations. I’m not quite sure how many more I can fit.

[High Turnout Wide Margins Mid-break]

Brianna Lennon: And how, I mean this has been, this has been one of my concerns, especially in talking about the SAVE [Safeguard American Voter Eligibility] Act, because the SAVE Act has the additional penalty clause of criminal criminal statutes if you do this incorrectly. If somebody’s bringing in all of this documentation, I mean, local election authorities, at least in our case, are not experts on validating the validity of a birth certificate or a marriage license or something like that. What kind of training – or is there any training – do you all receive, like when this went into effect, how do you know that you’re not accidentally taking a fraudulent piece of documentation?

Tina Guilford: So, I will tell you our supervisors are the checklist. So, they’re the ones who officially register voters. They’re the ones who actually approve the voters and add them to the checklist. They haven’t, I mean, they’ve had very minimal training. Us town clerks, and we’re the ones, again, our supervisors checklist are – they’re paid on a stipend. They are not here at Town Hall every day. The town clerk’s office, and in the cities, the city clerk’s offices – we are the ones that are there every day. We do marriage licenses, and we get a lot of training on what to look for from various states on birth certificates, marriage licenses or divorce decrees. So, we kind of have a really good idea of what we’re looking for based on the different states. But, I mean, there are forgers out there, and they forge stuff, so, you know, we record numbers, but not every state puts a number on their birth certificates. Some states do. Some states don’t. If we see a passport, we record the passport number. If we see naturalization papers, we record those numbers.

Eric Fey: Do you take a copy or scan an image of any of the documents?

Tina Guilford: At this time, we have not been instructed to, so we do not. I would not be surprised if that’s coming. Last year, we upgraded our statewide voter registration system. The system we had been using was from the 90s. It still ran on Internet Explorer. So, we still had to, like, go into a browser and put it into IE mode so we could actually log in to the system.t It has scanning capabilities. It has the capability to scan into a voter’s file. So, I would not be surprised to see that coming. However, that’s going to require funds, and we do have a lot of statutes in the state, and one of them is that they’re not supposed to do any unfunded mandates. So, while something like voting machines and poll pads is optional for the municipality, you don’t have to have them – although I don’t know how anybody would expect us to hand count 18,000 ballots and you know, have results in a timely fashion. Those are choices the municipality makes, so the municipality has to pay for it, but anything in that pertains at the state level, so for example, for vital records, the state provides us paper, they provide us the ink, they provide us, you know, they provide us with all those things. So, the municipality doesn’t pay any money. So, if they wanted us to scan, they would have to provide us with scanners.

Brianna Lennon: With the legislation when it passed, was there any discussion about voter education and getting this out to people? Because you mentioned that you were talking to, you know, reaching out to the independent living facilities, but with the unfunded mandate requirement that you have, and we have that as well – was there an expectation that you were going to be having to do a bunch of voter education, or was this just as as people learn about it, they’ll figure out they have to do it?

Tina Guilford: So, a lot of us took it upon ourselves to educate our, you know, our residents and our voters. The State definitely did a big social media campaign, the Secretary of State’s office, and there were a couple of stories in the local in our local ABC affiliate, and in the the newspaper that we have – the statewide newspaper, the Union Leader, and WMUR is the local affiliate. I don’t know that that was enough, and I feel the state should do more. I know, I myself, attended all our local meetings that are televised, you know, so town council meetings, school board meetings, all that kind of stuff, and talked about our March election, our new machines, our new voting requirements. And I plan to do it again. We don’t have another election now until March of 2026, I plan to do it then, and then whenever we have our primary because we’ve traditionally had our primary on the second Tuesday in September, our state primary, and let’s just say that trying to actually do UOCAVA [The Uniformed And Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act] within the 45 days has been a very big issue. So, there were, I don’t know, three, four bills in the legislature to move the primary. I think they’ve settled on the second Tuesday in June, which, of course, makes the filing period smack dab in the middle when we have town elections in March, but we’ll deal because we always do, right?

Eric Fey: Yeah, that’s kind of like an unofficial motto of election administrators, “We’ll deal because we always do.” I’ve heard many, many people say it.

Tina Guilford: Well, it’s got to get done, so we tend to figure it out.

Eric Fey: Yeah, absolutely.

Brianna Lennon: There’s our new shirt, there we go. “We’ll deal because we always do.”

Eric Fey: I want to switch gears slightly, Tina. I want to give you a chance to talk a little bit more about other things you do in your role, because, like county clerks in Missouri that wear a lot of hats, I’m sure you do a lot of other things and just run elections, and even when we called you to set up this episode, you were saying, in the near future, you’re going to the high school to, I think it was the high school, to teach a class, and, you know, you’ve got this, this history you’ve explained of how you’ve been very active in your community, you care a lot about it. So, if you would talk a little bit about what are the other things you do, and what motivates you to want to, you know, go teach a class as part of your role, officially or unofficially? And how’d that come about?

Tina Guilford: As town clerk, not only do we do elections, we do vital records. So, if you need anything to do with a vital record, you have to go to a city or town clerk, and we do dog licenses. For the most part, in the state of New Hampshire, most town clerks also do vehicle registration. I happen to not do it in my town because we’re very large, so we actually have people that that’s all they do. But we do a lot of that. And some town clerks are also the tax collector. So, then they also do tax collection and utility payments. So, luckily, I don’t have to do the tax stuff, but I have to know about it because the residents come in and ask a lot of questions.

We are also two separate governments in our town – the school district is its own government, and I’m the School District Clerk, so I have to stay hip to all the school stuff. Our high school in Derry is a private high school. We tuition our students to school there, and every April they have Social Studies Week. So, as part of Social Studies Week, they invite anybody that’s elected that they can get their hands on to go in and talk about whatever they’re doing. I work very well with the people at Pinkerton Academy, again, we run our elections there. Their students use elections for volunteer hours through the National Honor Society, through the Future Business Leaders of America. All those groups, they send me students for two, three hours at a time on election day, and we train them as greeters and to, you know, kind of help people kind of find their way in and out. So, I have a very good relationship with them. So, my usual thing to them is, “You tell me how many classes you need me to do, and I will do them.” So, I’m doing, I think it’s three next Friday and two on Thursday. So, I think five total, and I’ll be talking soup to nuts on how local government runs, and talking about things like registering to vote. Some of the classes will be seniors, so those ones, we definitely want to get them interested in registering to vote sooner rather than later. But some of them that I talk to are freshmen and sophomores. I will tell you that most of them are very interested in what businesses are coming to town and, you know, “When is the new Chipotle going to open?” Those are the questions they ask because I guess at their age, at their level, you know, that’s what’s important. But it’s great to talk to them, and I talk to them about what I do, and then I see them, you know, volunteering at elections, or actually registering to vote, or voting and, yeah, I kind of, I don’t know, we’re a town of 35,000, but it’s a really small town, because I can’t really go anywhere without people knowing who I am. I’ve been the face of elections in Derry for a while now.

Brianna Lennon: You’ve been listening to High Turnout Wide Margins, a podcast that explores local elections administration. I’m your host, Brianna Lennon alongside Eric Fey. A big thanks to KBIA and the Election Center for making this podcast possible. Our Managing Editor is Rebecca Smith. Managing Producer is Aaron Hay. Our Associate Producer is Katie Quinn, and our Digital Producer is Mark Johnson. This has been High Turnout Wide Margins. Thanks for listening.