Two Republican candidates for the state legislature are suing the Goffstown Public Library for violating the state's electioneering rules, after being told by the New Hampshire Attorney General's office that the library's actions are likely legal.
Ross Berry is running to represent Hillsborough District 44 in the State House. He alleges a questionnaire sent to candidates violates New Hampshire's law on electioneering by public employees, and he initiated a complaint for a restraining order against the Goffstown Public Library on Monday, Oct. 7.
The Goffstown Public Library’s executive director Dianne Hathaway and the library’s board declined to comment on the issue.
The questionnaire asked candidates about their positions on legislation they’d support for Goffstown, abortion access, increasing education funding and how candidates would address the disproportionate rates of suicide and homelessness among LGBTQ+ youth.
“These questions are biased, but that's a secondary problem,” Berry said. “The first problem is that just by conducting this survey, whether it was truly neutral or not, they are in fact electioneering, and it is prohibited.”
Berry said he’s not afraid of answering questions about his stances on public concerns. But he said the fact that a public institution is asking the questions in the first place goes against the state's ban on using public resources for electioneering.
“If the purpose of this [is to ask] questions of candidates and then publish them so that voters can review them and make up their minds, that is the definition of influencing an election," Berry said.
Berry said those reading the answers could be swayed based on information gleaned from the questionnaire.
Before the lawsuit was filed, Brendan O’Donnell, the head of the state's Election Law Unit at the Department of Justice, told Berry in an email that state law does not prohibit municipal entities from holding candidate forums and questionnaires.
According to the Attorney General's office, state law does prohibit public employees from using public resources to endorse specific candidates or measures.
But O’Donnell said that the open response nature of this particular survey gives candidates a chance to respond to questions within their political stance.
“Every candidate has an equal opportunity to participate in the questionnaire, there are no world limits on candidate responses, and all responses are published without any editing from the town," O'Donnell wrote. "If a candidate disagrees with the premise or wording of a particular question, there is no reason the candidate could not use part of their answer to explain why they disagree with the premise of the question."
Berry said he will wait for an official decision from the Attorney General’s about his original complaint before commenting on O'Donnell's analysis.
