Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

170,000 Online Sign-Ins. No Duty to Answer One.

New Hampshire built an online front door to the House and records every sign-in. No House rule says what lawmakers owe the people who use it, and state law leaves it to each town whether you can join a local meeting from home.

In 2025, people signed in online to New Hampshire House committee hearings more than 170,000 times. They picked a bill, clicked support or oppose, and some attached a PDF of what they wanted to say. Citizens Count, the nonpartisan voter-information project, then lined those sign-ins up against what each committee recommended. Across 963 hearings, the committee went the way of the online majority 49 percent of the time. When 100 or more people signed in, it went their way about a third of the time.

That number does not prove anyone ignored anyone. Committees weigh testimony in the room, the bill text, the fiscal note, their caucus and their own judgment, and a stack of form clicks is not a poll. The problem is narrower and worse. Granite State Report found no House rule that requires a committee to say what it did with the online record. House rules require committee minutes to note the important points witnesses make at a hearing, not what the committee made of them. New Hampshire built a front door, records who comes through it, and has never written down what the house owes them.

Below the State House the door gets smaller. State law leaves it to each selectboard, school board and planning board whether a resident can join a meeting from home. The state has already written a rule that narrows that gap, twice. It applied the rule to state boards and to agency rulemaking, and left out the Legislature and every town.

What the front door does

The House form on the General Court website asks for your personal details, the hearing date and the bill, then a position. A box takes typed testimony, and an upload takes one PDF up to 2 MB. Sign-in closes at 11:59 p.m. on the day of the hearing. The page warns that whatever you submit becomes part of the public record under the Right-to-Know Law.

The Senate form is thinner. It asks for the hearing date, the bill, whom you represent and your position. It has no testimony box and no upload. The New Hampshire Bulletin’s 2025 guide to the session told readers to send Senate written testimony to the committee by email.

Spoken testimony happens in person or not at all. During the pandemic both chambers took testimony remotely. When the state’s emergency orders expired, so did the suspension of the House rules requiring a quorum of committee members to be present, and the House and Senate would allow only in-person testimony when lawmakers reconvened in January 2022, the Bulletin reported. An advocacy group, New Futures, had gathered more than 850 signatures asking lawmakers to keep the remote option. Citizens Count’s public guide states the current practice flatly: neither chamber takes testimony by Zoom.

What both chambers do well is broadcast. The New Hampshire Law Library’s legislative-history guide says every Senate standing-committee hearing streams on the Senate’s YouTube channel, with coverage from 2020 on, and the House channel holds committee meetings back to 2020. A resident in Colebrook can watch a Concord hearing live. That resident cannot speak in it.

What the count shows

Citizens Count published its analysis on March 8, 2026. It compiled every online sign-in from the 2025 House session and compared each hearing’s online majority with the committee’s recommendation. The average bill drew 179 sign-ins. About a quarter of hearings drew fewer than 10. Only 26 bills topped 1,000.

The pattern runs the wrong way for anyone who believes turnout is power. When fewer than 10 people signed in, committees matched the online majority 64 percent of the time. From 10 to 99, it was close to a coin flip. At 100 or more, about one in three.

The spread between committees is wide. Environment and Agriculture matched the online majority after 80 percent of its hearings and Children and Family Law after 70 percent. Science, Technology and Energy matched it 22 percent of the time. Finance, which writes the budget, matched it 13 percent of the time.

Two caveats from the analysts belong next to those numbers. Citizens Count counted “Ought to Pass with Amendment” as a yes without analyzing the amendments, and it noted that committees may rewrite bills in response to criticism the tally cannot see. The partisan split may explain part of the gap too. Bills with a Republican prime sponsor got a favorable recommendation 68 percent of the time, Democratic bills 43 percent. The online majority backed 81 percent of Democratic bills and 44 percent of Republican ones, and Republicans hold the House majority and its committee majorities. Elections are supposed to count.

None of that answers the question a resident is entitled to ask: what happened to what I sent? The House had a bill on that. House Bill 1114, sponsored by Rep. Janet Lucas and ten other Democrats, would have required standing committees to preserve written public comment and report how it shaped their recommendations. The Legislative Administration Committee recommended killing it 8-3, while the minority wanted it sent to interim study. The House laid it on the table by voice vote on March 5, 2026, refused to take it back up 123-207 a week later, and let it die when the session ended.

What the research says about doors like this

Granite State Report read a reading file of 38 documents on online politics, mostly journal articles, book chapters and conference papers, collected under a 2014 chapter titled “From Politics to E-Politics.” That chapter, by Sam Takavarasha Jr., Jonathan Cox and Stanislas Bigirimana, argues that organizers should update proven methods for digital tools rather than throw them out, and uses the community-organizing model of Saul Alinsky, which the authors say the 2008 Obama campaign drew on, as its worked example. Several of the papers around it arrive at the same finding about government-run participation.

A 2013 survey of internet politics by Archon Fung, Hollie Russon Gilman and Jennifer Shkabatur of Harvard sorted the hopes into six models and judged the transformative ones less likely than the incremental ones. Reporting Shkabatur’s research, the authors wrote that “no US government has conferred actual decision-making power to participants in an electronic venue.” U.S. tools, they found, are consultative. Peter M. Shane, introducing a book on online consultation in the Obama years, wrote that few such forums “are tied in any ascertainable, accountable way to actual governmental policy making.” He noted that the final drafting round of the Obama administration’s open-government consultation drew 375 contributors.

European researcher Alina Ostling reached the same place in 2010: online participation had been tried widely and had rarely changed a decision. A 2004 review of English-language research by Alice Robbin, Christina Courtright and Leah Davis found that the technology mostly reinforced existing political behavior and that elites and organizations benefited most. Christopher Weare, writing in 2002, pointed out that two predictions in the literature cannot both hold: government-designed tools either protect elite power or open new participation, and which one a given tool does is a question for evidence.

Read against the chapter’s case for updating old organizing methods rather than trusting new tools to do the work, the New Hampshire evidence lands hard. A click is not organizing, and a sign-in is not power. Input carries weight when someone is obliged to answer it, and New Hampshire has not written that obligation.

The rule exists. It skips you.

The Right-to-Know Law’s main meetings section, RSA 91-A:2, lets a local board allow a member to join by phone or video, but only as an option and only when attending in person is not reasonably practical. Outside an emergency, a quorum must be physically present at the noticed location, and the meeting has to be audible to the public at that location. Granite State Report found nothing in the section that requires a town, city or school board to let the public join remotely.

The New Hampshire Municipal Association’s legal counsel, Jonathan Cowal, told local officials in the January/February 2026 issue of its magazine that continuing remote public access is “entirely the choice of the municipality.” Under that reading, a resident’s way in depends on the town, the board and the night.

Now look at what the state demands of itself when it chooses to. Chapter 188 of the Laws of 2023, which took effect Oct. 3, 2023, added paragraph IV to RSA 91-A:2. When a state board meets remotely, the paragraph reads, “Members of the public shall be permitted to participate remotely” in those meetings, including testifying as the board’s rules allow. The same paragraph exempts the General Court, both chambers and every committee of either house. State agencies writing administrative rules face a similar floor under RSA 541-A:11: an agency may hold a virtual or hybrid rulemaking hearing only if the public can take part by telephone, with a way to tell the agency during the hearing that access has failed.

Bills to widen the door have died. House Bill 1014 in 2022, titled “Allowing public meetings to be conducted virtually,” was laid on the table 175-155. House Bill 1461 in 2024, which would have required municipal bodies to live-stream their properly noticed meetings, went to interim study on an 18-1 committee vote and a House voice vote on Feb. 8, 2024, and died there.

What would close the gap

Three fixes would close most of it.

First, make the answer part of the record. Under the state constitution, the House settles its own rules of proceedings. It can require every committee report to state the online tally and, when the recommendation runs against the online majority, give one paragraph saying why. That is House Bill 1114 without the statute, and it needs no governor’s signature.

Second, restore remote spoken testimony in House and Senate committees, with the floor the state already set for its own agencies: a phone line anyone can use and a way to report that it failed.

Third, carry paragraph IV down to the towns. When a selectboard or school board lets one of its own members phone in, the public gets the same line. A board that already runs the call would give up little by opening it.

Collecting is not the same as listening. The online form already collects every name and every position. The missing piece is the sentence that tells 179 people on an average bill what happened to what they said. Ask your state representative whether they would vote to require it.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Sources for this article are the current text of RSA 91-A:2 and RSA 541-A:11, the House and Senate online testimony forms, the papers cited, LegiScan bill histories, Citizens Count, the New Hampshire Bulletin, the New Hampshire Law Library and the New Hampshire Municipal Association. The 2025 sign-in figures are Citizens Count’s compilation, not a Granite State Report count. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors at the top of the article, stating what it said, what is true, what changed, and the date and time.