New Hampshire Doesn’t Count Who Meets the Five-Day Records Deadline. Five Verified Residents Can Start the Count.

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Your Voice, Granite State Report’s polling desk for verified New Hampshire residents, opens with one question about the Right-to-Know Law. No result shows until five verified residents answer. Here is how to become one by postcard.

Ask a New Hampshire town office for a record it can’t hand over on the spot, and the law starts a clock. Within five business days the office has to do one of three things: give you the record, deny the request, or tell you in writing how long it needs and why. That is RSA 91-A:4, IV(b), and it applies to every public body in the state, from a three-member select board to a state agency.

Who keeps score on that clock? When Granite State Report built its Noncompliance List, I located no state agency that keeps a running count of how the Right-to-Know Law is obeyed, and no statute that requires one. A resident who wants to know which towns answer in five days and which take five months has to build that record by hand.

So GSR is going to ask the people who file the requests. Your Voice, the site’s polling desk for verified New Hampshire residents, puts one question to them: the last time you asked a New Hampshire public body for records, what happened within five business days? The desk will not show a single number until five verified residents answer. This piece explains why that rule exists and how to become one of the five.

Disclosure: Granite State Report built and runs Your Voice and the verification system described here, and I am its editor.

Related coverage: “They Can’t Count the Rules. We’ll Count Who Answers.” explains why GSR’s political features are open only to verified Granite Staters, and GSR’s Oct. 19 report on the verified network lays out the room this desk belongs to. Your Right to Know: A Working Guide to RSA 91-A walks through filing a request.

One question, five answers

The poll offers five answers. Three of them track the three moves the statute allows: I got the records, They denied it in writing, and They told me in writing how long it would take. The fourth is the one the law does not allow: I heard nothing within five business days. The fifth, I have never made a records request, keeps people who have never filed from guessing.

The written part matters. A delay under the statute is not a shrug at the counter. The office owes you a written statement of the time it reasonably needs, the reason for the delay, and an itemized cost estimate if copies will cost money. A denial owes you something in writing too: the specific exemption and a short explanation of how it applies.

One answer per person won’t tell you which town broke the rule. It isn’t built to. It tells you how often the five-day promise holds for the people who use it, which is a number I have found nobody in Concord publishing.

Why the count stays sealed until five

Your Voice runs on a few rules, and they are printed on the desk’s own page. Only verified residents vote, and verified officeholders are counted apart from them. Each account votes once, by secret ballot. The site keeps a one-way mark that an account voted, so it can’t vote twice, and a running count for each answer and county. Nothing ties the mark to the answer.

Then the privacy rule: no result appears until five residents answer, and no county or officeholder split appears for any group smaller than five. In a small county, two or three answers can tell a neighbor how you voted. Five is the floor that stops that.

Five answers also aren’t New Hampshire. The 2020 Census counted 1,120,680 adults across the state’s 10 counties. Every Your Voice result sets its respondents against each county’s share of those adults, and a county-balanced figure appears only after enough of the state has answered. Until then the label stays on: an opt-in poll of verified residents, not a scientific survey.

Here is where the desk stood on Nov. 9, 2026, by its own public counter: 14 polls open, 14 answers from verified residents, no officeholder on the record, and every answer that named a county came from one of the 10. That is a start, and it is thin. The fix is more verified residents.

How to get verified by postcard

Verification proves you live in New Hampshire. It does not prove citizenship, a party or a voting record, and GSR said in October that it would not use the voter checklist for this. The postcard route never asks for an ID. It takes five steps.

1. Make a free account. Go to granitestatereport.com/sign-in/, enter your email address and choose Email me a sign-in code. Type the code. There is no password to remember, and the same steps make the account the first time.
2. Add your New Hampshire address. Open your profile and fill in your street address, town and ZIP. GSR stores private contact details encrypted.
3. Ask for the postcard. On your profile’s Verification tab, choose the postcard.
4. Enter the code. GSR mails a one-time code to that address. When it arrives, type it into the same Verification tab, and your account counts as a verified resident.
5. Vote. Open granitestatereport.com/voice/, pick your answer, choose your county or “Prefer not to say,” and cast the vote. It can’t be changed afterward.

If you would rather not wait on the mail, the same Verification tab takes an ID photo instead. Your own browser locks the photo with the editor’s public key before it uploads, so the site stores a file it can’t open.

What happens to your answer

It becomes one more mark in a count. GSR records that your account voted and adds one to the total for your answer and the county you picked. It does not store which answer your account chose, and Your Voice sends no answers and no account data to any outside service. When a poll’s results go public, its page carries the county table, a CSV and JSON download anyone can reuse with credit to Granite State Report, and a printable brief.

The same desk takes your questions. Verified residents can suggest the next poll from the Your Voice page, and an editor reads every suggestion. Officeholders who verify their seats can answer the same polls and, if they choose, put their answer on the record under their own name.

Questions readers ask

Do I have to be a registered voter?

No. Verification checks that you live here. GSR said in October that it would not use the voter checklist. Plenty of people who live here aren’t registered, and their representatives still owe them answers. A verified account says nothing about your party.

Can someone outside New Hampshire see the results?

Yes. Reading stays open to everyone, and once a poll’s results are public anyone can download them. Only voting takes the code. A reader in Ohio can watch the count. A reader in Ohio can’t change it.

Will my neighbors find out how I voted?

Not from GSR. The site never stores which answer your account picked, and the five-person floor keeps a small county’s split hidden until enough people have answered to protect each of them. You can also choose “Prefer not to say” for your county.

What else does verification unlock?

Your comments post without waiting in the moderation queue, though the usual spam filters still apply. Your profile shows who represents you in Concord and Washington. And you can put a question to a New Hampshire officeholder in public. GSR screens it, and the official answers under their own name.

Five residents

New Hampshire wrote a five-day promise into law and, as far as I can find, never set up a way to see whether it is kept. A count from verified residents won’t settle that by itself. It is a start the state hasn’t made. If you live here and have ever waited on a town hall for a piece of paper, the count needs you. Five of you opens it.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against the sources named in the fact-check table. Granite State Report built and operates Your Voice and the verification system this article describes; the editor who wrote this piece runs both. Results described here are an opt-in reader poll of verified residents, not a scientific survey. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors at the top of the article, with what it said, what is true, what changed, and the date and time.