A Federal Judge Ruled Scanlan Didn’t Have to Hand Over the Voter File. The Justice Department Says He Is Under Criminal Investigation Anyway.

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

New Hampshire’s secretary of state faces the Legislature’s vote on Dec. 2, 2026. The 1960 records law the federal government sued under punishes losing or destroying election records, and GSR found no public record that he has done either.

David Scanlan spent part of Veterans Day 2026 at the New Hampshire Veterans Home, where a reporter from InDepthNH asked him about a federal criminal investigation with his name on it. “No, I’m not worried,” the secretary of state said.

According to letters InDepthNH obtained and described in a report published Nov. 11, 2026, the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division told Scanlan in September that he is under criminal investigation for refusing to turn over New Hampshire’s unredacted voter registration list, and ordered him to preserve evidence. In July, the division’s then-leader, Harmeet Dhillon, had written to him laying out the criminal laws she said were in play.

Read that threat beside the statute and the court record, and most of its weight falls away. The law the federal government sued under, Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, makes it a crime to fail to keep federal election records, or to steal, destroy, conceal, mutilate or alter them. Its text attaches no criminal penalty to turning down a records demand. It sends that fight to a federal judge, and a federal judge in Concord already decided it in Scanlan’s favor on June 29, 2026. As described so far, this investigation looks like pressure on an official who won in court. It lands three weeks before the 424 members of the Legislature vote on whether he keeps his job.

Related coverage: GSR’s Nov. 11, 2026 report, 424 Lawmakers Will Choose New Hampshire’s Election Chief. The Ballot Is Secret by Custom., explains how the Dec. 2 vote works and what voters can ask their legislators before it. This piece adds the federal investigation now hanging over the incumbent.

What the letters say

GSR has not seen the letters. Everything about their contents here comes from InDepthNH’s report by Damien Fisher. By that account, Dhillon wrote to Scanlan in July 2026 that the Civil Rights Division could go to court for injunctions and was also authorized to prosecute criminal violations. In September, 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, with civil and criminal sanctions attached. InDepthNH reported that neither Neff nor the Voting Section answered its questions.

Dhillon no longer runs the division. The Associated Press and NPR reported that she resigned on Nov. 5, 2026, and the AP reported that Attorney General Todd Blanche announced he had accepted the resignation. InDepthNH described her as reportedly fired. The resignation account rests on the attorney general’s own public statement, so it is the stronger of the two.

No charge has been filed. GSR found no public record of a grand jury subpoena, an indictment or a criminal complaint naming Scanlan. A letter saying someone is under investigation is a step a prosecutor can take alone, on paper, without a judge.

Seventeen months, one answer

The fight started with a letter. On June 25, 2025, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division asked Scanlan a list of questions about how New Hampshire keeps its voter rolls and requested the statewide voter registration list, active and inactive voters alike. Scanlan answered the questions on July 25 and declined to send the list. State law, he wrote, allows its release only in limited circumstances that did not apply, and each town’s public checklist could be had from local clerks and supervisors.

The Justice Department came back on Aug. 18, 2025, and asked for every field: full name, date of birth, residential address, the last four digits of each voter’s Social Security number and the full state driver’s license number. Scanlan refused again on Aug. 28. After consulting counsel, he wrote that the letter cited no federal provision that overrides New Hampshire’s privacy law. The department sued on Sept. 25, 2025. Four New Hampshire voters joined the case on the state’s side.

On June 29, 2026, U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante dismissed the suit. The department appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on July 6, according to Democracy Docket’s case tracker. On Sept. 1, the state asked the appeals court to throw the appeal out without full briefing, calling the government’s demand facially insufficient. GSR found no ruling on that motion in the filings it reviewed. Three days after the state’s motion, on Sept. 4, a Justice Department lawyer wrote to Scanlan ordering him to keep the 2024 general election ballots and records, Vermont Public reported, citing ongoing litigation without naming a case.

Two holdings, either one enough

Judge LaPlante’s 26-page order turns on the words of the 1960 law. Title III requires election officers to keep records that “come into” their possession relating to registration and voting. LaPlante read those words to mean records officials receive from outside, such as the forms voters fill out. The statewide list is something else. He called it “a continuously maintained, state-generated compilation of data,” a database the state builds and edits every day. A record the state creates for itself never comes into its possession from anyone. So the list falls outside the law, and the government’s demand for it fails.

The court found a second, independent defect. Section 20703 of the law requires a records demand to state both “the basis and the purpose” behind it. The August 2025 letter named a purpose and cited the department’s legal authority. It offered no fact about New Hampshire’s rolls, no complaint and no pattern of error. LaPlante held that legal authority is not a factual basis and that the missing basis was fatal on its own. The department’s separate claim under the Help America Vote Act fared worse. LaPlante found the government had abandoned it in its own briefing, and that the act contains no disclosure provision in any case.

New Hampshire is not an outlier. LaPlante counted nine earlier federal courts that had dismissed the same kind of suit, with none granting the government the order it wanted. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed one of those dismissals, in Michigan, on June 24, 2026. The Associated Press counted New Hampshire as the tenth state where the department lost.

Where a crime would have to be

Lay the four sections side by side and the structure is plain. Two of them carry criminal penalties, and both are about keeping records intact: failing to retain them, or destroying, altering or hiding them. The other two govern a demand and what happens when it is refused. The answer to a refusal, in the text Congress wrote, is a court order, not a prosecution.

That leaves one word a prosecutor could reach for: “conceals.” Whether turning down a demand on the strength of a state privacy law can count as concealing a record is a question the court filings GSR reviewed do not answer. Judge LaPlante’s reading makes the question harder for the government. The concealment crime in section 20702 covers only records that section 20701 requires an official to keep. LaPlante held that the statewide list is not one of those records. If that holds on appeal, the voter list sits outside both criminal sections. The First Circuit can read the statute differently, and nothing here predicts how it will rule.

Then there is preservation, the subject of Neff’s spoliation warning. On that count the public record runs the other way. After the Sept. 4 letter, Scanlan emailed local election officials telling them to keep all 2024 ballots and other records, according to Vermont Public. In the same message he said the federal government had offered no factual or legal basis for its demand, and that his office would weigh any request to inspect the records case by case. An official ordering towns to hold onto records is the opposite of the conduct section 20701 punishes.

The crime on New Hampshire’s side

That is the bind. New Hampshire law makes it a crime for the official who holds the database to release it in any way the statute does not allow, and a federal records demand is not on the statute’s list. The Justice Department asked the court, in its complaint, to declare that federal law preempts any state law standing in the way. LaPlante never reached that question; he dismissed the case before getting there. So the preemption fight is unresolved, and the only court to rule on the demand itself said it was defective.

When the ruling came down, Scanlan put his position in one line. He said 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 wanted on top of that was dates of birth, partial Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers for every registered voter in the state.

What the Legislature should do with this

The 400 representatives and 24 senators elect the secretary of state by joint ballot on Dec. 2. Scanlan, a Republican, will face a Legislature that Democrats control after Nov. 3, and InDepthNH reported that some House Democrats are unhappy with his election management, arguing that his enforcement of election law kept eligible people from voting. That is a fair subject for a vote. Lawmakers can judge his guidance on student IDs and anything else in his record, on the merits and in the open.

What lawmakers should not do is treat the federal letter as evidence of anything. A district judge read the same law and found the demand behind it defective twice over. The criminal sections of that law are about destroying and losing records, and the record shows Scanlan’s office ordering towns to keep them. A legislator who votes him out should say why, in public, and the reason should be one he can answer.

The same holds in the other direction. A vote to keep Scanlan is not a vote of confidence in every call he has made. It is a judgment on a record. Legislators who cast that ballot in secret, by custom, can still tell their constituents which way they went and why.

What to watch

Three things will tell New Hampshire whether this investigation has substance. The first is the First Circuit: a ruling on the state’s request to dismiss the appeal, or a schedule for full briefing. The second is any filing in a federal court that names Scanlan as a criminal defendant; none has appeared. The third is the paper itself. The letters between the Department of State and the Civil Rights Division are governmental records under RSA 91-A, and any person can ask the department for them. Whether exemptions cover some of them is a question the department would have to answer in writing.

Until one of those three moves, the public record says this: New Hampshire’s election chief refused to hand over the private data of every voter in the state, a federal judge said the law did not require him to, and his office told towns to keep the records the federal law protects. If that is a crime, the Justice Department will have to say which one, in a courtroom, in front of a judge.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Sources: the federal court order and complaint, the U.S. Code and the New Hampshire statute, read in full, and the news reports named in the fact-check table. The contents of the Dhillon and Neff letters are as InDepthNH reported them. This analysis rests on the court record and the statutes. On Nov. 11, 2026, Granite State Report asked the Department of State and the U.S. Department of Justice for written comment, and asked Henry Klementowicz of the ACLU of New Hampshire, which filed an amicus brief in the case, for his written reading of the statute; any reply will be added in full, with its date. This is analysis and opinion, not legal advice. Corrections appear at the top of the article, dated, and are never removed.