New Hampshire
Christopher Bell stays undefeated in NASCAR Xfinity Series at New Hampshire with 4th straight win
LOUDON, N.H. — Christopher Bell used a three-wide, last-lap pass on Saturday to drive away and win the NASCAR Xfinity Series race for the fourth straight time at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
The 29-year-old Bell needed three extra laps on the 1.058-mile track but remained undefeated at New Hampshire in the Xfinity Series and scored another win for Joe Gibbs Racing in the No. 20 Toyota.
Bell led 43 of 203 laps and added this checkered flag to his collection of Xfinity wins at New Hampshire in 2018, 2019 and 2021.
Sheldon Creed was second and Cole Custer third, both drivers caught up in Bell’s thrilling pass and both drivers fell just shy of keeping Bell out of victory lane.
“I feel so bad for Sheldon,” Bell said. “He’s been really really close to winning these things.”
Creed has two runner-up finishes this season and 10 overall in the Xfinity Series without a win in 86 career races. He’s tied with Dale Jarrett and Daniel Hemric for most second-place finishes before a victory.
“I’m running out of ways to lose these things,” Creed said.
Bell and Custer kept the headlines confined to the track.
Bell blurted out that Chase Briscoe was set to leave Stewart-Haas Racing, which shuts down at the end of the season, and make the move to Joe Gibs Racing in 2025. Briscoe is slated to drive the No. 19 Toyota for JGR.
Custer lost his Cup ride at SHR after the 2022 season and spent the last two years driving for its Xfinity program. He won the series championship last season and leads the points standings this season by 15 points over Zane Smith.
“I felt like we had that one,” Custer said. “We had the best car all day and to have it ripped away with one lap to go is just heartbreaking.”
Custer, who led 114 laps at New Hampshire, could get a return to the Cup next season.
SHR co-owner Gene Haas announced this week he will remain in the Cup Series and field one car in 2025. Haas will keep one of the four charters that belong to Stewart-Haas Racing and will operate next season as the Haas Factory Team.
“I think what Gene Haas has done in this sport, it would be a dream come true to get to run that Cup car,” Custer said.
Stewart-Haas Racing is primarily run by Joe Custer, the chief operating officer and longtime Haas confidant. Custer will remain president of Haas Factory Team — and his son could get the Cup seat.
“Whenever I went back to the Xfinity Series, my goal was always to go back to Cup,” Cole Custer said. “I’ve been trying to work on what I can do to get myself better over the past year and a half. At the end of the day, you try and do as best you can and you hope it all sorts itself out. But I really don’t have much to say or anything right now that’s solidified or anything.”
Justin Bonsignore finished 23rd in his Xfinity Series debut hours after he won a race at the track in NASCAR’s Modified Tour. He’s a three-time NWMT champion. Driving the No. 19 Toyota for Joe Gibbs Racing, Bonsignore was collected in a late wreck.
The Xfinity race was run on wet-weather tires, a first for the series on the oval.
Soon after Joshua Bogden attempted to register to vote on the day of Portsmouth’s municipal elections Nov. 11, he faced a tough decision.
Bogden had not brought along a passport or birth certificate to prove his citizenship. And though he had previously been registered and voted in Wilton, poll workers told Bogden he needed to leave and return with one of those physical documents.
Bogden could either drive to city hall and request a same-day copy of his birth certificate, or rush home and find his own copy. But he had only hours until the polls closed, and only minutes before Portsmouth stopped its birth certificate service at 4:30.
In the end, Bogden decided to drive home and chance that he could find the certificate, he said during a press conference Thursday. He did find it and was able to vote. But the hassle he faced is at the center of arguments by some that recent changes to New Hampshire’s voter registration laws are too strict and will result in frustrated voters choosing not to vote.
“Luckily, I lived nearby,” he said. “But if there had been any more sort of traffic or anything in my personal life — going home to pick up the kids, trying to do this after work — there’s no way I would have been able to come back and vote successfully.”
Since a new law took effect November 2024, New Hampshire voters are required to produce hard copies of citizenship documents the first time they register to vote in the state. The law eliminated the previous option for voters registering on Election Day to sign a “qualified voter affidavit” that allowed them to vote without proving citizenship by testifying on penalty of perjury that they were a U.S. citizen.
Republican supporters of the law, House Bill 1569, say the new requirements are reasonable and necessary to close loopholes that could allow non-citizens to vote, and that voters should prepare by obtaining their citizenship documents in advance
Lawmakers also passed a follow-up law in 2025, House Bill 464, that allows local election officials to access the Statewide Voter Registration System, New Hampshire Vital Records, and Division of Motor Vehicle databases in order to attempt to corroborate a resident’s citizenship.
But a number of voting rights groups are suing in federal court to block the law, arguing it creates an unconstitutional burden and that it will disenfranchise eligible voters, especially those for whom obtaining a passport or birth certificate could be difficult.
In the meantime, the October and November municipal elections have offered a fresh look into how the new law might affect voting in practice.
According to a tally by the New Hampshire Campaign for Voting Rights, 123 voters were turned away from the polls due to a lack of documents. Combined with the 121 residents the group reported were turned away for the same reason during town meetings in spring, at least 244 people were turned away in 2025, the group says.
Voting rights advocates and Democrats argue those tallies are a cautionary tale for the state ahead of the September 2026 state primaries and the November 2026 midterm federal election. Many more people are likely to vote in those elections, and many more who don’t bring along their citizenship documentation could be turned away, advocates warn.
They hope U.S. District Court Judge Samantha Elliott, who is presiding over the lawsuit, will issue an injunction ahead of the midterms. A full evidentiary trial in that case is expected in February.
At Thursday’s press conference, advocates attempted to show the difficulty posed by the new documentary requirements, which election law experts have called the strictest in the country.
In addition to Bogden, Brayden Rumsey, a Dover voter, said he had to drive home to retrieve his passport in order to vote Nov. 11. Rumsey was not aware of the new citizenship documentation requirements; he had assumed that showing a REAL ID driver’s license would suffice, since to obtain it he had been required to show his passport.
“I have my own car. I have my own way of getting there. I don’t have any kids to take care of. I have access to a passport and access to my birth certificate that I could easily get,” he said. “I know a lot of people don’t have that privilege like I do.”
And Michael Blanchette, who recently moved from Concord to Manchester, said he had called the city ahead of the Nov. 11 election to get confirmation of his citizenship using his previous registration and presence on the voter database. But despite that confirmation, Blanchette said he was still asked for citizenship documentation at the Manchester Ward 7 polls, and had to wait an hour for multiple election workers and city officials to clear him to vote.
“(I knew) if I went back home and took my pain meds, I was not coming back out,” he said. “And it was now or never. So I stuck through it. I didn’t realize it would just drag on.”
Linnea Hartsuyker, a supervisor of the checklist in Dover’s Ward 5, said she had seen at least one prospective voter leave and not return once learning of the requirements.
Hartsuyker said the 2025 law providing election workers access to the state voter file proved helpful, allowing her to verify at least those voters who had already registered. That remedy would not have worked for new voters who moved from out of state, she said.
“Last year at the general (election) I and my team registered 50 people per hour for 12 hours,” she said. “That’s almost one person per minute with the old system, and I am quite worried about being able to do that in the coming election, at the midterms.”
Access to those state databases might vary from polling place to polling place depending on internet availability and the amount of time and manpower available during a rush of voters, critics say. Rumsey and Blanchette said workers at their polling places did not appear to have direct access to those databases, necessitating calls to city hall officials.
It is not clear how the apparent tallies of voters turned away from voting might affect the trial in next year’s lawsuit.
In a July 29 ruling, Elliott ruled that some of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, filed in 2024, lacked standing because their experiences did not directly demonstrate a potential unconstitutional barrier to voting. But she granted standing to other plaintiffs, such as the Coalition for Open Democracy, the League of Women Voters of New Hampshire, the Forward Foundation, and three plaintiffs who were minors but planned to register to vote when they turned 18 and said the need to procure documentation was a burden.
The Attorney General’s Office has defended the law and said the constitutional challenges are not substantiated. In a Nov. 7 memorandum asking Elliott to dismiss the case, Assistant Attorney General Michael DeGrandis argued that the law struck a balance between allowing every eligible person to vote and safeguarding the process from fraud.
“New Hampshire pairs that open access with commonsense eligibility checks so only the votes of eligible voters are counted,” DeGrandis wrote. “Striking this balance is essential to guarantee an election system that is both welcoming and vigilant in protecting the integrity of the ballot.”
And he wrote that the law does not impede the organizations suing, and that the individual plaintiffs “have not offered competent evidence of cognizable injuries.”
“It is Plaintiffs’ burden to come forward with definite, competent evidence of injury, causation, and redressability, but they have not,” DeGrandis wrote.
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