Rachel Baker is going to have to think of a new present for library staffers this holiday season.

“For Christmas I would always buy them sweaters… just to keep them warm,” said Baker, who has worked at Canterbury’s town library for 20 years, the last five as its director.

Holiday sweaters, ugly or otherwise, won’t be needed this year because the building, a converted cinderblock fire station, now has something that most buildings take for granted: insulation.

“When I say it had zero insulation, I mean zero. I have pictures!” said Baker. “You could see Mt. Kearsarge through my roof… There was no caulking around my windows, none.”

That problem was solved during a five-day session in April, when crews from Northeast Air Sealing of Concord crawled through the roof and otherwise gained access to fill leaky air spaces and, in industry parlance, tighten the building envelope.

“They did the ceiling, all the walls, around the windows. They did it without us having to move the books out — they were brilliant,” Baker said.

Elkins Public Library at 9 Center Road moved into the former fire station in 2004 as part of a town-wide municipal building project, but initial plans for radiant heating were dropped, leaving just a propane furnace. Patrons and staffers have shivered through winters ever since.

The roughly $20,000 cost of the improvements was mostly covered by NH Saves, a program funded by New Hampshire utilities using ratepayer money that supports a variety of energy efficiency work, with the help of a $7,210 energy efficiency incentive from Unitil. Baker said town resident Tom Flaco did the heavy lifting on getting the assistance.

The improvements are expected to lower the library’s annual energy usage by approximately 1,515 gallons of propane, saving around $4,500 a year.  

The arrival of cold weather means people will be able enjoy the library without having to put on fingerless gloves and break out the space heaters, but even during the heat of summer, Baker noticed an unexpected improvement.

“Acoustics was the biggest difference,” she said. The uninsulated cinderblock building had allowed outdoor noise to intrude even as it reflected indoor noise. “We didn’t notice that until it was gone — it was so much quieter.”

The director has an extra reason to enjoy the upgrade because she grew up in Canterbury where her father, Dale Caswell, was fire chief.

“I knew this building intimately. I spent my childhood in this firehouse,” she said. Seeing it take on a new life has been a treat: “It’s a gorgeous space. We have so much room here.”

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.