New Hampshire’s 2025 Campaign Finance Overhaul: Mandatory Online Reporting Now in Effect
Jan 13, 2025Mandatory Online Campaign Finance Reporting for All Candidates
New Hampshire’s new campaign reporting rules became effective on January 1, 2025
New Hampshire has been modifying and tweaking its campaign finance laws for several years. The latest changes — made with the passage of House Bill 1091 in August 2024 — concern candidate and campaign reporting requirements. These changes took effect on January 1, 2025, and will affect most candidates planning to run for any state office in the next election cycle.
All reporting is online
The new regulations require, among other things, all candidates and political committees to use the state’s online Campaign Finance System for filing all the reports specified in RSA 664. RSA 664 is the statute governing collecting and managing political expenditures and contributions in the state’s elections. Candidates for Governor, Executive Council, and State Senate need to start using the online system immediately for the upcoming election cycle. Candidates for all other offices have until November 2026 to comply.
The online Campaign Finance System was created in 2016 to provide the public with a clear window into who is donating to campaigns and how a candidate is spending those donations. While the process is meant to save candidates time and effort, many candidates have opted to use the paper filing option. This option requires the campaigns to submit either a typed or handwritten hard copy.
The New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office must scan those documents and upload them for public view online. Without consistency, many campaigns use a tiny font in these documents and then fax the hard copy, further degrading legibility. Also, according to an NHPR report last fall, “the lack of rules about legibility incentivizes campaigns to make their filings as difficult to read as possible, making it challenging for the public – or a rival campaign – to analyze the donor list.
With mandatory online reporting, access to donor information should become more accessible than ever. We’ll have to wait and see how that goes.
What else is new?
Besides making online reporting mandatory, House Bill 1091 made several other tweaks to the state’s campaign finance law.
• Limits on contributions are now based on the two-year election cycle. Limits are no longer tied to the exploratory phase, primary, or general elections. As of January 1, 2025, corporations and individuals may contribute $15,000 to candidates and $30,000 to PACs or political parties per election cycle. An election cycle begins on the 22nd day after a state general election and continues until 21 days after the next general election.
• The definition of a “political committee” now includes a candidate committee, a political advocacy organization, the political committee of a political party, and the committee of a segregated fund — which is another way to describe a political action committee or PAC.
• All existing filers in the Campaign Finance System — with either a surplus or a deficit — have been automatically registered for the 2026 two-year election cycle.
• Regardless of receipt amount, data entry in the Campaign Finance System must include all donors’ full names and postal addresses. The online system reports will automatically put donors in alphabetical order. If the donor’s aggregate contributions during the two-year election cycle are $50 or less, the name and address will not be available to the public and are exempt from disclosure under the Right-to-Know law, RSA chapter 91-A.
• The past practice of reporting amounts received under $50.01 as “unitemized receipts” is no longer permitted. Receipts under $50.01 must now be entered individually, and the report must include the donor’s name and address.
If you have any questions about the intricacies of campaign finance law, reporting requirements, ethics matters, lobbying law requirements, gaming regulations and laws as they pertain to campaign finance issues, creating nonprofit entities and coalitions to deliver messages to government decision-makers, or any other business and government relations issue don’t hesitate to contact Orr & Reno for assistance.
