16:59
Brief
House Bill 1597 will arrive on the House floor Tuesday with a 21-0 committee recommendation that it pass. (Getty Images)
The state Attorney General’s Office has been asked to investigate whether a superior court judicial nominee lived in one town and voted in another in 2008.
At a confirmation hearing last week, Rockingham County Attorney Patricia Conway said she voted in Atkinson in 2008 while helping her elderly father to the polls. At that time, she and her husband, Eric Lamb, were listed on Salem property tax records as owning a home in Salem. Lamb voted in Salem the year Conway voted in Atkinson.
Conway is Gov. Chris Sununu’s nominee to serve as a superior court judge. Her nomination is scheduled for a vote before the five-member Executive Council Wednesday.
In a letter Monday to the Attorney General’s Office, Councilor Cinde Warmington, a Concord Democrat, requested an investigation into whether Conway voted in the wrong town in 2008. Separately, Warmington has asked Sununu that a confirmation vote for Conway be put on pause pending an investigation.
Conway did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
According to a LexisNexis records search, Conway owned a house in Salem in 2005, the year she married Eric Lamb.
She and Lamb are listed on 2005 Salem tax assessment records as owners of a home at 10 Teague Drive, which is three years before she voted in Atkinson. (She is identified as Patricia G. Lamb on the tax record.) Her husband voted in Salem in 2008, according to voter registration records.
Conway and her husband bought the Atkinson home of her father in 2012, following his death in November 2011.
Under New Hampshire law, a person must be domiciled in a town in order to vote there.
A domicile is a place “designated by a person as his principal place of physical presence for the indefinite future to the exclusion of all others,” the law states.
In last week’s hearing, Warmington asked Conway if she had voted in Atkinson in 2008. Conway confirmed that she had. Neither Warmington nor other councilors asked Conway whether she lived in Atkinson at the time.
In Warmington’s letter to the Attorney General’s Office, a copy of which was shared with the New Hampshire Bulletin, the executive councilor noted that the voting violation, if true, would have constituted a Class A misdemeanor back in 2008.
“Accordingly, I ask that you review this matter and advise the Executive Council regarding the facts and circumstances surrounding Ms. Conway’s eligibility to vote in Atkinson in 2008 at a time when she and her family were, by her own account, living in Salem,” Warmington wrote.
Requests for comment from the Attorney General’s Office and the governor’s office were not immediately returned on Tuesday.
Read the letter below:
Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our web site. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of photos and graphics.
Related News
