#

Maybe Republican former state Rep. Troy Merner should not have answered the door in his underwear when an investigator from the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office knocked at the Carroll home where he lives.

Maybe he should have resigned from his elected positions when he moved to the home outside his district. Or maybe someone in the State House should have acted when they were alerted about Merner’s residency in December 2022.

That was when top lawyers with the New Hampshire Department of Justice, Myles Matteson and Anne Edwards, called Terry Pfaff, the Chief Operating Officer of the General Court, to inform him of Merner’s living situation, according to records made available Tuesday. House Speaker Sherman Packer (R-Londonderry) acknowledged Tuesday he was informed last December as well.

Merner was allowed to continue to represent the district he no longer lived in for months.

The New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office announced Tuesday it is charging Merner, 63, for wrongful voting, theft by deception, and unsworn falsification. The charges are the next act in a legal drama that started a year ago.

Formella’s office did not make Merner’s residency problem public until this March after it received a complaint that Merner had voted in Lancaster’s municipal election. Merner continued to serve in the House until September, when Formella’s office sent a memo to Packard confirming Merner did not live in Lancaster.

However, according to the records, investigators and attorneys inside Formella’s office knew Merner did not live in Lancaster as early as December of last year.

Packard said in a statement released Tuesday night he was aware of the December call to Pfeff, but Merner disputed that he did not meet the residency requirement. 

“Allegations against Merner were made in December 2022, and the General Court was made aware that Merner disputed and contested those allegations then. Merner continued to attest to the General Court through signed official paperwork that his residence was in Lancaster,” Packard said. “The details of Merner’s admissions relative to his residing outside of his district were not brought to the attention of the Speaker’s Office until September when the Department of Justice investigation had concluded.”

Merner was a Lancaster selectman and a state representative for Lancaster, Dalton, North Cumberland, and Stratford. The only problem is that he lives in Carroll, having moved there in the summer of 2022 with his new wife, Janet Nelson. After moving, Merner was elected to the House to represent Coos District 1 in November 2022.

Merner did not respond to a call Tuesday. He claimed, according to statements made to investigators, that his out-of-district residency was well known, and he was encouraged by others to continue serving, though he did not name his supporters.

The affidavit filed in the case depicted a man who seemed not to realize he was doing anything wrong.

“State Rep. Merner told (Investigator Anna) Brewer-Croteau that he could not believe that someone actually complained to (the attorney general), further stating that he (State Rep. Merner) has done so much for the town of Lancaster,” the affidavit written by Investigator Thomas Defosses stated.

A Lancaster resident contacted the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office a week after the 2022 election to report Merner was no longer living in town, and that the fact was well-known in Lancaster.

Merner sold his Lancaster home in the summer of 2022 and moved to Carroll after marrying Nelson. He claimed he had an arrangement with the buyer of his former home that he could temporarily stay in a room there, but he often stays overnight in an office he’s rented in Lancaster.

In his Dec. 5 meeting with Brewer-Croteau, during which he was in his boxers and a T-shirt and eating cereal, Merner said he planned to finish his terms as a selectman and state representative but not stand for reelection in 2024 since he no longer lived in Lancaster.

Lancaster Town Manager Benjamin Gaetjens-Oleson was aware of the issue when Brewer-Croteau interviewed him, saying he had fielded many complaints about Merner’s residency. But, Gaetjens-Oleson felt he could not do anything since Merner was technically his boss.

Gaetjens-Oleson reportedly warned Merner about his residency problem, saying it was “going to cause an upheaval with the locals.”

Merner would later tell Investigator Richard Tracy he had to keep on as a selectman since he was the only member of the board who did any work.

Tracy was assigned to the case after Fenella’s office got a complaint about Merner voting in the March elections in Lancaster. Merner told Tracy he thought voting was OK even though he did not live there.

“(He) said he had not heard back from the Attorney General’s Office since he spoke with (Investigator) Brewer-Croteau, and he did not think he was doing anything wrong,” the affidavit states. 

At that point, Tracy had established Merner was not regularly sleeping in the office he rented in Lancaster, as the neighbors attested they did not see him. When confronted with that, Merner claimed he thought it would be OK if he had an address in Lancaster and worked at the town offices regularly.

Now that his residency was out in the open, the investigation was on. Investigators found Merner had been submitting mileage expenses to the General Court for round trips to Concord from Lancaster and not Carroll. Lawmakers can get reimbursed for their trips to Concord to serve their constituents.

A round trip from Lancaster to Concord is about 202 miles, while the Carroll to Concord trip is about 176 miles, meaning Merner was overcharging taxpayers to get to work. According to the affidavit, Merner overcharged taxpayers a total of $973 throughout his entire term.

Merner was ousted from the House in September and resigned as a Lancaster selectman in October. He is now facing prison time, as the wrongful voting charge is a class B misdemeanor which carries a possible three-and-a-half to seven-year prison sentence. He is due to be arraigned on Dec. 28.

A Merrimack man and former Democratic candidate for state representative, Michael Drouin, is accused of jamming the cell phone of a GOP candidate during a special election last year.

Drouin, 30, was indicted this week by the grand jury convened in the Hillsborough Superior Court — South on one felony count of interference with election communications connected to the April 13, 2021, Hillsborough District 21 special election to replace House Speaker Dick Hinch (R-Merrimack).

Drouin allegedly took out a Craigslist classified ad offering a free trailer in the Nashua area and listed the cell phone number for Merrimack Republican Bill Boyd in the ad. Boyd eventually won the election to replace Hinch, who died from COVID-19, beating former Democratic Rep. Wendy Thomas with 2,531 votes to Thomas’ 2,144.

“That election day was chaotic,” said Rep. Joe Sweeney (R-Salem) who was with Boyd that day. “(Boyd) was getting dozens of calls asking about this free trailer.”

Boyd had already posted his personal cell phone number to Facebook on election day as part of an effort to get voters to the polls. Boyd was anticipating hearing from voters who needed a ride, and instead got call after call from people asking about the free trailer, Sweeney said.

Boyd declined to comment on the charges when reached Wednesday. Drouin did not respond to a request for comment.

On the day of the election, Sweeney filed a complaint with the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office, which had the ad removed from Craigslist. Investigators zeroed in on Drouin as the ad’s creator, though he initially denied he was behind the free trailer stunt. When investigators told Drouin they had evidence linking him to the ad, Drouin then claimed he created the ad as a “poorly timed” joke. Sweeney said that excuse does not fly.

“Him trying to play it off as a badly timed joke seems insincere to me,” Sweeney said.

Drouin now faces up to three and a half years in prison if convicted, as well as the prospect of being barred from voting in New Hampshire. Drouin ran an unsuccessful campaign for state representative as a Democratic in 2018, though he has reportedly dropped that affiliation and is now labeled as an independent. He is currently an alternate member of the Merrimack Conservation Commission.

Sweeney said Election Day shenanigans like Drouin’s are unusual in New Hampshire. 

“I can’t think of a similar scenario where someone puts up a candidate’s phone number to mess with him on election day. I really don’t know what this guy was thinking,” Sweeney said.

The charges come at a problematic time for the New Hampshire Democratic Party, which has been plagued by charges of election interference and dirty tricks in the past few months.

During the run-up to this year’s midterms, for example,  Democrats were hit with a cease and desist order from the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office over illegal mailers. Those mailers, paid for by the state Democratic Party, solicited absentee ballot requests be sent to a non-existent government agency. It also included false claims about voter histories, according to the order issued by Attorney General John Formella.

“In light of our conclusion that the NHDP has caused voter confusion given the incorrect return addresses to clerks on its mailers, the incorrect direction to non-existent ‘boards of election,’ and the incorrect voter domicile information, the NHDP is hereby ordered to cease and desist any and all activities which violate the law by causing voter confusion in the future,” Formella wrote.

And just last month, Fomella’s office said Democrat Steve Marchand lied about his role in a political scheme targeting his opponents in Portsmouth.

Marchand, a progressive Democrat who once served as Portsmouth mayor and sought his party’s nomination for governor, was issued a letter of warning to Marchand for his involvement in Preserve-Portsmouth.com and other websites that targeted sitting city council members in the last municipal election.

Marchand’s bogus website was built to mirror a legitimate site with a similar name, Preserve Portsmouth, and purported to support the same city council candidates the original site endorsed. But it falsely described them as far-right Trump supporters. According to documents obtained by the Attorney General’s Office, Marchand wanted to depress voter turnout among Republicans to benefit Democrats on the ballot.

Democrats are also accused of sending illegal mailers supporting MAGA Republican candidate Bob Burns in the Second Congressional District GOP primary.

The Reynolds DeWalt Corporation, a Democrat-aligned mail firm based in Massachusetts, sent the four mailers promoting Burns in the GOP primary, helping him defeat mainstream GOP candidate Mayor George Hansel of Keene. Burns, who won 33 percent of the vote, beat Hansel by fewer than 1,800 votes.

According to a complaint filed by the state GOP, the mailers were illegal because they “failed to identify in the mailers who sent them, including a failure to provide ‘paid for by’ disclaimers on multiple mass mailings.”

The Attorney General’s Office contacted Reynolds DeWalt about the mailers before the primary. It refused to tell the attorney general who paid for them. The company is represented by the law firm of Hillary Clinton’s former attorney Marc Elias, the attorney responsible for funding and disseminating the “Steele Dossier” that helped feed the claim of collusion between Russia and the Trump 2016 presidential campaign.