Bill Gardner, who for decades as Secretary of State has fiercely defended New Hampshire’s right to hold the country’s first presidential primaries, said Monday he would resign after 45 years.
Mr. Gardner, a Democrat first elected in 1976, had enjoyed largely bipartisan support, even as the job of Secretary of State — each state’s top election administrator — has become more political, a national trend accelerated by the false claims of former President Donald J. Trump of widespread vote fraud.
Mr Gardner, 73, said political reasons didn’t force his decision, nor was his health a factor, although during a news conference at the Statehouse in Concord he reflected that he was the country’s longest-serving secretary of state — one of the only four New Hamphirites to hold the track since 1929.
“The two previous secretaries of state died in office,” he said. “I have thought about that. Would I be such a person?”
Asked about the future of New Hampshire’s presidential primaries, which bring a wave of national attention, money and visitors every four years, Mr. Gardner said other states would try to cross the line, but said the Granite State would remain the first.
“There will be challenges,” he said. “They will find new ways to try. But it should work out.”
Especially among some Democrats, there is a desire to unseat New Hampshire from its main electoral spot, as well as Iowa from its previous primaries, because both states are whiter, older and more rural than the country as a whole.
One lasting obstacle is New Hampshire state law, which requires the primary to be held before a similar contest. Mr. Gardner, who had sole authority to set the primary date, had said that if another state tried to move forward, he would simply move New Hampshire’s date to December or even November.
Mr. Gardner escaped Mr. Trump’s campaign of personal insults and pressure in 2020, targeting other election officials in battlefield states that President Biden won, likely because the New Hampshire race wasn’t particularly close.
However, after Mr. Trump made the baseless claim in 2016 that “millions” of illegal votes had been cast by non-citizens across the country, Mr. Gardner agreed to join a committee Mr. Trump had set up to to do research. His decision to join the committee, even after Mr. Trump falsely claimed he had won New Hampshire, was sharply criticized by some of his fellow Democrats. The commission was disbanded after a large number of states refused to cooperate with what they considered to be intrusive requests for information about voters.
Mr Gardner at the time defended the commission and his role in it, saying he had hoped the “facts would speak for themselves” about the lack of fraud. On Monday, he reiterated his belief that the commission was intended to restore Americans’ waning confidence in the election results.
But at the time, Democrats’ disappointment with his role led to the most serious challenge he faced for reelection, in 2018, when another Democrat, Colin Van Ostern, nearly dethroned Mr Gardner.
The New Hampshire Secretary of State is elected every two years by the members of the state legislature. Mr Gardner’s current deputy David Scanlan will take over this week until the legislature holds its next election.
On Monday, leaders of both parties came to praise Mr Gardner.
“Secretary Gardner has fiercely defended our primaries over the years and made sure that Granite Staters play a vital role in our nation’s political elections,” Donna Soucy, the Democratic leader of the State Senate, said in a statement.
Governor Chris Sununu, a Republican, said New Hamphirites owe “an enormous debt of gratitude” to Mr. Gardner’s election administration for “always being open, fair, accessible and accurate.”