By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org

The New Hampshire Supreme Court on Thursday overturned Richard Rosen’s illegal voting conviction, ruling the trial court judge was wrong to suppress evidence that another man confessed to casting the illegal vote.

Rosen, 87, was found guilty of a class B felony in 2024 for allegedly voting in the 2016 general election in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts. But, the Supreme Court ruled Grafton Superior Court Judge Lawrence MacLeod erred by not allowing jurors to know that Rosen’s Massachusetts groundskeeper, Billy Botelho, confessed to investigators that he had voted in Rosen’s name.

“Botelho’s statements either impliedly or expressly constitute confessions to voting in the defendant’s name during the November 2016 election — the same election for which the defendant was charged with double voting,” Associate Justice Patrick Donovan wrote in the unanimous decision.

Rosen’s commercial greenhouse business, North Country Growers in Berlin, warned staff last week it is in danger of shutting down and unable to make payroll, according to NHPR reporting.

Rosen has homes in Holderness and Belmont, Massachusetts, and there were absentee ballots cast in his name in both communities for the 2016 election. But when New Hampshire investigators talked to Botelho he told them he sent an absentee ballot in Rosen’s name for the 2016 election, as he had a number of times over the years.

“Botelho again admitted to voting in the defendant’s name ‘three, maybe four times.’ He stated that he first voted in the defendant’s name in the 1970s and had most recently done so in the 2020 election,” Donovan wrote.

Belmont election officials testified at the trial that registered voters, like Rosen, are not required to show photo identification when getting an absentee ballot. In Holderness, Rosen went in person to get an absentee ballot and received help from the town clerk filling it out. Rosen is legally blind.

During the trial in which jurors were not informed that another man regularly voted for Rosen, prosecutors presented evidence that Rosen had voted in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts in multiple elections. Donovan wrote that the evidence of other alleged illegal votes for which he was not charged with a crime resulted in the jury being prejudiced against Rosen.

“The danger of unfair prejudice was significant. As the defendant observes, because ‘the issue of alleged voter fraud has become a controversial and hot-button topic across the country,’ evidence of numerous uncharged instances of double voting created a substantial risk of unfair prejudice,” Donovan wrote.

Donovan was joined in his ruling by Associate Justices Mellisa Countway and Bryan Gould. Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald, the former New Hampshire Attorney General, was recused from the case. Rosen’s appeal was heard in November, while former Associate Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi was abstaining from all cases following her conviction on a class B misdemeanor stemming from the criminal investigation involving her husband, former Ports Director Geno Marconi.