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N.H. to allow ‘ballot selfies’
By Jaclyn Reiss and Milton J. Valencia
Globe Staff

If you want to snap a photo of your New Hampshire ballot and share it online, go ahead: A court has ruled that you can.

A federal appeals court in Boston has affirmed a lower court’s decision to strike down a 2014 law that banned New Hampshire voters from posting photos of their marked ballots online.

The decision Wednesday came after the law was met with skepticism from the three-judge panel, who questioned the state’s objection to voters who want to publicize their ballots.

‘‘What’s wrong with that?’’ Justice Sandra Lynch asked earlier this month.

The ban was passed in 2014 as an amendment to an existing law that bars voters from showing a completed ballot to someone else, including on the Internet, before submitting it at the polls. The law was meant to prevent vote-buying, in which voters show their completed ballot for a payoff.

The law was believed to be the first of its kind and banned voters from posting an election booth photo online regardless of how much time passed since the election. (The state Legislature in Indiana passed a similar law, though it has suspended enforcement pending litigation in that state.)

The case of Leon Rideout et al. v. William M. Gardner, New Hampshire’s secretary of state, sought to overturn the law. A lower court struck down the law in August 2015, but the state appealed.

The New Hampshire case was heard in Boston because the regional federal appeals court in Boston hears cases from lower courts in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and the district of Puerto Rico.