A state House committee voted unanimously Tuesday against a bill that would upend the primary election system in New Hampshire.

Currently, undeclared voters can choose either a Democratic or Republican primary ballot on election day and become a registered member of that party. They can also fill out a form to immediately return to undeclared status after voting.

Under House Bill 172, registered voters would need to declare their party affiliation well before the primary if they wished to vote in it.

Rep. John Sellers, R-Bristol, the prime sponsor of HB 172, said the current system allows people to vote in bad faith.

“This is no different than the Red Sox playing the Yankees and the Red Sox telling the Yankees, ‘Hey, by the way, you’re going to use this pitcher today against us,’ ‘’ he said when he introduced his bill to the House Election Law Committee on Feb. 11.

That committee recommended, 17-0, on Tuesday that the full House reject the bill.

Rep. Ross Berry, R-Weare, the committee’s chairman, said statistics show the state’s current system worked well in the Jan. 23 Republican presidential primary.

He acknowledged that under the state’s current primary voting system “there are bad actors.”

“And shame on those bad actors, the bad actors being undeclared voters who lean in one direction and vote in the other direction in the primary with the intention of messing with it,” Berry said.

Berry said that in order to determine how many people did this last year, he examined how many of the people who participated in the Republican presidential primary later voted in the Democratic state primary.

He found that out of more than 300,000 people who voted in the Republican presidential primary, only 23,095 voted in the subsequent Democratic state primary.

This was despite efforts by various groups, including a political action committee called Primary Pivot, to encourage people to use their vote in the Republican presidential primary to defeat Donald Trump.

Berry said his statistical research convinced him that there simply are not enough bad-faith voters to upend a system that allows the broad participation in New Hampshire primaries.

He said he also has philosophical reasons to oppose HB 172.

“You shouldn’t be asking taxpayers to fund an election they can’t participate in,” he said. “But if you actually want to go into the impact the bad actors are having, it’s arguably minimal and I would say that in the most coordinated, well-funded attack ever, Donald Trump still won the primary.”

The full House will eventually schedule a vote on the bill.

As of Feb. 3, there were 379,789 voters registered in New Hampshire as undeclared, 325,221 as Republicans and 277,076 as Democrats, according to the N.H. Secretary of State’s Office.

These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.or