The people who granted the authority get to ask about it.
NHEXIT is the campaign to put New Hampshire independence to a vote of the people of New Hampshire.
Four jobs, in order.
Get the question on a ballot
An independence referendum is a democratic act. We work to put the question to New Hampshire voters under New Hampshire law, and to make sure the wording is one an honest opponent would accept as fair.
Win the argument in public
A third of this state already says it would not join the union if it were not already in it. We build from there. Not anger. A settled sense that New Hampshire does a better job of governing New Hampshire.
Turn support into a legislature
Four hundred House seats, in districts small enough that a few dozen committed neighbors are noticed. Supporters become constituents who show up, testify, and are remembered at the next filing period.
Keep the reason in view
At Exeter on 5 January 1776, New Hampshire adopted the first state constitution in America and put its government on the consent of the people, six months before the Declaration. It did not declare independence. It simply stopped taking orders. That instinct is not new to this state.
We put our names on it.
Independence movements come down to who is willing to say so in public, under their own name, in a room where people disagree.
Carla Gericke
President, NHEXIT Now
A writer and a lawyer, born in South Africa, who came to New Hampshire in 2008 and has spent the years since arguing that the people who live here should be the people who govern here. She led the Free State Project as its president from 2011 to 2016 and is its president emeritus.
In 2014 she was the plaintiff in Gericke v. Begin, in which the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a First Amendment right to film police carrying out their duties in public. She founded the Foundation for New Hampshire Independence, testified in support of CACR 32 at the State House in January 2022, and launched NHEXIT Now in July 2024.
"It should always be in the hands of the people how they are governed."
Testimony in support of CACR 32, New Hampshire House hearing, 20 January 2022.
Self-government here is a building you can walk into.
Hampstead Meeting House
What we are for.
NHEXIT seeks to make New Hampshire a free, independent, and prosperous nation, governed by the people of New Hampshire, through peaceful and lawful democratic means.
Peaceful rules out everything that is not a conversation, a petition, a hearing, or a vote. Lawful means working through the General Court and the ballot rather than around them. And democratic means we will accept the answer we are given, then come back and make a better argument.
What we are not asking for
We are not asking anyone to renounce anything, to hate a neighbor, or to treat this as an emergency. The case for New Hampshire is available on an ordinary Tuesday and it should be made that way.
Why this state, and not another
Every independence movement that ever reached a real vote needed two things: a legislature that could put the question, and a people close enough to that legislature to make it. New Hampshire has both, in a form no other state can match. Four hundred representatives. Districts of a few thousand neighbors. Legislators paid two hundred dollars a biennium, who serve because the people next door asked them to.
Add to that a constitutional history no other state has. New Hampshire's ratification is what made the Constitution law, and New Hampshire's first demand in the same document was that undelegated powers stay home. This state has been making that argument since 1788. We are continuing it.