The decision of the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office to appeal the so-called “ballot selfie case” to the United States Supreme Court is a case study in bad government. The decision extends an embarrassing saga for the state of New Hampshire in the area of election law and the Constitution.

It chills voting rights and leaves Granite State taxpayers to deal with the ever-mounting attorney’s fees award against the state that will result from an all-but-inevitable loss. Joe Foster should cut his losses, drop the case or settle, and, in any case, look to support the voting process in more constructive ways.

In two widely respected opinions, federal trial and appellate courts struck down a New Hampshire law punishing voters who photograph their ballots and post them to social media. The most recent opinion, Rideout v. Gardner, handed down in September 2015, struggled to restrain itself from mocking arguments by our attorney general. He argued that the “ballot selfie law” protects the voting process by exposing voters to state investigations, charges and fines for innocuous conduct.

As the appellate court’s decision reveals, “Digital photography, the Internet and social media are not unknown quantities – they have been ubiquitous for several election cycles, without being shown to have the effect of furthering vote buying or voter intimidation.” Indeed, the secretary of state apparently conceded that the law did not solve an “actual problem” with voting and that there has been no record of any complaint regarding vote buying or coercion since 1976.

The state summoned Hitler’s Germany and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in support of the law, betraying a startling disconnect with other statements made regarding the health of New Hampshire’s democracy (to say nothing of a remarkable, even incendiary, lack of perspective). Responding with common sense, the appellate court noted, “There is no evidence that these historical examples from dictatorships have any material relationship to the present political situation in the state of New Hampshire, a democracy.” That our state enforcement officials need this kind of reminder from an appellate court raises more than an eyebrow.

Meanwhile, the attorney general appears to have turned a deaf ear to voting rights and First Amendment advocates of all political stripes who entered the case against our attorney general. Cyberlaw and First Amendment specialists from Massachusetts to California helped persuade the federal appellate court that, “ballot selfies have taken on a special communicative value: they both express support for a candidate and communicate that the voter has in fact given his or her vote to that candidate.”

Rather than taking a step back and evaluating the case for what it is – a clear loser – Joe Foster is elevating the matter. Just as in past cases where the attorney general has taken a case to the United State Supreme Court after losing at the appellate level, the decision to elevate the “ballot selfie case” comes with a very real price tag. The litigants will seek to recoup their attorney’s fees and have a right to do so under federal law.

You, the taxpayer, will pay this bill. In a case where voters, taxpayers and the government all seem to be the losers, it is hard to see any merit in the attorney general’s decision.

(Chuck Douglas is a former U.S. congressman and N.H. Supreme Court justice. He currently works as a trial attorney in Concord.)