The case of the Libertarian Party versus New Hampshire's Secretary of State became something else entirely yesterday: A chance for the state Republican Party to square off against state Democrats in a court of law.

The Libertarians essentially won their case in November, when Merrimack County Superior Court Judge Carol Ann Conboy struck down as unconstitutional a law passed last year that allowed the state to sell detailed voter data only to the major political parties. And Secretary of State Bill Gardner never was an enthusiastic defendant: He said from the beginning that he personally opposed the law.

The question Conboy mulled at a hearing yesterday is what should be done with the information already sold to the state's Democratic and Republican parties. The file included data that previously had only been available from towns, such as voters' names and party registration history, as well as voters' year of birth, a statistic that had never been released before.

Barbara Keshen, an attorney representing the Libertarians, and Jim Kennedy of the attorney general's office, representing the state, agreed that taking the information back would be difficult. "The bell's been rung," Kennedy said at one point, reiterating a statement Keshen made at an earlier hearing.

Keshen said that the Democratic Party had offered to give the Libertarians its data file but that her clients had turned them down. "It would be unprincipled to become yet another party that has access to the information at this point," she said.

But not everyone agreed that remedy would be hard to come by. Chuck Douglas, an attorney for the Republican Party, argued that the judge should force the Democratic Party to hand over to the state the profits it made from selling access to its file to political organizations, including presidential candidates for $65,000 each.

"We did not gain financially," Douglas said. "The Democrats did. Give it back."

But Democratic Party lawyers disagreed, arguing that the sales were legal and that the data obtained from the state under the law was only a fraction of its overall file, which they said was an expensive project compiled "painstakingly over the years," said party attorney Kathy Sullivan.

"There's been a lot of sound and fury between the two parties," Sullivan said.

Conboy told Douglas that if she set out to calculate what fraction of the money the Democratic Party got from data secured from the state, she would also have to look into what the Republican Party did with the file. Douglas told Conboy the party had made the list available, free of charge, to the national party. Conboy told him she would have to look into what happened after that.

"I am loath to go down that trail for both parties," Conboy said. Later, she added: "As we move out, where does it end?"

Sen. Peter Burling, who sponsored the original law, also spoke yesterday. Burling, a Cornish Democrat, said that his goal all along was to make it easier for candidates to reach voters and that he had sponsored a new bill, scheduled to reach the Senate floor tomorrow, that would allow any candidate or political party to buy a more limited data file from the state.

By LAUREN R. DORGAN

Monitor staff