House State & Local Government Committee Notes

12pm, Tuesday, April 13, 2010

HB 3456 Odom / SB 3392 Finney, L.: Purging voter registrations. Requires voter registrations that are considered inactive to only be purged in the second year after a federal census of population has been taken. AMENDMENT: Senate State & Local Government amendment 1 prohibits a voter from being purged due to a deficient registration form once the administrator has declared the person a registered voter unless the administrator later determines the voter knowingly made or consented to false information being placed on the registration form or failed to provide a valid signature.

Odom: Amendment 1 makes the bill. This codifies how a voter registration form should be treated under the law. The intent is to make certain that decisions about deficient voter registration forms are made on the front end, before a voter registration is issued, because it is very difficult to purge a registration once it’s been issued. A form can only be considered deficient prior to the registration being issued- you can’t retroactively declare the form deficient. The TN Supreme Court has supported this. They said that, once a registration is issued, the person is to be considered officially registered regardless of whether the form was deficient. The purpose of this is to provide clear direction to our administrators and everyone else involved in the elections process.

Todd: (Points out that the amendment before the committee is different than the one that passed in Senate last week. Todd is very angry about this because he specifically directed the Sec. of State’s office and interested parties to work together this week to come up with something that everyone could agree on, and he thought they had done that. But, he wasn’t made aware of the Senate amendment until 30 minutes ago, and the Sec. of State’s office, sponsor, etc. do not agree on that amendment.)

Evans: What’s the problem with declaring a voter deficient (not purging them) after they’ve been issued a registration?

Odom: Some of these people have been registered and voting for 45 years. It’s wrong to send them a letter after all that time that there’s questions about their registration form.

Evans: I don’t agree with you. We don’t want to disenfranchise anyone, but if their form doesn’t meet the requirements, we have a responsibility to make sure it’s corrected.

Odom: I think that you’re going to find that what’s going on now (the Voter Registration Verification program) is very illegal.

Swafford: I believe it’s never too late to fix a mistake, no matter how long ago it was.

Odom: The TN Supreme Court said, “voters should not be disenfranchised because of the failure of administrators to perform their duty.”

Motion to table the amendment fails. 8 to 8. Haynes passed.

Haynes: I was told we had the support of everyone involved. I thought the Sec. of State’s office supported this, but apparently that agreement has broken down. I’d like to hear from the Sec. of State’s office.

Todd: (reiterates his frustration that all parties are not in agreement because an amendment passed in Senate last week that is slightly different than the one before the committee, and, apparently, no one knew about the amendment.)

Peaches (Borchert?): Benton County has been accused of criminal activity. The county elections office is number one in the state in screw-ups. But nobody has been purged. 11,000 deficient registrations have been remedied. The one that are found deficient are going to be remedied when the person comes to vote. Democrats and Republicans in Benton County are very happy with what’s going on. Benton County should be a model for dealing with deficient registrations. We don’t need to move forward with this boll. What we’ve been doing has worked for 100 years- why change it now that Republicans have take over the election commission?

Mark Goins, Coordinator of Elections, Department of State: I didn’t see this amendment until 11:30am today. The amendment I thought we’d agreed on is not the one before us. Any insinuation that we’re doing something illegal or for partisan reasons is wrong. The Supreme Court decision refers to situations in which the elections administrator makes a mistake, not when the individual registrant makes a mistake. The only thing different between this amendment and the Senate amendment is the last line, “or failed to provide a valid signature,” and that is the point of contention.

Yoakley: Does this bill clarify every bit of what happens when a voter registration is declared deficient? Does this correct the problem, no matter who made the mistake?

G: Yes.

Y: I don’t understand what the big issue is if this bill, with the amendment, is going to fix this problem.

Carr: Does this bill fix a problem, or are you already able to fix a problem, as illustrated in Benton County?

G:… We’d support this bill with the Senate amendment, but not with the amendment before us. We have to have a valid signature. The signature is critical so that we can compare signatures to determine if the original registration form was forged. This elections administration walked into a bad situation – we did not create it. Apparently there was a lot of incompetence in previous administrations.

Tindall: We want to err on the side of the voter. We should make sure this bill will help more people vote.

Moore: I would like to know the percentage of deficient voters that are declared deficient due to a lack of a valid signature.

Amendment 1 to amendment 1 adopted. This makes the House amendment identical to the amendment passed in Senate last week.

Rolled 1 week.