Controversial elections security bill could see changes
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A hotly contested election bill with new citizenship checks and data buys could soon undergo edits.
House Bill 1264 has won praise from some who say it would improve election security. But it’s also rankled voting rights advocates — who fear it could disenfranchise some eligible voters — and deadlocked the bipartisan state clerks association.
“We require clean elections to maintain voter trust,” said Jonathan Bechtle of the Florida-based Foundation for Government Accountability. Indiana needs a similarly “clean” voting roll to do so, he told the Senate Elections Committee.
“You cannot sit here and pretend that red tape and extra steps don’t take their toll on people, especially people with limited resources, people between homes or without them,” MADVoters Indiana co-founder Chelsea McDonnel said.
Changes could be on the way. Sen. Mike Gaskill, R-Pendleton — who chairs the committee — said he’s seen at least four possible amendments but didn’t indicate what he’d support.
He entertained about 90 minutes of discussion on the legislation Monday, including 24 witnesses limited to three minutes of testimony.
The bill creates new requirements for first-time voters, proof of citizenship and more. It also would allow state election officials to pay for commercially available data — likely Experian’s TrueTrace — and let county voter registration offices use the information for voter list maintenance.
Several witnesses in favor of the legislation, including county clerks, said they’d personally dealt with registration and voting errors involving non-citizens.
Cass County Clerk Destry Richey said she know of at least two such incidences in her county and expected more in the future.
“I want to justify that this is an absolute must for me,” she said of the proof of citizenship provision. The state’s top election officials — designated National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) officials — would compare the statewide voter registration system against Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) lists of temporary credentials to find non-citizens registered to vote.
They’d have to inform counties of those non-eligible voters. The legislation sets out a process for counties to follow, which includes an appeals process.
But multiple people observed that the BMV information is outdated and asserted that the agency itself often registers non-citizens.
Tippecanoe County Clerk Julie Roush, a Republican generally in favor of the bill, called that “particularly troubling.”
Immigration lawyer Rachel Van Tyle, who testified in opposition to the bill, said clients had told her the box is “already checked” for them to register to vote during BMV visits. It’s illegal to vote in most elections as a non-citizen, and she said doing so could later doom a prospective citizen’s case.
Julia Vaughn, who leads government watchdog Common Cause Indiana, similarly asked the committee to instead turn its attention to the BMV.
“It seems backwards to attack this by examining the voter’s status. Why not get the Bureau of Motor Vehicles to quit illegally registering people?” she asked.
Marion County Clerk Kate Sweeney Bell, a Democrat opposed to the bill, said county clerks “aren’t immigration attorneys” and that she didn’t want to be “responsible or determining someone’s immigration status.”
The committee heard further testimony from a pair of medical students and others on how other provisions could harm people who move addresses often or have no permanent address, like college students and homeless Hoosiers.
Gaskill held the bill for a vote at his committee’s next meeting.
“I think that bill is important enough that we need to allow an extra week of discussion,” he told the Capital Chronicle. “… I think the longer we talk about it, the better decision that we’ll make.”
The move comes after author and House Elections Chair Tim Wesco, R-Osceola, took nearly three hours of testimony on the bill across two meetings. Gaskill is the House bill’s Senate sponsor.
Although some witnesses have called to study the legislation’s provisions over the interim, Gaskill said he still planned to move it this session.
“I think we need to take action,” he said. “We have elections coming up this year. The better we can do in ensuring the integrity of our elections — that’s our duty to the citizens.”
The Indiana Capital Chronicle is an independent, not-for-profit news organization that covers state government, policy and elections.