Sen. Leland Yee’s bill to fast track online voter registration took an initial step forward yesterday.
On a party line, 3-2 vote, the Senate Elections and Constitutional Amendments Committee approved Senate Bill 397, which would allow voters to register to vote by submitting an electronic affidavit via their county’s election office website.
The Florida Senate passed a massive overhaul of state election law by a 25-13 vote Thursday that would make changes to early voting, limit a voter’s ability to change his or her address or name at the polls and set up a presidential primary committee.
Democrats argued against the legislation though and said it would disenfranchise voters, particularly college students who frequently take advantage of the registration changes at the polls because they move so often. “We have young people who would love to register to vote,” said Sen. Gwen Margolis, D-Miami.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson blasted state Republican lawmakers Monday for an election law overhaul that he says will block college students and military personnel from having their votes counted next year when he and President Barack Obama both seek re-election.
Then Nelson waded into a controversy of his own when he suggested the U.S. special forces that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden could be blocked from voting if the Legislature passes the bill.
Bills moving through the Florida Legislature could make the voting process difficult for some Florida voters, including college students.
Currently, many students who move to a new county for college can change their addresses at the polls if they want to vote in the county in which they live and go to school.
If anyone needs a clue as to why the state’s Republican-dominated Legislature is making proposals that puts early voting in its cross hairs, one place to look might be Time magazine’s Oct. 30, 2008 issue.
In it was a piece titled “How Early Voting Could Cost McCain Florida.” It detailed how early-voting Democrats, many of them energized by the candidacy of Barack Obama, were outnumbering Republicans at early voting sites by more than 20 percentage points.
College students seeking to vote at their campus precinct will find it harder to do. So will women who’ve changed their name but not re-registered before an election. The time for early voting would be cut from 14 days to six.
Groups like the League of Women Voters will find it tougher to register voters. And citizens attempting to amend the constitution will have to gather more than 600,000 signatures in two years instead of four.
A few days after New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna Duran notified all 33 county clerks that their biennial voter purge would be canceled this year, Deputy Bernalillo County Clerk Robert Adams made a disturbing discovery — 44,601 county files stored on the state’s voter registration database had been accessed and altered.
Accustomed to spending long hours in front of his computer, Adams says he was shocked to learn informational “flags,” which are attached to voter files after mail is returned by the U.S. Postal Service as undeliverable, had simply vanished on Valentine’s Day.
With a fast-approaching presidential election expected to bring more than 8.5 million Floridians to the polls, the Legislature is battling over sweeping changes to nearly every aspect of state election law.
Supporters tout the changes as fighting fraud. Opponents say they are disenfranchising. And the people charged with counting ballots wonder why lawmakers are trying to reinvent the wheel in the first place.
The Florida House passed a sweeping overhaul of election laws Thursday that Republicans say will streamline voting machinery and Democrats say will make it harder for people to vote in the nation’s biggest battleground state in 2012.
Passage on a 79-37 party-line vote followed two days of intensely partisan debate — a harbinger of next year’s presidential election when Florida’s newly increased 29 electoral votes and all 160 legislative seats will be at stake in a pivotal reapportionment year. But the closest that any Republican lawmaker came to stating the obvious — invoking President Barack Obama’s name — was a passing reference to preventing “the Chicago method” of voting more than once.
Florida lawmakers passed a dramatic overhaul of state election law Thursday night, a move that GOP legislators say will bring integrity to the process and one that Democrats counter will disenfranchise voters across the state.
The measure, a major rewrite to the laws that govern the state’s elections, passed 79-37. Among other things, the measure (HB 1355) would limit voters’ ability to change their address at the polls, change third-party voter registration rules and make it more difficult for citizen groups to put amendments on the ballot.
Having solved all other problems, the Florida Legislature now turns to the most dangerous threat of all …Voting. No kidding. The 2011 Legislature is considering, and its committees have approved so far, bills that would:
• Cut Florida’s early-voting period (nearly one out of five ballots were cast early in 2010) from two weeks to one.
• Bar anyone who has moved or changed a name, such as newly married women, from updating their information at the polls on Election Day and receiving a regular ballot. They would have to cast “provisional” ballots instead.
• Crack down on, and expand penalties for, groups that try to register new voters — which used to be considered an all-American activity.
• Make it even harder for citizens to change the Florida Constitution by setting an earlier expiration date for petition signatures.
For more than a decade, lawmakers have been tweaking election rules to improve on Florida’s ham-fisted history of counting ballots. This year, an election law rewrite is moving through the state House that voter-rights activists have assailed as “good old-fashioned voter suppression” and “Jim Crow tactics.”
The legislation was described as a cleanup bill in advance of the 2012 elections that is “important to ensure the integrity of the political process and our elections in Florida,” said sponsor Dennis Baxley, a Republican from Ocala.
The latest House makeover of Florida election laws stirred intense controversy Thursday as unions and grass roots political groups complained that it would suppress 2012 voting in a state Barack Obama won in 2008.
By a 12-6 party-line vote, the House State Affairs Committee approved the new bill, setting up a vote by the full House. Similar legislation will be taken up Friday by the Senate Rules Committee.
Efforts by Sen. Ron Young to reform the state’s voter registration system are gaining traction in the Maryland General Assembly. Young, a Frederick Democrat, sponsored two bills this session to help improve voter registration. They have until midnight Monday, when the General Assembly is scheduled to adjourn, to pass both chambers.
The first, which has already passed the Senate and on Thursday passed the House of Delegates with an amendment, would allow Maryland election officials to share voter registration with other states. The Senate is scheduled to vote today on an identical bill that originated in the House of Delegates.
The House Republican Leadership has introduced a bill that the Leon County Supervisor of Elections calls a travesty. Proposed House Bill 1355 passed through a subcommittee Friday morning. Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho says proposed House Bill 1355 destroys the election process as it currently exists in Florida and he went to legislators to let them know that he strongly opposes it.
Sancho shook his head at the 128-page document before heading inside the House Office Building to let the Governmental Operations Subcommittee know how he feels. But, to no avail. The subcommittee members voted in favor of proposed House Bill 1355. Sancho says he disagrees with a change that would allow the partisan appointee of the governor to control all supervisors of elections and give them orders, or remove them from office. Sancho said, “This is ridiculous. It would be as if an appointed water district commissioner could order an elected legislator around. There’s only one reason for this and that is partisan control over the process. It serves no interest of the citizens.”
Over the objections of county elections supervisors and public-interest groups, a bill that would make numerous changes to Florida’s elections law cleared a House subcommittee on Friday. The Government Operations Subcommittee voted up the bill on Friday by a party-line tally of 9-4.
Its sponsor, state Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, said the changes will get the state’s Elections Code in “ship-shape” for the next election cycle and the redrawing of congressional and legislative district lines. “This bill preserves and protects the political process,” Baxley told the subcommittee.
A new plan for to close Idaho’s primary elections and require voters to register by parties could still allow independents to cast a vote in primaries, though party leaders would have the final say on such participation. The chairmen of both the state Republican and Democratic parties say they’d welcome independent voters in their primaries.
The legislation for closed primaries follows a successful lawsuit by the Idaho Republican Party, which convinced a federal judge that Idaho’s open primaries, which let voters pick any party’s ballot, violated its constitutional right to assemble. On Monday, budget writers also agreed to repay some of the GOP’s attorney fees. The Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee (JFAC) agreed to pay the Idaho Republican Party $100,000 to cover lawyers’ fees for the lawsuit striking down open primaries.
New Hampshire’s new Republican state House speaker is pretty clear about what he thinks of college kids and how they vote. They’re “foolish,” Speaker William O’Brien said in a recent speech to a tea party group. “Voting as a liberal. That’s what kids do,” he added, his comments taped by a state Democratic Party staffer and posted on YouTube.
Students lack “life experience,” and “they just vote their feelings.” New Hampshire House Republicans are pushing for new laws that would prohibit many college students from voting in the state – and effectively keep some from voting at all.
A bill to strip college students of the right to vote conforms with the Founding Fathers’ view of domicile, its lone sponsor argued Thursday. Rep. Gregory Sorg, R-Easton, said he merely wants to return residency for voting to where you came from and not where you’re attending school.
“This doesn’t take away the right to vote for anyone,” Sorg insisted. “This says you vote where you reside, and you don’t vote where you happen to spend a few years of your time but have a domicile somewhere else.”
Nearly one out of four Marylanders who have tried to register to vote at a Motor Vehicle Administration office in the past four years has not been added to the voter rolls, according to state records obtained by The Sun.
Though some of these tens of thousands of would-be voters have undoubtedly found alternative methods to register, officials at the State Board of Elections say they field calls every year from residents who say they turned up at the polls on Election Day only to discover their names did not appear on the rolls. Elections officials, good-government advocates and lawmakers say the failures illustrate the challenges of implementing the federal Motor Voter Act.