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Please check back to this page for a list of bills endorsed by New ERA for the 2009 Virginia General Assembly session.

2008 Session Wrap-up

First, the good news: Senator Deeds' recounts bill, SB 35, passed the House Privileges and Elections subcommittee and the full committee, and just passed the full House. The governor supports the bill. This is a simple but important bill that tells election officials that in the case of an election close enough to require a recount, the officials should in fact count the ballots again; i.e., optical scan ballots are to be run through the scanners a second time. (Of course, there's nothing you can do to recount a DRE.) Our coalition was able to amend this bill in the Senate to ensure that the scanners went through a second round of logic and accuracy testing before reading the ballots again, so we have some level of confidence about the accuracy of the results.

 
Now, if you were from another state, you would yawn in my face about a recount that actually recounted ballots, but this is huge news here in Virginia, and if you remember my earlier email, success was very much in doubt right up to the moment of the P&E subcommittee meeting. Call us pathetic, but we are very excited about this.
 
Obviously, the level of confidence would be even greater if the machines were actually audited to compare the machine tallies to a hand count of a sample of ballots, and this should apply to all elections rather than only those close enough to require a recount, but we were not successful in getting that language passed this year. However, the stripped-down version of our  audits bill, Senator Herring's SB 292, did pass both Senate and House with a provision for an optional pilot program of audits. It sets the stage for future mandatory audits if cost and procedural concerns can get worked out, and if we aren't all heartily sick of the subject by then.
 
In addition, our bill to improve the certification process for new election machines, Senator Barker's SB 536, has also passed. Virginia localities will be buying a lot of new machines in coming years as they switch to optical scan, so improving standards now is important.
 
Finally, the New Era bill to add a voter receipt to registration forms, Senator Howell's SB 62, passed both Senate and House without a dissenting vote but with a near-fatal detour to Appropriations, where it was almost left for good. In fact, we were given to understand that it was dead. The coroner's report proved premature--fortunately for new voters, who will now have evidence of who registered them and a phone number to check on their status before they show up at the polls on election day.
 
In the loss column, bipartisan redistricting takes first place. There was a lot of media attention and fanfare accompanying that bill when it was in the Senate this year, but the fact was that a similar bill passed the Senate last year without a signature drive and the Chamber of Commerce endorsement. None of that means anything as long as the power to decide the fate of a bill belongs to three Republicans on the five-member House P&E subcommittee on elections. Next year may be different; the legislature will see which way the wind is blowing after the November elections, and House Republicans may decide to join the game if they think they need to get what they can while they can. So watch this space.
 
The same trio on the House subcommittee also killed our bill to allow in-person absentee voting without an excuse. When you see long lines at polling places this November, part of the credit must go to Delegates Jones, O'Bannon and Suit for killing this popular bill.
 
Lots of other interesting and unusual bills came and went this session. Placing well in the category of Bald-Faced Attacks on Democracy was a bill that would have disqualified any write-in vote that misspelled the name of the candidate. ("Do you know how to spell my name, Senator?" asked Chap Petersen of the bill's patron, and that was pretty much the end of the bill.) See what you miss when you only read the papers?