Bipartisan redistricting. Sen. Creigh Deeds will have the Senate bill, and Del. Bob Brink the House bill. There may be others as well. Many groups support these bills, which also have overwhelming public support. The challenge for us will come in translating that public support into pressure on the House leadership to accept the concept of power-sharing in legislative redistricting. Last year a bipartisan redistricting bill passed the Senate with support from both parties, but was killed in a party-line vote by a 5-person subcommittee of the House Privileges & Elections Committee.

 

No-excuse in-person absentee voting. Both Sen. Janet Howell and Del. Brink will be introducing bills on this again this year, and we are told there will also be bills from others on early voting, a similar concept. We all saw how absentee voting in the weeks before the election cut down on the length of the lines on election day. Contrast this year with the 2004 election, where long lines persisted through much of the day. The most common comment we got from observers of the election this year was how important it was to push for expanded absentee voting, to allow anyone to vote absentee in person without having to swear to one of the permitted excuses. This has been on our agenda from the founding of New Era, and has always failed in the House P&E subcommittee on the (unsubstantiated) claim that expanded absentee voting opens the door to voter fraud. If this year is to be different, it may be because different jurisdictions chose to interpret the absentee voting rules differently. Many jurisdictions this year interpreted the excuse of being “absent from the jurisdiction” to include anyone who worked outside the county, even if they weren’t “absent” all day. Fairfax also encouraged people to claim a “disability” if they were over 65, or just unable to stand in line for a long time. These interpretations make a mockery of the absentee rules, and beg the question why we continue this charade.

 

Permitting voters to vote by provisional ballot if they go to the wrong precinct within the right jurisdiction. Sen. Howell will patron this bill. Currently if you show up at the wrong precinct and are told you are registered at a different precinct, you cannot cast a valid vote unless you go to that other precinct, even if you’re in your home county and the races on the ballot there are ones you could vote in at your correct precinct. If it’s close to the time of poll closing, you may not be able to get to the correct precinct in time. The change we support would give you the option of voting by provisional ballot at the wrong precinct, so long as you were in the right jurisdiction (county or city), and ensure that the provisional ballot is counted at the canvass. If the races on the ballot differ, your vote would count only for those races and ballot questions that are the same as those on the ballot at your home precinct; but you would be allowed to vote, which we believe is the critical thing.

 

Permitting independent voters to serve as election officers. Del. Brink will patron this bill. Currently the election code requires an election officer to agree to represent either the Democratic or Republican party. This makes some sense—you want people of opposite parties keeping an eye on each other—but it goes beyond what is necessary for fair elections, and discourages an entire class of voters from serving as election officers. These are people who are involved, concerned citizens, and who feel strongly about supporting the democratic process, but who do not identify with either major party. It is foolish to bar them at the same time that many jurisdictions have trouble recruiting enough election workers. The SBE told us last year that an Attorney General opinion interpreted the law to allow independents to serve; unfortunately, the opinion in question did not actually say that, and the practice in the local counties is to insist on election officers choosing a party to represent. Clearly we need a code change. Our proposed change would allow independent voters to serve, so long as they were not either the Chief or the Assistant Chief election officer.

 

Paper trails. We achieved the first major step towards voter-verifiable paper audit trails two years ago when the legislature banned further purchases of DREs, with the result that this year saw more jurisdictions using paper ballots read by optical scanners, as we have been advocating for. Unfortunately, while this makes for an auditable system, we still don’t have the laws in place to require—or allow—audits, and for the most part our “recounts” still don’t involve actually looking at the paper. This defect has received a lot of press attention this year in conjunction with the recount in the Goode race, and this has sparked interest in the GA. Our coalition partners at Virginia Verifiable Voting have been conferring with legislators on a bill to require audits. The difficulty this year is that anything with a price tag has an uphill battle when basic services are being cut due to the budget shortfall.