This year I submitted testimony on a total of twenty-three bills. Fortunately, many were easy for us to understand and quite redundant. The General Elections and Administration Committee passed a total of one-hundred and eighteen bills. To me, they should have been much more selective in choosing bills to hear and those to pass. Although most of my testimony opposed bills, some of it was followed by the Committee. We are pleased to support seven bills passed by the Committee and oppose eight.
Here is a crib-sheet to help in understanding critical election bills (Those with “*’ are those where we submitted testimony):
H.B.5417 Oppose – Task Force to study blockchain for the registration database. An over-hyped technology in search of an undefined problem.*
H.B.5816 Support – Eliminates the archaic inner absentee ballot envelope.
H.B.5817 Oppose – Will add work to checkers, increase staffing and lines. Unnecessary, and burdensome.*
H.B.5820 Oppose – Task Force to study Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). Study too limited, RCV incorrectly defined.*
H.B.6047 Support – Multi-color ballots for multi-district polling places.*
H.B.6063 Oppose – More than one ballot in inner envelope. Dangerous, prevents legally required tracking of absentee ballots an important check on double voting. Instead consider passing H.B.5816.*
H.B.6876 Support – No change for scanning documents by cellphone etc. Current charge is exorbitant.*
H.B.7160 Oppose – One of several poor to harmful Election Day Registration Bills Instead, pass S.B.1049.
H.B.7321 Support – Increases voting security and audits.
H.B.7383 Support – Strengthens Freedom of Information for database data.
S.B.156 Oppose – Absentee ballot requests w/o signature. Signatures have helped catch frequent fraud in Connecticut.*
S.B.265 Oppose – Reducing Moderator Certification. We need more training, not less. Watch the meetings of the Commission on Contested Elections on CT-N for examples of insufficient training.*
S.B.1036 Support – Study regionalization of election administration.
S.B.1046 Oppose – Election Day Registration in polling places. Makes the current civil-rights violation worse without solving problems. Instead, pass S.B.1049.*
S.B.1049 Support – By far the best Election Day Registration bill. Removes arduous cross-check, and eliminates civil-rights violation.*
As we have said before, we aim for a balance between voting integrity, serving voters, and costs, in that priority order.
