SB08-040 Online election registration, scheduled at Sen St...Affairs Comm Wed at 1:30PM

["Margit Johansson" <margitjo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

    SB08-040 (Gordon; no House sponsor) proposing online election registration is scheduled for the Senate State...Affairs Committee this Wed, Feb.27 at 1:30PM.

     It was scheduled weeks earlier, but was postponed.  Back then, Chuck Corry couldn't attend the committee meeting, so I

wrote something up incorporating his written comments, for testimony.  Since the bill was never considered, I sent my notes to

David Archer, Senator Gordon's aide.  Chuck said online registration lists could be subject to malfunction and fraud.  Thus I don't see how we can support the bill.  The convenience argument doesn't work if the practice makes one's registration insecure.

    Chuck, will you be able to make the committee this time?  I hope so.

I also checked with national computer security people to get their take on this.  It didn't seem like they had a position paper on online registration, as they do for online voting (including online return of voted ballots), but I was advised that at the very least, before online registration be instituted, security studies by legitimate experts should be done.  I have not seen any information which would lead us to support this bill.  We know that registration lists are proving undependable technically, (Denver County in 2006, and other jurisdictions across the country since then) and that registration lists have been deliberately tampered with to subvert elections (Greg Palast on FL in 2000); thus we can no longer dismiss the topic of electronic registration lists as being of less importance than the voting process itself. Online registration is surely at least as problematic as offline electronic registration lists, and possibly more so.

     I hope people will be able to attend the hearing.  Comments?

Margit

 

Margit Johansson