A sweeping elections bill that has garnered opposition from local election officials passed the state House with 21 Republicans joining Democrats to vote against the bill.
House Bill 534 would authorize the State Board of Elections to use federal citizen verification systems and require individuals who are identified as inelgible to show proof before being allowed to vote. It also enshrines that judicial nonpartisan candidates are allowed to weigh in on partisan issues and identify their political party.
The bill would also allow incumbent U.S. representatives and senators to run simultaneously for president, letting them appear on the ballot twice — it’s a provision added to the bill in the last-minute committee substitute.
Rep. DJ Johnson, a Republican from Owensboro, said he believes Kentucky has the “best laws in the nation,” but there’s always more to do.
“There are those who are always looking for new ways to cheat the system. Because of that sad reality, it is our responsibility to remain ever vigilant,” Johnson said.
Democrats attempted several floor amendments. All of them were called out of order due to a Republican maneuver. GOP leadership sent the bill back to committee after it sat on the floor for two weeks, where a new version of the bill was adopted. That means opponents didn’t have time to file amendments that could be considered without suspending the House rules.
“I do wish that we could have done these things and waited a day on this and operated within the rules and be able to have that kind of full-fledged debate and have a roll-call vote on these amendments,” said Lexington Democratic Rep. Adam Moore.
Moore himself filed four floor amendments, but his attempt to suspend the rules failed.
While Republicans did not air their concerns on the House floor, a couple expressed uneasiness about the opposition of the Kentucky County Clerk’s Association in a previous committee hearing.
Johnson removed some of the issues of concerns to county clerks, including an emergency clause that would have made the bill go into effect shortly before the May primaries. The version that passed the House also removed a provision allowing clerks to upload scanned ballot images for citizens to view. Johnson said he felt the bill was sufficiently edited, despite the association's continued opposition.
Citizenship Verification
The State Board of Elections would also be authorized to enter into agreements with the federal government under the bill to identify noncitizens who are registered to vote.
A previous version of the bill specifically required use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program, or SAVE, to identify noncitizens registered to vote. The recently revamped SAVE tool has been taken up by many Republican secretaries of state, but an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found that the administration rushed the rollout and it has made persistent mistakes, especially when analyzing the status of naturalized citizens.
The SAVE program has also faced resistance from some states who are unwilling or wary about turning over their voter rolls to the federal government. The Department of Justice sued Kentucky’s GOP Secretary of State Michael Adams over his refusal to turn over voter rolls to the federal government unless a court order told him otherwise.
“Kentucky law protects voters’ personal information, and I will not voluntarily commit a data breach by providing Kentuckians’ personal data to the federal bureaucracy unless a court order tells me to,” Adams said in a statement at the time.
County clerks have said they fear the requirements could put even more burden on voters incorrectly kicked off voter rolls and the clerks who have to correct mistakes. The bill lays out a process by which a person flagged by the system is mailed a notice and cannot cast a ballot until their citizenship is verified. That requires bringing either a birth certificate, passport, or certificate of naturalization to the county clerk or a polling location.
Taylor Brown, a lawyer with the board of elections, said they have concerns about the accuracy of the federal tools and questions about voter privacy. He said the federal government may have access to individual’s information, but not connected to their status as a Kentucky voter.
Johnson defended the measure on the House floor, saying he believes voters’ privacy has been maintained in his bill. It calls for sharing names, dates of birth and social security numbers of registered Kentucky voters.
“What they've asked for is access to basically a more concise database where they have easier access to it. The information is already there,” Johnson said. “They're just looking for us to help them correlate it, make it a simpler process.”
Judicial Nonpartisanship
In a letter to Johnson, Chair Charles Boteler with the Kentucky Judicial Campaign Conduct Committee said that the courts have already guaranteed First Amendment speech rights for judicial candidates and the legislature should not get involved.
“The General Assembly has, wisely in our view, left the issue of candidate speech to the courts,” Boteler wrote.
Though there would still be no partisan primaries and no party ID would appear next to a judge’s name on the ballot, the legislation would allow judicial candidates to “publicly disclose” their party affiliation and talk about their “political values or viewpoints consistent” with that affiliation.
The legislation would also explicitly allow state and county political parties to endorse, support, or make contributions to help elect nonpartisan candidates. The bill states that “shall not affect the nonpartisan status of the office or the candidate.”
Rep. T.J. Roberts of Burlington, a Republican co-sponsor, said Kentucky’s codes of judicial conduct have run afoul of First Amendment rights before, which has been born out in court.
“The federal courts have consistently held since 2002 a very basic principle that judicial candidates have free speech,” Roberts said.
Rep. Erika Hancock, a Democrat from Frankfort, filed an amendment to try to strike the language from the bill. She said she did not want justice viewed “through a partisan lens.”
“If we want to debate making judicial elections partisan, that's a very serious conversation we should have openly, not by quietly blurring the line in an election bill,” Hancock said.
On the ballot twice
The bill would change the current law to allow members of Congress to run for both their congressional seat and in another election decided by the Electoral College — a.k.a. presidential races.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul ran for president in 2016. In 2014, the GOP-dominated Senate had attempted to push through a bill that would allow federal candidates to have their name appear twice on a ballot, but it died in the then-Democratic-controlled House. Paul is up for reelection in the U.S. Senate in 2028 — the same year as the next opportunity to run for president.
“The best option was to allow them to be able to do both, and honor the desires of the voters that have already elected him, while at the same time giving him the opportunity to run for the most important office we have in our country,” Johnson said, who did not directly name Paul.
Republican Rep. Jim Gooch Jr., of Providence, voted against the bill, both on the floor and in committee.
“We have some members of our federal delegation that, to me, are becoming an embarrassment to Kentucky, and I won’t vote for this bill as long as that clause is in there,” Gooch said when he voted no in committee.
