Every once-in-awhile what is considered the omnibus elections bill presented
each regular session to the Louisiana Legislature contains something
significant to the way in which elections are conducted in the state. Most
years it only makes technical and procedural changes that significantly alters
things little. But this time out, one of these minor changes may have big ramifications
to an important special interest that has nothing to do with elections.
Tucked away in this year’s version, which comes as a product of the
State Board of Election Supervisors, among the roughly three dozen measures
expected to be written into bill form and introduced is one that would drop
the requirement that the names of inactive voters – those who have registration
addresses not able to be verified by registrars of voters during the annual
canvass or whose correspondence sent to the address on file was returned
undeliverable – be published 90 days prior to federal primary elections. The
purpose of this is every two years for the state to alert these voters that
they would have to go through additional hurdles in order to vote unless they
provide address verification.
Instead, the state argues that the online listing, where
a voter may enter their names to see whether they have been put on inactive
status which is never more than a day old, should suffice. It also would save,
according to the last available statistics, for all parishes $200,000 in
off-election years and $375,000 in presidential election years.
This makes all the sense in the world. How many people scan newspapers
in July of even-numbered years to see whether they got put on the inactive
list? And if you are one of those very few curious and concerned enough about your
status, instead of getting one shot every 730 or 731 days to check a paper copy
(or subsequently conduct extensive searches with costs to locate the exact page
of paper), you can do it any time by the Internet.
But this sensible proposal will encounter fierce opposition if it makes
it into the bill, coming from the major beneficiary of this largesse, the
newspaper industry. Over the past
few years, legislators have introduced multiple bills to scale back or
eliminate the need for state and local governments to publish various kinds of
public records, given the advent of nearly zero-cost Internet publishing as opposed
to the several millions spent in contracts, to the strenuous opposition of
those outlets on the government payroll.
To date, fatuous arguments by the newspaper industry have kept these
bills from enactment. Web-based access is far easier – leading to the irony
that many papers end up also putting these notices on the web while charging government
for printing them, inserting an entirely unnecessary and expensive middleman
into the process. And the argument that there is more newspaper access than web
access for some of the population has absolutely no currency – if you don’t own
a computer or even smart cell phone (and at that level of tight resources, you probably
can’t afford today’s inflated newspaper prices, either), isn’t it actually
easier to walk into a library and look up something on a public terminal than
to head to the microfilm readers to find the issue with the information you
want in question?
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