In minor skullduggery, Secretary of State Monae Johnson appears to be working to erode the authority of the bipartisan Board of Elections over her office.
Secretary Johnson has proposed two bills, Senate Bill 19 and Senate Bill 21, that would rescind the authority of the Board of Elections to make rules regulating the Secretary’s public reporting. SB 19 gets rid of the board’s authority to designate the form in which the Secretary publishes monthly voter registration data online. SB 21 strikes the board’s authority to designate the form and content of the reports the Secretary must publish by March 1 each year telling how many voters were purged from the rolls due to inactivity, relocation, death, felony conviction, or mental incompetence.
Notice that SB 19 and SB 21 don’t eliminate the statutory requirement that the Secretary of State publish these reports; they only leave her free to format those reports as she sees fit. SB 21 also may give the Secretary some more leeway in determining how much detail to include in the voter-purge report.
Note also that, as I scan the Board of Elections Administrative Rules over breakfast, I don’t see any rules specifically governing those reports. So it may be that the board has never exercised its power to tell the Secretary how to publish those reports.
It is thus possible that the enactment of SB 19 and SB 21 would not amount to any hill of public-record beans. But when I see the hyper-partisan, election-denying, and perhaps most importantly under-experienced Secretary of State trying to escape any level of regulation from the three Republicans and three Democrats who sit on that board with her to guide the office’s prudent service of the voters and the general public, I have to feel just a little suspicious that Secretary Johnson may be testing the waters for taking away other, more important oversight that the Board of Elections may exercise. Stay tuned for committee testimony to hear just what SB 19 and SB 21 are about.
More nonsense and buffoonery from the SOS…Legislature could pass on a fight with Monae and let her have her way resulting in additional meaningless election reports.
As noted to the grudz a few posts ago, organizational theory views such a narrowing of the structural hierarchy and reporting as = to creating a proportionally DEEPER organization – in this case a state. BTW = all depth of the state resides in a single person in an authoritarian regime.
Cory, do you have the members’ names of the Election Board?