Election package approved
Few lawmakers pleased after deadline barely met

BRAD SHANNON

THE OLYMPIAN   02 April 2005

Tempers flew and voices cracked Friday as House Democrats narrowly beat a deadline for pushing out of a key committee a package of bills that would change election procedures.
 
Five bills were approved by the time the headlong rush was over, including measures to standardize voter registration record-keeping and voting procedures. But Republicans were fuming and Democrats were stammering, and nobody was happy after a series of party-line votes in the State Government Operations and Accountability Committee.

A requirement for poll-site voters to show photo identification was stripped from one bill that had passed the Senate even though it had backing from Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire and a task force she created on elections after the furor over her 129-vote victory last fall.

Another killed bill provision required Secretary of State Sam Reed's office to work with federal immigration authorities to weed out noncitizens from a statewide voter database being assembled by Reed's office.

"We came into this process thinking we really were going to do something," complained Rep. Lynn Schindler, R-Spokane Valley, who got up from her committee chair and left in anger before all the bills were voted on. "I'm terribly disappointed in this, and I'm very upset."

Democrats, led by Rep. Kathy Haigh of Shelton, who heads the committee, insisted they were moving forward with a measured approach to the changes. Haigh said she was resisting adding measures that could discourage voters from registering or turning out.

"It's not party line, although I know it looks like it is," Haigh said after the votes, her voice cracking with strain. "It's about only changing what we really need to change."

Rep. Sam Hunt, an Olympia Democrat who sponsored several amendments that in effect killed off the Republicans' pet proposals, told the committee that he thought the voting system is based on trust and that lawmakers should not take steps that discourage people from voting.

"The system was not broken when we came in here, and we don't need to put up excessive walls around the registration and participation," Hunt declared.

Hunt said he thinks it's important that the Secretary of State's Office clean up a voter registration database but not in a way that intimidates voters or discourages people from registering.

The election issues have produced heavy strain in the Senate.

Republicans last month formed a bloc to refuse passage of a mid- August primary election date, even though many GOP members agree it's needed and a similar bill later sailed through the House on a 95-1 vote.

Secretary of State Reed expressed concern in an interview Friday that the Legislature's big push for changing state election procedures now might be slipping into partisan territory that could hamper the overall effort to win back public trust.

Reed also shared Republicans' dismay that Democrats moved to strip the bills of provisions they considered key.

Even so, the House did pass five election bills, including one requiring a paper trail on electronic voting machines. Activist John Gideon of Kitsap County said the unanimous committee approval of Enhanced Substitute Senate Bill 5395 was crucial and a "huge stride" once three amendments from Republican Rep. Toby Nixon of Kirkland were added to ensure verifiable election results.

Senate and House committees passed several other election bills earlier in the week but with less fanfare. The Senate Government Operations and Elections Committee approved a House bill moving the state primary to August and another letting counties switch more easily to all-mail voting systems; but the Senate stripped a provision forcing all counties to switch by 2008.

And the House added a provision to the Senate's vote-by-mail bill that requires all counties to switch by 2012.

Nixon, the Republicans' top elections voice in the House, said he expects to take the fight over poll-site photo identification and other issues to the House floor, whenever the bill comes up for a vote.