I missed this last week, but State Rep. Scott Hochberg sent out a press release, which is posted on the House website about Governor Perry’s veto of his bill HB1457.
If Governor Perry was denied a voter registration certificate because a clerk spelled his name “Peiry” instead of “Perry”, we’d never hear the end of it. But that’s what happens to 70,000 Texas citizens each year, who have their voter registration certificates delayed or denied, because of typos or misread handwriting in county offices that cause their names or birthdates not to pass a state “matching” test against the Department of Public Safety (DPS) drivers license file.
These are not mistakes made by voters who somehow forgot how to spell their names. Nor are they fraudulent applications. Rather, they represent a relatively small number of data entry errors on the hundreds of thousands of applications typed into the system each year by clerks in voter registration offices.
There used to be even more rejections, until the Secretary of State agreed to not deny applications because of differences in hyphens and other punctuation in names. This bill would have taken the next logical step, directing the Secretary of State allow for minor, obvious typos when matching to the DPS file, if the rest of the information matches.
Despite the governor’s claim to the contrary, the bill does not take counties out of the process. In fact, for every suspected typo, the bill requires the county to go back and check the actual voter registration application to confirm that it really is consistent with the information on the DPS file. (See HB 1457, page 2, lines 11-18.)
This bill was the product of meetings with the Secretary of State, her predecessor and staff over the past interim, along with detailed research by my office showing that many Texans whose applications were rejected never got to vote. Even worse, our research showed that whether or not you are ultimately put on the rolls depends on where you live, since some counties put a higher priority on fixing their errors than do others.
These errors have nothing to do with fraud. The governor’s argument on this point is not supported by ANY facts. Anyone who examines a list of the rejections sees immediately that the great majority of them are minor, innocent typos that should not interfere with a Texas citizen’s right to vote.
Indeed, if a person wanted to register fraudulently in someone else’s name, as the governor alleges, that person could simply leave the drivers license space blank on the application, and the registration would be issued without ever attempting to match it against the DPS drivers license file.
In a session where voting issues were high profile, contentious, and partisan, this bill received unanimous bipartisan votes in committee in each chamber, and was passed on House and Senate consent calendars. A small allocation for the necessary computer changes was also included in the appropriations bill.
The right to vote is precious and fundamental. Our current registration process allows this right to be withheld in large numbers at no fault of the citizens trying to register. Why would any elected official, charged with upholding the Constitution, not want to do everything possible to keep this from happening?
I think we all know the answer to that question. Perry’s statement on the veto is here. And as noted by the Quorum Report, it contains a typo. Hey, it could happen to anyone, right? Good thing for Perry that didn’t invalidate his veto. Good for him, too bad for everyone who would have been helped by HB1457.