OK, forget what I said about HB626. The new version isn’t any better.
Instead of spending $220 for fresh copies of naturalization papers, the bill would now simply make the Secretary of State vet birth certificates and naturalization papers when cross-checking voter registration applications with social security and drivers license records.
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Whether Anchia, Gallego, and Hochberg sign off on it or not wouldn’t change the fact that if the Secretary of State can’t find the naturalization papers, then s/he wouldn’t approve the registration, hence the application is dropped.
So your future voter registration would be in the hands of a bureaucrat. You can imagine the potential for error, especially if you have a very common name, or an easily-misspelled name. It’s almost preferable to make people spend their own money on the certified copies. And you just know that the SOS office will be underfunded and understaffed for this, because when has the Lege ever allocated anough money for this sort of thing? No thanks, I say.
I’m not sure that the individual counties could do a better job than S.O.S.
I would prefer that the state back off this legislation entirely for now, and develop an electronic system for citizenship verification that involves the U.S. Government.
Such a system would require that registrants provide name, DOB, place of birth, and last 4 of SSN. Burden of proof would be on the state to show reason why the voter should be denied.
There is a smarter way to handle this using information technology. This must NOT present any obstacles to voting by any citizen in any demographic group.