Jill Carter bill would put personal information about every voter online

By Rudi Keller

Missouri Independent

Missouri Senators raised privacy concerns Monday during a hearing on a bill that would put personal information about every registered voter on a state website.

Under the legislation proposed by state Sen. Jill Carter, a Republican from Granby, the secretary of state’s office would be required to publish the full list of approximately 4.5 million registered voters on the office website. The list would have to include the voter’s name, address and date of birth along with a voter identification number, the township or ward where they reside and the precinct where they are assigned to vote.

“This seems like a lot of personal information that is going out there,” state Sen. Maggie Nurrenbern, a Democrat from Kansas City, said during a hearing of the Senate Local Government, Elections and Pensions Committee. “I have very serious privacy concerns about that being on a website.”

Voter registration lists are public records and the statewide list can be obtained with a Sunshine Law request and a nominal payment, Carter said during testimony to the committee. Making the entire voting list public, she said, “just helps the administrators and those poll watchers be able to ensure that the poll data is just timely before the election cycle.”

Carter’s office clarified that the intent of the bill was to ensure the most up-to-date information was provided to election judges and poll watchers on Election Day. Posting the material online was the result of a drafting error, and Carter said she would revamp the language of the bill before the committee takes a vote.

“I can go to my clerks and get a lot of that information, but in regards to a website, let me follow up and make sure of that,” she said.

Along with the provision to put voter lists online, the bill would extend a fee collected by the secretary of state’s office, require election tallies to be reported with separate totals for Election Day voting and absentee ballots and direct the office to assign a unique identifier for every voting district in the state.

Even though voter registration lists are public records, along with information about participation in particular elections, it is not generally available online.

The secretary of state’s website maintains a page where individuals can check voter registration but no individual’s information can be accessed without the exact name used for registration, as well as their birthdate and county of residence. In some instances, the user must also supply an exact street address.

State Sen. Sandy Crawford, a Republican from Buffalo, said she was worried that the information required in the bill would reveal personal information and how individuals actually voted in some smaller locations.

Along with the website list of voters, local election authorities would be required to report election results at the precinct and township levels, showing the vote on election day and the results from absentee ballots in separate tallies.

Some townships, Crawford said, have 50 or fewer registered voters.

“It seems like a lot of identifiable information, right when we have so many concerns about fraud and everything else,” she said.

Secretary of State Denny Hoskins supports the bill because it would extend a fee on business registrations that supports the office’s technology fund, said Amanda Bell, the office’s lobbyist. The $5 fee, first established in 1994, funds the office’s cybersecurity efforts and pays for computer upgrades for business and election systems, she said. The fee expires at the end of the year and the bill would extend the sunset for four years.

There was no discussion of the provision putting the secretary of state’s office in charge of assigning voting district designations. That is currently a local responsibility and has become an issue in one of the cases challenging the gerrymandered congressional district map passed last year by Republicans.

A trial was held in the case last week but no ruling has been issued.

Under questioning from the committee, Bell said only individual voter information was accessible online. It is available on request, she said.

“You’re not just going to go out there and get a whole list of everybody in the state,” Bell said. “That’s how it currently is.”

Senate Minority Leader Doug Beck, a Democrat from Affton, asked whether there was a need to publish the full voter list with birthdates and addresses.

“You can go check out your own,” Beck noted. “Why do we need this to be written down here?”

Bell said she did not know.

“I did not,” she said, “request that portion of the bill.”