By Gracie Thomas | LSU Manship School News Service
BATON ROUGE – A House bill that would require the Louisiana secretary of state to submit details on every registered voter to a national database for investigation into their eligibility passed 73-29 Tuesday following extensive debate.
House Bill 691, by Rep. Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia, would require the secretary of state to submit personal information of every registered voter in the federal database annually.
All potential noncitizens would be subject to an investigation by their parish’s division of election integrity to verify their status, which could result in cancellation of their registration. Voters would have 30 days to respond once they had been sent a notification.
Louisiana election officials already have used the federal technology to remove approximately 400 noncitizens from the state’s voting rolls.
The secretary of state submits every voter’s first and last name, home address and Social Security number for verification, and the federal Department of Homeland Security runs it through a database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program.
No research has been conducted to determine how ineligible voters were able to register to vote. Beaullieu said his goal is to ensure that all future secretaries of state continue checking voter rolls through the federal database.
“Every illegal vote that is cast in our elections cancels out a legal vote,” Beaullieu said.
Many representatives spoke in opposition to the bill, citing Louisiana’s good standing in election integrity under Secretary of State Nancy Landry as a reason for it being unnecessary.
“I think we’re ranked fourth in the country for election integrity,” Beaullieu said. “I think it’s a lot of the work Secretary Landry is doing. This is going to be an opportunity to keep those rolls clean.”
Representatives opposing the bill were concerned about disenfranchising voters. Rep. Candace Newell, D-New Orleans, expressed concerns about the notification process for those being investigated and was dissatisfied with the safeguards protecting legal voters from being unnecessarily removed from voter rolls.
“If the mail was intentionally misdelivered or mishandled, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the U.S. Postal Service will not be liable and our citizens will have no recourse for their constitutional rights being mishandled,” Newell said.
Newell cited statistics from Texas, which has been using the federal database to verify its voters, indicating that 25% of naturalized citizens in certain counties were marked as ineligible to vote due to the Social Security Administration’s failure to update its database.
Newell said election timelines may not allow for newly naturalized citizens’ information to be updated prior to election deadlines, leaving eligible voters unable to vote and creating risk for violating voting-rights protections.
Concerns about preventing eligible voters from participating were echoed by Rep. Wilford Carter Sr., D-Lake Charles.
“You’re going to have a lot of errors, a lot of mistakes,” Carter said. “As many as 10% of the people in Louisiana are not going to be able to vote.”
Rep. Edmond Jordan, D-Baton Rouge, questioned the integrity of the bill as it relates to the privacy of U.S. citizens, saying it might violate citizens’ constitutional rights by sharing their private information. He also cited Louisiana’s success in election integrity.
“I find it ironic that we would protect one right, and then, on the other hand, violate another,” Jordan said.
Beaullieu said the bill would “protect our election system, which is extremely important to the foundation of our democracy.”
“If that’s what it takes to protect it, go ahead and share my Social Security number,” Beaullieu said.
The Department of Homeland Security’s database is tied to immigration records, and Newell said expanding the use of the database could create a chilling effect on voter participation, particularly in immigrant communities.
Newell said the system is imperfect. “When it fails, it’s not the system who suffers – it’s our voters,” she said. “HB 691 overestimates the problem, it underestimates the burden and it’s undermining confidence in our election system rather than continually strengthening our election integrity here in Louisiana.”
The Louisiana bill comes amid a push by President Donald Trump to change voting laws before the mid-term elections. He is pressuring Congress to pass a federal voting bill that would require people to provide more identification, like passports or birth certificates, when registering to vote. The bill has been stalled in the U.S. Senate
Trump has long claimed that voter fraud is rampant, though Louisiana and other states have found no evidence of that. The president also signing an executive order Tuesday similar to Beaullieu’s bill.
The executive order would require the Department of Homeland Security to create a “state citizenship list” based on data from various federal databases, including citizenship and naturalization records and Social Security records.
Through the order, federal officials would have to send the citizenship list to state election officials, as well as ensure that the U.S. attorney general prioritizes the prosecution of election officials who provide federal ballots to voters who are ineligible. Election officials in some states have said they view the order as unconstitutional and will challenge it in court.