With three weeks left to go in the Missouri legislative session, a wide-ranging elections bill is waiting in line to come up for Senate debate.
The legislation is designed to ease administrative burdens for local election offices. It’s been years in the making for Missouri’s county clerks and State Rep. Peggy McGaugh, R-Carrollton. She served as the Carroll County Clerk for 32 years.
“It has all the things that the local election authorities have needed,” she told Missourinet.
The bill would allow government offices to email election notices.
“Notices by e-mail are coming from the city clerks telling the county clerk, ‘Hey, here are the offices up. Here’s who filed,” she said.
Another feature of her bill would give all Missouri election authorities the option to mail a notice of a sample ballot to voters – rather than publishing a notice in the newspaper.
“Rather than the old two weeks before the election and one week before the election, this now can occur six weeks prior to the election, giving them a lot more flexibility in when they’ll be able to get them in,” she said.
McGaugh is also proposing to move the candidate filing deadline for April’s local elections.
“The school secretaries, the filing, the city halls don’t have to be open that week of Christmas to be able to take those filings. It’s been a problem throughout several years,” she said.
Her bill would require automatic tabulating machines to be tested a week in advance of an election instead of two weeks.
Is this enough time if a machine breaks down? She said many counties have extras or they could rent or borrow a machine from another county.
Another piece of the bill would require St. Louis election candidates to show proof of paid local taxes before they can file to run – just like candidates are required to do in all other Missouri cities.
Her proposal would also let voters cast a provisional ballot in any public election – not just state and federal ones.
“Because if a person came in and their identification couldn’t be determined at that time, they didn’t want to turn them away from the polls. They wanted to be able to let them have a ballot, put it in the provisional envelope, the person that could come back later, and prove that they really were that person,” said McGaugh.
To align with other government offices and services, her bill would ban special districts from using taxpayer money to influence elections.
She said the feel-good part of her bill would designate August 12th as “Election Worker Appreciation Day” each year.
According to McGaugh, the original parts of the bill that were controversial were taken out – restoring the presidential preference primary and extending in-person absentee voting without an excuse.
As for the cost of her bill, she said it won’t cost taxpayers anything.
For more information about House Bill 1871, click here.
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