Rep. Leonard Christian opposes state mandate to move local elections to even-numbered years

M speaker about a week before I I packed up to come over here and start the session my County auditor who has been the county auditor for more than 20 years and has been doing the elections in my county for a long time so I do respect the fact that she has got a lot of knowledge during our conversation and our meeting she said that this was one of her priorities not to happen she had some very much um I think well founded concerns about moving these elections and one of the ones she expressed to me was some of the additional cost of doing these elections and some of the abilities that she just does not have on the election ballot it requires by law certain things like how to mark your ballot and how and make a correction and and of course we will have um possibly some initiatives on the ballot uh and other you know Statewide races and federal races and the ballot is going to get quite long she explained to me that the machines that that they currently own and use that are not that old there's a limit to the actual size because the fonts already requirement is the law of how much you know their font is and how large and what has to be on the ballots so at some point by eliminating these other elections it will make the ballots so long that they may be required to buy new machines to process the new ballots she so we had the conversation littleit more well will it just go to two pages to accomodate the machines because the cost of to our counties especially our small counties to go out and just buy new machines is prohibitive and she said that well while that would be an option how do you account for a voter having two pages a one and two page they're not serial controlled ballots our ballots by Constitution are secret so how do you once they separate the the ballot from the security envelope how do you keep those two pages in account for them and if you had to go back and do uh an audit of the election having two pages would be a nightmare and every time we have these nightmares it just causes a little more distrust in our system so she is not for having these these Ballot or these elections go away so again this was important to her we heard testimony that this is not a good idea um over and over again and so Madam speaker while while we understand we want more voter in participation we do want more people to be able to participate in our elections I don't think removing a year's election helps PE people to participate uh in any main as a fashion so with that I urge a no on this on this uh Bill thank you mad speaker