The Senate State, Veterans, & Military Affairs Committee unanimously advanced HB 26-1023, a bill shifting caucus and assembly liability from volunteers to political parties, while laying over the contentious SB 26-119 — a bill to authorize electronic ballot return for special districts and statutory towns — until May 17th after extensive opposition testimony from election security experts and civic organizations.
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Jocelyn Bocaro, Forest Senti, Andrew Moore, and Mike Duran argued the technology is proven, end-to-end verifiable, encrypted, and auditable, citing Denver's 2019 pilot and described security properties. C.J. Coles, Susannah Goodman, Holly Monkman, and Lisa Danitz countered by citing four federal agencies (FBI, NIST, DHS, EAC) as having repeatedly characterized electronic ballot return as high risk, with Goodman specifically naming the Mobile Voting Project as a vendor with 'strong financial incentives to promote online voting.'
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“Senate Bill 119 is not a mandate. It does not require any jurisdiction to adopt electronic ballot return. Instead, it creates an option limited, limited specifically to Title 32 special districts and statutory towns. These are often smaller local governments that may face unique challenges in reaching their voters.”
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Sign in to subscribeWe will begin with House Bill 1023. Thank you to the sponsors, Senator Bazley and Majority Leader Rodriguez. Would one of you, Senator Basley, please kick us off, sir? Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, members. Honored to be appear before you and to present House Bill 26, 1023. The purpose of this bill is to move the, the liability for, for not getting it just right. When it comes to accessibility during caucus and assembly processes for the parties, it moves that liability from the volunteers to the party themselves. So I'm going to walk through it in a little more detail right now. So a couple of years ago, a bill was moved into law, signed into law, that requires access to remote access for those who require that for ability purposes to access caucus and assembly. So that's levied on both the major parties, of course, and what the result of that, that both parties realized was that they were losing volunteers because volunteers then started realizing, wow, I could be liable for a $3,500 fine if I, if the Internet goes down and I'm not giving remote access at a caucus. So this seeks to…
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