The Election Administration Subcommittee advanced eight bills on absentee deadlines, voter roll maintenance, ranked choice voting, automatic voter registration, and ERIC membership while killing a ballot-language readability bill and carrying over a hotly contested electronic ballot-return bill for disabled and military voters, drawing extensive public opposition on cybersecurity grounds.
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Delegate Hope argued the system is not Internet voting but rather a ballot upload that is physically printed, creating a 100% paper audit trail using multi-factor authentication and end-to-end encryption, and that 32 states do this without a single allegation of abuse. Cindy DeFranco (Verified Voting) countered that the amended substitute 'would put more voters at risk than the introduced version by adding covered voters to voters with a visual impairment or print disability to be eligible to vote with a tool that is undefined in the language.' Susan Greenhall (Free Speech for People) argued many states adopted electronic return laws based on an expectation that the Pentagon would develop a secure system in the early 2000s, but the Pentagon abandoned it as infeasible.
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“Currently blind or apprenticed to disabled Virginians often must rely on a third party to mark their ballot, stripping them of that right to a secret ballot. We think about us. We go into the voting booth. No one's there with us. No one sees what we're doing. But someone that's visually impaired, they don't have that same right.”
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Sign in to subscribeCall this subcommittee meeting to order for privileges and elections. Elections administration. Clerk will open the rolls and members will take their attendance. Okay. Clerk will close the roll and we have a quorum. We're going to get right into it and start with House Bill 493. Delegate Hope, you have the floor. Thank you, Madam Chair. Members of the subcommittee, I believe I do have a substitute. Committee operates by motion. Move the substitute. It has been moved improperly. Second to substitute. All those in favor say aye. All those opposed? Okay, the substitute is before us. Can you explain us a little bit what it does? Dug it, hope. Thank you, Madam Chair. Appreciate you very much. With the substitute, we made some technical changes, but we also moved the enactment date until January of 2028. I've been working with the Department of Elections, and that seems to be the time that they need to or in transition. So that is what the substitute does. I'll go ahead and explain the rest of the bill, though. House Bill 493 requires the Department of Elections to provide a uniform electronic tool to all localities, to all allow voters with…
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