House backs bill to scrub voter rolls based on jury duty excusals

Senate Bill 250 wouldn't require election officials to remove people in bulk, only to take lists of people disqualified from jury duty because they're not a U.S. citizen and use that "to conduct efforts to remove names."

This would become part of routine voter registration maintenance, and the bill tells local boards to use jury excuses "in conducting systematic efforts to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters."

Just what that would look like isn't detailed in the bill and would be worked up later by election officials, "but it will involve some sort of verification prior to removing anyone from the voter rolls," Kelly Tornow, associate general counsel at the State Board of Elections, said in an email.

This could be similar to the process used to remove felons from the voting rolls, which involves sending written notice to the addresses where people are registered to vote and giving them 30 days to object.

Similar bills have been proposed several times at the General Assembly without becoming law, but this version has now gotten successful votes in both the House and the Senate. It cleared second reading in the House 66-44, with another House vote likely next week to send it back to the Senate for more discussion.

For the 83 remaining matches, the State Board of Elections documented that the people in question were legal voters using information from the state Division of Motor Vehicles and other sources.