00:00Thank you, Ranking Member Morelli, and thank you to our witnesses for appearing here today.
00:06When I served as the Secretary of State of Florida, one of my core responsibilities was to work with local election officials to ensure voter rolls were accurate and up-to-date.
00:17Voter list maintenance is a critical part of ensuring election accuracy and building public confidence in our elections process.
00:26This is not and should never be a partisan issue.
00:31Maintaining accurate and reliable voter rolls is fundamental to election security and public trust.
00:38That work is not suppression.
00:41That work is not a purge.
00:44It is an essential part of sound administration and public accountability and should be required both by clear laws and by any reasonable standard of public integrity.
00:56As members of this committee, we have a responsibility to ensure that every state is using clear, consistent standards to maintain their roles,
01:08and we should be promoting transparency, supporting data-sharing tools, and removing barriers that prevent states from performing these essential duties.
01:19I was so pleased to see that President Trump's executive order on preserving and protecting the integrity of American elections supports these goals,
01:29including expanding access to tools like the SAVE database, which helps identify voters who may no longer or may not be eligible.
01:36So I thank you all for bringing with you today ideas and testimony that relate to how we can support election officials in doing that better.
01:47Mr. Reamer, I would like to return to your testimony about the NVRA and the 90-day blackout periods.
01:59I think that's an important thing for us to understand as we consider the way that law is written today and how it might be better.
02:08So you mentioned the blackout periods.
02:10And now there are different types of removals, are there not, that some of which are affected by blackout periods, some aren't.
02:19Would you please elaborate for us on what the law is now and how it could be improved?
02:23Mr. Absolutely. So the blackout period applies to systemic list maintenance that takes place within 90 days of any federal election as it relates to voters who have moved.
02:36And some courts have interpreted it to apply to removing non-citizens and other ineligible voters as well.
02:42It does not apply to removing deceased, and it does not apply to removing some other types of ineligible voters.
02:49Individualized removals are permitted within the 90-day period, but any time a state tries to do individualized removals,
02:59they get sued saying that it's a prohibited systemic removal process.
03:08As a former Board of Elections officials, you helped Virginia establish data-sharing agreements with neighboring states.
03:16Would you tell us how effective were those useful?
03:20Is it something that you recommend other states deploy to help ensure their role accuracy?
03:26Absolutely. It's absolutely essential because the NCOA data does not have enough.
03:33It's missing. It's missing information.
03:35The best way is for states to talk to each other and to share that information and to, you know, get these voters off the rolls.
03:43And I think one thing that I was emphasizing is what we really need to do is skip this confirmation process
03:49that you have to wait two federal general elections as much as possible because it just doesn't work.
03:55It's too clunky.
03:57And, Mr. Adams, I'd like to return to you.
04:00One of the things you mentioned in your testimony was the third-party voter registration groups
04:05and the effect that they have on contributing in some places to inaccuracy or duplicate registrations.
04:12Would you elaborate on what those groups are, how they work, and how they affect this problem?
04:16Right. These are the people with clipboards at community events or at the grocery store.
04:20And what we have found over and over and over again, the problems on the voter rolls are often traced back to third-party registrations.
04:27Whether it's Rashawn Slade, which I would urge you to look in my written testimony in the appendix,
04:32he was getting registered to vote six times by third-party groups.
04:35Same with non-citizens in North Carolina.
04:38We trace those back in those reports to third-party registration groups.
04:43Look, there's a different incentive structure.
04:44They want to get as many people registered as possible.
04:47So they don't do a lot of quality control.
04:48I'd also like for you to touch on, in your experience, some of the efforts and some of the lengths
04:55that elections officials go to in their communities to help ensure that voters are able to register
05:02and that registering to vote is an accessible and easy process for them.
05:06Yeah. It has never been easier in the United States to register to vote than it is right now today.
05:11And it's never been easier to vote than it is today.
05:13And that's in large measure because of the diligence of a lot of election officials
05:17who pour a lot of time and money into making it easy to register and vote.
05:21That's why the registration and participation rates were so high in this last federal election.
05:28I now recognize the ranking member of the election subcommittee,
05:32the general lady from Alabama, Ms. Sewell.
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