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Secretary of State-backed cleanup bill would change 'votes' language to 'ballots' and tighten recount denominator
Summary
Senate Bill 212, requested by the Secretary of State, makes drafting changes to statutory language—chiefly replacing references to "votes" with "ballots"—and adjusts the recount-fee denominator. Deputy Secretary Erin Hennessy asked the committee to adopt three technical corrections.
Senate Bill 212, presented at the committee by Sen. David Rochefort as a request from the Secretary of State, makes technical corrections to statutory language by replacing several references to "votes" with "ballots" and clarifying the denominator used for calculating recount fees.
Deputy Secretary Erin Hennessy testified the changes would make office practice consistent with the department’s counting and fee procedures and fix drafting errors from earlier versions. Hennessy asked the committee to accept three edits on the current draft: one change on page 1 and two edits on page 2 that change the vocabulary and the recount-fee standard to "less than 1% of the total ballots cast."
Committee members had no substantive opposition and accepted the proposed clarifications. The committee did not take a final vote on the underlying bill during the hearing and signaled it would consider the corrected draft language as a committee amendment when the bill is before the panel for committee action.
