Duval elections panel hears Supervisor of Elections update on student registration, state bills and website plan

Robert Phillips, Supervisor of Elections for Duval County, told the Elections Advisory Panel on June 18 that his office has registered “over 1,500 high school students” in a countywide voter-registration effort and is tracking several state bills that could change how the office runs elections.

The registration push is organized as a competition among schools and is broken into categories by school size, Phillips said. “Yesterday we were at Bishop Kenny … we had 287 or something like that, pretty much every junior in their class,” he said, describing classroom-by-classroom visits as the most effective method.

The update covered three recurring themes: (1) the student-registration drive and routine list maintenance, (2) legislation under review at the state level, and (3) plans to replace the county’s web host.

Phillips said the county’s registration work continues outside of election years and that monthly list maintenance is ongoing. “Anyone who probably was inactive that would have been moved to ineligible would have been swept up right after the November election,” he said, adding that off-year activity is mainly “people moving in and…