As the Indiana General Assembly passes its halfway mark, several bills have not met their required milestones to get further consideration.

One of them was HB 1288, which deals with election security. It was sponsored by Representative Ryan Lauer, a Republican whose District 59 covers most of Bartholomew County, including the city of Columbus.

The bill got a mention at an early-February meeting of Monroe County’s election board, as part of county clerk Nicole Browne’s rundown of pending legislation.  It got a second look, because of its requirement that voting systems store votes “as a whole number, without the use of decimals or fractions.”

Browne told her two colleagues on the three-person board: “I don’t want anybody to be alarmed in Monroe County. We have never reported out our votes in anything but whole numbers.” Browne ventured, “So something’s going on in some other county. And I would not take that as a fire alarm in Monroe County.”

According to Lauer, the motivation behind the bill was not based on an attested problem with vote total reporting in any of Indiana’s counties. Continue reading “Bill that would regulate Indiana voting systems to ensure one-person-one-vote not seen as essential this session” →