The controversial resolution of the District 101 race revealed a disappointing lack of integrity within the Maine House of Representatives, and it also pointed out an area of conflict built into the state’s voter registration process.
The sorry history of the episode:
The District 101 contest was won initially by Pittsfield Republican Sumner Jones on a margin of 36 votes. It later was nudged in a recount to the Democrat, Louise Townsend, by four votes.
The ethics commission (evenly balanced between Democrats and Republicans), voted 7-1 to hold a new election. The House elections committee, dominated by the majority party, thumbed its nose at the ethics panel and gave the seat to the Democrat.
It wasn’t a pretty way to win a House seat, but in this session of ugly and sometimes illegal maneuvers to build a bigger majority, Democrats have learned to fill seats in whatever way works, and without flinching. Not a twinge of conscience.
The pretense for overruling the ethics commission was a legal opinion that state law obliges that challenges to the registration of voters occur on Election Day.
This was a convenient technicality for Democrats to hide behind in the Jones-Townsend scenario (five voters in the district didn’t live there), but they, and Maine, can’t have it both ways.
This state has some of the most liberal voter-registration laws in the country. In major cities, people now line up by the hundreds to register on Election Day (in Bangor last November, the city registered more than 800 new voters). It has been proposed that these same-day registrants be offered the added convenience of signing up at the polling place, which will add to cost of administration.
Regardless of the merits of providing this service to procrastinators, how does the Legislature plan to reconcile it with the need to challenge voters within the narrow construct of the legal opinion in the Jones-Townsend controversy?
Town and city clerks’ offices already are overloaded by this practice, which is being abused. It is impossible to take the time to check the residency of each registrant without disenfranchising prospective voters at the end of the line.
Although a commission empaneled by the secretary of state will recommend changes to the state’s voting laws, the Legislature should be prepared to make some tough calls. Where extraordinary levels of convenience conflict with the system’s capacity to monitor itself, lawmakers should be willing to place a premium on the integrity of the processs and on accuracy in voter registrations.
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