In a recent editorial the Deseret News wrote, “If Utahns have the right to keep their voter registration information private, political parties and candidates should not be allowed to violate that trust.”
But it is more than just a matter of trust. If the Democratic and Republican parties are allowed to require Utahns to give them their personal identifying information as the price to vote, that could be seen as a form of poll tax.
A poll or head tax is imposed equally on all adults at the time of voting. It was used in the South during and after reconstruction as a means of getting around the 14th Amendment and denying blacks their right to vote. The 24th Amendment made poll taxes illegal as a prerequisite for voting.
At the present time, voters in Utah can register to vote without making their personal identifying information available to political parties and to potentially 7.7 billion people worldwide who can find their information on voterrecords.com once it is sold by the lieutenant governor’s office for $1,050. Roughly 15% or 250,000 registered voters have elected to make their records private even though most Utahns still don’t know that they can protect their voter records.
Now, in a rare bipartisan effort, Utah’s Democratic and Republican parties say this voter privacy must end. A bill has been introduced into the legislature, SB83, that denies the average person the right to make their voter records private while allowing elected officials and prominent people to make their records private.
Under SB83, the names, addresses and phone numbers of victims of domestic violence, of children who testified in child abuse cases and of law enforcement officers and judges who don’t provide justification for keeping their records private will have their information given to the two major political parties, to candidates, to their agents and to their independent contractors.
And if SB83 passes the legislature, all of Utah’s currently registered voters who refuse to give their extremely valuable personal information to the Republican and Democratic parties will have no option but to cancel their voter registrations and be denied their right to vote.
Individuals who are not already registered to vote will have to provide their personal identifying information to the Democratic and Republican parties if they want to vote.
SB83 raises a series of questions.
Should the right to vote be dictated by the Democratic and Republican parties when 40% of all registered voters in Utah don’t belong to either of those parties?
Should the Democratic and Republican parties have access to the information of 600,000 unaffiliated voters?
Should the quarter of a million voters who have already made their voter records private be forced to cancel their voter registrations in order to protect their privacy?
Should the taxpayers be stuck with the $145,000 bill that is attached to SB83?
And since an individual’s personal identifying information is a highly valued commodity, is requiring voters to give this information to the Democratic and Republican parties as the price required to exercise their right to vote a de facto poll tax?
Legislators would do well to remember that they recently found themselves aligned against the people on tax reform because they did as their leadership asked rather than what the people wanted. If legislators deny voters the right to make their information private because their parties tell them to do so they will once again find themselves aligned against the people and will have to face the consequences.
Ronald Mortensen is a retired foreign service officer and a citizen lobbyist who works to protect the privacy of personal identifying information that Utahns are required to give to the state and to local governments.