South Bend Tribune (Op-Ed): Our civic health is on life support. Indiana’s legislature doesn’t care

The recent Indiana Civic Health Index should be a wakeup call for Indiana elected officials, like the alarm of medical devices alerting doctors and nurses to a patient in need of urgent care.   If you haven’t read the report, let me call out the alarms clearly. Indiana:

• ranked 50^th in voting in the 2022 elections
• has consistently ranked in the bottom 10 in voting for the last 13 years
• moved backward in the rankings for both voting participation and voter registration in the last 11 plus years.

It’s an alarming trend for our state and one the Indiana legislature should be working to fix. Sadly, it appears there is no Hippocratic oath to “do no harm” when it comes to treating our civic health.   Instead of making voter registration easier, Indiana legislators are proposing House Bill 1264, which, under the guise of “election security,” targets new citizens for extra scrutiny if they register to vote and outdated information from the BMW identifies them as non-citizens.  This proposed policy is not only unnecessary and ill-conceived, it’s likely to generate a legal challenge.

In another section, the bill creates a process to use a database operated by Experian, the national credit bureau, to check a voter’s address. This raises concerns about the accuracy of information that may be used to question a voter’s registration, as well as privacy concerns about co-mingling sensitive financial information with a government database.       HB 1264 also puts logistical barriers in place that will make it more difficult for volunteer groups like the League of Women Voters to register high school and college students or anyone who can’t prove their place of residency.  Given the current state of our civic health, this change in a law that has been in place for more than twenty years takes us in the wrong direction.

Our civic health “doctors” aren’t just standing still at our medical alarms, it seems they are actively working against saving our civic life.   What the Civic Health Index report shows is the General Assembly’s long-term effort to reduce voter participation is working. The report says reduced competition in elections caused by gerrymandering and election administration choices — like making it hard to register to vote and keeping voting hours the lowest in the nation — are contributing to our civic health illness.   No surprise, since in recent years, the Indiana legislature has rejected increased voting hours, continued to gerrymander their districts to fit political party needs over citizens, and implemented unwieldy barriers to ballot access.  Thankfully, we can look at what civic health “doctors” in other states are doing. The index says the states in good civic health allow automatic voter registration, same day voter registration, no excuse vote by mail and election day voting more than 12 hours.

Throw in better redistricting — through an independent citizens’ commission free of partisan politics — and a repeal of the 2021 affiliation law, and Indiana would be a shining beacon of good civic health.   We have the prescription for better civic health. It’s time for our elected officials to follow it.