Illinois governor Bruce Rauner waits for the arrival of President Barack Obama at the Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy on February 19, 2015 in Chicago, Illinois. Dating back to the 1880s, the Pullman district, on the city’s Far South Side, is one of the country’s first company towns.
Advertisement
In hopes of addressing the decade-long rape kit backlog, Gov. Bruce Rauner signed a bill Friday to help sexual assault victims seek justice.
Although embracing the concept and pledging to work on revisions, the Republican’s veto message battered the plan for what he perceives as weaknesses that invite breakdowns in the system’s integrity.
Under the legislation, starting in January 2018 people seeking a new or updated driver’s license – or other state services – would automatically be registered to vote or have their registration updated unless they opted out. He said more needs to be done to protect against voter fraud and comply with federal law, which requires applicants to sign an application or attest to “meeting the qualifications to vote”.
Republican skeptics of the bill contended it would improve the odds of Democratic candidates in local elections by boosting, in particular, the registration of younger voters, who tend to vote Democratic.
Manar says he’ll continue pushing the idea.
“Some of the agencies in possession of citizenship-related information are prohibited by federal law from sharing that information” with the elections board, Rauner wrote in his veto message to lawmakers, adding “the consequences could be injurious to our election system”. “Automatically registering voters would have allowed us to do exactly that”, he said.
Some of the concerns include voter fraud and state agencies’ abilities to update voter registration accurately.
“Agencies with access to citizenship information should use that information to verify a person’s eligibility before processing the voter registration”. “(Gov. Rauner’s office) doesn’t understand the bill and what it does”, he said.
Rauner also raised questions about the reliability of state agency information, the measure’s implementation timeline and resources needed for the effort.
We are deeply disappointed by Governor Rauner’s decision to veto bipartisan automatic voter registration legislation.
One of those supporters was Sen.
Just Democracy Illinois, a coalition that worked to pass the legislation said Rauner’s veto is moving the state away from making voting more accessible.
Groups that advocated for the automatic voter registration bill also responded to Rauner’s veto with disappointment.
The legislation, the product of a working group led by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, requires “victim-centered policies and sexual assault response training”, Madigan’s office said.
This bill is an overarching bill that provides victims with stricter protections during the evidence collection process and ensures that the transfer of evidence from hospitals to law enforcement is done in a timely manner.
Advertisement
Nonetheless, the governor said he is “hopeful that these concerns can be addressed and we can together enact a bill that achieves our shared goals”.
