« Ind. Courts - More on "Delaware County jury to decide circumcision case" | Main | Ind. Court - Asphalt plant lawsuit and statute of limitations issue »

Friday, October 07, 2011

Ind. Gov't. - Big election law bill vs. all inclusive "budget" bills

Andrea Neal, adjunct scholar with the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, has a column this week on the confusion over the "measure [that] removes from the ballot municipal candidates who are unopposed." The ILB has had a number of entries on this issue, the most recent being this one yesterday.

Neal's column concludes with this:

The dust up over HB 1242 raises two deeper issues that lawmakers might want to tackle next session as well.

The first is the epidemic of unopposed races. It takes work for political parties to recruit candidates for municipal offices, especially in counties where one party dominates. But it's vitally important for the future of democracy to give voters choices in the General Election. Might lawmakers have creative ideas to encourage citizens to run for office?

Second: Does the legislative process need internal checks to make sure all legislation gets properly debated? A search for newspaper clippings unearthed no coverage of the provision, which did not appear in the introduced version of HB 1242 but was added later as an amendment.

"It slipped by people; it certainly did me," Senate Leader Long told the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette. "It was tucked in a big bill."

Maybe that's the problem. The version signed into law by Gov. Mitch Daniels took up 67 pages and included 31 separate changes in election law. It shouldn't be so easy to slip something bad by the Senate President and the House Speaker.

Re the second issue -- well, yes. It is certainly true that big bills may not be debated in full and that amendments may be slipped in at the last minute. (Or that their impact may not be immediately obvious.) But at least this bill focused on a single subject, election law.

Neal apparently has not had the opportunity to review the past two decades of the biennial budget bills and their "surprises." See, for instance:

Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 7, 2011 09:42 AM
Posted to Indiana Government