From Shella comes news of a clash of titans:

Republican Governor Mitch Daniels vetoed the bill to allow for more vote centers today. This is his veto message:

“While this bill contains provisions that would make the act of voting more convenient, it does not contain sufficient safeguards against fraud and abuse and removes long-standing bipartisan checks and balances in the conduct of elections.”

Republican Secretary of State Todd Rokita upset. Here’s the statement he issued:

“How ironic it is that the one local government reform that actually passes the legislature ends up getting vetoed. Vote Centers is perhaps the only local government reform that so far has been proven unequivocally to save taxpayers money. I would expect, given the serious fiscal condition of the state, that the concept is important enough to find its way into the budget bill so that all 92 counties be given the opportunity to realize the unquestionable taxpayer benefits and savings.”

I’m glad the Governor vetoed the legislation.

The problem with the legislation isn’t that vote centers are bad. Far from it.

The problem with the legislation is that they rely upon the county election board make decisions about them.

The legislation about vote centers suffers from being tied to a much worse problem that nobody ever wants to address.

Indiana’s laws for county election boards are flawed.

(Read more after the leap)

A county election board has three members: someone appointed by the Republican county chairman, someone appointed by the Democratic county chairman, and the county clerk. Because the county clerk got elected and is therefore almost always a member of one of the two parties, this means that one of the parties always has a majority on the election board.

The other party is, with the exception of certain measures requiring unanimous votes, essentially shut out. To even hold a meeting of the election board to look at an issue or a complaint requires two of the three members of the election board to be in agreement, which means that the minority party has few options available to it if the majority party decides that it wants to ride roughshod over them.

Compare the county election boards (with their three members, two from a given party) to the state election commission (with its four members, two from each party) and you see the difference clearly. A majority vote of the latter body is by definition bipartisan. If county election boards were structured like the state election commission, unanimity need not be required for vote centers to be implemented.

Anyway, if the Democrats in Lake County hadn’t trampled all over the implementation of vote centers in that county to gain unfair partisan advantage in 2008, I think that Republicans like Mitch Daniels could perhaps be more trusting of allowing vote centers to be implemented more broadly and less stringently in other counties across the state in future years. Until then, no dice.