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Election board seeks passage of bill allowing registration by mail
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Posted on Aug 17 1999
The Board of Elections is urging the Legislature to pass the election reform bill that would allow off-island citizens to register by mail.
The elections board started allowing registration by mail earlier, but discontinued the system recently following the Office of Attorney General’s issuance of an opinion that said such practice was not permitted by the Commonwealth law.
Carlos Camacho, president of the Democratic Party, wrote to the board’s executive director, Gregorio C. Sablan, last week questioning the discontinuity of registration by mail.
“I strongly feel that this decision does a great injustice to the disenfranchised citizens,” Camacho said.
“To disallow citizens, who are absent from the Commonwealth because of educational, medical, employment, military duty of other requirements, to register by mail means to deny them the right to vote,” Camacho added.
He noted that most of these prospective voters are “first time voters who have just attained, or will be attaining on the date of the election, their voting age, as well as those who may have never before registered.”
Sablan described the board’s decision as “regrettable.”
However, Sablan said, he relies on the Legislature’s positive action on House Bill 11-115, which would make it legal to conduct off-island registration by mail.
“Until the law is changed, there is very little else we could do,” Sablan said, as he called on the Democratic Party to “join us in urging the legislature to enact this election reform legislation into law.” (MCM)
