An Act To Improve Absentee Balloting
Be it enacted by the People of the State of Maine as follows:
Sec. 1. 21-A MRSA §753-B, sub-§6, ¶A, as amended by PL 2013, c. 457, §3, is further amended to read:
A. The list of absentee voters must include each voter's name, residence address, voting district and party affiliation; the date and manner by which the ballot was requested, issued and received; and a notation of whether the application and the ballot were accepted or rejected. For an application that was rejected, the list must include the reasons for such rejection. The clerk must also indicate on the list when the absentee voter is a uniformed service voter, overseas voter or township voter. By the time that all absentee ballots have been processed on election day, the clerk must update the central voter registration system or annotate the printed list of absentee voters to reflect all ballots that were received by the close of the polls on election day, including a notation of whether the ballots were accepted or rejected and the reasons for such rejections. This list, reflecting all absentee ballots received by the close of the polls, must be made available for public inspection. Any absentee voter certified as a participant in the Address Confidentiality Program pursuant to Title 5, section 90-B must be listed by the voter code assigned to that individual under the program instead of by the voter's name and reflect the Address Confidentiality Program address assigned to the voter. The list of absentee voters must be sorted so that the program participants appear at the end of the list and must be printed on a separate page of the list. The portion of the list of absentee voters relating to Address Confidentiality Program participants must be kept under seal and excluded from public inspection.
summary
This bill requires that the list of requests for absentee ballots that a clerk is required to create and maintain include, in the case of a request that is rejected, the reasons for the rejection.