HB67 clears House

Rep. Jamie Kiel’s bill to prohibit the state from selling voters’ phone numbers for comm ercial purposes moved a step closer last week to final passage.

The House passed House Bill 67, carried by Kiel, R-Russellville, Thursday morning after being carried over and revisited with a Democratic amendment.

The bill would remove phone numbers from automatically being included in the voter rolls and prohibit their sale for commercial purposes. Current law allows the state to sell all personal information included in voter registration lists, except for Social Security numbers.

Kiel said on the House floor Thursday he brought the bill because his constituents complained about the excessive robocalls they receive. The bill will make sure the state is not “complicit” in spam calls, he said.

The other component of the bill is a $1,000 ceiling on how much the secretary of state could charge for voter registration lists.

It currently costs one cent per voter to obtain a voter roll, meaning data for the entire state would be around $38,000. Kiel has said the figure is higher than the cost to obtain the voting roll for every other state in the country combined.

Democrats amended the bill on the floor twice. Rep. Kenyatte Hassell, D-Montgomery, brought the first amendment to clarify that campaign activities do not constitute the commercial use prohibited by the bill.

During the floor discussion of the bill, Democrats objected to losing access to voters’ contact information.

The bill passed by a vote of 85-16. It now heads to the Senate.