A bill to help counties keep track of students who are registered to vote might not come before the General Assembly because the rules committee has not released it.

Rep. John Countryman, R-DeKalb, said he did not expect the bill to pass this session, because the rules committee has kept it for so long. He said House Speaker Micheal Madigan does not seem to want to handle election issues this year.

Countryman said he and Rep. Myron Olson, R-Dixon, co-sponsored House Bill 3160. The bill would require NIU, along with other universities, to submit a list of all residence hall residents to the county clerk’s office (or the election commissioner’s office) by Sept. 30, Countryman said.

The county clerk then would compare the list of residence hall students’ names and addresses against the list of registered voters, Countryman said. Students on the residence hall list whose names and addresses do not match the voter’s registration list would be taken off the registration list, he said.

Students who are taken off the voter’s registration list would receive a notice within 10 days of the registration deadline, Countryman said. Students could reinstate their registration by visting the county clerks office to verify residency, or they could send their registration card, which has a change of address form, he said.

DeKalb County Clerk Terry Desmond said the difficulty with a bill like this is that if the county clerk’s office does not receive the residence hall list until Sept. 30, the county clerk might not be able to go through the list in time to notify students to re-register.

Currently NIU will not allow the DeKalb County Clerk’s office (or other outside agencies) to obtain the list of residence hall residents, Desmond said.

Desmond said last year about 8,000 names of registered voters were taken off the list because the addresses were changed, or the people moved from DeKalb County. He said formal voter registration reminders are sent out each year, but this does not lessen the amount of changes that are done every two years.

Desmond said voter registration lists usually have a lot of extra names because students forget to change their registration addresses when they move. He said students are usually the most mobile group in the community in terms of residency.

Desmond said the bill would be an asset to the county clerk’s office and to students if the clerk’s office could get the list of students earlier. He said if the clerk’s office has the student list at anytime, they could eliminate the extra names from the registration list months before the registration deadline.

Student Association President Jim Fischer said he believed it was unnecessary to single out students for a voter registration bill. “The basic premise of scrutinizing one group of voters rather than one other leads me to question this (bill). I don’t see why students need to be looked at so closely,” he said.

Fischer said the only problem he sees with voting policies for students is that not enough register to vote.