People who commit some voter fraud would face stiffer penalties under state Sen. Scott Sifton's proposed law.
"It increases from Class C to a Class B felony, acts that constitute voter fraud," Sifton, D-Affton, told the Senate's Financial & Governmental Organizations and Elections Committee Monday afternoon.
"We're not changing what actually constitutes voter fraud - we're simply increasing the penalty."
In Missouri law, a Class C felony charge is less serious than a Class B, with a maximum prison sentence of up to seven years if there's a conviction.
"By making it a Class B, we would increase the maximum penalty to 15 years," Sifton said. "We also have a minimum 30-day shock treatment."
And his proposal would prohibit a judge from suspending the imposition of a sentence, which would allow the conviction to be removed from the person's record if he or she completed probation successfully.
But, Sifton said, he's not proposing an alternative to the controversial photo-ID proposal which lawmakers again are considering in both the House and Senate this year.
"Obviously, there's been a debate in connection with other legislation in this building, about how serious a problem voter fraud is," he acknowledged. "I don't mean to get into that debate here, other than to say - hopefully, we can all agree that this is something we take very seriously, whether it happens zero times, one time or a million times.
"We need to make sure there's maximum deterrence possible to keep people from doing it."
John Scott, Secretary of State Jason Kander's policy director, told the committee: "We take elections fraud very seriously.
"Let's get tough and strengthen the elections laws that we have in place, the penalties that we have in place."
Scott told the committee Kander's office has received complaints about voter registration fraud, and he encouraged them to "take that penalty from 7 to 15 years, put some more deterrence in that. Let's put folks in jail for 30 days and let them think about what they did."
Sen. Will Kraus, R-Lee's Summit, sponsors a proposed bill and constitutional amendment that would allow lawmakers to require that voters show a photo ID in order to vote at the polling place.
"Those who argue against the death penalty say it's not a deterrent," he noted. "I like increasing the penalties.
"But I think we need to go a step further and figure out how we're going to catch people who are breaking the current laws."
Kraus told Sifton: "There's no way we're going to be able to catch someone who does impersonation fraud, and goes in and votes for somebody else, with your legislation."
Sifton said his goal is getting stronger penalties.
"(They) would be looking at 15 years instead of seven," Sifton said.
The committee took no action Monday about recommending the bill for full Senate debate.