PIERRE - A legislative committee on Monday endorsed an amended bill that would make voters' birth dates confidential on voter registration lists.

Voter registration lists are public records, and they are commonly purchased by political candidates and political parties wishing to contact voters for support or surveys.

The lists are sold by the secretary of state and county auditors.

SB2, approved 4-3 by the Senate Local Government Committee, would continue to list the year that a voter was born but would not include the month and day.

Secretary of State Chris Nelson, who proposed the measure, said that would help prevent identity theft.

"We don't think it's appropriate for us to be selling thousands and thousands and thousands of birth dates when we sell the voter registration list," he said. "There's been some concerns that … could be used to foster identity theft."

Full birth information still would be available on individual voter registration cards kept in county auditors' offices, Nelson said.

"We are not in any way trying to restrict the public access to voter registration cards," he said.

Nelson's bill would have forbidden the use of voters' birth dates, including the months and days of the month they were born, but the measure was amended Monday to list only the years when people were born. That would allow those who purchase the lists for political purposes to at least know general ages without being able to specifically learn the exact birth dates.

"By leaving the year of birth, we're still giving enough information for either candidates or political parties if you were looking to do some sort of age- or even gender-specific post cards or whatnot in a campaign," said Sen. Jason Gant, R-Sioux Falls.

"Taking off the month and birth would make it harder for individuals who are trying to get mass volumes of information to try and use that in a way that they shouldn't," said Gant, who offered the amendment to list only the years when people are born.

Opposition to the bill came from Dave Bordewyk, general manager of the South Dakota Newspaper Association.

Although individual voter registration cards would contain full birth information, those cards are not specifically identified as public records, he said.

"I don't know that the county auditor in Minnehaha County would destroy those cards, but certainly the auditor would have the discretion to say, "I don't have to let you look at those records because I'm not required necessarily by law to keep those records,"' Bordewyk said.

Nelson conceded that voter registration cards are not public records required by state law. Federal law requires them to be kept for 22 months, and it is the practice in South Dakota to keep them for at least that long, he said.

An auditor could keep voter registration cards from being viewed by the public, but that is not likely, Nelson said.

"That would be technically possible but incredibly foolish of an auditor to discard voter registration cards, and I can't believe any auditor in this state would do that," the secretary of state said.

Gant said he would draft legislation later to declare voter registration cards as public records so they would be open to the public.

SB2 was sent 4-3 to the Senate floor.

The committee unanimously approved another bill that would put a state framework in place for a special election to replace South Dakota's U.S. House of Representatives member in the event that a catastrophe of some sort resulted in the deaths of at least 100 members of the House.

Nelson said the state already has a law that provides for the election of a U.S. Senator in such an event, and SB1 also would extend that procedure for South Dakota's U.S. House position.

In such an instance, SB1 would require the governor to set the date of a special election to fill the vacancy. Political parties could nominate candidates for the vacancy, and independent candidates could get on the ballot by gathering enough signatures on nominating petitions.